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3 Email Marketing Pitfalls

As the former email marketing lead for CWD, it’s has been my job to write great emails for companies. This makes it really easy for me to spot ineffective emails that business owners send out on a regular business. And there are a lot of them. It doesn’t take long to learn effective email marketing skills. However most business owners have no idea that they are damaging their brand with the emails they send.

Here are 3 Email Marketing Pitfalls to avoid:

1) Not addressing your contact personally: Most email marketing software systems use merge fields or merge tags. You can use merge fields to pull a contact’s information out of your database and use it to personalize the email you are sending. Instead of addressing your contact with “Hey Friend,”, which is highly impersonal, use a merge field to insert their name. In your email it will look like “Hey MERGE FIELD,” and when the email comes to them it will have their name in it: “Hey Bob,”. Addressing them with “Hey Friend” is a sure fire way to get them to stop reading your email.

Don’t have their first name? Address them by title. Or, by the group your are speaking to. ie. “Hey Entrepreneurs” , “Hey Singles”, “Hey Foodies”.

2) Talking to much about YOU: Sorry to say it, your contact doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves. They want to know what they are getting from you. How will your product or service help them? How are they going to benefit? The best sales people get into their customer’s world. Find out what they want first. Then sell it to them.

What’s a great way to find out what your audience wants if you aren’t sure? Survey them.

3) Selling too soon: If your contact has never purchased from you asking them to buy right away will be jarring to their system. It may even push them away. You have to build a relationship with them before they feel comfortable buying from you. This takes time. Be patient. Email marketing is foreplay. It’s the appetizer before the main course. If it’s not good, you’ll turn people off. If it’s good you will build a list of faithful followers that will be beneficial to the success of your business. If they love you enough they will share your business with other people.

How to grow your web business with digital marketing

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How to use email marketing to grow sales

How to use email marketing to increase sales

Effective email marketers use email as the medium to:
1) Generate new leads and turn potential buyers into buyers, and
2) Keep existing buyers engaged so they are more likely to buy in the future.

If you are having trouble doing either of these things you could be using tactics to market your products or services using email that is ineffective and in some cases damaging to your brand.

To find out if what you are doing is an effective use of email marketing to grow sales, it’s important to decipher if you fall into one of two categories. Are you an email blaster? Or an email marketer?

It’s crucial you know the difference. The bottom line is: Email marketers use email to develop connections and brand affinity and email blasters turn people off in the hopes of landing a few sales. They use brute force to blast their message. Read these definitions to identify where you stand:

Definition of an email blaster: An email blaster uses email to try to get people to buy their stuff. They don’t consider that there are different groups of people with different needs on their list of contacts. The goal of an email blaster is to sell their stuff to whoever will buy it. They send emails with no strategy and no direction. Their email content is all about them. And they send emails to anyone that they have an address for.

Definition of an email marketer: An email marketer creates a long-term sales strategy that has a specific end goal. They send emails to various groups of people. The emails deliver valuable content that speaks to what the people want. They build desire, trust, and loyalty. They ask people to buy when appropriate. Their email content is all about their people and shares expertise that is of interest to them.

If you find yourself in the email blaster camp, don’t feel bad, that is where most people find themselves. Why? Email marketing is still a relatively new form of marketing. At least it is evolving. There are only a handful of highly effective email marketers. But the club is growing, thankfully. Here are five things they do to use email marketing to increase sales.

How to use email marketing to grow sales

1: Segment your list of contacts. Categorize your contacts based on what you want to send them. You want to think about speaking to the group versus sending them stuff they don’t care about. Then need to create different email funnels for each group because the content you are sending them will (and should) be different.

2: Establish a long-term email marketing strategy. To do this you need to decide what the end goal, is. This is the action you are driving your contacts towards. It could be different for each email funnel you create. However, usually, the end goal is to have the contact make a purchase. Or take a specific action that forwards your business.

