Email marketing is still one of the easiest ways to make more sales. Boasting an impressive return of £36 for every £1 spent, it’s both affordable and extremely cost-effective. AND it succeeds across all industries because it is scalable and customisable.
Pretty impressive stuff. There is a catch though.
It has to be done right.
Bad email marketing often fails.
That’s why…
- It can get a bad rap
- You might be putting it off
- It can be pretty overwhelming to know where to start and how to nail it
But don’t be fooled. I’m here to show you that it can be very simple and easy to build into your marketing strategy.
The Benefits Of Email Marketing
Whatever you’re selling, whoever you are, email marketing can help boost your business.
Good email marketing:
- Draws in high-quality individuals to your prospect pool
- Cleans your list as you centre in on your buyer personas
- Boosts your brand awareness
- Nurtures your leads
- Builds stronger connections with existing clients
- Enhances trust and loyalty across the board
And ALL of this works together, like clockwork, towards the ultimate goal: converting prospects into paying clients.
Sounds easy enough, but where exactly do you start?
Pillar #1 - Build Your List With Trustworthy Leads
Anyone using email marketing needs a list. Not just any old list. One full of people who are interested in what you do and willing to buy from you.
Having an in-depth knowledge of your target audience is vital at this stage. Age, profession, wants, needs… Hoarding this knowledge allows you to make sure they feel heard and offer them solutions to their problems.
Incentivising these trustworthy leads to subscribe is the next step. This can be achieved using two key marketing tools:
- Enticing lead magnets. These are giveaways that motivate readers to give you their email addresses, like ebooks and short courses. I’ve written a whole blog about them here.
- User-friendly opt-in forms. The form a reader needs to fill out to get on your list should be clear and attractive.
It’s give and take. Offering your target audience high-value, relevant freebies in return for their contact details will draw in the right people. Building your list organically like this has been proven to work best.
Pillar #2 - Serve Your List With High-Quality Content
A huge part of email marketing is forming customer relationships. You won’t make sales without putting the legwork in. Before someone buys from you, they need to know, like and trust you. So nurturing those high-quality leads on your list is key.
But how exactly do you do that?
Two words. Nurture campaigns.
Nurture emails are usually sent weekly. Their role is to inform, engage and entertain. There’s no hard selling involved. Rather, they overcome objections and educate your prospects.
Every email you send should feel personal, like you want to connect with your subscribers. By getting to know them and sharing valuable knowledge, they should feel understood and supported… Priming them to buy from you at a later date.
Want to add even more value to your nurture campaigns?
Try putting these measures into place:
- Personalisation. Use merge tags and custom fields to make your customer feel valued.
- Segmenting. If you send a fancy offer to subscribers who barely understand their problems, you risk losing them. Segmenting your list means you can develop each relationship reliably. It’ll be easier to convert prospects when more trust has been earned.
Pillar #3 - Extract The Opportunities
On many occasions, I’m asked to review the existing email newsletters of speakers and coaches that aren’t working for them, and often there are improvements I suggest to make them more useful or more engaging. But once in a while I’m asked to review a newsletter that hits exactly the right note – it’s high quality, it’s genuinely useful and it’s perfectly targeted to the reader. But it still isn’t working.
In those cases, I’ve dug a little deeper and found that although the educational content is good, they rarely, if ever, ask their readers to buy anything!
Serving your list with high quality content is just the start, and yes, the cream will often rise to the top and you’ll generate leads, enquiries and sales from that alone.
But it shouldn’t be left to chance.
Use the trust and goodwill you’ve build up by sharing your expertise to send well-crafted sales messages.
The age-old 80:20 rule is a good one to follow here: 80% of the content you send should be high quality, educational information, related to your area of expertise, that will help your readers to make a positive difference in their life. That 80% is what earns you the right to send 20% sales content, recommending products and services that will help them to reach their goals quicker.
Make Your Email Marketing Strategy Pay
It doesn’t matter where you are in formulating or maintaining your email marketing strategy. There is always something to be learnt, or a next action to take.
Here’s what I mean. You can extract opportunities by:
- Using your social media streams to promote your lead magnets and generate more enquiries. How did your readers react?
- A/B testing your emails and analysing the data. How did your emails perform?
- Nudging your subscribers to buy if you think they’re ready. Did you convert them? Look back - have you nurtured them enough?
- Staying in contact if a subscriber doesn’t buy from you. ‘No’ simply means ‘not right now’. You've put the effort in so far, don’t give up on them!
Aim to arm yourself with more information at every stage to equip you for the next.
As you can see, email marketing is one of the best ways to market your business.
The best thing about it?
It doesn’t need to be overwhelming.
In this blog, we’ve expanded upon the three pillars of email marketing that make it simple and achievable for all.
New to this and not sure where to start? An old hand but wanting to add more value to your approach? Book a call with me today to take positive action and enhance your email marketing.
