Email marketing has the potential to be the single most powerful marketing tool in your arsenal. Don’t take my word for it: if you check the blogs of any of the biggest ‘make money’ experts on the web, they will almost unanimously advise that email marketing should be front and center as part of your marketing and that it is more profitable than many other kinds combined!
But the fact remains that a lot of people aren’t going about their email marketing in the right way. Unfortunately, they have been misguided or they simply got the wrong end of the stick. As a result, they will spend an awful lot of time treading water and not making any progress. This is frustrating and it leads a lot of marketers to give up on this aspect of their marketing strategy.
This report is here to change that for you. Herein, you will find 21 incredibly powerful hacks that can instantly increase your engagement, your deliverability, your conversions and more. Are you ready? Let’s go!
1. Warm Up Your List
To avoid getting a bad ‘sender reputation’, it’s very important to avoid letting emails bounce or get delivered with very poor open rates. A good way to protect yourself from this fate is to first ‘warm up’ your IP address and mailing list. That means sending some emails from your account to only your most engaged members – maybe even friends and family. This will get you off to a good start which could stand you in good stead if things take a turn later on.
2. Keep Your Friends and Relatives On There
For this same reason, you should keep friends and relatives on your mailing list. They will (hopefully) always open them, which can help just a little in keeping your sender rep positive.
3. Send Emails Consistently
Don’t go long periods without sending emails and likewise, don’t go through phases of bombarding your audience. Let your recipients know what to expect and they’ll be less likely to complain or get frustrated with you.
4. Tease the Next Email
Once you have a consistent schedule, you can use this to your advantage by getting your recipients to eagerly await each new instalment! Do this by teasing what’s coming up and making it sound highly exciting.
5. Use Split Testing
Split testing means that you are going to send out two very similar emails, perhaps with subtly different subject headings, and then see which performs best. This will teach you the best practices to adopt and thus help you to optimize your process.
6. Use a Landing Page Builder
Something like Lead Pages or Thrive will help you to create more professional looking landing pages which will in turn help you to get more conversions.
7. Calculate How Much You Can Spend on PPC
Once you have a landing page, you can then use PPC (pay per click) advertising to direct traffic there. You now know how much you are paying (maximum) for each visitor. If you know what your conversion rate is and you can calculate the average number of purchases each subscriber makes (and how much profit comes from each one), you can choose the perfect budget for your ads and guarantee that you’ll stay in profit! Almost…
8. Offer a Good Incentive
A good incentive or magnet is something like a free ebook or a report. This can help to encourage people to part with their email address when they might otherwise have been on the fence and it will hopefully mean you buy some good will in the process!
9. But Not Too Good!
While it’s a good idea to offer an incentive, you don’t want to make this something too amazing. In fact, a report is almost always better than a free ebook.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, if your incentive is too good then you will risk attracting people to your mailing list who are in fact not interested in whatever you’re talking about. They will sign up purely to get your free gift and they might then never read any of your emails or even unsubscribe as soon as they have what they want! This skews your data and of course damages your sender reputation, so you want to avoid it.
The other issue is that if you plan on selling an ebook later on, giving away a free ebook will seem to undermine the value of that product. If you are giving one away for free right now, then why would someone be willing to pay $100 for the next one? Especially seeing as they probably haven’t read the freebie yet…
10. Use Storytelling
Storytelling is precisely what it sounds like: telling stories! In other words, when you write your next email, try to frame it as a story. Instead of dispassionately describing the merits of a certain technique or product, instead try talking about how it helped you and how it changed your life. Set the scene, describe the emotion and generally get your audience invested in the outcome. This is a far more engaging way to explain something and it’s actually much more persuasive as well.
11. Use the Recipients’ Names
Your autoresponder contains a feature in it that allows you to include the recipients’ names in their emails. This will automatically replace the {Name} tag in every single message so that they say ‘Hi Joe’ or ‘HI Dave’ instead of just ‘Hi’.
Now, I used to not be a fan of this technique. Everyone can see through this and it’s clear that it’s not personal and that just makes it seem emotionally manipulative. As it happens though, using this strategy has been shown to help you avoid ending up in the ‘Social’ or ‘Promotions’ inbox because it looks like natural and normal correspondence. That’s good news – so use this strategy!
12. Be Brief
Whenever you send an email, you always need to make sure that it contains value of some sort. That means it should provide a tip, a lesson, instructions or perhaps just entertainment. Whatever the case, your audience needs to feel that it was worth their time reading that message.
Better yet, you want to ensure that the amount of time they spend is short. If they can get maximum value for minimum time investment, then that will be a more efficient exchange for them and it will feel like even more value. They’re essentially getting more for less! So, learn to write efficiently and get right to the point – be respectful of your audience’s time.
13. Use a Normal Email Structure
Earlier we mentioned that using the first name in your email could help you to stand out and to by-pass the spam filter.
Another trick you can use that will do the same thing, is to try and use a more conventional structure. In other words, instead of creating an elaborate newsletter template with headings and flashing lights, instead try writing a normal email as you would do to a friend. This will feel much more authentic and personal and it will also be more likely to bypass those various filters and make it to the inbox.
14. Ask to be Whitelisted
If you are still facing emails that end up in the spam folder, then one of the simplest and most effective solutions is just to ask your recipients to whitelist you. That means removing you from any spam lists and putting you in the primary inbox rather than the secondary ones.
A great time to do this is in your welcome message for your double opt-in. Your audience will need to see this message in order to sign up and you can warn them that it might go into their spam folder. You can then take this same opportunity to warn them that all your future correspondence might end up there and that they should move you to the primary inbox if they want to be sure they don’t miss future updates.
15. Use a Lightbox
Lightboxes are ‘popovers’ that appear on top of the rest of your content in a window and cause the rest of the site to go black. Normally, they force the user to click ‘OK’ or ‘Cancel’ to dismiss and in most cases, they are promoting a mailing list. While these can be a little frustrating for the user, studies show that they increase conversions by as much as 400% which makes them highly worthwhile.
16. Use a Sidebar Widget
Remember that a lot of your visitors won’t land on your website or blog through the home page. If you have popular blog posts or pages within your site, then you need a sidebar widget that will contain your opt-in form. This way, people will be able to sign-up wherever they land on your site and you’re drive many more conversions as a result.
17. Mention Your Mailing List in Your Text
Another way you can get people to sign up from your blog is simply to mention your email list in your blog posts. Again, if you have a post or two that is very popular, you can simply add a little section toward the end saying that you have much more content like this that you’d like to share and that you’d love it if people could sign up.
Sometimes the simplest methods involve just asking! And you can do the same through your social media too or on your YouTube channel. And it works both ways: don’t forget to ask your email subscribers if they’ll consider following you on Twitter.
18. Try the AIDA Format
If you want to sell through your mailing list, then don’t go straight in for the kill. Instead, try to build awareness and attention first and take advantage of the serialized nature of your emails. You can do this by using the AIDA structure: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.
19. Ask People to Forward on Your Emails
Remember how we said it was a good idea to ask people to sign up? Likewise, you can also just ask people to forward on your emails to others. This is a fantastic way to get your messages to spread and especially because your messages will be coming from addresses that people already know.
But of course, for an email to be worth sharing, you’re going to need to ensure that you pack in a ton of value!
This by the way is how the website Brain Pickings (www.brainpickings.org) started. This site began as an email round robin that owner Maria Popova sent every day. It became so popular that it eventually evolved into this huge site!
20. Include an Opt-In Form
If you are going to ask people to manually spread your emails around then don’t forget to include an opt-in form right in the message, or alternatively to include a link to one. Otherwise it won’t lead to new subscribers, which is kind of the point!
21. Wake People Up With a Giveaway
Has your list gone sleepy? Is the list that once used to respond by rapidly opening every single message now not paying any attention to your new correspondence? You can fix this problem by getting your audience to wake up with an exciting email. One good option is to give something away for free and to mention that right in your subject line.
As well as getting people to click who might have stopped, this also builds a lot of goodwill. We are very used to getting things only when people want something. But if you can send an email that gives something away completely for free to people who are already subscribers… then that is unexpected! And this can win you the kind of goodwill that helps to really engage your audience and make proper fans who will support you going forward.
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