Email marketing is pretty great. If you build a list of people interested in a topic, you can easily make a profit. This is before you even learn much about how to do it properly. If a person signs up for your email lists, they want to hear from you about the topic.
If the emails you send are even half-interesting and useful, many of these subscribers will come to appreciate you. And if they appreciate you, they’re very likely to buy what you sell or recommend.
The reason I’m telling you all of this? If you haven’t started building a list yet, start today. Yes, we will share a ton of information about how to improve your email marketing. All of these tips will help you get better over time.
Our advice will help you get better delivery rates, more opens, and higher conversion rates. But you don’t have to know everything to start. Don’t postpone until “you have enough knowledge”. In the end, once you start making a profit, you’ll wish having started sooner.
Every day that goes by without you getting people onto your email lists, is a day in which you rob from your future self.
We’re so passionate about this idea at Emercury, that we did something that nobody else does. We have a forever free plan which includes every cool feature, even the fanciest and most advanced ones. That means you can learn as you grow. And we won’t charge you a penny until you grow past a certain point. But if you already have email lists and want to get more out of them, read on.
Five ways you can get more out of your email lists
Segment & Organize Your Lists
Segmentation is kind of a similar concept to targeting. If your marketing targets the entire world’s population as if they were homogenous – you’ll see very poor results. The same holds true if you treat all of your email subscribers as if though they’re the same person.
In fact, this is a common reason that people forget to do segmentation. They assume that if you do your targeting, you’ve done your job. After all, you made sure to only target a certain kind of people in the lead acquisition, so aren’t they already one uniform segment?
Actually, that’s only partially true. Yes, if people have joined your list, they do represent a segment out of the overall population. Let’s say that you have a weight-loss & fitness newsletter for men. Your overall list represents the segment of the population called “Men interested in fitness & weight loss”.
But there’s no reason to stop there. Even among those men, there are subcategories. For examples, there are those who are more into the “getting toned part” and less into the “dropping weight thing”.
Some of the subscribers will be younger and single. They might respond to a theme like “getting girls by having an attractive physique”. These younger guys will respond to different emails than a married father of two children. He is interested in fitness so that he can enjoy better health and do more activities with his family.
And don’t forget about the sales cycle
Even if two people are exactly identical in terms of their interests, they will still differ by their position in the sales cycle. You have people who are in the curiosity stage. You have people who are engaged and opening most of your emails and clicking most of your links. And then you have people who have already bought some of the things you sell.
Sure, a well-crafted autoresponder sequence solves some of this. Your earlier emails will assume an earlier-stage recipient. Your later emails will assume a later stage customer. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good first step. If you’re just starting out, it’s perfectly fine to just create one general autoresponder. But the longer you do email marketing and the bigger your list, the more you want to segment.
Fortunately, with Emercury, a lot of this is pretty straightforward. You can easily use our reporting feature to identify which subscribers are at which stage and segment them out.
Segmenting also improves deliverability
We’re quite famous for our commitment to helping you get the best email deliverability possible. But did you know that segmenting also helps with your deliverability?
First, when you segment, you get better at sending people what they’re actually interested in. This reduces the number of people who mislabel you as a spammer.
Secondly, with a quality ESP, you can segment subscribers by domain and email provider. This means that you can utilize a warm-up routine for certain domains where it makes a difference. For more on that watch this video. We illustrate just such an example.
Five ways you can get more out of your email lists...Segment & Organize Your Lists #emailmarketing Click To TweetUse Surveys
“Get user feedback” is probably the most ignored advice in the field of business. It is probably the single best thing the average business can do. Unfortunately, many of us get carried away with building the product. We do this to such an extent that we forget to ask the actual consumers if we’re going the right way.
All the major business bestsellers keep repeating this advice for a reason. In fact, they sometimes give you 50 different tips that are all just a variation of “ask for feedback” or “listen to the customer base”. This is something you want to make part of your business mantra in general. But it is also something you want to make an integral part of your email marketing strategy.
Fortunately, Emercury has a free survey feature built-in with every plan. Yes, we even include it in our “forever free plan”. To see how a survey can be useful to you, our email surveys video might be quite illustrative.
Five ways you can get more out of your email lists...Use Surveys @emercury #emailmarketing #surveysClick To TweetPersonalize your email marketing
The fact is that traditional impersonal marketing is dying. Today’s consumers reward relationship-driven marketing. They want to feel like they’re being addressed as an individual with individual desires and needs.
