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Is it true that email is one of the best ways to easily boost profitability in any business? Yes, absolutely so, and especially if you have some tricks up your sleeve.
In fact, on this page I am going to share eight of the best profitability hacks that let you leverage email to substantially boost your profit, whatever your business model or industry.
1) Get personal (and personalize)
This might sound a bit unusual, but you have to realize an absolute fact: people buy from people that they like and trust. And getting more personal and building a relationship is the best way to achieve this.
However, this doesn’t seem very business-like, now does it? Well, this is where email comes to the rescue. You might have heard that email is the single highest-ROI investment in marketing, and this has been true for over two decades now.
But do you know why this is the case? It is for two major reasons. The first one is that email itself feels very personal. Receiving an email from someone is completely different to seeing a TV ad or seeing a billboard.
And while it is possible to build trust with things like social media, it still comes nowhere near to the “intimate” feeling of email.
To top it all off, when you use channels such as social media, you are completely at the mercy of their algorithms. You don’t own your followers, and they can change who sees your messaging on a whim. This is why email is more important than ever.
The other major reason email delivers the best ROI? It is the best way to achieve and deliver a personalized experience. That means you can treat people differently based on their unique features and how they engage with your brand. This is not possible with channels like social media where you post the same thing for everyone.
In an era when the customer comes to expect personalization as a given, we simply have no choice other than to deliver this, and build some trust and loyalty while we’re at it. Email will help you achieve this.
2) Habituate people to your brand
Big corporations have been doing this for a while. In fact, they spend billions of dollars to make sure you see their logo everywhere. This is so that you get accustomed to seeing their name and associating it with a given type of product or service.
It utilizes a well known phenomenon called “the mere exposure effect” whereby people prefer things simply because they have been exposed to them more often. Now, the good news is that you don’t need to spend millions of dollars to keep re-exposing people to your brand. In fact, sending email is next-to-free.
That means that after you get someone’s email address, you can consistently and constantly remind them of your existence. This is useful even if they’re not currently at the point where they need to buy something.
When they’re ready however, you will be the first brand that they think of. Alternatively, when a friend of theirs asks for recommendations, you will be the first brand that they think of and recommend.
But wait. Obviously you can’t just send emails like “hey, we’re here, we exist, just reminding you about our existence, ok thanks”. The good news is that there is a great excuse to consistently email people and keep your brand top-of-mind.
All you have to do is provide value. As long as you send emails that are valuable to them even if they’re not currently in the market for purchasing something, your emails make sense.
And as a bonus, sending valuable emails also accomplishes a ton of other goals, all of which contribute to increasing your profitability. This includes boosting your levels of trust and perceived authority, improving your deliverability and email reputation, and a lot more.
3) Tap into the power of storytelling
Everyone loves a good success story, or a story about how they had to battle some challenges only to come out victorious on the other end. The reason for this is that people are looking to solve their problems, but aren’t as inspired by dry technical explanations.
As a side note, this is one reason that case studies also work to build trust and authority. People prefer hearing about how a business or an individual did something in the real world. They love to see a real tangible example that they can relate to. It is something that they can imagine doing themselves in their own life or business.
Now, storytelling is challenging in one sense, it doesn’t lend itself to just any communication channel. Whilst doing a little bit of storytelling can improve certain types of ads or social media posts, it’s not really where it shines.
Storytelling works best where you can get someone’s full undistracted attention. And at the moment there are only two channels where we see people do that. The first one is email, and the second one is video, but only provided that you build up a large following of people who watch all of your videos.
While the second options sounds all sorts of cool, you also have to understand that it is quite the gamble. You could spend years trying to build up a fanbase on a video platform like YouTube, and never crack the code. You might simply never get to the point where people are willing to give you their attention and engage in your stories.
Email on the other hand imposes no such risk. Anyone who starts an email list can start weaving storytelling into their newsletters, automations and campaigns and start seeing an increase in sales.
4) Leverage Upsells and Cross-Sells
Let me tell you a key secret to profitability that is true in all industries and business models. Most profits are made on the backend. In fact, some of the most profitable businesses in history have been those who bank on this trick. They disrupt entire industries by outpricing everyone on the front-end, and then making all of their profit on the back-end.
If someone tells you that their business isn’t making enough money, you can be certain of one thing. They’re not doing everything they can to increase profit-per-customer and money-made-per-lead, but more on that in the next point.
While there are quite a few ways to improve the profit made per customer, there is a clear winner when it comes to “stuff you have no excuse not to implement today”. And that is implementing more upsells and cross-sells.
Now, while I don’t know you personally, if we talked one-on-one, I bet I could come up with a lot of upsell and cross-sell opportunities for you to implement. And of course, the best way to implement them is through email.
With that said, as an aside, why not book yourself a free demo where we can talk one-on-one? I’d love to be able to show you how you can boost profitability using email. I wish I could get more specific in an article, but I’d have to know more about your specific business.
So book yourself a free demo while we still offer those. And in the mean-time, feel free to check out this guide on implementing upsells and cross-sells. Hope to speak with you soon though.
5) Turn “never customers” into profit
Let me tell you a huge secret to higher profitability. An email address can be turned into profit even if they don’t buy a single one of your products or services. That’s right, you don’t have to succeed in selling your own products or services to produce more profitability.
The fact is that some people who inquire about your business will never ever buy from you. Yes, we expect that some people buy reasonably soon after giving you their email address. Others might take years to make their first purchase. And some will never buy a single product.
But here’s the fun part, you can still make money from owning their email address. Consider this: if they have an internet connection, they are buying something, just not what you offer. All you have to do is to strike a deal with businesses in other industries to make a commission from sending them a lead.
Now, obviously you will need to decide which subscribers you advertise your partner offers to and when. It’s generally a good idea to wait and give them enough time to buy some of what you offer. However, after a certain period of non-purchases, you can find excuses to recommend other non-competitive offers to them.
And it doesn’t have to be just the people who aren’t buying from you. Ironically enough the people on the other extreme are a great candidate tool. If someone buys everything you offer and a bunch of your upsells and cross-sells, they’re a good candidate to present with partner offers and make some additional profit as well.
6) Maximize the power of both ever-green and one-off promotions
Here’s another example of a huge profit hack, and one you have probably heard many examples about. You have probably heard those stats about businesses that make something like 90% of their total profit during the holiday season. That is, out of all the annual profit that they make, 90% is made during the holiday season.
Now, obviously, this isn’t to say we should all become a business where things work that way. But it’s to remind you of how powerful special sales can be, because this overall concept works in any industry and with any business model.
The fact is that if I were to sit down with you one-on-one, I could identify a lot of ways that you can utilize one-off promotion opportunities. Ones that would be perfect for email and a way to drive some great profit-boosting campaigns every few months or so. But again, this all depends on your specific business.
In a generalized guide like this, I can simply point out some considerations. For example, note that you can use almost anything to create special sale opportunities. It doesn’t even matter what the excuse is. You’re launching a new product? Well that is an excuse for a 48 launch sales promotion for that product. You could even use it as an excuse to discount your entire range to “celebrate the launch”.
Look at things like black friday promotions and realize you can use similar psychology for any “one-time event” that you come up with. This allows you to create massive one-off promotions that can create a big influx of extra profit.
On the other hand, please don’t forget the evergreens
Let me backtrack for a second and delineate something. There are two types of events that you might use as an excuse for a promotion. The first are those events that are tied to the calendar we all share. By that I mean a Black Friday happens for me, at the same time that it happens for you. As does New Year’s.
However, this isn’t tied to just holidays. It is also true for something like a product launch. If a product launches on March 15th, well that is the same day for you as it is for me, or anyone else. So these are the type of events that you leverage to create one-off promotions as we discussed above.
However, there are also events that happen on a different date for everyone, based on their unique customer journey. And you can utilize these as an excuse to have special offers and sales as well. This is what’s known as an “evergreen promotion”.
For example a week after they claim a free entry-level product, they might get an email that tells them about a time-limited promotion to upgrade to the pro version. They are then informed that they have 48 hours days to buy your product at a special discount.
