EMAIL Marketing Strategy 2017: 2017

Sunday, 17 September 2017

What is email marketing and how do you make a popular policy?

Email marketing is not always a marketer’s first choice when it comes to campaign planning, but it’s still powerful enough to be a significant part of a marketing strategy.

This is an attempt to understand what it is about, how it works and how a brand can embrace its benefits.

Definition

Email marketing is a way to reach consumers through direct electronic mail. It’s a direct method of written communication that aims to reach a targeted audience for the promotion of a campaign, a product, or a service that might be useful for the recipient.

Unlike spam, the context is crucial for every email, as its effectiveness depends on the ability to grab the recipient’s attention. The goal is to add value and convince a consumer to proceed to further actions through the right incentive.

Its low cost compared to other forms of marketing doesn’t make it an easy method of reaching consumers, as it still requires the right strategy to drive the desired results. However, email marketing has the potential to be a key part of a marketing strategy, provided that a business follows all the necessary steps when starting with a new email marketing plan.

Four tips to get started with email marketing

The first step for an email marketing campaign is to build a list that will serve as your target audience from now on.

It’s not just about adding email addresses to a list, as it’s important to have the consent of the people you’re adding to your list.

How, then, can you build the email list?

The most popular ways to convince people to join your email list are to add value, or provide an offer. People are becoming less willing to share their email addresses, as they are already receiving a large number of emails. Thus, you need to provide a solid reason for them to join your email list.

Examples:

Free download

Exclusive offer

Free tool

Discounts

Free ebook

Report

Once they are interested in joining your list, it’s up to you to maintain their interest and be as useful and relevant as possible to them.

Decide on CTA

Email marketing starts by deciding on the call-to-action you want to include and thus, the goals you are setting for each campaign.

It has been observed that a call-to-action button can increase conversion rates by as much as 28%, compared to a text link. This means that a button can increase the chances of turning a recipient into a customer, which is why it requires the right amount of testing until you find the best option

A call-to-action button has to be placed in the most strategic position to make the next step easier for the recipients. Even the choice of colour may affect the conversion rate, depending on the psychology of the user and how they react to each colour.

Moreover, a call-to-action button has to be clear, without confusing the recipients. Each email campaign should have one specific CTA to make sure that it doesn’t divert from the initial plans.

For example, if you want to increase awareness about a product, you should create a call-to-action button that encourages users to learn more about it or even to get a free trial. There’s no need to add more CTAs about an additional announcement, or a new report. These can form part of a different email campaign.

Decide on frequency

It is estimated that sending four emails per month instead of one increases the chances of having consumers open more than one email.

Whether a campaign involves just one message or a series of emails, you need to decide on the frequency you’ll be contacting your audience.

Even if you’re planning to send one email for the promotion of your new product, you need to ensure that you’re not sending any other emails for different campaigns on the same day, or else you risk annoying and losing subscribers from your list.

Start by planning your monthly email campaigns, and be consistent with the frequency. This way your recipients know what to expect from you, which increases the chances of maintaining their interest in your messages.

Measurement

The three most popular metrics for email marketing are:

Open rate

Click through rate (CTR)

Unsubscribes

An analysis of these three can offer useful insights on every email campaign, as they indicate whether a campaign is interesting enough to convince recipients to open an email and most importantly, whether they are also interested in clicking on the CTA.

On the other side of things, if a campaign leads to an increased number of unsubscribes, it means that it lacks the necessary context, which may require further thinking on how to adjust your future email campaigns.

Email analytics can go beyond these three metrics and each platform has its own way of measuring success, but these three can make a great starting point for every campaign, helping you understand your audience and whether your message reaches its recipients.

Moreover, conversion rates make a significant type of measurement, with 60% of marketers considering it the primary method of evaluating an email’s effectiveness.

This is a useful way to link email marketing with your general marketing goals, by finding the best way to track email campaigns and associate them with the way recipients react to them.

Overview

As 92% of online adults use email, with 61% using it on an average day, a business cannot ignore its potential as part of a marketing campaign.

A personalised, targeted and carefully planned email marketing strategy can spark further interest among consumers towards a product, a brand, or a service.

Attention spans are becoming shorter, but this doesn’t mean that a business can’t use its creativity to capture the recipients’ attention with a unique email marketing campaign.

It’s all about understanding the importance of context, and using it accordingly as part of a campaign.

5 Surprises to Writing Sales Emails That Scenes Will Answer To

Think it through from the POV of your prospects. Visualizing how much of it they are actually going to view tells your exactly where to focus your efforts. Fire off some boilerplate with just a name change? Game over.

But before you take it personally, try putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects. High-level prospects receive hundreds of prospecting emails every single day -- personally written ones, not spam or bot emails. No one has the time to carefully read that many messages! Your prospects have no choice but to scan them all and quickly decide what’s worth their time, and what’s not.

