There are a whole host of reasons you undertake email marketing. That said, the reality is that making money will be high on the agenda. And you can rightly expect it to. One stat tells you that 66% of consumers have made a purchase following an email. Another case study shows how insurance company Aviva increased their revenue by 45% by sending a greater number of emails. It seems that email marketing is right there at the heart of building a profitable relationship with your customer.
However, not all email marketing campaigns are created equally. Indeed, there are radical differences between one done well and one done poorly – one will aid profitability, one will potentially damage it.
How do you make email marketing campaigns profitable in reality?
1. Be on point
We talk about funnels a lot when it comes to marketing. However, when it comes to the individual email you need to turn the funnel on its head. Consider the subject line as the narrowest point to entry. You’ve got to get this right to widen them out into your juicy content.
Therefore, always take extra care with your subject line. This is the hook. If you can personalise it, like you can with Postman, then make sure to do that too. Don’t forget to test subject lines in order to see which gets the highest click-through rates.
2. Be consistent
We’re not arguing that you should never make changes as your testing reveals what works well. We are asserting that you need to be as consistent with your customers as you would be with your closest friends and family. Your customer likes to know where they stand.
In real terms, this means don’t only email your customers when you want to sell them something. That’s a sure fire way to a negative relationship. Instead, be consistent with offering advice, information and education. The selling will then simply happen as a result of a consistent, trustworthy relationship.
If you really can’t help yourself, stick to the 80-20 rule. Do everything but selling 80% of the time and leave just 20% of your efforts to selling.
3. Be relevant
Not all customers are the same. This is a key to profitability. You need to use segmentation to ensure that you only offer relevant content to the individual reader. The aim here is to position yourself as the most trusted source of information for this particular area of need, whether that’s products for the beloved pet or IT service packages.
Within your content you need to deliver what your audience is looking for. Are they coming to you for a humorous take on life? Do they trust you for the latest news in your industry? Or perhaps they see you as an authoritative source to help them make decisions?
4. Be direct
Your weapon of choice when it comes to crafting profitable emails is the call to action. You need to be absolutely clear what you want the call-to-action to be in each and every email. The entire content should be shaped around this.
There’s an easy way to figure out your CTA. Take a moment, before you put fingers to the keyboard, to ask yourself what you want the reader to do. This may be to click a link through to a particular page, it may be to like you on social media, and it may be to complete a form or take advantage of a special offer.
Choose one call-to-action and make it clear throughout the email.
5. Be generous
Everyone loves a freebie! If someone is wading through a tonne of emails and the word FREE jumps out at them, you’re more likely to get them clicking through. When you reward subscribers to your emails with vouchers, discounts, exclusive sale access, offers and the like, then you make them feel valued and you make them feel they are getting a bargain. These are great ways to get them to actually spend their money with you.
6. Be list-savvy
Before you even consider the nature of an email itself, you need to get subscribers to your campaign. Realising that you need a populated, but pre-qualified list is your first hurdle.
The easiest way to do this is by using a squeeze page or pop-up on your homepage. This is where individuals actually sign-up to receive emails from you. They are more likely to do this if you offer something for them. Free white papers and eBooks on sign-up are both very useful tools. These are called lead magnets.
7. Be clear
It’s surprisingly tricky to get one email looking equally good across different devices and screens. Yet you need your emails to look just as good on an Apple iPhone as they do on an individual’s Windows laptop.
The simplest way to make your emails look great, and therefore encourage profitability, whichever device they are being opened on, is to choose email marketing software which does it for you.
8. Be personal
Customers like to be treated as the individual they are. They also want to know that they are talking to a real person. Therefore, wherever possible, have your emails come from a genuine name. They may be automated, but they will then look personal.
Secondly, make the content of the email personal to the reader. This can be achieved using segmentation and automation. Drop in their name and remember their birthday. By doing this you build a personal relationship with your audience.
9. Be test aware
Another benefit of choosing an effective email marketing software is that it should come with testing tools which make things simple for you. This allows you to test different emails against one another to see which fares best and draws in the most financial benefit.
We can’t stress this enough. If Google can test 41 shades of blue to see which one gets the most clicks, you can test a couple of email campaigns! In this way you learn what creates an effective campaign for your business, not someone else’s. And that’s all that really matters.
10. Be an affiliate
Teaming up with someone similar, but not a direct competitor, can reap rewards for you both. Plugging each other’s business is a great way to build your own reputation as well as gain commissions through sending traffic to the affiliate.
The same approach works well when you use email marketing for cross-selling. You know they’ve bought X so wouldn’t they also love Y and Z? It’s all about carefully informing them of the opportunities rather than the hard sell. The same approach can also apply to gentle reminder nudges for repeat orders when the right amount of time has elapsed.
Email marketing can most definitely be profitable. It doesn’t cost much to do, but done well can lead to profitable relationships based on tangible actions. Follow our approach above using Postman email newsletters and you’ll soon be seeing the benefits for yourself.
