Why email marketing?
Consider the cost of prospecting or maintaining your current accounts. Let’s look at prospecting. Let’s say, on average a telemarketing rep can make 100 quality dials per day. They will get about 80 voicemails, they will get shut down about 10 times, 5 people won’t be qualified, that leaves 5 people, and about 1 will be in a buying cycle. (This is based on my telemarketing experience). At $20 per hour, that means it costs about $160 per qualified lead. Now depending on your close ratio of qualified leads, your cost per new customer could be significantly higher than that. Email marketing best practice can help you reduce your costs.
With email marketing you can send out thousands emails to your already qualified contacts very inexpensively and have your sales talent focused on talking to inbound leads generated from your best practice email marketing campaigns. Your cost per customer and cost per close will go way down!
Current customers take a certain level of maintenance. If you’re going to call them on a regular basis, or visit them, the cost can add up. Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch on a regular basis, make special offers, distribute news about new features and benefits, and to demonstrate your value.
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #1: Have an opt-in call to action on your website
I see so many people who spend thousands of dollars building a website with professionally designed graphics, videos, pictures and copywritten material. However, other than the standard “contact us” in their menu system, there’s no calls to action, and no subscriber collection form. When I talk to people and ask them what the purpose of their site is, they tell me, to generate business. How will it generate business if you don’t make it easy for people to let you know who they are? Few people go to a website and immediately dial the contact us phone number. They’re on your site because they’re doing research about who to buy from. You could help their decision making process by offering them more information and more content by collecting their contact info. This is a great way to build your marketing list over time. You also need their consent to send them marketing messages. I discuss this further in tip#6.
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #2: Manage Your List
When I talk to people and ask them about their mailing list, I generally get, “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get that organized”, “I don’t really have one put together”, “I’ve got lots of contacts in my Outlook!”. If you have a reply device on your website, or even collect information in some other system to collect prospect’s info, you really need to spend the time to organize it into an email mailing list. It’s not hard and it’s time well spent.
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip#3: Use a professional email mailing system
There are many on-line cloud based email systems that are SPAM Act compliant, keep track of opens, allow people to unsubscribe, etc. This is critical for judging and improving the success of your mailing campaigns. They also offer many pre-designed templates that make it easy to create professional looking content. Do not cut and paste 100 email addresses in to your Microsoft Outlook!
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #4: Have Compelling Content
Hire a professional copywriter. It’s money well spent. A good subject line, content and call to action incorporated in your content will pay off. Direct marketing is a profession that has been around a very long time. There are tried and true practises that will increase response rates. A professional copywriter knows how to use these techniques and customize them to your campaign.
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #5: Have a CALL TO ACTION
Every email should have a call to action. If you’ve gone through the trouble of getting your list together and written good content, consider what you want your reader to do. For example:
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Click here to see a listing of all our marketing services
Not only does this help you get conversions, but you know how effective your email is by the number of people who respond to it by following the call to action.
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #6: Obey the Law!
Just so I’m clear, YOU CANNOT JUST SEND EMAILS TO ANYONE! In Canada we have Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). You must get verbal or written consent to send commercial electronic messages to your leads. The onus is on you to prove consent (there are some exceptions I go into CASL rules in more detail in this blog post on CASL.) This means you need a system to collect leads, manage them and collect and prove consent. Web forms are great for this purpose because they automatically collect the person’s info, plus date and time of form fill and you can include a consent checkbox to send further information.
In addition to consent, you also need to have a working method of unsubscribing from your mailing list. This is also a requirement of CASL. Finally, your emails need to contain the name and address of the sender.
If you’d like a complete review of your email practices or would like a proper email marketing system set up, contact us for free initial consult.
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Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #7: Clean Your List
When you begin to send emails on a regular basis for marketing purposes, you have to start to consider your email reputation and the deliverability of future emails. If you keep sending to lists of people that have high bounce rates (invalid email addresses, etc) your email provider will either cut you off or reduce your reputation as an email sender. This makes it harder for your emails to get in the inbox of your contacts and will ensure your emails to directly to the spam folder.
To avoid this, you need to clean your list. There are many commercial email list scrubbers you can find online. You submit your list to them and they will test all the emails for deliverability. You’re likely to get the list back in 3 categories: 1) Undeliverable 2) Unknown (server did not provide a response) or 3) Deliverable. You only want to send your list to #3 and clean your list for sure of #1 (undeliverable). For emails that come back as “unknown” it means the email server was not configured to provide a response as to whether or not the email address exists. In this case, it would be a good idea to review these manually and ensure they are correct before adding them to your regular mailing list.
You should also have a mechanism where bounced emails are automatically removed from your mailing list. This will clean your list over time. However, this is not a substitute for using an email list cleaner in the first place.
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #8: Check for Deliverability
The last thing you want to do is spend all this time and effort putting together a marketing system, a well written email campaign and offer and for it to go directly to the spam folder. There are online deliverability testers that can rate your email deliverability. They check for things like if your IP address is blacklisted, you have an SPF Record, DKIM and DMARC records in your DNS. These are all email security features that ensure your email is sent from you and is not spam. Most spam filters will send emails to the spam folder or reject them entirely if these security features are not set up correctly. I use mail-tester it’s a great, free email deliverability tester. (It is limited to a few tries per week for the free version).
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #9: Monitor and Score Your Leads
Sending emails to clients is not a one shot deal. It’s something that has to be done over an extended period of time, sending valuable tips and information to clients. This keeps them engaged with your company and brand. The key here is to be top of mind when your potential client actually needs and is ready to buy your product or service.
There is software that can monitor email opens, link clicks, website visits and form fills. You want to use this data to score leads. For example, an email open is 1 point, a link click is 5 points, a web page visit is 10 points and a form fill is 50 points. In this way, you can assign a score to your leads and for example, only schedule a sales call to leads over 100 points. This makes your email system much more effective for sales and allows sales to be more effective by only reaching out to the most interested leads (who are probably the most likely to convert to a client!).
Email Marketing Best Practice Tip #10: Leverage Email as “Tease” to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Don’t give away all your great content in an email. The email should “sell” the content you have on your website. For example, if I was writing an email to promote the content of this blog post, I might highlight some of the tips, but not go into detail. I’d offer benefits like “get higher email deliverability, higher engagement and more leads with these 10 Email tips….. Read the full article on my website”. Why? Because now I can score the lead and know they are interested in email marketing when they click the link to read the article. Plus, once on my site, there are contact forms, my contact page and other ways the lead can contact me directly if they want to express interest.
Do You Need Help with Your Email Marketing System?
If you’d like help designing or evaluating your email marketing system, contact us. We’re here to help. We help clients with their entire system from Website, to CRM, to email marketing system to designing and developing email content.