How I Make Sales with One Email: Email Marketing for Beginners
If your emails aren’t getting opened, you’re missing out on engaging with your audience in a place they always go: their inbox. There are a few things we can do to make sure our emails get opened and read and engaged with, so in this video, I’m sharing 4 of my favorites for writing great emails.
If you missed last week's post, I talked all about the fundamentals of email marketing—the legal stuff you should know, setting up your platform, and your lead magnet.
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Brand
So, first things first, there are a couple things someone sees when they get your email in their inbox that makes them decide whether or not they should open it. The first one is the name that it's coming from. Do they recognize the name (of your business or your own name if you're using it) on your emails? Do you have that brand recognition? If they signed up knowingly and opted into your email list, that shouldn't be a problem, but if it's been a while since you sent an email, they might have to think, “Okay, who is this person again?”
Subject
The second thing is going to be your subject line that will either make them delete the email or open it because they're intrigued and they want to learn more. There are lots of different ways that we can experiment with our subject lines, but what I recommend is testing for your own audience. Maybe trying out really short subject lines that are just one or two words, and longer subject lines that are more like a phrase or a sentence, and seeing which one piques their interest and gets them to open up your email.
Value
The next thing is being known for sending great emails—of course, this happens over time as people get more familiar with the emails that you write. The more that you're known for consistently sending value or sending what people signed up for on a regular basis, the more likely they are to see your name in their inbox and excitedly open it because they know what to expect inside.
Personalization
Next up is personalizing your emails. I recommend collecting at least their first name when you create that opt in to your email list, that way you can send them personalized emails to their name. This is something email marketing platforms have built in (each platform calls it something different, but it's basically just a special tag that the platform then knows to incorporate their first name whenever we send out that email). It's a really nice way to personalize and definitely something that people have come to expect from their emails.
A more advanced strategy that we'll talk about in my email marketing course coming soon is segmenting your list to make it even more personalized based on what they've purchased or haven't purchased or what emails they've engaged with or haven't engaged with. I talk about how you can actually use that to make more sales and personalize those emails even more.
If you want to hear more about advanced strategies and deep dive step-by-step into getting started with email marketing—or getting better results from email marketing if it's something that you're already doing—then go ahead and get on the free wait list for my new email marketing course that’s coming soon! Just go to https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/email
Metrics to Watch
There are some metrics to be aware of when it comes to your open rates. Some email platforms automatically open and report those emails as opened back to your email marketing platform. For example, Apple Mail is one of these, and it causes your open rates to be inflated. You’ll want to keep an eye on your open rates to see how you’re doing and where you might want to change things to see if you can increase that number. I go onto more detail about percentages in my YouTube video, so if you’re interested, check it out!
But like I said, this number can be inflated. To tell if your subject lines are improving over time, just look at the general trends. If your you know first email was a 40% open rate and the next one was 45%, and then the next one was 50%, it's a good indication that you're sending great emails and people want to open them.
I love email marketing but it's not something that I started off loving. It took a few years of selling my books before I realized how important it was to get people off of social media and onto my email list.
If you're here, you probably know that I love social media marketing, and I talk about it all the time—it has been the number one source for my sales—but as we grow our communities on social media, we want to make sure we have a way to contact them off of social media too. We never know what's going to happen to a platform or maybe our account gets randomly shut down.
Thanks so much for reading, and if you want to here more on this, check out my YouTube video or podcast (linked in the buttons below the image at the top of this page. I'll see you in the next one!