What if you had a salesperson who would work for you 24/7, 365 days a year?

What if this same salesperson knew exactly what to say?

What if this person didn’t cost you a penny more in employee wages?

If you’ve ever seen a dog cock their head when they hear a strange noise, you just might do that when I tell you about this awesome, cheap, superhuman salesperson.

Ready?

This salesperson is…your email.

Despite what you may have heard, email marketing is not dead. In fact, EverConvert estimates something like 126 trillion emails were sent in 2020.

That’s trillion with a “T.”

Also, 92% of all web users have an email account and 99% check their email daily. Even the notoriously hard-to-reach demographic of teens reports over 75% of them still as avid email users.

Many companies also report an ROI of 122% using email marketing, making it the most effective digital marketing channel out there.

If you’re not using email marketing because you heard it was dying on the vine or you tried it and found it didn’t work for you, here are some simple strategies to making this overlooked marketing option soar for your company.

Email Marketing Tip #1: Give People Something of Value to Encourage Signups

There are many companies out there who collect customer or prospect contact information and then never do anything with that information.

Or maybe they send out the occasional “blast” to their list pushing the latest product or sale. 

Some companies encourage visitors to sign up for their weekly or monthly ezines or newsletters. 

The problem with that is with millions of ezines and sales-y emails being stuffed into consumers’ inboxes, the allure of an ezine or newsletter doesn’t carry the same desirability.

The key to ramping up your signups is by offering your prospects something of value beyond just a generic ezine. In the case of email marketing, the most sensible thing is to offer a free report. 

Here’s an important point: This ‘free report’ (a simple digital document that gives readers information of interest) must offer information customers of your products or services would find valuable.

Here’s a great example:

One of our clients is a school assembly performer. He visits schools and performs school assemblies for all the kids on topics like science or drug awareness.

With funding being slashed all the time, schools are always looking for ways to save money on these incoming presentations.

Knowing this, our client offers a free report that gives users nine different funding options for incoming school assemblies.

It’s information he knows his potential clients want, so by offering the free report in exchange for the prospect giving up their contact info, he gets more signups.

Email Marketing Tip #2: Develop Systematic Follow-up

Once you harvest those names, just sitting on them until you run a sale kills any value in the list.

Effective email marketing requires staying in contact with your list on a regular basis, whether it’s once a month, weekly, or daily. 

For many industries, monthly is not enough and daily is too much, so weekly is good.

For maximum effectiveness, these follow-up emails should not all be of a sales-y nature. Offer your prospects valuable tidbits of knowledge they would find useful.

Use these touchpoints as an opportunity to develop a relationship with your clients. 

Let them get to know you and your company. 

Why was your company started? 

What interesting features does your company offer that no one else in your niche provides?

Email Marketing Tip #3: Automation is the Key to Success

Autoresponders are the easiest, most effective way to follow up with prospects. They keep your company at the top of consciousness and ease prospects closer to a sale without being pushy.

The basic concept is simple. Your prospect fills out a contact form on your site to get the free report you offer, schedule a consultation, whatever.

After that, at scheduled intervals, they are sent follow-up emails that keep your company, product, or service at the forefront of their mind. Each email highlights one key feature of your product or service.

Here’s a critical point: Rather than merely asking for the sale over and over, each email merely urges the prospect to take action, such as:

• calling your team on the phone for more information
• visiting your website to watch a video
• come to your physical location
• or something else.

Many CRMs (Customer Relationship Marketing software) makes it easy to upload these prewritten emails. 

Then you can schedule them to go out at properly spaced intervals once a person fills out the contact form. Test it here.

Email Marketing Tip #4: Evergreen Content

Sending out seasonal emails for special holiday promotions makes sense.

If you have a snowplow business, you’re probably not going to send many promotional emails out for that service in April.

However, for these autoresponders, it’s important that they are evergreen.  If a prospect fills out the form at any point in the calendar year, the follow-up emails are just as appropriate to receive in January as well as July.

This means avoiding any references to winter, holidays of any kind, or recent news events.

To be clear, any recent media happenings that nicely dovetail with your products or services would be a great way to tie current events into your marketing efforts. 

Such tie-ins would likely be one-off emails or mini campaigns that could easily be scheduled.

Email Marketing Tip #5: Follow Email Best Practices

These days, people’s spam filters are in contact hyper-drive.

When our client and his wife were both using Outlook, they couldn’t even get emails through to each other!

Also, because people receive on average 100 emails a day, they are just looking for an excuse to hit “delete.”

This means your company will want to adhere to basic best practices.

Here are just a few things to keep in mind:

• Avoid spammy type words in your subject lines. No “Free,” “Lottery,” “You’ve Won” or “Weight Loss.”  

• Write Your Subject Lines Like This, not like this, and certainly NOT LIKE THIS.

• If possible, personalize your email with your prospect’s first name. We are drawn to our own names and are more likely to at least slow down and look at a subject line if it has our own name in it.

What You Can Do Next

So obviously email is here to stay. If you’d like to find out how we can help you maximize your email marketing efforts, contact us below: