The best way to improve your business is so obvious most people miss it. Instead of rewriting business plans, searching for new JV partners, sourcing hot products or revamping your website, increase sales using email marketing.
Email marketing works as well as it does because it’s an effective way to reach mobile readers, an effective way to keep customers informed, and an effective way of creating a low-cost, high-value marketing campaign.
While the benefits of email marketing are easy enough to understand, what baffles many marketers is how to engage with their audience. With that in mind, here are 5 tips on how to get more people to read and follow through on your email’s call to action:
- Use a good platform
When it comes to building email lists, you need to get a robust platform. This is one that has good deliverability rates and that gives you the functionality to send out different types of emails. First, you need a platform like Horizon Email Advertising to deliver your emails, whether they are broadcast emails or a newsletter sent by an autoresponder. Second, you need to make sure that these emails are delivered to your readers without being filtered out as spam. Ultimately, your goal is for your readers to open your emails, read them, and respond to your call to action by clicking through to the link to your blog post or sales letter.
- Get to know your target audience.
If you only have a vague idea about your audience, you will be throwing darts with a blindfold on.
You must get to know your target market.
You can find out more about them by sending out email surveys, asking directly on social media, or researching what others in your niche have discovered.
Next, create a persona of your ideal customer. Find out what interests them, what rouses their passion and what turns them off. Develop an intuitive feel for what they love and hate. Once you do, everything you say will resonate with them.
Armed with this knowledge, you now know how to write subject lines that get your emails opened. You also know what to say in your emails and how to entice to click on your call-to-action link.
Once you understand your audience and can communicate to them in a way that makes you an insider, your response rate will automatically shoot up. Your audience will feel you understand them at a deep level.
- Study email copywriting.
Top copywriters appear to dash off-the-cuff emails that directly strike a chord with their audience. However, this knack for creating instant rapport is far from accidental. It’s the result of intense study on the principles of selling in print.
Your best course of action to get more emails read is to either hire a copywriter or learn enough about copy writing to do it yourself.
In fact, even if you intend to hire a copywriter, you should study email copy writing. This will help you appreciate what your copywriter is doing. If you are ignorant of how copywriters think, you will probably misunderstand the use of colloquialisms, casual grammar, and provocative statements. You will judge their work based on what you learned in your high school English class. You might even interfere with what they are doing, making prudish corrections that sabotage their careful sales psychology.
When you study the anatomy of an email, you will learn:
- · How to write captivating subject lines.
- · How to write the first sentence in the email to keep them reading.
- · How to structure the email to keep their attention.
- · How to write calls to action that make them curious enough to click your link.
- Perfect your timing.
You can figure out the best times to send your emails based on statistical data. If, for instance, you are promoting a long video sales letter, don’t send it to people when they are most likely to open it at work. They will probably set it aside to watch later and never get around to it. Send it either in the evenings or over the weekends. You can do everything right, but if your timing is wrong, you will miss out on many sales. At the Olympics, for example, it didn’t matter if an athlete did everything in their sport technically correct – if their timing was off by a fraction of a second, they might have failed to qualify for the finals or might have missed out on a medal in the finals.
- Use the right trigger words.
When it comes to word choice, you have to consider both the spam filters and readers. Trigger words will appeal to both, but in opposite ways. A trigger word like “free” will trigger the spam filters to send your email to junk mail. Meanwhile, you have to use the right trigger words for your target audience. The only way you can figure out your best choice of words is through research. Find out what words to avoid triggering the spam filters and what words to use to engage your reader’s core interests.
- Emphasize scarcity.
It’s human nature for people to avoid making buying decisions. Even if your product is exactly what they need and it’s offered at a perfect price point, they may not buy it. While they may actually have a burning desire for the product—for instance, someone with almost no website traffic might be thrilled at your comprehensive traffic generating course—they may still not buy it. Instead, they postpone making a decision until they have more time to consider it. Unfortunately, they never get around to buying it. Introducing scarcity prods them into taking action. You could, for example, only offer your product for a limited time or only offer it at a discounted price.
