If you’re only using email marketing to send out a company newsletter, you’re missing out on a potential revenue stream.
There are emails that everyone dreads and others that customers get excited about seeing in their inboxes. What’s the difference and how to you get your brand to be the one that builds anticipation?
Spend the time to build a plan for your email marketing with these five helpful tips, tools and strategies that can help you grow your brand and build up your bottom line.
1. Design
Before you get too carried away with any email marketing campaign, take a moment to figure out the design. The less there is to your email, the better. Clean, simple designs that are easy to read, with content that is easy to digest, does the best for open and subscription rates. In fact, your design can even be as simple as text only.
Many successful marketing campaigns don’t have any design to them, they simply look like a personalized email. That can be an incredibly effective marketing tactic.
Take for example emails from James Clear, who has more than 70,000 subscribers, according to a June 2014 article from buffersocial. His email design is simple, personalized, and as his numbers demonstrate, effective.
2. Single-focus messaging
Clutter is the enemy of success. Never is this truer than with your email marketing campaigns. This is where so many well-intentioned entrepreneurs make mistakes.
It’s fine if you want to have a weekly corporate email newsletter, although if there’s no revenue generation arm to it, I’d challenge you to answer why. You need to separate out a clear message for each communication with your email list. There should be one clear and simple call to action that is so obvious, even a monkey would click on it.
Don’t clutter your email marketing with links outside of that call to action. Any clickable link should always be to connect your audience with the action you want them to take. No exceptions.
3. Incremental sales
When you set up email marketing campaigns properly, you have the ability to strategically chase after incremental sales. This is the essence of a sales funnel that says you take your visitor, convert him or her into a prospect, then a lead and then seal the deal with him or her as a client.
The wider your funnel, the better your opportunities to close sales, create clients and then go to those clients with incremental sales email campaigns. If a client has just purchased a product from you, and you know you have a valuable companion product that would go perfect with his or her purchase, you can set up an email campaign to go after that incremental business.
The key is to always make valuable connections between products or services so the incremental sales are genuine. Otherwise you’re going to irritate your clients. Unless you want to do this process manually each time, which you should not, you’ll want to learn about drip email marketing campaigns.
4. Drip campaigns
Drip email campaigns are marketing emails you set up in advance that automatically trigger off of events. For example, when you sign up for someone’s list and you immediately get a welcome email — that’s a drip campaign email triggered off the registration.
Perhaps a week or two later you’ll get an email about a service or product. That’s a drip email campaign based off of time.
It’s all cooked up in advance, programmed into a marketing CMS platform such as Marketo or Eloqua, which you can set then forget. These can be particularly valuable for nurturing new relationships, adding incremental business or staying in touch with clients who haven’t purchased in a while.
5. Cross-pollinate
Affiliate sales are a great incremental business model that can serve both you and your clients if you properly pair your business with another brand.
For example, in point three I mentioned only recommending products or services that are truly a good match for your client’s recent purchase. What if you don’t have something that would help them?
A great way to help recommend something valuable and still gain an incremental piece of business is to utilize affiliate sales.
If your business is affiliated with another brand, it can do the same thing for you and send customers your way when there is a great match. It’s a great way to cross-pollinate business and offer a complete solution for your clients’ needs.
