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Ever feel overwhelmed and feel like there are too many email marketing challenges and hurdles to tackle? I can’t blame you if you get this perception. The fact is that most of the information out there is unnecessarily over-complicated. Tackling most email marketing hurdles can be easy when you understand what matters most, and decide to focus on the foundations.
Fortunately for you, this is exactly why we decided to come up with this guide where we show you the easy way to tackle all of those email marketing challenges. Once you do that, email marketing should become fun and enjoyable, instead of overwhelming or complicated. Oh, and as a bonus, expect some amazing boosts to your bottom-line and email marketing ROI.
Challenge 1: Producing enough content
The number one most disastrous thing that I see in email marketing? It’s when someone destroys their deliverability, reputation and annoys subscribers due to sporadic email marketing.
And the main reason this happens is because they don’t have a consistent way to keep a steady stream of content going.
What will usually happen is that they get excited about email marketing, produce a ton of content, bombard subscribers, and then hit a wall. At this point they might go missing for months without sending a single email.
The first and most important thing is to understand that consistency beats volume. That is to say, it’s better to send 1 email every two weeks, than to send a lot of great content at once, burn out, and then go missing. It’s ok to increase your volume over time, as you develop your skills and ability to produce.
Another thing you have to consider is that automated emails count into your total volume. As you learn more about what works, you can put more and more of your email sending on autopilot. Overtime you’ll able to segment better, and enroll them in relevant drip sequences with evergreen content.
Challenge 2: Getting Past the Inbox Gate
I have some bad news for you, spam filters are ruthless, and even perfectly legitimate emails can end up in the dreaded junk folder. This means that even if a subscriber explicitly asks you to email them, the inbox provider may decide to place your email straight into the junk folder.
Fortunately, if you’re an Emercury user, you’ve already done one of the most important things, which is to pick a platform that centers around deliverability. As weird as it may sound, most email sending platforms don’t care much about your emails achieving peak deliverability.
Their platforms are centered around overwhelming you with a myriad of ever more complicated features and featurettes which make it look like you’re doing something useful. When the truth is that merely boosting your deliverability will drastically increase your sales and bottom line.
Aside from picking the right platform, the second most important factor is a focus on engagement. Now, I’m not saying this is the only factor, but if you focus on engagement you’re indirectly doing most of the things that put you in good graces with the inbox providers.
Their main job is to deliver emails that users want to read, and the main thing they look at to determine this? You guessed it, how much people engage with your emails. And as a bonus, engagement also happens to be the number one factor that improves conversion rates and sales.
To learn more about engagement see The One Secret To All Email Marketing Profits, and to learn more about dodging the spam filters, check out: How To Avoid Email Going To Spam: Land In The Inbox Every Time.
Challenge 3: Writing emails that convert
This is one of those things that “feels” difficult, but is actually a lot easier than you may think. Much of the “difficulty” comes from the misconception that you need to be some kind of a master copywriter to make sales. And well, that might actually be true with other channels, but not email.
The entire beauty of email marketing, and what makes it special is that by its very nature it feels a lot more intimate. This means that you don’t need years of copywriting experience to know how to make the recipient feel like you’re talking to them directly. Email (when combined with even the most rudimentary personalization) achieves that by default.
Ok then you can just write anything, and it will convert? Well, not so quick. While it is a lot easier thanks to the powers of email, there are still a couple of things you want to focus on in order to create content that converts.
The first thing is that you want to change your mindset from “selling” to “demonstrating authority. And you do that by showing that you understand the subscriber’s point of view, problems and know how to solve them”.
That’s just a long way of saying that you need to provide value. You actually have to demonstrate that you know a thing or two about the subject matter.
And you want to demonstrate and show useful and easy ways that the subject can solve their problems, all without charging them a penny. Selling is quite easy when the subject already sees you as an authority figure that knows the easy, efficient solutions to their problems. They will gladly pay to get more of the good stuff which you demonstrated that you can provide.
To learn more about converting with your content, see our guide here: Writing Marketing Emails That Convert: A Step-By-Step Guide
Challenge 4: Picking the right email sending platform
With so much choice out there, it can seem overwhelming knowing what to do. All those endless lists of features and plans and tiers, what are you supposed to do? How can you even tell which of those 3904 features you need to use, and which ones you don’t need?
