Understanding Email Marketing

Aug 17, 2010 by

Email marketing is one of my core marketing tools to drive traffic to my websites. This blog post is for a speech I will be doing for the idaho web marketing meetup, please feel free to leave comments if you have any questions.

First, these are the current rules for emailing. READ THEM!

What I will be talking about:

- What is email marketing
- Rule #1, constant contact
- Know your audience
- The actual email
- When to send the emails
- Getting emails
- Automated emails

- What is email marketing?
Basically, email marketing is were you keep in contact with your target audience using emails. Most people think of email marketing as sending out newsletters to increase sales, leads, or traffic. But in fact that is just one form of email marketing that you can do, you can also set up a system so that you can automatically email your list on a schedule, such as all of those ebook people. You can also have your emailing system send numerous email reminders to increase your websites activity (notice that meetup.com sends a lot of reminders, facebook sends reminders all the time as well). You can also do direct emails that are hand written by you to increase your sites activity, one example is sending out emails written by you to your past customers asking them how they liked there products or what not. But of course the old fashion “newsletter” is the most popular type of email marketing.

I believe that most businesses should use email marketing to help there branding. With everyone having smart phones these days businesses can target a bigger audience easier now. Also, one of the bests things about email marketing is that it converts sooo great! I have one email list that has about 2000 emails and whenever I would send out an email the list would make me about $1500 profit, so that is about $0.75 that I made per email address, and ill tell you how I do it;

- Rule #1.. Constant Contact
Ok I know that there is a company that is called “constant contact”, but I have always called my own personal email marketing rule #1 “constant contact”. When you are doing email marketing, you are not making a sale, you are not increasing your traffic, you are not gaining any leads…. no your not… you are building a brand! The traffic, sales, leads, etc are all other benefits of email marketing. The reason why I call my rule #1 “constant contact” is because in order to build your brand you must have constant contact with your target audience.

When your doing email marketing, you should not focus for a sale, lead, or whatever. Instead you should focus on building a “brand” so if someone needs a product then they will think of your “brand”. All of the sales, traffic, leads, etc are all extras from building up the brand by using email marketing. For example, currently I have 0 dentists company’s that email me at all, yet if any dentists company gets my email and then emails me on a weekly basis (send an email Monday morning about the weekly specials and what not) then I would probably call that dentists company when I needed my teeth cleaned next. I may delete/archive the emails as soon as I get them, but in the back of my mind I know the company’s name so if I ever had a tooth ache I would call them because the company’s name is in the back of my head. Notice how godaddy always sends you emails? Thats called branding, you might not need a domain on a day to day basis, but if you ever do need a domain… you have godaddy in the back of your mind

Ok back to constant contact… you should have your email marketing campaigns planned out on a month per month basis, remember that all of the months in the year are different, depending on your niche you can tweak your emails for the season. Like if you sold wakeboards, then you might want to hit up the spring and summer months really hard, and also the Christmas season really hard. Each season will have a different approach to your email campaign, such as in the spring I would use discount codes a lot, then in the summer I would send into emails about wakeboarding contests and new wakeboards in stock (the contests part is to keep them interested), I would also hit up the wakeboard accessories a lot more in the summer. Then in the winter I would have a email campaign that of cource targets the xmas season. You just have to make sure that you are keeping in contact with your email list so that they think of you when they need to order a wakeboard, you want your brand name in the back of the users head for when the time comes that they need a new wakeboard.

Remember this is my #1 rule, make sure you are keeping constant contact with your audience

- Know your audience

You need to research your target audience a ton so you can market to them perfectly. If I had a dentists website then I would have a way different email then if I was promoting ipods. There is a lot more to knowing your audience then most people think, most people think that they can get away with just researching there competitors to see what they are doing on there email marketing. But there is a lot more to it then that, if you really want to research your audience then check out the list below;

1. Research Forums
I always research niche related forums for a new niche to understand how my audience talks and to see if they are smart people whom I’m dealing with. Like I said before, if I had a dentists newsletter then language in the email would be a ton different then an email that is selling ipods. For a dentists website you would want to describe the process so the reader fully understands what you offer them, compared to a ipod newsletter were you would probably just have a simple email that would consists of the ipod stats and such.

2. Test, Test, test
Ok so you know how to talk to your audience, but you don’t know exactly how to run the email campaign, this is were the testing comes in. Depending on your niche there could be a few different ways to target your audience. Some people care a lot about discounts, yet some people hate those kind of newsletters and would rather like to hear about whats going on with the actual company. I am kind of that way, I personally hate those discount emails (like godaddys), but I love reading newsletters about company news or new add-ons to a company.