If your email doesn’t make the cut right away, it’s lost forever. Luckily, there are surefire ways to get your emails read by any prospect, so you can crush your sales goals. Check out these five powerful secrets to writing sales emails that your prospects will actually open and read:

1. Focus on the subject line and first sentence.

Far too many salespeople spend all their time crafting the message body of their sales emails, and then they quickly slap on a subject line at the last second. Instead, you should be laser-focused on crafting your subject line, and pay special attention to the very first sentence.

Related: 3 Reasons Email Campaigns Remain the Best Marketing Tool

Why? The vast majority of your prospects are scanning their emails on a mobile device or within an email program that displays a preview of each email’s subject line and first sentence. If your email is ever going to get opened in the first place, then you must be strategic about these two components, above all else. Make sure your subject line provides compelling value up front, and that it’s simple and straightforward. The first sentence of every email should look like it was written specifically for each individual prospect.

2. Drop the formality.

You shouldn’t be trying to impress prospects with the quality, structure and formality of your writing: Your prospects don’t care about any of that. In fact, a formal-sounding email is far more likely to get deleted in today’s business world. Conversational and casual is where it’s at. Keep your sales emails friendly, low-key and informal to put prospects at ease and dramatically increase your chances of setting a sales meeting.

3. Research and personalize.

While you don’t need to do a tremendous amount of research for every email you send, you should do enough to show you know who the recipients are and what their deepest frustrations might be. Use social networks and search engines to figure out each prospect’s current title, recent projects and other relevant information that will dramatically increase the chances your email is opened, read and replied to.

Related: Starting a Business? 4 Ways to Research Your Potential Customer.

By the same token, always personalize sales emails by greeting prospects by their first name. And don’t send the same boilerplate message to everyone! If your prospect evens thinks you’re copying and pasting the same email to multiple recipients, only changing the first name, then it’s game over for you. Instead, include a challenge or accomplishment specific to the prospect’s organization to show you’ve done your homework.

4. Keep your message as short as possible.

Writing too much is one of the biggest mistakes salespeople make when it comes to sales emails. Remember, you goal isn’t to educate the prospect or inundate them with information. Rather, your goal is simply to elicit a response. That’s all. Prospects don’t want to read multiple paragraphs. If your message is too long, they’ll quickly move on without responding, even if the subject line and first sentence caught their attention. Your sales emails should never exceed five or six sentences -- and shorter is even better.

5. Always ask a question.

Since the goal of every sales email is merely to elicit a response, you should always ask a question at the end of each message. Don’t end your email by saying, “Let me know if you have any questions,” or “Let me know if you’d like to talk more.”

Related: 4 Questions to Ask When Planning Effective Customer Messages

Instead, encourage your prospect to engage by asking, “Do any of these issues ring true to you?” or “What is the best address for me to send this to?” A simple question makes it far easier for your prospect to respond and engage, ultimately leading to further conversation.

3 Reasons Email Promotions Continue the Best Marketing Tool

Mobile phones have made email inboxes portable, so that no one is ever really offline. Take advantage of that.

I used to think that email marketing’s days were numbered. But, as a recent study from marketing technology pioneer Zeta Global and market research firm The Relevancy Group found, there’s even more value for email marketing today than in years past. Why? Mobile trends have brought new life and relevance to the dated technology.

With more and more consumers going mobile, they’re now staying connected to their personal inboxes 24/7, wherever they go. This e-commerce study, surveying 1,000 U.S. adults, found that email marketing’s value in the mobile era can be broken down to three major factors:

1. Everybody loves a bargain.

If you're like me, you're actually looking forward to the Ann Taylor email with a "hidden surprise" that translates to 70 percent off the sale price. Promotional email marketing is an effective way to drive engagement, especially around popular shopping holidays when consumer interest in making purchases is higher and an email’s call to action can help tip a decision in a particular direction. Deals such as discounts and special offers are very helpful for consumers, signified by 62 percent of survey respondents saying these promotions have aided them in making shopping decisions.

Related: 8 Shopping Habits of Millennials All Retailers Need to Know About

Executed properly around relevant seasonal opportunities, online retailers can leverage timely, urgent demand in the market with offers for attractive deals to drive conversions. It’s worth noting that offers for free shipping (41 percent) and “buy one, get one free” (37 percent) are the most attractive for consumers. Additionally, though everyone loves a deal, women (50 percent) respond more to discounts than men do (40 percent).

2. People are too busy (and impatient) to shop.

Last year, I did all of my Christmas shopping in one day. Husband, five kids, parents, sisters -- did it all in three hours. How? Online shopping is more convenient than ever before. Zeta estimates that nearly one-third of all consumers accomplish the bulk of their holiday shopping online. Furthermore, a majority of online shoppers (71 percent) were willing to complete purchases on whatever device is conveniently available when looking for a product, though 67 percent did say tablets are preferred.

Related: 8 Tablets for Business: the Pros and Cons

Ultimately, online shopping has become a significant method for consumers to conveniently make purchases, particularly among people between 27 and 45 years old, whom Zeta found are most likely to do the majority of their shopping online.