3: Develop various email funnels and map them out. Once you decide what the end goal for each funnel is you can work backwards to design a system that drives people to that end goal. For example, if the end goal is getting a potential buyer to buy, your entire email strategy should be focused on sending them emails that primes them for that action. You want to build trust and delivery value during this process.

4: Create valuable emails. Emails should be used to deliver valuable content to your contacts on a regular basis. Get them used to receiving emails from you. Make the emails good so they want to open them. A good way to do this is to give stuff away.

5: Track your performance. Effective email marketers are constantly tracking their open rates and the actions of their subscribers and tweaking their strategy. If emails aren’t getting opened you need to make changes.

How to write email subject lines that are irresistible

Did you know that the email subject line is the most important part of your email? It’s more important than the body text, more important than what you are giving away, more important than what you are trying to sell.

Why? Because if your headline isn’t great, your emails won’t get opened.

Here are five expert email marketing strategies on how to write email subject lines that are irresistible…

Email marketing strategies for great subject lines:

1) Blend in to the inbox: When your email looks like all the other emails in a person’s inbox the recipient will see it as an email they need to open. They may even open it accidentally, but that’s okay, you got their attention. Examples:

“Quick question”
“Thanks for your help”
“Thought you’d like this.”

2) Make your email sound important: When your email is important it gets opened. There are certain things that make an email important. If it comes from the president of a company, it’s important. If it’s about crucial businesses matters, like safety or legal requirements for businesses, it’s important. If it’s an exclusive offer for a select group, it’s important. Examples:

“A Message from __________________ (President’s name)”
“Gift from ____________________ (President’s name)”
Safety regulations for Warehouse Managers
Exclusive industry insider offer

3) Play on human curiosity: Did you know that the National Enquirer is the fifth most read publication in the world? People buy the National Enquirer because the headlines are crazy and they sound close enough to reality to be true. People like weird. They feel compelled to open things that they are curious about. Or, things they can’t believe till they see them. NOTE: If you go weird, the content of your email needs to be the truth. Example:

“Adopt Pinky, the cat that uses the toilet”
“The health secret I learned from a Balinese Medicine Man”
“Drink beer. Lose weight.”
“The Mad Hatter reminds me of you”

4) State the value of the email’s content: If you are giving away tangible advice in your email. Or a giving away an attachment that is very valuable, you can simply say what it is. Example:

5 Email marketing secrets the experts use
3 Super weight lose foods
10 Fitness mistakes you might be making

Use these four email marketing strategies to create effective subject lines and track your open rates to see if they increase.

5) Be familiar: If I send you an email and we know each other, chances are you will open the email because you know me. Write headlines that assume you are connected. In the right circumstances these can be highly effective.

Tips because you are amazing
I wanted you to see this
Do you have a few minutes?
You will love this info

Email marketing strategies: 7 tactics you should know

Effective email marketing strategies can be hard to execute. And being a great email marketer – that is, someone who writes emails that actually get opened and read – requires a precise combination of skills.

To be effective as an email marketing strategist, you need to be a big picture thinker. You need to be able to develop a long-term strategy with an end goal in mind. To create this strategy, and have people do what you want them to do (click where you want them to click), you have to know some human psychology basics. You also need to be an expert in the techniques of master salesmanship. This requires knowing what your audience wants. You also need to know how to deliver your sales message clearly and effectively.

When all these skills come together, your emails will get opened. That equates to money for your business.

Here are 7 fundamental email marketing strategies that the email marketing gurus use:

1) Segment your list of contacts. Categorize your subscribers based on the information you’ll be sending them.It should speak to what the group wants or cares about.

Let’s say you sell pet products for small and large dogs, offering giant dog bones to the owner of Fluffy the teacup poodle is a waste of time. Fluffy’s owner is never going to buy a large dog bone (unless they have a second bigger dog).

You also want to segment the people who have purchased from you from the people who haven’t. You should be sending them different messages. If someone buys from you, they are much more likely to buy again, so you can be a little more aggressive, but not at the expense of offering valuable content. The underlying message for existing customers is “keep buying” and for potential buyers it’s “trust me”. That has to be done subtly and as a subtext in all your emails.