One way to deepen your relationship with your email subscribers is to utilize more personalization. Now segmenting itself is a way of facilitating and doing personalization. In fact, sometimes the terms “personalize” and “create segments” can be used interchangeably by some marketers. But I want to go a step further here and give you some more examples.
In my mind, segmentation is one of the things that you do in order to differentiate people. Personalization is what you do to let them know that you see them as unique and different. The most obvious old-school example is using their first name to address them. But these days we can go a lot further than that.
In fact, that most basic example (using their first name) brings up a useful distinction. There are generally two things you can base your personalization on.
- You can base it on recipient details like their name, sign up date, geographic location etc
- You can base it on the characteristics of your email relationship
The fact that a subscriber is a 20-year-old man from Germany falls under the first type of data. The fact that they are a Hotmail user and love opening all of your emails would fall under the second type.
There are many ways to get their personal data
You may, for example, collect it during the initial opt-in process. Our system allows you define custom fields so you can do this. Just watch our video tutorial to get the gist. You may ask people to give your their profession, age, gender, or anything you deem would work well.
This will depend on your industry and traffic. Some marketers can get away with asking for a ton of information. Some might find it a luxury to even ask for a person’s name, instead opting to only ask for the email address.
You may also obtain additional such data by asking for it after people join, by emailing out surveys, subscriber appending with geodata and much more.
There are many characteristics that define your email relationship
You choose which characteristics to segment people by. It might be the fact that they love opening all of your emails, or the opposite, that they rarely open your emails. It might be the fact that they clicked on a certain product purchase link, or that they forwarded your emails.
A quality email marketing platform will let you identify these characteristics with ease. For example, Emercury has several tools that help you do just this. We help you identify the behavior of your subscribers. This then lets you segment subscribers by type of relationship. But you’re the one who decides which defining characteristics are worth segmenting by.
Let’s look at some practical examples about personalization
Consider a scenario where you re-engage stale subscribers
You may create a segment from all the people who: are subscribers but haven’t opened your emails for more than 3 months. Now, these are people who aren’t producing a bounce or a complaint. They’re just people who are not opening the email for whatever reason.
Creating this segment in Emercury is pretty straightforward. When creating a segment, look for the “Mailed, Opened, Clicked Conditions”. Set it so that it applies to people who have “not opened” for more than 3 months.
There are many possible reasons why they’re doing this, but a campaign targeting them might fix that. If you make a separate segment out of these people, you can send them a special email. You would want to make the subject dramatic or funny to let them know that this is “decision time”.
You would then tell them “Hey, I noticed you’re still receiving all of our emails, but aren’t very interested in reading them”. “We want to make sure we’re only sending emails to people who are really interested. If you want to keep receiving our emails, click this link”. Alternatively, you might want to send them a survey. There are many creative ways to go about it. This is just to get you started thinking.
Or perhaps a scenario where you reward your best fans with a gift
Nothing makes people feel like they’re a unique person as a gift or a sincere thank you. Again, with Emercury this is rather straightforward. You may choose to create a segment of all the people who: have been subscribers for longer than 6 months; are still actively opening emails and have clicked certain links you think are a good marker of their dedication.
You can then send these people a thank you email. The more variables (recipient details) that you use in this email, the better. Your subject line might read something like “Thank you {name!}”. You would open the email by saying something like “You’ve been with us since {opt-in date}, and have faithfully followed our journey”. Then you might give them the reward “We want to say thank you by giving you early access to our latest product, at 50% off. Just enter the coupon “top fans”.
Being quick to respond to their behavior is also a great way to personalize
The behavior of your subscribers is a great basis for your segmentation efforts. But creating segments involves some manual decision-making on your part. Sure, with Emercury creating segments off of recipient behavior is easy, but sometimes you want something completely automatic.
This is where our autoresponder feature comes in. Now, most people associate the term “autoresponder” with the simplest type. This is where someone subscribes to your list, and “the autoresponder kicks in the moment they opt-in to a list”. It then sends them a sequence of emails based on a time-schedule off of their sign up date.
But our autoresponder is a lot more clever. It can kick-in based on different triggers. For example, it can kick-in when someone opens a certain email, clicks on certain links or based on a certain event or anniversary.