3. Mobile phones have revitalized email.

I look at email on my phone no less than 50 times per day. And I'm not alone. When looking at last year's holiday research, Zeta found that 34 percent of conversions came from mobile devices. With more people opening marketing emails via mobile and retailers seeing strong conversion rates tied to this trend, there is no doubt that the combination of mobile and email is delivering promotional messaging more effectively and providing retailers an additional edge in the maturing e-commerce space.

Related: 5 Ways to Be More Mobile-Friendly in 2017

Today, brands need to have relevant, impactful messages that resonate with individual consumers. With the resurgence of email marketing, it is possible to deliver the right message, using the right channel, at the right time more accurately than ever before

13 Things to Start, Break & Save Doing With Your Email Marketing in 2017

If you’re reading this blog post, there’s a good chance you arrived here by clicking on a link in an email we sent to you.

Email marketing is a powerful tool to encourage your audience to engage with content and to nurture leads in your database along the buyer’s journey.And despite what you may think, email marketing is still growing: Gmail alone has 1 billion users worldwide, and The Radicati Group predicts that there will be 3 billion email users worldwide by 2020 (that’s almost half of the world’s population).

Reap the positive ROI benefits of email marketing with the help of this 14-point checklist for optimizing your emails. Certainly email is not dead, but it is getting harder to do well. HubSpot Postmaster and Email Engineering Director Tom Monaghan distilled his wisdom into a set of guidelines for email marketing for growth in 2017 at INBOUND last year. Read on to learn what strategies you should start implementing, absolutely avoid, and keep up in 2017 and in years ahead.

How to Improve Your Email Marketing in 2017

1) Send emails to lists that want to hear from you.

If you have email lists with low rates of engagement activity, stop sending to them. Every time you send to a list with low open and engagement rates, it hurts your domain reputation and your chances of connecting with other potential customers.

Monaghan said it best in his talk: “You are what you eat, and so is your marketing.” When you receive tons of emails from brands you don’t engage with, constantly deleting them or marking them as “read” is most likely tiresome. Empathize with your subscribers and treat their inbox the way you would want your inbox treated.

2) Have a goal for each email before you press “send.”

If you don’t have a goal in mind for the emails you’re sending, the recipients won’t know what the goal is, either. Once you define a goal for your email sends, you can define success and build a list to make that happen.

Goals for your emails could include a contact filling out a longer form for a gated content offer to provide your team with more information about their organization, or redeeming a promo code for a purchase on your website.

Give recipients options in your messages, such as calls-to-action and links in text, so they have multiple avenues to achieve your goal. Everyone’s behavior is different, so make your emails flexible.

3) Personalize and test your emails.

Email personalization really works. For example, back in 2014, we found that emails with the recipients’ first names in the subject lines had higher clickthrough rates than emails that didn’t.

When it comes to personalizing your emails, stick with the basics. Personalize according to recipient names and company names, but to avoid being creepy, leave it at that, urges Monaghan.

Nothing is less personal than receiving a “Dear Customer” or “Dear First Name” email, so test every email to make sure you’re sending to recipient names.

4) Send emails from a personalized account.

Don’t send emails from a “noreply” email account. Personalization works on your end, too. Boost your engagement by personalizing the “from” email address to drive replies from subscribers to a real person instead of “noreply@company.com.”

5) Experiment with sending emails on different days of the week.

Stop sending emails on Tuesdays. Seriously, stop.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the most popular days to send email, but they’re oversaturated with messages that might be overwhelming your subscribers. If you want your emails to be opened, try sending them on Mondays and Fridays. Emails with calls-to-action perform well on Saturdays, so don’t be afraid to send emails on the weekend, either.

In any case, try experimenting with your approach to lessen your subscribers’ email load Tuesday through Thursday, when most business emails are sent.

6) Engage with contacts who've submitted forms, not contacts whose information you’ve imported.

When someone fills out a form and provides their email address, their engagement rates are typically higher than cold contacts you’ve imported from a list. That’s because they want to hear from you and chose to engage with your content -- they’ve told you this by filling out a form. This is evidence that the inbound marketing methodology is working for email marketers.

And by the way, don’t buy email lists -- you’re only hurting your credibility and annoying people who haven’t asked to hear from you.

7) Suppress your unengaged subscribers to avoid sending graymail.

You may be sending spam without knowing it, and that’s because the definition of spam has changed. Graymail refers to bulk email messages that aren’t technically spam because the recipients gave you their information, but the fact of the matter is, they get your emails and don’t touch them. Engagement rates plummet if recipients don’t open your first email, so if they continue ignoring you, the probability of them ever opening your messages is going way, way down.

Stop sending graymail, and listen to what people are telling you by not opening your emails. Start suppressing your unengaged subscribers. That way, your open rates will increase, and inbox providers will see that you’re responding to subscriber behavior.

8) If people are unsubscribing, don’t worry too much (yet).

You can’t please everyone, and unsubscribes will happen. Luckily, your subscribers didn’t mark you as spam -- they simply told you, in the nicest way possible, that they’re not interested in hearing from you anymore.