Let me let you in on a secret. I could take a master email marketer, limit them to only features that existed 10 years ago, and they would still outsell someone using a platform with all of the latest features. And can you guess why? If you said “better content”, that’s only half of the answer.
The reason is that most of the benefits in email marketing still come from those basic features that we’ve been improving and polishing to perfection over the years. The more “cutting edge” a feature, the less of a factor it is in your results. The basic features (and skill sets) are where the money is at.
So where am I going with all of this? You want a platform that puts the basics that give you results at the front and center. Take Emercury for example. While we do have all the latest advanced features for the long-time veteran who needs that extra boost, the entire experience is centered around the basics.
Our dashboards are designed to get you focused on what gets you results. To learn more about this and other factors around choosing an email sending platform, check out: Email Marketing Services: Choosing the One.
Challenge 5: Achieving Optimal Email Cadence and Frequency
Finding the right balance between too many and too few emails can significantly impact engagement, conversions and even deliverability. Sending too many emails can obviously annoy the subscriber, and get them to report you as a spammer. And yes, this is even if you got full permission to send them all of these emails.
But what a lot of people don’t realize is that sending too few emails can often be just as bad. In fact, from my experience, most email marketers send too few emails. And what do I mean by too few?
Well, you need to reach a certain level of frequency in order for the subscriber to get accustomed to seeing you in the inbox. You want to get them in the habit of expecting your emails.
Think of how friendships and all types of relationships form. They require that you interact with the person often enough for that sense of familiarity to form. If you see them every once in a while, they’re just an acquaintance. Email is similar.
To learn more, check out our guide: Email Frequency: Don’t Get It Wrong, Follow These Best Practices.
Challenge 6: Automating and Scaling Email Marketing Efforts
One of the biggest advantages to email marketing is that you can literally automate every single aspect of the customer experience. In fact, you can eventually get to a point where most (if not all) of your email marketing runs on autopilot.
You can have a fully elaborate system which tracks the customer journey via the subscriber’s behavior. This includes how they engage with your emails, the actions they take on your website, or even anywhere else outside of email.
In turn, you can collect data based on all of this behavior and have different, personalized and fully automated sequences and emails that are sent to your customers, again based on the segmentation data you’ve collected via their behavior.
However, it is precisely this idealized version of email marketing automation that overwhelms you when you’re just starting out. In fact, it can be a challenge to decide exactly what to automate, and how much.
The solution? It’s simple. Start out by automating the must-have sequences first. This includes your welcome or onboarding emails. And then gradually, as you learn more about what your subscribers respond to, build more sequences based on what you learn.
The same applies to deciding what data to collect. You will, over time, learn what the “differentiating data” in your use-case is, and then collect this data. For example, you might learn it’s important to differentiate smaller from medium-sized businesses. Then, you can create a custom field “number of employees” where you track this.
Or let’s say that you run a fitness newsletter. You can tag people based on whether they open and click on your emails regarding “losing weight” or “putting on muscle”. I hope you get the idea, as it will depend on your specific use case.
To learn more, read: Unlock Ultimate Marketing Power with Automation Workflows
Challenge 7: Measuring Progress
I am often surprised when I find out that an email marketer doesn’t track their results. This is absolutely essential if you want to maximize what you get out of email marketing. With every technique that you learn from this blog, and then apply, you want to actually keep track of how it affects your results.
There is some good news though. Measuring results in email marketing is exceptionally simple and easy. And in fact, if people are putting it off, it’s probably because they think it’s like the complex analytics you see with things like paid ads or website analytics.
The truth is that you can start by just looking at the basics. This includes engagement (opens, clicks unsubscribes) as well as the basics of deliverability (bounces, complaints). With this you’re 90% of the way there. In fact, you might never even need to make it any more complicated than this.
As an interesting side note, one of the things I hear most often from people moving to Emercury is that they moved because of our reporting functionality. It’s simple, clean, and straightforward. It makes it intuitive to jump into looking at your campaign results straight away.
But again, this is part of our philosophy in keeping the focus on what matters, and not overwhelming you with the side features. You can of course make it more complex over time, to where you tie specific events on your website to specific emails, through website events, incoming and outgoing webhooks.
But again, this is just an option you might never even need. Studying those basic metrics is everything you need to achieve killer results with email marketing.
Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies, including email segmentation. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.
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