Today I want to talk to you as the CEO of a company that is concerned about ROI on my own marketing, rather than the leader of a company that does work for our clients as an internet marketing and email marketing consultant. I want to talk about the concerns many of us have when we think about marketing. Is it going to be worth my time and how do I get the most out of it?
To answer the question in the headline, yes! You can get a 400% increase in your email marketing ROI. The trick is to do it wisely and know what’s working and what’s not in the current market. If you’re reading this you probably believed it might be possible or you wouldn’t be wasting your time learning more about email marketing.
Often we have clients who come to us the first time and say, “We’ve tried everything to market our company and nothing works, but we want you to do something that does.” So we listen to their situation and we come up with a marketing plan and the first thing we hear is, “No you don’t understand, we tried that and it doesn’t work so why would we do it again?” Most of the time the answer to that question is that the medium they used wasn’t the problem, it was the execution that was the problem. What I want to say to these people is, “what you spent your money on wasn’t the problem, it was how you spent it.”
Every advertising medium still works if done correctly in the right situation. It’s like a specialty tool in your tool box. You may not use it 99% of the time but in the perfect situation it is life saving. If you use it the wrong way though it will appear to be a waste of money. So, you need to change the way you look at it. I usually try to do this as diplomatically as possible with our clients because our desire is to help them succeed. As you can imagine, many leaders are not ready to hear it was their fault and that they need to change and grow. Since this is a blog I’m choosing to not be as tactful. Please forgive me but I don’t want you to miss opportunities. So how do you increase email marketing conversion?
Conversion rate in email marketing could be several things. It could be opening the email, clicking on a link in the email or becoming a paying customer. For this discussion let’s look at becoming a customer. The average conversion rate for becoming a customer is less than 1%. Direct mail looks at a 1% to 2% response rate and the sales conversion rate is usually less than that.
When you look at your email marketing in a holistic system you can get 4% to 6% and even more for your response, which would give you a minimum of a 400% increase in return.
These are the questions you need to ask and the areas you need to be aware of when you are setting up a killer email campaign.
1. Do you have a persona of your ideal client created?
Personas are very powerful tools for writing better email marketing copy. This tip alone can cause a significant uptick in conversion rates.
2. Are you writing your emails to those personas and speaking to their unique concerns and needs?
It’s easy to do all the work on personas and forget to use them.
3. Are you mapping out multiple emails that would be delivered in a series?
You need to have multiple emails that are tied together. You’ve probably heard that it takes multiple impressions to get people to even contact you. We use an average of 5 emails over 20 days, but this case study from marketing sherpa uses 11 emails in 18 days.
4. Are you using a software system designed to manage your email marketing in a sophisticated way?
Some companies that do this are Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, A Weber, and we use a suite called HubSpot that includes email with several other tools for marketing.
5. Are you following a protocol for designing your emails in a way that is proven to have the best results?
We use a 12 point checklist. Do you know how to measure your potential success on just writing an email?
6. Are you including images in your emails?
7. Are you including links to valuable and relevant content in your emails?
This is your chance to connect them to your site and blog and demonstrate your competence.
8. Are your emails designed to funnel people through the decision/buying process?
Don’t just write a bunch of emails, but design them to move people through the process.
9. Are the pages that you are linking your prospects to optimized to engage them even further down the sales funnel?
If you do all this work to get people back to your site but it isn’t optimized to also move people through the funnel and engage your personas then you will loose them there at your website.
There you have it! 9 things you can do to increase your email marketing results 400% and beyond. The reason most people have such small conversion rates is not because the medium doesn’t work but because they haven’t learned that there is a better way of executing their plan.
This is why we regularly advise people to get help and in this case find an email marketing consultant that knows their stuff and fits your culture. That is what we do for our clients because you can’t be an expert in everything. This just happens to be one of our strong points.
Have a great day and go increase your email marketing conversion!
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