Don’t be too worried yet, but if more people keep unsubscribing, try to identify the potential cause. Consider suppressing or sending fewer emails to subscribers who aren’t engaging as much.

9) If people stop opening your emails, figure out what’s going wrong fast.

If your email open rate is falling, it means you’re missing the expectations of your recipients and that you should prepare for worse outcomes. It’s a leading indicator that spam complaints and unsubscribes are coming, and you should immediately suppress your unengaged subscribers to show email providers that you’re responding to feedback. Test different emails to see if you can improve your open rates.

10) If people mark you as spam, immediately stop sending email and identify the source of the complaints.

If you’re being marked as spam, your domain reputation is at risk, and you could become blacklisted by email providers. Whether the spam complaints are caused by a new source, bad forms, or you missing expectations of your list, slow or completely stop sending emails until you figure it out.

If you aren’t getting unsubscribe or spam complaints, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the clear -- the messages could be going straight to recipients’ junk folders.

11) If you want to learn more about email marketing, take the free email marketing certification course.

Learn more about email marketing with Monaghan right now by taking HubSpot Academy’s Email Marketing Certification course. In only 3.5 hours, you'll learn about lifecycle marketing, email list segmentation, design, deliverability, and more skills to help you cultivate a strong strategy for 2017 and beyond.

12) Be thoughtful about your subject line.

Don’t write clickbait email subject lines. When people click on your email and then immediately bounce away when they realize your subject line wasn’t genuine, your clickthrough rates will suffer.

For best results, customize and personalize email subject lines and experiment with emojis. Pro tip: Read subject lines out loud before sending. Would you open that email if you received it?

13) Remember: Email is getting harder, but it’s still working.

Every year, engagement rates start to slip, and it gets harder to reach people’s inboxes. This doesn’t mean that email marketing is losing its efficacy, it’s just getting more competitive. The divide is growing between email marketers who know what they’re doing and those who don’t, so make sure to put in effort to test different strategies and keep your subscribers engaged.

The theme of all of these email marketing guidelines? Testing. Every audience and contacts database is different, so make sure you’re testing the implementation of new strategies and tailoring them according to how your subscribers engage. And when you’re ready to hit “send,” here are some lead nurturing email examples to inspire your creativity.

5 Email Marketing Twists to Twice Your Business Income

Email is the most powerful marketing channel of the 21st century. In fact, email is so powerful that the Direct Marketing Association says that you can get a return on investment (ROI) of $38 for every $1 you invest in email marketing. Similarly, research shows that email is responsible for driving 25.1 percent of all Black Friday sales in 2015, compared to just 1.6 percent of sales from social media.

If you want to get results from email marketing, though, you need to change your approach. The following are some very little tweaks you can make to your email marketing that will give you a massive boost in revenue:

1. Create and execute an “abandoned cart” follow up strategy

One of the toughest realities you have to face as an online business is that a huge -- and I mean HUGE -- portion of people will go through your sales process, from their first visit to your website right to the checkout, and then drop off.

Data from Baymard, which is based on 34 different cart abandonment studies, found that a whopping 68.81 percent of people abandon carts. That's 68 sales out of 100 that disappear at the final step.

Of course, there are many reasons why people abandon carts, but you can use email to recoup some of these sales.

Radley London recovered 7.9 percent of lost sales simply by sending cart abandonment emails. Boot Barn generated a 12 percent lift in recaptured revenue by using email to remarket to cart abandoners.

Devise a means of conducting email follow up with cart abandoners and consider integrating one of these email marketing systems with your checkout system to make following up easy.

2. Email cross-selling and up selling

How much is cross-selling worth to your business? For e-commerce giant Amazon, cross-selling was worth $37.45 billion in 2015 -- a whopping 35 percent of their revenue.

Amazon’s recommendation engine is one of the most effective cross-selling systems in the world, but very few people know that email is the most powerful ingredient of this recommendation engine.

Experts reveal that conversion to sales from Amazon’s on-site recommendation could be as high as 60 percent, but the conversion is much higher with email. Play it like Amazon and integrate email into your cross-selling and upselling efforts, both in introducing offers and in following up on those offers.

3. Segment your email list and avoid using the batch-and-blast approach

Here are two of the most common approaches to email marketing:

The batch-and-blast approach, in which everybody is lumped into one category and emailed.

The segmented approach, in which subscribers are segmented based on interest and other relevant information.

Which of the two approaches do you think is more effective? Well, let’s consult research again: According to a study conducted by Marketing Sherpa, segmenting emails can boost email conversion rates by up to 208 percent.

You can segment by gender, age bracket, interests, activity on your site, purchase behavior, interaction with your site or a host of other categories. The more personalized and segmented your emails are, though, the better.

4. Optimize the timing of your emails

Research shows that there is a best time and day to send emails depending on your goals. Here are some quick facts based on some reliable sources:

The best time to send an email is between 10 and 11 a.m.

The best weekday to send emails for high transactions is Monday, and the best weekend day is Sunday.

The best day to send emails or high open rates and click through rates is Tuesday.

