There is always room for improvement in even the most optimized and efficient email marketing campaigns.
From edited body messages to different marketing tactics, email marketing is a progressive and ever-changing phenomenon.
If you are satisfied with your email marketing success but want that little bit more from your subscriber list, here are some general tips.
1) Split content and marketing somewhere between 70:30 and 80:20.
Too much marketing content and your campaigns will fail before they have started. Too little and you will build a very valuable audience without business results.
Email marketing is a balancing act, and without the right blend of true content and marketing materials, it is easy to fall out of the ROI zone.
Keep things balanced between 70:30 and 80:20 in terms of content:marketing.
2) The bigger your list, the lower the impact can be.
Email marketing is about scale. Marketers with big email lists can afford to use offers with a lower per-sale or per-action return because their list is big enough to contain and dilute the financial damage.
However, if your list is small it is best to stick with offers that give a high ROI. This method ensures that you’re still earning enough to cover your time and produce a profit.
3) If you are marketing to a blog audience, write in first person.
Have you got email leads that you generated with a blog? While it might be tempting to reuse old content articles and marketing materials for your email campaign, it is unlikely that they will have a healthy conversion rate.
Blog audiences are interested in one thing – the blogger – and without that first person voice, it is very unlikely that they will be interested.
4) Don’t sell, pre-sell.
Linking directly to a sales page from your marketing emails is unlikely to help you create any sales. Sure, one or two visitors might be convinced and converted, but doing so leaves you with a large portion of readers who are not interested in your product.
Instead of hitting them with the hard sell directly, use pre-sell pages to build confidence and interest in your product.
5) Integrate images into your emails.
Text-only marketing can be dull, uninspiring, and worst of all, ineffective. With a couple of unique images embedded in each email, your marketing campaigns could go from a boring affair to a conversion-heavy machine overnight.
Experiment with images, track results, and don’t be afraid of adding media to your email format. As you might know, email marketers are more and more looking into video in emails (or better: links to video in email with an image of the video in the mail).
6) Once you have built a list, don’t neglect it.
Building a list isn’t a one-off goal, but an ongoing effort. No matter how many thousand email addresses you’ve built up, there is always room for more. However, don’t focus too much on the ‘more’ (quantity) but on how you can keep the existing subscribers by offering them what they want!
Keep marketing your list to people but most of all: provide valuable content to your subscribers, give them sharing tools and a way to talk back to you.
Again, email marketing should be a dialogue.
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