Email marketing it IMPORTANT for business these days.
By email marketing, I mean sending your audience emails either helping them out with something, or trying to SELL them something.
Let’s go over some ways to keep your email subscribers ENGAGED and reading your emails. The problem is, your subscribers aren’t as engaged as you’d like them to be. What do I mean by this? Well, they’re just not opening enough of your emails. They’re not buying your products? They’re not singing your praises. Why is this?
I’ll share what I’ve learned and how I’ve managed to grow a list from absolutely nothing to over 1.5K subscribers in less than a year with no advertising spend or super active promotion.
There are a number of things which are stopping your email subscribers being as engaged and loyal as you’d like, and it’s best to look at all of these factors at once and try to work on as many of them as you can in order to see the best results. To start with, think about why people would even sign up to an email list in the first place.
Why do people sign up to email lists?
This is the starting point. Before we can start changing things and optimising we have to think about why people signed up to your list in the first place. What did they want? What were they looking for?
Now hopefully, you were offering some sort of value in return for their email address. A ‘Lead magnet’, which is usually a small PDF document or report sharing some valuable information with the new subscriber.
Let’s say you’re reading a post about how to care for tree frogs, you get to the end of an awesome article, and you see a small opt-in form, saying that in return for your email address, you’ll be sent a PDF of the best things to feed tree frogs!
It’s free after all, you just need to enter your email address. A no brainer. This is a classic ‘lead magnet’ whereby someone gives their email address to get SOMETHING. Figure out what people thought they were going to get when they signed up to your email list. If it was a PDF, ask the following things –
- Is it high quality?
- Did it actually help your subscribers?
- Did it solve a problem for them
- Did it start to show a little bit about you and your ‘personal side’ in order to build rapport?
You can ask the same questions if it was something else. Some people like to offer a ‘series of lessons’ in the form of an autoresponder AS their lead magnet. This can work but from my experience, it tends to take way too long to see profits or sales from your email list this way.
They’re fixed on getting a series of free lessons that the second they see an offer or anything they would need to pay for, they ignore it and wait for the next ‘free content’. Now of course, there are exceptions, and you’ll still see a few sales and revenue from an email list that offers a lesson series, but I think it’s better to have a ‘solid’ lead magnet.
So establish what they were looking for when they signed up.
Let’s say they signed up to get an Ebook showing the best ways to control your dreams. The Ebook could explain a little bit about it, teaching them something BUT leaving them wanting more. They’re hungry for more.
When you’ve ‘teased’ them in this way, they’ll be much more likely to buy if you then offer them a ‘add on’ or a much better/bigger version of the free thing they opted in for.
Make sure your EMAILS match your OPTIN form
If your opt in form said ‘Sign Up For A Free Lesson Series On xxxxx’ Then DON’T bombard them with emails trying to sell a load of products! They signed up because they wanted FREE lessons, so anything other than that (unless you’re very clever about how you present it) will be shot down. They won’t like it.
You need to keep your promises.
If you offered a free lesson series, you need to be MUCH more subtle about how you market things to your list. Be personal, genuine, and don’t try to sell too hard. If you want to try to sell an Ebook, and your opt-in form said you’re giving away free lessons, you need to make sure to word it in such a way that it doesn’t seem like you’re ‘taking’ from them.
An example could be –
‘Hey!
Hopefully you’ve been enjoying my lessons, and you’re getting some results! I’m really grateful that you’re on my email list.
I’ll keep this short as everyone’s busy these days! I’d like to tell you about an awesome new Ebook I’ve created teaching how to properly xxxxxxxxx with minimal effort! Check it out here –
YOUR LINK TO YOUR PRODUCT
Don’t worry, your free lessons will carry on as normal, I just wanted to tell you about this because it can really help ‘speed up’ your results! If you’re not interested, that’s totally fine too! I hope you keep enjoying the lessons!
Regards, xxxxxx’
If however, your opt-in form made it CLEAR that they’d be sold to, then you need to be more direct and try and trigger their emotions!
If the opt-in form copy said something like this –
‘Enter your email address here to get the latest information about xxxxx products’
Then your email could read –
‘Hi there.
If you’re like me, you LOVE cars.