It is essential to also consider the role the time of your audience plays; the time zone of California is different from that of Florida, and that of Florida is different from that of Berlin. So, it is essential to identify where your audience is mainly based, and then use that knowledge to optimize your emails.

5. Embrace full-on email automation

All things being equal, most of what I recommended above can be done with automation.

Most email services let you automate email timing, making it possible to send emails to different people at different times based on their time zone. They let you split test various elements of emails. They let you configure your emails in such a way that one event triggers another and the experience is different and personalized for each customer depending on what action they take. You want to familiarize yourself with, and make effective use of, these features.

In fact, some email services like Send Pulse are already introducing artificial intelligence for email marketing in a way that does all the above and more. That said, it is important to realize that full-on automation is the future of email marketing. You should look into services like Infusion soft, Active Campaign, Northport and a host of other relevant email service providers; I did a breakdown of the most popular ones here.

Monday, 11 September 2017

Finish You’re Emails with this 1 Word Much Improves the Answer Rate

The art of effective emailing begins with how you end.

I'm sure I'm only one of many people who feel as if they're drowning in a sea of email. There are countless tips on how to manage your inbox if you're on the receiving end and how to write better emails if you're on the sending end. Yet still, sometimes emails simply go unanswered. I'll admit I'm guilty of the nonresponse, especially when my emails start piling up after a few days away.

This isn't very hopeful if your day-to-day involves a lot of emailing -- especially if it's critical that you get a response. Thankfully, the folks at Boomerang, a plug-in for scheduling emails, did a little study to see if the language people use to close their emails has any effect on the response rate. "We looked at closings in over 350,000 email threads," data scientist Brendan Greenley wrote on the Boomerang blog. "And found that certain email closings deliver higher response rates."

But do all emails need a response? Not necessarily. That's why Boomerang ran a variation of the test that looked at threads whose initial email contained a question mark, meaning the initiator of the conversation was likely looking for a reply.

Which sign-off do you think is best for professional emails?

Let's see if you can guess which of these closings the data proved to be the most effective for replies.

Sincerely

Cheers

Warmly

Thanks

Regards

Best

Take care

Ciao

Talk soon

Looking forward to your thoughts

Your initials

[No closing at all]

The answer? Those that express gratitude. "Emails that closed with a variation of thank you got significantly more responses than emails ending with other popular closings," Greenley writes. Here are the exact numbers: Emails that ended in Thanks in advance had a 65.7 percent response rate. Of emails that ended in Thanks, 63 percent got responses. The third most effective closing was Thank you with a 57.9 percent response rate. Across the board, Boomerang found that sign-offs that included some sort of expression of gratitude had a 36 percent relative increase in average response rate.

The worst way to end your emails

It's also worth exploring a couple of the lowest-performing sign-offs on the list. It turns out that ending your email in Regards or Best could be dooming your response potential. In the 350,000 email threads they examined, Boomerang found Best was the worst performer of them all.

Of course, the subject line, tone, length, and content of your emails matters too. You can't write a long-winded, confusing, and unkind email, then simply end with "Thanks!" and expect a reply.

10 Key Methods to Success At Your Email Marketing This 2017

Here are a few sure ways to help you get started sending out great emails this year.

1) Think about prime send times

Depending upon your unique subscriber list, content, and company, you’ll have a prime send time that varies from everyone else’s. According to an email report by Experian Marketing Services, most emails performed best when sent between 8:00 p.m. and midnight. This block of emails boasted a 22% open rate and a higher-than-normal click through and sales rate.

These results may be on account of inbox crowding: if you send your email While this is a great baseline to start from, it’s important to remember that each company’s prime send time will vary, so it’s important to look into your analytics to find your best sending time.

2) Give something away

People love free stuff and it’s just as true in email marketing as it is anywhere else. Recently, Bluewire Media ran a test on their 6,300 email subscribers. They were wondering which types of content earned the highest click and conversion rates. What they found was, overwhelmingly, that emails giving away templates and tools were opened at a much higher rate.

For example:

Download your free copy of 25 Proven Email Subject Lines for Your Email Marketing

To get more engagement from your customers and produce higher levels of conversions for your company, offer to give something away every now and again. Whether it’s a template or an eBook, freebies keep your users interested and help you produce great email marketing results throughout the new year.

3) Optimize for mobile

We can’t say enough about this. Mobile is a huge deal right now and if your email marketing content isn’t optimized for mobile platforms, you’re missing out. Mobile traffic makes up 47% of the average email open rate. That said, it’s hugely important to make sure that everything you send out via email looks and performs great on a mobile phone.

This means converting your content to one column templates, increasing font size to make it more readable on a small screen, ensuring that buttons are at least 44 pixels x 44 pixels, and making CTA buttons obvious (above the fold) and easy to click (by placing them in the middle of the screen).

4) Make use of weekends

Earlier we talked a bit about your prime send times but what about your prime send days? According to the aforementioned Experian study, emails sent on Saturday and Sunday outperformed emails sent on weekdays. That said, consider whether sending your marketing emails on the weekends is something that will work for your clients and company.