You can use this technology to send a very personalized follow-up based on their actions
Let’s say that this month your friend is launching a product. And you choose to promote her product to your list. So you send out an email where you praise her product and put an affiliate link to the product page. If you have access to a good autoresponder, you can now personalize the follow-up with your list.
- You can create an autoresponder that targets those who didn’t click the affiliate link. Your follow-up would acknowledge the fact that the recipient didn’t check out your recommendation. You might gently remind them to check out the product and give them a few more reasons to do so.
- You can create an autoresponder that targets those who did click the affiliate link. Your email would thank them for checking out your recommendation, and ask them if they liked the product. You might even suggest that they’re free to reach out if they have questions about your friend’s product
AB-Split Test Your Subject Lines
There are literally thousands of little tweaks and optimizations you can do to your email marketing. And we will eventually talk about most of them. But there is one tweak that has the most immediate impact on your results.
What if you could double the opens you get for the emails you send out? Even if you changed nothing else, it would be a huge boost to your profits. As it turns out, this isn’t as farfetched as it sounds.
Depending on your current open-rates, it might be quite possible to drastically increase your open rates. And how do you do that? Hire the best copywriter in the world to write your subject lines?
Actually, no, but it brings up a good point. Even if you did hire a super-expensive copywriter, you would learn something interesting. It doesn’t matter how good his initial subject line. You will find out that he will want to test several variations to find out which one performs best.
Even if you end up doing email marketing for decades, you will never reach a point where you’re certain which subject line works best. You will make better guesses. But you will never reach a point where you instantly come up with the “optimal subject line”.
This is good news for those of us who aren’t elite copywriters
It means we can achieve similar results by just testing more. Our initial guesses might not be as good, but we can still stumble upon a great subject line through testing.
Unfortunately, many arrogant email marketing platforms act as if this feature isn’t for the “common folk”. They often hide it inside of higher-tier plans or charge extra for it. Not on Emercury! Email subject split-testing is available on every Emercury plan. Including our free forever plan. Yes, we’re awesome like that.
Five ways you can get more out of your email lists...A/B Split test your subject lines #emailmarketing Click To TweetMaintain good list hygiene
Let’s be blunt here for a second. If you forget about list-hygiene, your lists will become next to useless. It might sound like an exaggeration. But it’s not. When you have a “dirty list” all of your efforts are severely diminished.
The “dirtier” your list, the more effort you’re putting in to get less out of your marketing. The feedback you’re getting from your list isn’t “real” if your list isn’t real. If it is full of abandoned and fake emails, you’re not getting the real story.
For example, you might notice that over time your open rates are getting worse. You might notice that people are forwarding less of your emails. And you might notice fewer clicks and sales.
If you forget to keep your list clean, you would draw the wrong conclusions. You might assume that your emails have gotten worse. You might conclude that the market has gotten much more competitive. In truth, it might be just that you forgot to clean up the list and the bad emails piled up.
Fortunately, Emercury includes top-notch email list-hygiene with every plan. You can try us out today, with our forever free plan. And yes, even the forever-free email marketing plan includes all of our list-hygiene features.
Five ways you can get more out of your email lists...Maintain good list hygiene #emailmarketing Click To TweetStudy your reports
Information is power, and your email reports are powerful information. It can guide your decisions about email marketing.
Every good email service provider has a reporting function. Very few offer it with every plan, though. We’re unique at Emercury about this. We even include it in our free forever plan, so that you can test it out even today, for free. But I digress.
The point is this – you want to utilize the power of email reports whenever you have it. If you’re an Emercury user, you’re in luck, you already have it. But let’s talk about what you want to do.
A good reporting feature should give you information that can guide your future actions. For example, in our reporting center, we give you data that has many uses. You can look at things like bounce rates (and types of bounces). This can guide your decisions about performing list-hygiene.
But you also have data about things like opens, clicks and forwards. This can guide your decisions about improving your marketing strategy. It can also help you segment better. We even have a special feature inside of the reporting area that uses data from the reports to create new segments.
To learn more about our reporting feature, watch this video. This is only a glance at a fraction of the power that our reporting center gives you. But I hope it gives you a good intro on why you want to dig into your reports.
Five ways you can get more out of your email lists...Study your reports #emailmarketing Click To TweetWhat are some ways you are getting more out of your email lists? Let me know in the comments and please share this article if you found it valuable 😉
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