Email marketing remains as one of the most effective online marketing channels today. But there are reasons why some people are receiving good sales every day from their mailing list while others struggle to get their subscribers to take action after reading their emails.
Here are the 3 important fundamentals you must take note of to maximize conversion from your emails.
1. Permission
Getting permission from your subscribers is the key to effective email marketing.
Never rent or buy email databases to blast offers to people who don’t know you, and have no relationship with your business. It is costly, ineffective, and worst of all, spamming peoples’ inboxes only do more harm than good to your reputation in the long term.
A much better approach is to ask your website visitors or customers for permission to join your mailing list. This way your subscribers are expecting to hear from you and they will be more than happy to receive your emails!
The main challenge of many businesses is getting people to subscribe to their mailing list.
What you can do is to offer freebies to provide people with an incentive to join your mailing list. For example, at WebSprout Academy, we give away discount vouchers, eBooks and a logo design kit to our subscribers here, while my friend, Stephen Mok, offers a free eBook on how to find a reliable financial advisor in his blog.
It is never too late to start building your list because all your subscribers are going to become your followers and they are great assets for your business in future.
Getting permission from people before sending them informational or promotional emails is the first key to success!
2. Personalization
Once you have gotten the necessary permission, the next important step is to make sure that you personalize your emails with the name of the email recipient (the small things matter).
Starting your email with “Hi Patrick, how are you doing” is way better than saying “Hi everyone, how are you doing”!
People will be delighted to receive emails from you that are addressed to them personally. Above all, it makes them feel important and it goes a long way towards building rapport with your subscribers.
Ordinary email providers like Gmail or Yahoo do not allow you to send mass personalized emails. And it would be impossible for you to personalize and send emails one by one, especially if you have a large mailing list.
What you need is an autoresponder software such as GetResponse that helps you to automate the process and makes your life so much easier (they offer a free 30 day trial here).
My clients have seen tremendous improvements in their response rates after switching from sending general to personalized emails. You should try it too if you have been sending mass emails without personalization! Watch my video to learn how you can send personalized emails easily using GetResponse.
3. Targeted Content
The third thing is to ensure that the content that you provide is targeted to the needs of your subscribers.
If your list comprise of people who are mainly interested in learning forex trading, you don’t want to be promoting products like healthy mangosteen juice to this group!
Over the years, I have seen business owners who blast their clients with irrelevant offers, resulting in people unsubscribing from their mailing list.
Bear in mind that your subscribers are people that lead busy lives and receiving messages that are not related to what they want will only appear intrusive. After all the effort that you put into acquiring your subscribers, the last thing you want is to annoy them and lose their business.
Segmentation also plays an important role here especially when you have various groups of customers or contacts with different needs. For instance, I have a customer list which I send regular updates, a subscribers list which I send weekly tips on Internet business, and a business associates list which I share business resources. You too, should do the same.
Implementing the above three things will help you to see a higher ROI (Return-On-Investment) over time. Remember, build relationships is the key to success.
Practice the 3:1 rule – educate (share useful resources) your list three times before you start to promote something once. Educating and making your subscribers trust and like you is your immediate priority if you want to create a strong income stream from your email list!
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