5) Keep your whole list active

Say you have a list of 1,500 email subscribers. Great! The problem is that only a portion of that list is likely to be active. In fact, some studies have found that most lists have an inactivity rate of 63%. That said, in order to make the most of your email list, you’ll have to figure out a way to engage the entire list rather than just a portion. One of the most effective ways to do this is through what marketers call a “Re-engagement campaign.”

Re-engagement campaigns look a little different for every marketer, but essentially they involve testing different subject lines to find out which ones earn the highest open and click rates from the highest portion of your list. Keep in mind, though, that any re-engagement campaign you run should offer value, as well. Once that inactive 63% of your list clicks an email, they’re going to want to see something good.

6) Write to one person

Nobody wants to be just one person in a crowd of subscribers, so help your readers feel unique by writing every email as if you were writing to them and them alone. This approach makes your emails more personal and provides a higher level of value for every reader.

7) Be respectful

Remember how we said earlier that 144 billion emails are sent every day? Most consumers feel like all of them wind up in their personal inboxes. For this reason, it’s hugely important to be respectful of your readers’ time. To put this another way: don’t spam anyone. Spam is one of the quickest ways to get yourself booted from the inbox and companies that don’t send spam are generally more well-regarded by their customers.

That said, only write an email when you have something valuable to say and be careful to get to the point as quickly as possible. This will keep you in your customers’ good graces and allow you to maintain your inbox privileges.

8) Remind your readers

That they’re not aloneWhy do people sign up for email lists? To get great content, information, and offers. But what’s one of the easiest things marketers can do to ensure that their readers are anxiously awaiting the next email?

The answer is simple: remind readers that you’re on their side. This takes a variety of different forms, including polling readers for content ideas, offering surveys, letting readers know you sympathize with their struggles, and then offering them actionable solutions to deal with them. This tip should pervade your content and, when done correctly, can take your emails from “blah” to “wow!”

9) Reward readers

So you’ve got a faithful list of readers. How do you keep them that way? You give them a reward! By rewarding your readers for faithfully opening your emails, you inspire them to continue doing so in the future. Rewards can be anything from access to a super-secret sale to insider info, industry tips, or inspirational content that’s not shared anywhere else.

10) Make use of power words

When you get 20 emails an hour, nothing much stands out. Until, that is, you see a subject line that includes emotive, exciting power words. Incorporating sensory phrases into your email marketing can go a long way toward improving your open rate and ensuring that your emails are well-received by readers.

Email Marketing Tips designed for Online Business (Mail Chimp vs. Convert Kit)

No matter the type of online business or blog you decide to start, your number one asset online is your email list. Why? Because you control your email list. You don’t own your followers on social media; the social media platform owns your account and your followers. When you collect a customer’s email address, you now own the right to communicate with that customer as long as you collect and handle your communications in a legal manner.

If that sounds a bit strange to you, that’s okay. It wasn’t an intuitive concept to me either. Let’s break down what I mean when I say “email list” and talk about how you are going to capture a loyal

Following through collecting email addresses.

Email marketing tips for online business and bloggers. MailChimp or ConvertKit? Learn the two major things you should consider before making a choice! Email marketing strategy entrepreneur / Email list growth / Make money from home / How to start a blog

This post is part of my Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Building an Email List.

How to Get Started with ConvertKit:

Email Marketing Basics

I am going to lead you through everything you need to know to not be “that person.” You know, the person who spams the heck out of our email boxes. We’ve all been there. Don’t let that spammer be YOU!

Do I really need an email service provider (ESP)? Can’t I just use my Gmail account?

Yes, you do—and no, you can’t! You absolutely cannot send mass emails out through your Gmail, AOL, or domain email address. NO, NO, NO!

Let me repeat: you cannot compile a list of email addresses from people, import them into your personal Gmail account, and send them an email.

Let’s break this down. You own a local coffee shop that makes amazing coffee that you sell online. When customers come into your store, you ask them to leave their email address for future promotions. You must also ask them to verify that they are approving you to email them on a regular basis. The email address can either be automatically added to your ESP (depending on the system you have set up) or you can manually add it to your ESP. But you cannot take that email address, add it to a mass distribution list in Gmail, and start sending promotions.

So, what is an ESP? Why do I need an ESP?

An ESP is similar to your website hosting company. An ESP provides a server that houses your email list and sends out your mass email distributions.

You need an ESP to ensure you are complying with CAN-SPAM laws.

What is CAN-SPAM and how does it impact my email marketing strategy?

You can read all about CAN-SPAM directly from the FTC: Candid answers to CAN-SPAM questions.

These are the basics of CAN-SPAM:

Your company must be clearly identified as the sender (or you as a person must be if you are the company brand).

Your physical address must be present in the email.

You must include a way for subscribers to unsubscribe from your email list in every single email that you send.

You have 10 days to follow through on unsubscribe requests and remove the email address from your distribution list. Every good ESP does this automatically.

