Email marketing is one of the few evergreen marketing solutions that a business can use. Appearing as early as the internet started in the form of newsletters, the fundamentals of email marketing hasn’t changed much. Build an email list and sell through the list. Of course, these days, we’re blessed with an abundance of tools, allowing us to build more advanced email sales funnels and design sharper and higher converting emails. But at the end of the day, the fundamentals remain the same. With GDPR a few years ago, email marketers have been hit with a range of new laws to govern the practice, and so, we explain the tips and tricks you should implement to thrive in this space.
Double Opt-In
Have you ever signed up for an email newsletter - only to receive another email seconds later to confirm that you signed up and you put in the rest of your information? This is the double opt-in method. Why not simply the process… you may ask. That extra step may seem like not a big deal, but it can affect the quality of your audience greatly.
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By having your audience confirm that they are on your email list will mean that they will expect to receive your future emails and it tells your audience’s email provider (Gmail, Office 365 and the rest of the gang) that they have interacted with this sender before and email providers will have a higher chance of putting your email into the ‘primary’ email tab, rather than ‘promotions’ where you will be a fish in a red sea.
Set Expectations
Do your customers know exactly what they’ll be receiving once they sign up? Do they know you’ll sign them up? (e-commerce stores… I’m looking at you… adding me onto your list after one purchase) If you don’t want to spend hours crafting up the perfect email, only to be responded with an unsubscribe, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Make sure you let your email list know what they’re signing up for before they join. From simply telling them they’ll get a weekly newsletter about your best selling products of the week, or some interesting stories you’ve put together, giving them a heads up before your email lands will mean your emails will having a higher interaction rate.
Let subscribers manage their preferences
Sounds simple right? But you’ll be surprised how many small businesses don’t have this option. The ‘unsubscribe’ button is step one, but what if your reader doesn’t want to fully unsubscribe, but rather just opt out of your weekly emails, but want to see any large sales or announcements? Give your reader the option to edit their preferences.
Each email should provide value
Another no brainer. But so many people send pure emails out for the sake of it. When you craft an email, always start with the north star in place. What is the north star? That is the single most important goal you want to achieve. 1 metric to rule them all.
Set that in place first, then build the strategy around it. For example, do you want to sell double your items this Christmas before the last? Well to do that, do you need to double your emails? If so, have a strategy in place so each email is generated with a purpose. To stop you from sending emails with no purpose, have a bit of copy written on the email to explain why you sent it, why they should explore your offerings (and to sell your product).
If you do that, you will find that over time, you will get a higher and higher open rate on your emails, as people genuinely look forward to seeing what you have to offer, and you differentiate yourself from the 50 other promotional emails in your reader’s inbox.
Regularly clean your list
You spend so much time to build up that massive list, only for us to tell you to start deleting people? Yes. If you’re reaching the point where each email you send out, you notice a decline in open rates, it’s a sign telling you to give your email marketing strategy a refresh.
Having your emails not clicked open, or worst, bouncing back will only give the signal to Gmail (and others) that your emails are lacking substance and not right for your reader. After some time, your emails will be prioritised less in the promotions tab, and may even get filtered into the spam inbox.
So use a tool like NeverBounce to clean up your list.
Sending your emails out to a smaller but more responsive list will give you far better results than blasting it out to a large unresponsive list.
So there you have it, permission-based email marketing is the future (like it or not… GDPR) so make sure you implement these tactics to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Email marketing is one of the only marketing channels where you don’t have to pay large sums of money for traffic and has the potential to generate a sizeable amount of revenue. So focus on this channel, and you’ll reap the fruits of your labour in no time.