2) Build a quality list, not a quantity list. You want people to want to be on your list. Think of it this way: If you are on Facebook and have 400 friends, how many of them do you actually consider close enough to invite to your wedding? Probably only a few dozen and really only a handful really matter to you and have a vested interested in you. When it comes to email marketing you want the “wedding guest” type of contact. The reliable people who care about you or your brand. Who cares if you have 50, 000 contacts if only 50 will actually buy from you. It’s not worth your time sending to the rest of them. They won’t be engaged by your content. They may not even open your emails and then your emails may get labelled as spam (which you don’t want, of course).

3) Find out what your subscribers want. Use surveys and feedback forms to engage with your audience periodically and find out what they want. Use the information you get to respond directly to their issues or to send them information and offers that fall in line with what they want. The more you know, the less you have to guess.

Back to the dog product analogy, if you know that Fluffy’s owner has an obsession dressing Fluffy up in cute dog sweaters, you can send her dog sweater dressing tips and over time promos for a dog wardrobe.

4) Be a source of valuable information. Give away great stuff often. Do it for free. Teach people what they want to learn. Share secrets. This makes you a valuable resource and one that can be trusted. People start to see your emails as must open emails.

Ever wonder why people love Oprah? She’s a source of valuable content that helps her fans live better lives. People want to be on her email list. Aspire to become the Oprah of the email world.

5) Don’t hard sell. People don’t like being sold to unless they think it’s their idea to buy. Don’t be pushy. Get them to arrive at the choice to buy on their own. Build trust by following Tactic #4 on this list. When people trust you, like you and like the stuff you give them they find you valuable and they will want to buy what you offer.

And, this doesn’t mean you never ask them to buy. Go ahead, ask them. Create the opportunity. But make sure they trust you first and they find value in what you give them.

6)Be strategic with your headlines.The subject line is the first thing that gets read in and email. Write a good headline for it. It has people open your email and read it. Here are some headline strategies:

Be weird – People are curious and can’t help themselves to find out what the heck you are talking about “Can you believe a one-legged dancer taught me this?”
Blend in – Make your emails seem like run of the mill emails so they get opened. You message shouldn’t appear like a marketing email: Use subject lines like: “Quick question”, “Need your help”, etc.
Challenge them – Make them thing and trigger their curiosity. “5 Fitness serious mistakes you are probably making”; “5 little know dog training secrets”.

7) Use a smart CRM. Smart CRM systems, like Infusionsoft, allow you to track the actions of your contacts so you know what they are doing at all times. That information is GOLD! It costs a bit of money but it’s worth it. Don’t cheap out with low cost tools.

Email marketing strategies: 7 tactics you should know

3 Email Marketing Pitfalls

Continue reading “3 Email Marketing Pitfalls”

How to grow your web business with digital marketing

Want to learn digital marketing tactics that will allow you to grow your business online and increase your earning potential? Join Ultimate Digital Marketers and learn how to grow your web business with digital marketing. You’ll get access to digital marketing secrets for FREE. You also get exclusive promos and discounts of up to 50% on online courses.

How to use email marketing to grow sales

Effective email marketers use email as the medium to: 1) Generate new leads and turn potential buyers into buyers, and to 2) Keep existing buyers engaged so they are more likely to buy in future. If you are having trouble doing either of these things you could be using some ineffective tactics to market your products or services using email. Read this article to avoid them.

How to write email subject lines that are irresistible

Did you know that the subject line is the most important part of your email? It’s more important than the body text, more important than what you are giving away, more important than what you are trying to sell. Why? This article tells you what you need to know to become a great subject line writer.

Email marketing strategies: 7 tactics you should know

Effective email marketing strategies are hard to execute. And being a great email marketer – that is, someone who writes emails that actually get opened and read – requires a precise combination of skills. Here are 7 email marketing strategist used by the experts to get results.