ESPs provide all of these services plus so much more! As we dive into email marketing you will see the power of setting up sequences and automation triggers, something you could not do by using Gmail. Many ESPs offer a ton of functionality—from professional email templates to Google Analytics and e-commerce tracking options.

The main point here is that ESPs make sure you are obeying the law! There are hefty fines involved for not complying with the CAN-SPAM laws.

Can I send a personal email to a customer?

Absolutely! CAN-SPAM does not prevent you from building relationships with people and engaging in normal email conversations.

A good way to look at using an ESP is that anytime you are sending a promotional email or mass distribution email, you should use an ESP. Anytime the communication is not specific and unique to that person, use your ESP.

Below you will find affiliate links. I am sharing these resources with you because they have helped me tremendously through my blogging journey. I do not recommend any products in this review that I do not use myself.

Which ESP should I start with?

This is a great question! There are many options out there, but I am going to focus on two: Mail Chimp and Convert Kit.

Mail Chimp is extremely popular. Many small businesses and entrepreneurs start out using Mail Chimp and have thriving email lists. You can use Mail Chimp for free with up to 2,000 subscribers (not including automation features). The price point makes it an appealing option for new business owners.

Convert Kit plans start out at $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers, and their particular target market is bloggers. Bloggers tend to have a need to create multiple email sequences and sales funnels. This requires robust automation features.

So, which one should you start with? It depends. (Ha, that helps, right?) Let me tell you what I did.

Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Building an Email List with Convert Kit. The Covert Kit Master class is here! Email marketing tips on how to leverage Convert Kit and grow your email list from 0 to 14,000 in just one year!

Email Marketing Tips: Mail Chimp vs. Convert Kit

About a year ago, Convert Kit really started gaining steam, especially in the entrepreneur and blogger world. Before that, Mail Chimp was a very popular option, especially for new bloggers or entrepreneurs that need a free/cheap alternative to managing emails.

Email Service Provider Basics: Mail Chimp

When you sign up for Mail Chimp, you can collect up to 2,000 email addresses for free. Their automation plan starts at $10/month. An example of automation is when someone signs up for your list and automatically receives a welcome email or a series of welcome emails. If you decide to invest in Mail Chimp, I suggest paying that $10 a month so you can set up an automation series for your subscribers.

Lists in Mail Chimp are where you house the people that sign up for your email list. In order to differentiate how someone joins your email list, you have to start a new list. What does this mean? Let’s say you have multiple ways for someone to get on your list such as an everyday newsletter and you also have a free email course. In order to know the opt-in that the customer signed up for, you’d need separate lists.

Email marketing tips for online business and bloggers. Mail Chimp or Convert Kit? Learn the two major things you should consider before making a choice! Email marketing strategy entrepreneur / Email list growth / Make money from home / How to start a blog

On the surface, there’s nothing that seems bad about that, except you’re actually going to end up paying for a single email address more than once.

The reason I chose Convert Kit over Mail Chimp is because I have multiple ways that I want to be able to segment people on my email list.

Email Service Provider Basics: Convert Kit Tutorial

Convert Kit uses a functionality called forms. Forms are how you get people on your email list. For each opt-in offer or product, you will create a form. The form is what either gets embedded on your website or, in my case, connected to my Lead Boxes. Lead Boxes is a way to collect email addresses using Lead Pages.

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For my free course, Busy Moms Building Online Businesses, I have two different forms in Convert Kit. I have one that’s on my home page that is an embedded form. I also have a landing page with Lead Pages that I connect to a Convert Kit form. I connect both of them to the same sequence. A sequence is the same as automation in Mail Chimp. A sequence is the automated email series that starts after someone joins a form.

Email marketing tips for online business and bloggers. Mail Chimp or Convert Kit? Learn the two major things you should consider before making a choice! Email marketing strategy entrepreneur / Email list growth / Make money from home / How to start a blog

Every time someone signs up using a different opt-in on your website, they are tracked under the subscriber tab in Convert Kit. Each email address only exists one time in Convert Kit. This means you only pay for each email address one time—a huge benefit of Convert Kit over Mail Chimp.

Email marketing tips for online business and bloggers. Mail Chimp or Convert Kit? Learn the two major things you should consider before making a choice! Email marketing strategy entrepreneur / Email list growth / Make money from home / How to start a blog

Two major things to consider before choosing an ESP

#1 Cost

Right now Convert Kit starts at $29 from 0 to 1,000 subscribers. Mail Chimp offers the first 2,000 subscribers for free. Keep in mind, subscribers could be duplicated over different lists and it doesn’t include automation. Automation starts at $10/month for up to 1,000 email subscribers.

There’s no doubt that Mail Chimp is a cheaper alternative to email collecting in the beginning. Once you start collecting a decent amount of emails their pricing tiers end up evening out.

#2 How many ways will someone be able to opt-in to your email list?

For example, are you a small business and you only need one main email newsletter list and you plan on keeping your list size small? If that’s the case, Mail Chimp would probably be the better option for you.

For most bloggers and most online entrepreneurs, we need to be able to tag people, segment people, and have them sign up in various different ways on our emails. I recommend Convert Kit for the majority of online business owners and bloggers!

