Winning Email Marketing Tactics and Strategy

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I hope that I have established for you that email marketing is the most lucrative way to build an internet business.  The return on investment is very high, and the entry costs are very low, which makes it a great opportunity to scale a business from small expenses to big profits for people with many different skill sets.  

Surprising Stats About Email Marketing…

I was speaking to Christine and she reminded me that it takes on average 8-10 touches before someone buys.  So, who’s Christine?

She was my sales rep at Outreach.com when I was a pastor.  She’s who I worked with when I was setting up a direct mail campaign for my church.

The multiple touches isn’t any different online, and that gets to the power of your email marketing.  Even with great SEO, a website isn’t enough.  Your website is competing with Amazon and a host of other mega-sites.  How can you compete with the big boys?  With email marketing.

According to the Radicati group, there are an estimated 3.93 billion email accounts worldwide, and that number is expected to grow to over 4 billion by 2020. Why should you use email for marketing? Here are 3 excellent reasons.

• Email is 40 times more effective for gathering customers than Facebook or Twitter.
• People spend 138% more on products they purchase through email solicitations than people who do not receive promotional emails.
• Return on investment from email marketing is off the charts – in three studies, the results were 3700% ROI, 3800% ROI, and 4200% ROI. Take your pick – they’re all fantastic, whether it’s $37 for every marketing dollar, $38, or $42.
  Source: https://www.digitalgyd.com/email-marketing-statistics/

3 Short Tips for Creating Outstanding Emails

1. Focus on great subject lines.  If you don’t get opens, and you’re not engaging with your prospects, so really work hard on compelling subject lines.

2. Keep your subject lines short.  Mail Chimp suggests 50 characters or less.  Eight words or less is a common benchmark.

3. Focus your email content on fulfilling the promise in your subject line.  This is called congruence and it is very important. Great content is what will keep your subscribers opening your emails.

2 Models for Email Marketing

There are many different approaches to email marketing, but here are two popular ways.

Let’s call the first model the 3-email approach. I learned this from my first mentor, but you can read more about here.

1. In the first email, focus on a pain point that your email subscribers can relate to. For example, if your niche is weight loss, you might want to get your subscribers thinking about Thanksgiving Day, if your list has a lot of Americans. It could be called National Overeating Day, and overeating definitely an issue for subscribers in the weight loss niche. What might you say that would connect your audience to their feelings around that pain point? You could direct your subscribers to a new blog post that you’ve written on this topic.
2. In the second email, deepen or amplify the problem and offer your solution: the Black Friday Weight Loss Extravaganza where you offer your product at a great Black Friday price. What are the benefits that your product or service offer? How does your product or service answer your prospect’s problem?
3. In the third email, urgency is the key. This is the final email in your sequence, so either you motivate action or your campaign lands with a thud or whimper. Does your offer have an expiration date? Is there a limited number of slots in your program? Will you offer bonuses that expire with this offer? Whatever you have to offer, do so with a sense of urgency in this final email.

Let’s call the second email sequence the 6-day approach. This is what I generally do, and I learned the basics of this approach from email marketing guru Ben Settle, who advocates for doing daily emails, but some weeks he only sends emails on Monday through Saturday. I generally don’t email on Sundays, but here’s what I do on Monday through Saturday. Introduce your offer with an email that is enjoyable for your subscribers to read. Show them why what you have to sell will benefit them. This is what Ben said in an interview about his approach:

“I guess if I had to sum it up the Ben Settle way of doing e-mail is to go out there every day and have fun with your e-mail; whatever you’re selling. Now Matt, when I say fun that doesn’t mean necessarily slapstick happy. I mean some people sell products that are serious, that’s fine. What I mean is you’re enjoying yourself. They’re enjoying reading your e-mails. You’re selling something people really want, something they need. They’re happy to pay you for it because you’re selling it to them in a way where they like to buy. That is really the basics of my system when you do it. That’s what happens.”

Ben makes it clear in his welcome email when people join his list that he emails every day. He repeats that in subsequent emails. Sometimes he emails more than once a day. The key is that he’s prepped his list for his approach. As someone who’s on his list, I can tell you that I open a lot of his emails. Why does Ben advocate for daily emails?

“There are a lot of reasons. One big reason is; I’ll give you two big reasons. One is procrastination. People will procrastinate. People will have decided to buy it three weeks ago. Today’s e-mail finally pushed them over the edge and they buy it. People will tell me this. This isn’t like this is my theory or anything. I hear this all the time. Ben, you bastard, you got me. I hear stuff like that. You got me today. I had to buy. I get that a lot or variations of that a lot. That’s one reason.

“Another reason is they build on each other. If people are hearing from you every day or five days a week; all those e-mails start building on each other. You become the leader in that niche whatever you’re in or you become a leader at it. You’re someone who is demonstrating your competency and your knowledge and your skill level in whatever it is you sell. You’re the one they know, like and trust after awhile. You become their trusted friend.

“If you do it right you’re not sitting there blatantly pitching every day. Again, you’re making it valuable, you’re making it worth their time to read it and you’re making yourself stand out from everyone else. You can only do that if it’s daily. You really can’t do that on a weekly or monthly or whatever e-mail.”

If you’re thinking that you can’t do that, listen to Ben once more:

“Here’s the solution to that. How’s that saying go? Is it time expands to fit work or something. Whatever it is, you don’t have to put three hours in to every e-mail. I would say set a timer for 20 minutes and give yourself 20 minutes to write an e-mail. It’s oh God, I can’t do that. Yes you can because it doesn’t have to be long. It can be a paragraph. It really doesn’t matter. You don’t want to write regularly. The more you do it, the faster and easier it gets anyway. The first several times, I’m not going to lie to you. It can be hard, especially if you don’t like writing.

“This is what I always give my customers. This thing I call a 30-day challenge. I lay out; write this kind of e-mail Monday. Write this one on Tuesday. I do that for that very reason so they get used to it. By the end of it they see their sales going up and that will motivate them. Let’s face it, if you’re going … if your sales dramatically go up or double or something; that’s pretty good motivation to write an e-mail every day.”

If you’re on my list, you know that my regular emails are longer than a 20-minute dash off. I subscribe to the more you tell – the more you sell school. But, you can write a 20-minute conversational email and it could work for you. The point is to find out what works for you. Maybe it’s a 3-email sequence. Maybe it’s a daily email. Find the frequency and style that works best for you. In other words, experiment.

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