Well, now there is a membership site DEDICATED to car lovers just like you and me. They’re only accepting a certain number of people, so to get in on this amazing new community, you NEED to go and sign up today.
If you wait any longer, it will be gone. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Go here now!
YOUR LINK
Seriously, don’t miss out on this!
Regards, xxxxxxx’
Do you see the difference?
Your personality and the way you speak to your subscribers has to be congruent with the opt-in form that made them sign up in the first place. If people sign up expecting loads of free stuff, they’re less likely to go and buy the first link you send them.
If however, you provide subscribers with a ‘one time’ lead magnet sharing information, then the next day when you pitch them a detailed Ebook, they’re much more likely to buy it because they’re engaged and interested.
Making sure there’s stuff for them to read
I made this mistake. I had a HUGE series of lessons on my autoresponder. I had about 25-26 emails there, (Which I now know isn’t that many) and they were set up to send every day for the first week, then every two days, and then every 3 days. A few months went by, and I thought I’d check my stats.
I hadn’t checked my email reports for a while, and I was shocked when I did.
Almost my entire list had got to the end of my emails! They were just waiting for the next email but it would never come, because I’d only written 26 emails. My emails lasted about 2-3 months from the moment someone subscribed to the moment they reached the end.
What’s more, is that almost all of the people who UNSUBSCRIBED from my list, had done so on the last email. Why? Because they were hungry for more content and I never sent it!
This kills your list and makes your subscribes MUCH less active, to the point where when you eventually DO send another email, hardly anyone opens it and a few unsubscribe. Sometimes people forget they’re on a list so when you send them an email for the first time in 2 months, they leave your list.
AVOID THIS!
Don’t make the same mistake I did. Make sure that you’ve got enough email content to keep people reading your stuff for 1-2 YEARS. I know this sounds like a long time, but you can space your content out! Let’s say you send one email a week, you only have to write just over 50 emails. That can be done in one day.
It’s worth doing as well, because the longer you keep an email subscriber on your list, the better.
Any one of your subscribers could open an email one day and decide they’re ready to buy from you. Or they could click a link to your site or blog, then see another link to a product and buy from your affiliate link. You never know. For this reason it’s good to keep as many subscribers as you can engaged and opening your emails if you can.
Don’t spam people!
Remember what I said about people expecting certain things when they sign up to an email list? Well, most people expect that they won’t be spammed. When they sign up to a list, they assume that because you’re offering them something good and they like you (Maybe they’re watched a few of your videos etc) that you won’t spam them.
When you send people content they don’t want, like random videos for products you haven’t even used yourself or are scammy, they’ll remember that and not only unsubscribe but speak badly of you every time your name is mentioned. You don’t want bad publicity in the internet game.
Try and reply to emails but don’t encourage it
When you first start out with your online business, it’s tempting to encourage people to reply and send you loads of questions. This can be good at the start, because you’re connecting with and engaging people but the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to keep this up.
It’s fine when you have 2 emails a day, but what about when you’ve got over 2000 emails per day?
You can’t possibly reply to all of them, and if you did, you’d be severely limiting and slowing your growth. You’ll be at a standstill because all your time will be spent replying to emails instead of creating content that could help millions.
Try and reduce the number of questions you get sent in. There are a few ways to do this –
- Include a detailed FAQ page directly on your contact page. Encourage people to read it. By having a huge page where you answer people’s most common questions, you can just direct people to that page before they message you!
- In your autoresponder series, tell them what to do at the end. The best ways to automate or ‘work smarter’ with regards to people emailing questions to you is to start a forum, or have people ask a community on your Facebook page. This way, they’re not only asking you, but they’re asking everyone in that community as well, and more often than not your other fans will answer their question for you.
- Try and write emails that don’t raise loads of questions. This is a simple one but it makes sense. Don’t write confusing or long winded emails, as this will just raise the number of people who reply to it and ask ‘what was that all about’. Try and make the emails really simple, easy to understand and helpful.
Summary
Thanks for reading. To keep email subscribers engaged, you’ve got to understand why they signed up in the first place, and what they’ll be looking for in the future. Keep your promises and really try to help your subscribers, they’ll reward you for it in the long run.