What happens when you get emails in your inbox trying to sell you something?

If you’re like me, most of them go into the trash, spam, or you click that unsubscribe button faster than you can say, “but wait, there’s more!”

On the rare occasion you let some emails come to your promotions folder, or even rarer - when you drag them from promotions to inbox, I want you to ask yourself why you do that.

The answer will most likely be because you like them! You like the product and company enough to look forward to its offers and discounts. But, that’s not enough. Even if you like a brand, you don’t put up with its emails unless you like the way they look, you don’t mind the frequency in which they come, and you feel like you’re actually getting something of value from them.

It’s a fine balance.

That balance is achieved when you do your email marketing right.

In the age of social media, cookies, and talks of smartphone apps sneakily collecting advertising information about you while you surf or le gasp, while you’re talking - you’d be forgiven for thinking that email marketing is dead.

Not quite. Far from it.

Email might be pretty much the oldest way of getting information about your brand or small business out there, but it’s also the most widely used, and according to Forbes, the most powerful tool to take your business (and its profits) to the next level.

It’s no wonder, because email marketing has the ability to give you the highest return on investment (ROI) - more than Instagram, Facebook, or sending out physical flyers to residential mailboxes (if you’re still doing that as a direct marketing tactic, please, Please, PLEASE get in touch with me so I get you into a brand new world of making money without leaving your chair!)

In fact, Europe’s largest community of data-driven marketers, The Data and Marketing Association found that with every dollar you spend on email marketing, you get $42 back.

From years in digital marketing, I have found that typically you’d be expecting approximately 30% of your revenue to come from email marketing. Half of this generally should come in from your automated promotional email flows (the “set it up once and make money from it forever” ones), while the other half should come in from your manual campaigns (those broadcast emails you should be sending out during Black Friday, Christmas, and all those other special occasions - like, every time you have a sale).

This means if you’re NOT using or optimizing email marketing, you’re potentially losing out on almost 1/3 of your sales per month. Let’s just take a moment to multiply that by 12 to get an idea of all the revenue slipping away between your fingers per year. That’s equivalent to slashing away 4 months worth of earnings from your business. Now that’s an eye-watering sum of money that really should be going towards your wistful daydreams of sipping Mai Thais on a sunny beach somewhere.

It’s clear: Social media marketing is the best tool you can use for outreach and driving traffic to your website. But, when it comes to customer retention, increasing sales, and being a lead generation magnet - email wins, hands down.

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The Email Marketing Strategy to More Money Making

Great, so everyone wants to make those email dollars.

But, how do you get started?

I wish I could tell you it’s as easy as writing up an email every once in a blue sale when the holiday season rolls around, then sending it to everyone you know. But, as with most things worth doing - it’s not!

First of all, how do you even get your customers to cough up their email addresses so you can turn them into a profitable mailing list?

Then, how do you get them to open the emails you send?

Once they’re opened, how do you convince them to buy whatever it is you’re selling?

You know yourself that most will end up unread in the dredges of your inbox or even worse, eek! Moved to spam.

Like with most things, there’s a formula. That’s the good news. It means there’s no need to stumble through trial and error, spend hard earned money on “giving it a shot”, or use guessology on what might hit or miss.

The bad news is that the formula has quite a few constantly moving parts to coordinate. Some would complain that this makes it complex, tedious, and time-consuming.

The fantastic news is that your friendly neighbourhood digital marketer (that would be moi), knows exactly how to set you up for email success, automate your campaigns so they generate profit while you sleep, and keep your new and improved campaigns a-coming. All while scheduling emails for your newest products and services you want the world to know about, your oldest products that need to get moving out the door, and all the money-making seasonal opportunities in between.

Got things to do, a small business  to run, and don’t have time to read the rest of this informative article? No worries! I’ll do you one better. Get in touch with me right now and tell me all about how far you want to push your profits and grow your business. I’ll tell you what we can achieve for your life’s work with an email marketing campaign customized for your business.

Otherwise, if you want to learn a little bit more about digital strategy when it comes to email automation or campaign performance, feel free to read on. In which case, your next question would most likely be:

What’s the formula Casey?

I’ll tell you.

First you actually need an email list so you have someone to send your emails to. This is a rather in-depth process that requires a customized marketing strategy for your business. I find it easiest to use engaging content marketing to lead people to your website so they can understand what you do and trust you. I also find it super effective to use a convincing landing page to get those leads in from social media advertising and willingly handing over their email addresses.

Next, you need a plan. Ask yourself these 3 important questions:

1. What are you offering your customers? This is where you think of your marketing message. All the best deals you have or special offers you can give them to draw ‘em in.
2. Who is your customer or client? This is where you determine where most of your market comes from and how best to engage with them. So you can decide the:
   1. optimal frequency of emails (not enough and they forget all about you, too many and they unsubscribe without giving you another chance)
   2. the best days and times to send out your emails so they actually get seen and opened (are most people you’re contacting the lunch time crowd, or early morning checkers?)
   3. voice and length of your emails (are you going long-form, or short and sweet? Hit them with the humor or keep it graphics heavy?)

1. How are you going to actually write all these emails up, get the graphics done, and have them dispatched to hundreds or thousands of potential customers or potential clients consistently, without fail, and without being flagged spam filters?
   

If you have a good idea of what (1) should be - great. That’s one thing out of the way which will be a relief, because you can focus the bulk of your efforts towards organizing (2), rolling out (3), and keeping it all going long-term. Admittedly, these are the nitty-gritty, fiddly, and high maintenance parts of the operation. But hey, you gotta put in the work if you want to reap the rewards!

Let’s dive into that just a teensy bit so you know what you’re dealing with.

