Sneaky tricks to double email conversion

 

Email marketing gives marketers and businesses an invaluable opportunity to maintain a line of communication (a link) with website visitors, who have given us their email (as well as permission to communicate with them). Against a backdrop of 98% of website visitors never return to a website, the opportunity that email marketing brings is a gem in the digital marketing toolbox that should not be wasted. Here we run our thoughts through the reasons email has to be part of your business’ digital marketing, where and how emails can go awry as well as tips to get email marketing right and reap the rewards.

Benefits of email marketing

When it is used correctly, there is no doubt that we make money from sending emails.

Some of the advantages of email over other marketing methods include these:

• Build brand awareness
• Direct messaging and one-to-one conversation with potential customers
• Build relationships and trust over time
• Learn subscribers’ interests and needs
• Promote products and services
• Convert website visitors into customers

For these reasons, email continues to be the most cost-effective method to get customers and sell more.

Challenges of doing email marketing

Getting emails to work for a business is fraught with challenges and pitfalls at every stage,  as you will either know from experience or recognise in the rest of this post.

One of the biggest challenges of doing email marketing has always been getting visitors to subscribe – give us their email address, without which any business is back to square one of forever trying to get visitors to their website. Getting email addresses is made much more difficult because we have all learnt to be blind to the ‘join our newsletter’ box regardless of where it is placed on web pages. It is almost as if we see clicking this box as the route to giving a stranger our keys and an open invitation to our personal lives! In a way that is what happens when some businesses get and then spam email addresses around the clock. I wouldn’t advise you to be one of the rogues!

Thankfully there are many clever, affordable automated email capture tools on the market now, like OptinMonster (there are many more email capture programs around) that are making getting subscribers so much easier. To me, there is nothing more magical than an email capture program that works out a website visitor’s ‘exit intent’ and uses that as a trigger to flash pre-programmed messages to encourage them to subscribe to your mailing list. I think that is a genuinely clever kit. That said, I am not a great fan of pop-up email capture programs that block your view as soon as you land on a website because they stop you seeing the website at all unless you perform an unwelcome additional action. Getting the message as you are about to leave the website is effectively a last roll of the dice before you disappear forever. Furthermore, by that stage, you will have seen all that the website has to offer to be able to decide whether it is worth you subscribing or not.

The double opt-in good practice in email marketing, which requires subscribers to then confirm their subscription before we can send them any messages is another massive potential minefield because our subscriber may not get the message or fail to act on it. Worse still, they may change their mind and opt-out of your emails at this stage. Any of these responses in effect mean that the subscription is not verified, so you cannot send emails to that person. Typically, most website visitors are lost in these two stages, making building an email list incredibly difficult.

It would be foolhardy to believe that sending emails guarantees that they will be opened – this is simply not the reality. You have to be prepared for ‘hard bounces’ – where the email address is no longer in use, so your email never gets delivered, and ‘soft bounces’ – where the recipient’s inbox is too full to allow any more message to be delivered. In the worst case scenario, subscribers can simply ‘unsubscribe’ or mark your email as ‘spam’ with just one click. Not only do any of this damage your Email Quality Score, making it more likely that email servers may blacklist your future messages – mark them as spam and therefore not deliver them, it makes maintaining your subscriber list really tough.

Reviewing your subscriber list regularly to weed out the dead wood is, therefore, necessary to ensure that you are doing your best to maintain a high-quality subscriber list. You may also find it helpful to periodically send an email to check -in with subscribers that they are still happy to receive your emails, especially those that have not engaged with recent emails by reading them or carrying out an action in the email. The risk here is that you may get a flood of subscribers replying to ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘stop’. Without a doubt, this can feel like the last thing you really need. However, this is a better fate than continuing to send emails to people that will never read them as it leads to a cleaner, better quality subscriber list.

Making emails work

Don’t let the pitfalls in email marketing put you off trying to make it work for your business.

Sending personalised emails is among the new email marketing commandments because getting an email that looks like it was created just for you gets more attention than mass mailouts that leave you feeling like just one of many subscribers. Personalisation is more than just inserting first names into your emails to subscribers, however, not least because most of us see right through emails that clearly were not constructed with us in mind – these tend to get deleted, marked as spam or lead to the dreaded unsubscribe. There are many automated email programs on the market that more or less send individual emails to subscribers. For example, Mailchimp (paid version) lets you sent up a workflow sequence so that subscribers get sequenced, individualised messages and content.

The real trick to making emails work for a business is to ensure that every email you send adds value to the recipient’s life. In simple terms, this means sending the right message to the right person at the right time. That is obviously easier said than done, which is why most of us are still struggling to get the full benefit of email marketing today. Once again, automated programs like Barilliance and Personyze mean that any small business can now design and send highly personalised product recommendation emails (based on rules about previous purchases, age, location, interests, page viewed, shopping cart, etc) just like e-commerce giants Amazon or eBay.

The Email Marketer’s challenge does not end there however because even when you have something useful for your recipients, you have to win the great battle of getting them to actually open the email and give you and the email the chance to get your message across.

This is where Digital Marketer’s article: 11 “Sneaky” Tricks To DOUBLE Your Email Conversions, available at http://t.co/KcemHJnQTK via @digitalmktr really comes into its own. We have all read about email strategies – ‘how to create sensational email subject lines that get opened’, ‘ how to structure emails to get engagement’, etc, etc. This article is different and is well worth a read because it gives you tried and tested tricks that you will not see anywhere else. Digesting and following them will give you hope that maybe, just maybe you too can make emails work for your business.

Just for the record, I liked this article so much that after reading it,  I immediately started to Follow Digital Marketer on Twitter (after retweeting, and posting it on Facebook, obviously). I happily recommend you do the same.

******************************************************************

Global.Media provides expert online and offline advertising, and marketing on all digital platforms to help businesses generate qualified Leads. Check out our Services page to see how our advertising and marketing services can help your business to get more customers and sell more, faster. Why not sign up for our newsletter using the simple form on the right? You can also follow us on social networks. Finally, we’d love for you to share this post with your network using the share buttons below.

*********************************************************************

Global.Media would love your thoughts and comments about this article and email marketing in general. Do you have any email tricks that work really well for you? Do you disagree with any of the suggestions? Please leave your comments here.

Other posts you may like

How Small Businesses and Startups Can Stay Competitive and Close Big Deals

How stressed are you (Flowchart) for entrepreneurs and digital marketers

Psychological Pricing Strategies Guide – 9 secrets to sell more

Our Digital Marketing Services:

Search Engine Optimisation| Content Development & Marketing| Email Marketing| Pay-Per- Click| Social Media Marketing| App Development & Marketing