With an evergreen promotion, the timeline is personalized
And the event can be anything really. For example, something like a 3 month anniversary from their list signup date, can be an event. Or even better yet, the first time that they check out your pricing page, or utilize some feature of your product (if you run a SaaS). That might be the perfect time to do something sales related, such as reaching out to them, or making a special offer.
While there are many ways to do this, at this moment I just want to get you started thinking about this. But one of the major ways we can leverage such events these days is to utilize something like Emercury’s events functionality.
And again, if you want even more personalized ideas about how to leverage this for your business, don’t hesitate to book a free demo. I’d love to show you how Emercury can help you with leveraging email to boost profitability in your unique business and per your specific needs.
7) Automate the customer journey
I’m sure that you have noticed there are plenty of businesses which aren’t very good yet seem to easily make profit. And in almost all of these cases it has to do with the fact that they have effective marketing strategies.
This isn’t to say that you should purposefully have a bad business that makes money by just focusing on marketing. I’m only pointing out how much of an effect marketing has on profitability. And when it comes to leveraging marketing, one of the best secrets is to study the basics.
One such basic concept in marketing is the idea of the customer journey. It’s just a fancy way of saying that each customer goes through stages before they purchase a product. That is, they don’t just learn of your existence, and then buy something from you the very next second.
Why does any of this matter though? Well, the way you should treat someone in an early awareness stage is very different from how you treat someone in the pique interest stage. At least if you want to maximize your conversions, and hence sales.
The good news is that with a modern platform like Emercury all of this can be automated. You can simply use our journey builder to create automations that track people’s journey using tags, and then treat people differently based on their point in the journey.
To learn more about this and higher profits through automation in general, check out our guide: 9 Key Steps to Utilizing Marketing Automation for Small Business. Or alternatively, book a free demo if you want to learn how Emercury can help you leverage modern features to boost your business with email.
8) Focus on deliverability
Here’s a funny line that I think says a lot: “An email which doesn’t land in the inbox can generate a grand-total of zero profit”. Obvious right? What’s not so obvious is that a ton of businesses are missing out on a ton of profit by not paying attention to email deliverability.
The sad truth is that most email platforms have a big dark secret. They don’t tell you that “sending” an email isn’t the same thing as an email getting delivered. And this is where a lot of beginners to email marketing get tripped up. You assume that because you’re using a fancy platform with a flashy interface, sending emails is the same thing as getting them delivered.
What you might not realize is that a ton of your emails never make it to the subscriber’s inbox. And every email that didn’t get delivered constitutes lost profit and lost sales. Unfortunately, this is a lesson too many learn too late in their email marketing endeavors.
In fact, our obsession with deliverability is one of the major reasons why email veterans keep moving their huge lists to Emercury. Just by moving their lists to Emercury they find out that they can make a ton of additional profit over night. Just because more of their emails land in those inboxes.
But here’s the secret, “a profitability hack”, if you will… You don’t have to make the same mistake everyone else does. That is, you don’t have to spend years sending emails with low deliverability before you start paying attention to it. You can get started on the right foot from day one. Talking to us about this is a good first step.
Get a partner on your side
The biggest secret to higher profits in business? Having an experienced mentor on your side that wants to see you crush it. If you’ve ever read even a single business success story, you will see they all have this in common.
Fortunately you’re in luck and you’re looking at just such an opportunity right now. You see, at Emercury we don’t see the people using Emercury as users. We see everyone as a partner. This is because we know that the more money you make leveraging email, the more you will need to use our services.
This is why we offer service, and not just a bunch of features. Something you will easily notice if you look at the pricing plans. They differ based on the level of personal attention and help you get in terms of making email work for your business. The software features are just a tool we use to help you achieve your business goals.
If you want to get a sense for this kind of one-on-one attention, be sure to book yourself a free-demo while I can still do those. Alternatively, feel free to grab yourself a username for the forever-free plan, before we pull it. If you grab a username, you get to keep it, and access to the forever-free plan, well, forever.
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