9 Ways To Get More Out Of Your Email List
By Nick Smith
Originally Published on 10th February 2022
Originally Published on 10th February 2022
Last Updated: 16 June 2022
If you’re in business you probably have an email list.
It could be a list of clients, or people who’ve signed up to your newsletter, prospects you’ve identified, or perhaps an old list of emails you found on a sale representative’s laptop which made you wonder “when was the last time we emailed these people?”.
Transforming your list into sales isn’t alchemy – it’s a science. The first ingredient is repetition, reminding customers you exist on a regular basis. Statistics also show new prospects may require multiple touchpoints -points of contact with your business- to gain enough trust to be willing to purchase from you.
Aside from sending out an email each week, how do you improve your results?
Read on for some suggestions…
1. Craft An Introductory Email
Arguably the most important email you send to a new prospect is the first, which sets the tone for future emails and begins the process of building trust.
This can be an opportunity to briefly highlight your company’s values & competitive advantage over the competition, without getting too bogged-down in details best explained on your website. If you’re unsure how often you should email prospects, why not ask their preference in your opening email to them?
Another tip is to place your unsubscribe link at both the top & bottom of your email. Making it easier for prospects to unsubscribe seems counterintuitive, but the more easily they can the less likely they’ll complain about being emailed instead. It’s far better to remove people anyone unlikely to purchase again from your list than to keep sending them emails they refuse to open every week – since that hurts your deliverability.
2. Promote Lead Magnets
One of the proven most effective email marketing techniques is the use of lead magnets.
This is when your email contains a link to a landing page or your website which lets prospects download a free guide, document, or resource. Usually in exchange for entering their contact details.
Why is this valuable if you already possess their contact information? It qualifies prospects who are interested enough to take action, helping you narrow down who to spend your time contacting. You may already have their email address, but can ask for their mobile number and give them a call later.
Lead magnet downloads should relate to the biggest customer problem your products or services are designed to solve. For instance if you owned a Plumbing business, you could create a free guide on “10 Common Household Behaviours That Lead To Blocked Drains”.
Never attach any lead magnets or download directly to your email, since people are wary of opening emails with attachments due to fear of computer viruses. Make them grab it from your website instead.
3. Create A Progressively More Enticing Offer
Instead of a one-size-fits-all offer, you can improve your results by varying your offer based on the behaviour of your email recipients.
For instance, on Monday you offer everyone on your list 10% off Yellow T-Shirts. On Wednesday, everyone who viewed the Yellow T-Shirt page on your website gets an email saying Yellow T-Shirts are now 20% off. Everyone who read Monday’s email but didn’t click a link gets offered 10% off Blue Hoodies instead.
Or you could advertise several different products in an email and track which of those links each recipient clicks. Your follow-up email would then contain an offer for a product they clicked a link to. If they didn’t click anything, you could send a new email featuring a different selection of products.
4. Conduct Surveys & Get Feedback
Anyone who runs a business understands customer feedback is priceless. Not only does it provide insights into how you can improve, customers appreciate being asked for their opinion and one of the easiest ways they can provide it is via email.
In exchange for feedback, offer customers incentives like discounts or prizes to encourage participation. For more specific feedback platforms like Typeform let you run targeted surveys so you can ask questions like:
- How did you first hear about us?
- What’s the biggest problem facing your business right now we can help you solve?
- What’s your biggest concern about our product or service?
- Is our product or service missing a feature you’d like to see?
- Which products similar to ours have you used before?
- What’s one reason you’d choose to buy a competitor’s product instead of ours?
- What’s one thing we could do to better serve your needs?
5. Anticipate Common Objections To Purchasing
Any good salesperson knows overcoming a prospect’s objections is essential to landing a sale with them.
The better you understand your target audience, the more effectively you can address their most common objections to doing business with you in an email. For example:
- Lack of Urgency – Highlight customer pain points, create a time-limited offer
- Lack of Budget – Justify the value to them, Break price into smaller chunks, utilize pay-later schemes
- Lack of Need – Highlight consequences of failing to solve their problem, or target a different audience
- Lack of Business Trust – Provide company testimonials, send multiple emails to build trust
- Lack of Product Trust – Provide demonstrations, free trials, research or stats to prove your claims
6. Personalize Your Message
Email personalisation helps recipients feel like you’re speaking directly to them, encouraging them to take action. Emails can be personalised in many ways, most email platforms allow you to store custom data fields for each recipient which can later be inserted into your email via a keyword.
Prospects be addressed by name (ie. “Dear John”) and their name can even be inserted into the Subject Line to make it feel like you’re talking directly to them. Their company name, business location or job title can also be used throughout the email to help make your appeal feel more compelling and authentic.
Understanding your audience lets you to craft emails using their own language, inserting the same jargon or patterns of speech they use themselves. Creating Buyer Personas helps you gain audience insights, or you can read reviews on sites like Amazon for products similar to yours & replicate some of the language used.
7. Ensure Your Email Is Readable On Mobile
Every year the percentage of people reading emails on their phone instead of a desktop or laptop goes up, and evidence suggests purchasing conversion rates are higher for emails viewed on mobile devices.
Which is why it’s so important your email’s HTML template utilizes Responsive design, which automatically optimizes how it looks depending on the device people view it on. The same applies to your website which should also be mobile-friendly.
Customer reluctance to read lengthy paragraphs on their phone is one reason why effective marketing emails tend to be short, providing only the minimum information needed to bring someone to your website where you have much more control over presenting product & service information to them.
8. Test & Measure Responses To Improve Them
A/B testing is a common practice in email marketing, and although most email platforms offer it as a dedicated feature you don’t need any special software to test different variants of the same email.
For instance you can divide your email list in half & send the same message to both, varying the Subject Line to see which one achieves a higher open rate. Doing it repeatedly yields a better understand of what works.
Experimentation can extend to things like the length of your copy, layout of your email, wording of the headline, font choices & colors, type of offer, and the most effective day & time to send your email. Over time the insights gleaned from repeated A/B tests help you connect with your audience on a deeper level.
9. Combatting List Attrition
One unfortunate reality of email marketing is your list will shrink over time. People will change email addresses, businesses cease trading, and prospects unsubscribe after losing interest. Email marketing is a numbers game and the more people who view your message, the greater the cumulative benefit.
Varying the content of your weekly emails may lower your unsubscribe rate, but will never eliminate it completely. Emails will continue to ‘bounce’ (become invalid due to people changing email address) the older your list is, so you need a strategy for replacing people you lose with fresh prospects.
That’s where our marketing lists can help replenish your list numbers & put you in front of a new audience. You can also Contact Us to discuss professional email design & copywriting services we provide.