How to Figure Out Your Email Marketing Schedule

Rejection is hard. This is true even when you’re mass marketing to nameless, faceless people you’ll never meet. Knowing that you’ve been blocked, moved to spam, or unsubscribed can be nerve-wrecking and frustrating - maybe even heart-breaking if you’ve only just started exploring email marketing!

But, just like those growing pains you suffered through in adolescence, you’ll be happy to know that a little reflection goes a long way.

First, leave nothing to chance. Do your research and get clued in on what isn’t nearly enough, and when more is too much.

A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research found that sending 5 to 14 emails a month benefits profitability best, depending on past purchasing behavior and current relationship levels with your company (more on that later). In general, 7 emails a month is considered the sweet spot. Their research also showed that sending 4 emails a month (too few), could lose you 32% of your lifetime profit, while sending 10 emails a month to unengaged consumers (too many) could cost you 16% of profits.

Now you have a good starting point, how do you further refine this so you can minimize being ghosted by your precious consumers. The one answer you’ll get from all the experts invariably boils down to test, test, then test again. This is where keeping a close eye on your open and unsubscribe rates will be helpful, but knowing how to analyze your customer data will tell you what it is you’ve done to win people or chase them away, and therefore, what you should do more of or stay away from forever!

This bit is so important that Ramit Sethi, the author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, actually advises that content outweighs frequency every time. He says, “​​If your emails are incredibly entertaining, informative, and engaging, you can send as many as you want,” which brings us to:

Copywriting For Your Email Marketing

So, beautiful emails actually need to be crafted. Each email design is an opportunity to connect with your existing customers and clients on an individual level. There is a whole bag of tips and tricks that you can apply here, for example:

• Word choice: This comes down to who you’re talking to and how much they know about you. New subscribers? They might need a little more brand awareness. Old fans? These guys are ready to go straight to the offers. In every case, go for the lowest common denominator. That means making it a point to speak to everyone the way “most people” will be happy with. For example, every English speaker understands plain old English, but not all will appreciate the edgy nature of swear words or the pericombobulations effectuated by sesquipedalia. So, keep it classy and keep it simple!
  
• Focus on the benefits: Whether you’re speaking to professionals or the everyday dude and dudette, go easy on the jargon and the specs, and give them real, solid, compelling reasons all about how you’re going to make their lives better. So they will open up and read your emails of course!
  
• See what your target audience sees: Did you know that the most optimal subject lines should not be more than 7 words? How about the fact that most people only ever read the first 3 words of a subject line, followed by the top banner in your emails, then the actual offers 90% of the time? Now you know this, make sure to write your subject lines last, pay most attention to the first 3 words, and get a good graphic designer to get your banners and offers in order!
  
• Don’t be content in spam’s clothing: When you’ve spent time and money on your email campaigns, it’s disheartening and just plain annoying to know that 25% of marketing emails go straight to the spam folder. Good email marketing copywriters know that inbox spam detectors use content based filtering to separate the spam from the ham. This means if your headings or preview lines are filled with trigger words like buy, bargain, cheap, or anything with free in it, then your email deliverability will most definitely be affected along with their brand loyalty!
  

Want to learn more about how to write the best email ever? I talk more about copywriting here. Or just get in touch in person and we’ll get your email marketing show on the road immediately, minus the boring, repetitive hassle of doing it yourself!

What Email Marketing Software is Right For Your Business?

Remember how I said email marketing is never about personally sending out hundreds or thousands of emails?

This is where the weird and wonderful world of campaign monitor tools and Other Complicated Things come in.

If you’ve never used Aweber before, find yourself googling “Klaviyo vs Mailchimp vs Omisend”, or are constantly putting up posts on Upwork looking for “email marketing experts specializing in Activecampaign”; then getting your head around using an email marketing platform for automation and broadcasts can be a little tricky and a huge time suck.

Our time here in this article is limited, so let me tell it like it is by making it clear to you that no matter which email tool you use or you’re thinking of going with, the most helpful thing I can tell you right now is to gather customer data and segment them according to interest and activity history. Now you have clusters of customers or clients looking for specific things from you, all neatly organized in different buckets. Your aim is to send each bucket only emails that contain precisely what they’re looking for.

In real life, this is what it looks like. Say, you sell both men and women’s clothing. You could make emails that list all your sale items for both parties, and send them out to everyone. Or you could send out customized emails for men, and customized emails for women. Now, you have men browsing apparel just for them, and women doing the same. This immediately engages your customers more because they know that when you send them something, it’ll be directly relevant to what they need and want.

Let’s say your products for women include both office wear and casual wear. Perhaps you have access to customer data which tells you that this bucket of women only browse casual wear. Maybe you know the previous shopping behavior of that bucket of women, and they have only ever purchased formal business wear from you. Further segmenting your categories again, means higher, more specific customer engagement, and therefore better responses, and returns.

How much better are we talking?

Researchers found that sending personalized targeted emails focused on your customers’ or clients’ specific interests can improve open rates by 10% up to 50%, and increase ROI by 43% up to a whopping 77.8%! 

In conclusion, it’s rarely about the email marketing software - it’s how you use it!

There’s so much you can achieve with email marketing. If it isn’t already a major part of your overall marketing automation, then it should be! What I’ve told you here in this write-up is barely scratching the surface. It takes years to hone copywriting skills, get a robust understanding of graphic design and UX, and figure out how to interpret customer data, test, re-test, and apply your findings from analytics effectively.

If you don’t have years to learn all about email marketing best practice yourself, don’t want to waste time and money on trying out tons freelancers specializing in bits and pieces of the process, and don’t want to juggle a team of people to connect with each other while you rush towards email campaign deadlines and business goals, then contact me for pain-free, high earning email marketing service.

An email marketing solution is what you need to get you away from working in your business so you can spend more time working for it and bringing in that sweet, sweet cashflow!