Back in the nineties when email was still a new phenomenon, people would read every email sent to them, so email blasts sent by marketers and sales professionals were a lot more effective. These days, however, people are a lot more selective about the emails they read. In addition, email inboxes have filters so bulk emails often end up in the spam folder.
How things stand currently with email marketing is that unless the email is written in the right way and can get through spam filters, it’s going to present you with some challenges. A personalised, well-worded email is much better than sending out bulk emails. Only 0.1% of people will respond to a mail that isn’t personalised. In the nineties, I had a 90% open rate for emails being sent out and an engagement rate of 50%. Sadly this has changed, but it’s still possible to get some bites using this technique.
If you are prospecting using email marketing, make sure that you write engaging text and include links that are valuable to the people you are emailing. Every single prospect will only think about what’s in it for them. It’s your job to engage your prospect when you email them. Once you have tailored this to the industry you’re in, you should experience some success.
Email marketing rules:
- Use short and punchy subject lines: The longer the headline, the lower the open rate. Keep it short and to the point!
- Define your audience: Make sure that the content that you’re sending out is relevant to your audience. For example, if you were selling cosmetics, then you should be targeting women. If you’re sending out communication about lipsticks to men, your numbers will be terrible. Know who your audience is, how old they are, what their interests are and what they respond to.
- Encourage subscribers to follow you on social media: Once a person opts in or subscribes to receive emails from you, you should send them an email in your auto responder that asks them to connect with you on social media. Not only is this a great way of growing your social media following, but they’ll also be able to see more of your content and offers.
- Use the 80/20 rule: If you use email purely to push your product, then people are going to opt out or unsubscribe. Make sure that you’re adding value to them 80% of the time (with relevant information, blog posts, podcasts, videos) and then you can push your products or services very subtly for the other 20%.
