Email Marketing Hacks

“The average open rate is 20.81% and we get an open rate of 56.30%. The average click-through rate is 2.5% and we get a click-through rate of 14.0%. This is how.”

Intro
1. Make a Compelling Offer & Deliver
2. Ask for a Reply
3. Don’t Send a Lot
4. Case Study
5. Other Perks

Email marketing has one of the highest conversion rates of any marketing channel. You want to get people to ask for an email, open it, then click through it. The average open rate is 20.81% and we get an open rate of 56.30%. The average click-through rate is 2.5% and we get a click-through rate of 14.0%. This is how.

Email Marketing Hacks

Intro

Our best, most sent email marketing message gets opened 71.9% of the time. And 17.6% of the time they even click something in the email. Our worst are all still at least double the average. We use email simplicity.

1. Make a Compelling Offer & Deliver

You should use an expert to recommend an “email list sign-up” offer. Then you should build the campaign and resources behind it.

Since I knew that most of my target customers were looking for 1.) ways to get more gigs and 2.) promotion for their craft, I was easily able to get in their heads and create offers that would really help them. Once I knew how to help our customers at the same time that I knew what it takes to operate parts of a business, I could combine that expertise to deliver big.

2. Ask for a Reply

Do you use Gmail? Your email can group all incoming emails into “folders” or “tabs” automatically to help you keep track of stuff. My Gmail loads with the tabs “Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums.” These are main categories for all your emails. But the other main “category” is Spam. And you obviously don’t want your company’s emails to go there. People usually never see those.

So, keeping your marketing emails out of the “spam” folder is good. Since you’re probably selling something you can end up in the “Promotions” folder along with other salesy stuff. But at least it’s not in Spam. Now, if you can get your emails into the “Primary” inbox they will be part of the first emails your customer checks every day and incredibly more likely to open it. Here’s how we do it.

Your primary inbox is meant to include only the emails that are most important to the customer. What makes them more important? It looks like the most recent back-and-forths get primary email status. So why not ask for a reply in the first email.

Getting a reply in the first email can bump your next few emails into the primary folder. The email service provider will think the message is very urgent since you rarely use email to send messages. Each email message you take the time to send out must be important since it’s not a text reply to a friend or a “like” on a recent Facebook post.

Since the email service knows your few conversations are most important, and since you’ve continued the conversation via reply, the next message gets status in your inbox.

Make sure you reply back to their reply.

3. Don’t Send A Lot

All our marketing emails deliver value. Sure, sometimes, a good coupon seems like a “given” value delivery to you, it can seem spammy and salesy to the normal customer bombarded by sales emails every day from other places.

Only send emails that have a specific deliverable value. If you send a discount for a product, make sure it’s sent to people that indicated they’d want to see it. But that’s as far as I’ll get into promotional email marketing.

When you keep your email open and engagement rates up, their email service provider will remember that your emails from that address are important. Use them wisely.

4. Case Study

Here’s the exact offers and emails we send for new customers (non-paying).

a) HelloBar

About 75% of our email marketing signups come from HelloBar. It’s pretty much the only thing we use because it’s not super invasive to the customer’s experience on the websites. We run two incentives at a time for Bandturo. Here they are:

1) Get Interviewed

2) Get Help Directly by Email [From an expert, implied]

On the first, we offer a published interview on podcast, blog, social, etc. Since most small artist or businesses can’t turn down free publicity, they jump at the chance. Especially if you make it really easy for them. UX rule number 1.

The second offer is to get help from someone knowledgable. This leaves room for customers with more particular questions, or feel the need to tell their story before finding a good fit.

Both convert at over 1% per view. Since every new signup from this channel is a lead we can choose to contact directly, we’re converting 1/100 website visitor, at least, into a lead with this channel alone.

b) The Email

The first email gets sent automatically from Mailchimp for free after they sign up.

Your email should make good on the offer and provide a great value as promised. We encourage the customer to email back for a direct response from a real human being. We also let them sign up for the free promo. Either way the customer signed up, they have the option to do both great things in the first email.

A direct reply gets future marketing emails directly to their primary folder instead of “spam” or “promotions.”

A click to get the free promo offer gets them to fill out a form on our website. They get what they want, and they get another chance to browse our offers. We also get the traffic boost for SEO.

This first email gets opened 71.9% of the time. They click through 17.6% of the time, too.

The next email gets opened 59.7% of the time and still gets 14.6% clicks through to our sites. It is another direct offer to help. It’s short and to the point.

5. Other Perks

Now, does the direct replies from a human take a little more resources? Yes. But we can sort of scale that time by offering to help with a particular need. We offer to dig up resources for copy & paste if they just ask. Easy to train, easy to delegate.

Do the form submissions require some formatting and a copy & paste to social? Yes. But this is now free content for our website, blog, podcast, and/or social. And if we get their profile/account address for social, we can tag them and get another sales push by showing them we did what we said we would and giving them another reason to connect or browse.

This content publication boosts our visibility on all platforms including search engines and social feeds. And when you post often enough, these platforms point to you more often. So you get dividends and free bonus exposure. What a great use of time and resources.

Other Performance Marketing Hacks

How to market with little budgets. A rant or how-to from what we did that worked really well.