Improving your email marketing strategy is not that difficult if you follow these 4 simple steps.
If you’ve taken the time to build an email list, then you already know how critical this asset is to your business.
So we want to ensure we are getting our messages through to our audiences, right?
Here are a few tips to improve your email marketing strategy.
1. Use double opt-in.
The #1 argument I get about this is that requiring people to double opt-in reduces the list sign-ups. While that may be true, a smaller, more engaged list is much more valuable than a big, huge list that never opens your emails in the first place.
Now.
To be fully transparent here, I still let people on my list without forcing a double-opt-in as part of my email marketing strategy.
However, 85% of my list HAS confirmed their email address.
Think about that.
The way I do this, is through a legacy Infusionsoft action that clearly asks them the verify their email when they click to download whatever lead magnet they opted in for.
If they don’t click through, they are not confirmed — but still added to my list.
But like I said, 85% of click the link and confirm automatically.
2. Stay away from the corporate merge/personalization.
People aren’t dumb.
They realize there is a [merge] field in the email and is replaced by [yournamehere].
I'm not saying STOP personalizing emails, just be cool about it.
Most of the time, it’s best just to get to the point. People already know their name.
Think about it this way.
If you sent an email to a friend, would you say “Hi Joey…”?
Perhaps…
But in most cases, it would be more along the lines of “dude…check this out” – so stick to how you would talk to your friends.
Of course, there are specific times you want to use the person's name – like in the subject line, because we all recognize our own name and will stop scrolling for a second…and hopefully open the email.
One of the best ways to get your emails opened is to learn how to write sales copy.
3. CLEAN your list regularly.
This tip should be #1 really. Because it’s SO important. Especially these days.
Again, it’s another tip that clients and students debate me on.
They don’t want to delete emails.
But if you have dead weight on your list, your ego of having that huge number staring at you when you open your email CRM is killing your email marketing if they aren’t opening and engaging.
Worse, if you have emails that are bouncing and you ignore them – by constantly blasting your list or something…you’re going to get flagged by the googles and ISP dudes.
You don’t want that.
Whichever email platform you are using, make sure you are taking every measure to proactively monitor opt-outs, and bounces.
Take this a step further and monitor engagement.
I do this every month now.
I have campaigns that run in the background that tag people accordingly.
If emails bounce, I have notices on my dashboard so I can see right away what’s happening. I’ll delete those emails because they’re dead anyway.
For the people that are unengaged or opt-out, I export those to another email service provider as a holder…and then delete them off my main Infusionsoft account.
This ONE thing keeps my list VERY clean and Infusionsoft happy.
Which makes my email marketing strategy work better because emails are delivered like they should be.
4. Segment your lists
These days, you really have to take some time to segment your list into groups of interest and behaviors.
Gone are the days of full-list blasts.
There are times for a full blast, but it’s slowly dying.
Only email marketers who have no intention of building strong recurring relationships are ignoring the segmentation and behavioral marketing strategies.
To give you an example…let’s use a typical webinar scenario.
I’ll have people tagged in these multiple ways:
- Invited to register
- Registered
- Didn’t register
- Attended
- Didn’t attend
- Left early
- Saw offer
- Didn’t see offer
- Bought offer
- Didn’t buy offer
- Sent follow-up
and so on.
As you can imagine, I can combine multiple tags and get a VERY specific segment of my audience for a new email marketing strategy.
So there you have it…a few tips on how to improve your email marketing.
You may also be interested in this post where I talk about a Failed Email Marketing Plan You Want to Avoid