Avoid Extraordinary Bounce Rates Through Your Email Marketing

Email messages may not reach the recipients and return to the sender for entirely different reasons. The returned email generated by the mail server contains the description of the error that caused the delivery failure. Based on those errors bounced emails are divided into two types: soft bounces and hard bounces.

What is the difference between them?

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A faint bounce is an email message that returns to the sender due to any temporary reasons: busy mailbox, account temporary down, network busy, mailbox over a limit, etc. If after several attempts to deliver such a message, it still bounces, a soft bounce email is classified as the hard bounce.

Hard bounces are permanently undeliverable email messages. The causes are invalid addresses like email or domain name doesn't exist, spelling errors or the mail server has blocked your server, or filtered emails and returned them as hard bounced.

Typically the error codes for soft bounced emails begin with 4 and for hard bounces - with 5. But the mail server can interpret bounces differently, so a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounced email on a different mail server.

Dealing with bounced emails after each mailing campaign is critical for every reputable marketer. Here are few quick tips you can follow to minimize the number of bounces, reduce email delivery costs, and increase conversion rates of your email campaign:

Check emails in your list for validity. You can use an email verifier software (you can find plenty of them on the Internet) to test the list of invalid emails. Or, at least check the addresses for typos manually.

Confirm email addresses. Send a confirmation message after the user subscribes to your list. If the message bounces, you will know that the address is not valid from the start. Also, you'll want to have a field in your sign-in form requiring the user to re-type his email address. Include Edit Your Account link in your emails. This will make it possible for your subscribers to keep their email addresses up-to-date with you. Check the blacklists and assure that neither you nor your ISP is blacklisted. This is important because you will not receive a bounced message as a result of a blacklist.

Remove SpamTrap addresses from your list. A spam address is an email address, to which nobody should be sending an email. Such email addresses are often added maliciously to identify the senders of spam. Send a test message to yourself. Before emailing to your subscribers, send a copy of your newsletter to yourself or some of your colleagues to check if everything is all right You can Reduce email bounce rate by including unsubscription links in your mailings; most email marketing applications allow you to add an unsubscribe link to your postings automatically or by a personalization tag.

Another point you can do is add a refresh profile link to your mailing, most email marketing software applications contain an update your profile personalization tag that you can also easily insert into your mailing. Another way to check bounces is to have addresses removed through setting up bounce management. This will cycle through your list and remove hard and soft bounces after a specified number of times. Most marketing applications allow you to automate this and even set the number of soft and hard bounces that a subscriber must reach to be removed. Another good road is to include custom fields for phone or address so you can use the phone or mail to renew the address of those subscribers that bounce.

How to compose a cold email that develops a reaction from even the busiest people

Occupied CEOs can't answer each email. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk envisioned. OnInnovation/Flickr Sending the correct icy email could arrive you your next customer, representative, or even employment.

In any case, as you most understand as a matter of known fact likely, attempting to connect to somebody you've under no circumstances met, especially on the off chance that they are very occupied, could be a pointless activity.

Gratefully, however, right now there are demonstrated strategies that will build your chances of getting a reaction - and ace organizer Keith Ferrazzi, creator of the top rated vocation control "By no means Eat Alone," can reveal to you what's reliably worked for him.

At the point when Ferrazzi first distributed his book in 2005, he had just been the most youthful CMO at both Deloitte Consulting and Starwood Hotels and Resorts; the CEO of showcasing startup Ya Media; and the author and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, an administration expert firm with vital customers like General Motors and American Express. As he clarifies in "Never Eat Alone," refreshed in 2014, he credits his prosperity from secondary college to the energy of connections.

Here's the manner where he suggests moving away from on the right foot, through email.

1. Have got a headline that gets their factor. Notwithstanding everything you compose, your email isn't getting perused in the event that the headline isn't convincing. "Focus on your most grounded snare, either the speak to you possess in like way or this esteem you provide to the desk," Ferrazzi composes.

2. Send it against the start or expire of the day. In case you're reaching a bustling individual, they'll most likely miss your message on the off opportunity that you send it amid their operating hours. Send it let me give you or as the ongoing workday closes, when they're presumably checking their inbox.

3. Compose a concise message. Consider the way you process email. On the off chance that you can't come to the heart of the matter inside a solitary screen of content, the beneficiary is most likely going to send it to the waste or overlook it until the end of time.

4. Give an invitation to take action. "Influence you initially demand to clear and simple," Ferrazzi composed. Rather than composing something dubious like "I'd love to get espresso at some point" or "get on the telephone," provide them with a few dates and moments that do the job, and note from what extent they might take.

5. Edit your email aloud. Go through your email, resoundingly if conceivable (whatever the likelihood that it's below your breath), to listen to how you're running more than. The objective is usually to be conversational and clear.

6. Examine your spelling and linguistic use. Programs been employed by in spell-checks - there is no reason behind appearing to end up being messy and hurried by communicating something specific with mistakes or awful syntax.