On certain niches you can send “company news” newsletters and you would probably get the same amount of sales as a “discount email” for a different niche. You have to test, test, and test to see what is the perfect email is so you can get the best conversion rate for your mula. Make sure you keep testing new email styles, sending times, email content, etc to find the best converter, but at the same time you will need to keep testing new emails. I usually send 4 newsletters per month per niche (that is besides my automated emails), so out of the 4 emails I would have 1 test email to see how it works out. You should do the same.

3. Subscribe to your competition… duh
Pretty straight forward huh, simply subscribe to all of your competitors to see what they are up to.

- The actual email

I hear alllllll theeeeee timeeeeee…. “but jon, I dont know how to design the email”, and my reply is always “dont use images!”, Ok listen guys, those image emails are of the past. I have done a lot of my own testing and the conversion rates are way way better on emails without the images (however, you might get the same result so make sure you test, test, and then do some more testing). Images were really popular back in the day, same with myspace. But as time goes by some stuff just doesn’t work as good as it used to, and that includes images in emails.

I think the reason why the images dont work as good anymore is simply because people are lazy. Images takes time to load, infact gmail doesn’t even load the images on default. Also people are using smart phones all the time, and when I’m not around my computer I use my phone to check my emails (like most people I bet), and I hate it when there are images in the emails because the stupid thing takes longer to load.

Also people in general are getting a little smart now-a-days, I use clicktale all the time now and I see that people DO read the content, specialty for ecommerce websites (I suggest to have a very detailed description now-a-days). Back in the day the general rule was “less is more” with ecommerce. But now its more like “more is more” with descriptions. Emails are kind of the same way, except I wouldn’t go into to much detail, the email is made to be the ad so the user goes to your landing page, were you will make the sale or lead or whatever.

- When to send the emails

Oh I love testing this out. I have it down to a science. I’m going to keep this part real short and simple because it is. OK, get this, people get paid on the first and the 15th of the month (not everyone but the majority of people). So the best times to send your emails are of course… the 2nd and the 16th of every month. Well its a tiny bit more complicated then that, but not much. Send your emails on the first Monday after the 1st or 15th. Also make sure to send your email so that it gets sent out at “10am EST”, that will make it so that it will reach your audiences mail boxes in the morning time all across America. Do not send the email in the afternoon, people seem to order more and be more active online during the morning. Dont ask why, but that is how it is (of course do your own testing).

Sending times rules;
1. send the first monday after the 1st or 15th
2. send the email so it goes out on EST, which is like 1-2 hours depending on the EST or the ESD, which is 8am in Idaho.
3. only send in the mornings

- Getting emails

Getting the actual emails might be the hardest part for some people, but if you know how to do it right then you will get good targeted emails. The first thing to remember is never “ask for there email”… never ever ask for the persons email, because they wont give it to you. You need to offer them some sort of tool, service, ebook, discount, etc to get them to enter there email. If you current ask for the persons email and then you switch the email lead form to something like “enter your email to get a free ebook about apples (or whatever)” then I guarantee that your conversions will be twice as much as usual. Now since you know to never ask for an email, the hard part comes.

Gaining emails is kind of easy. There are a bunch of different ways, but my favorite are below;

1. Offer a tool (example; check out this)
2. Gain emails from past customers, you have to ask the customers of course when they are ordering.
3. On the lead form, say “be sent info about \niche\ that we cant publicly post”, and then have an automated reply of some good info about the niche that the user will like. This works great because people always want to know “info that cant be publicly posted online” hehe (one of my personal favorites)
4. Have contests on your website to increase your emails, such as offering a free ipod weekly. Then have the users submit there emails to you for them to enter. People love online contests
5. Offer a ebook, but it works out way better if you write it yourself, John chow has a great ebook which is a good example. He got tons of emails from that.

- Automated emails

I love, love, love automated emails. Automated emails work great with helping brand your business. I use automated emails to let my past customers know about there orders during the whole process, which usually takes about 4-5 emails all together. I only use automated emails on my ecommerce stores because I’m not into ebooks at all. If you want to see how a good company does automated emails then buy something from bodybuilder.com, they have a great automated email system.

Basically, my automated emails consists of;

1st email; Thank you for your order! (confirmed order email)
2nd email; Your order is almost there (sent 3 days after ordering)
3rd email; Your order should be there (send 5-6 days after ordering)
4th email; Feedback (20 days after, basicly you ask for the customers feedback on there order, then you have them go to a web form to submit there data, which increases branding and site activity)

Now you can easily set up as many automated emails as you want, you just have to learn simple php, the laws, and how to use crons. It is actually really easy to set these up if you want to screw around with php, just make sure you follow all of the rules.