Our company started email marketing a few years ago. Like a lot of newbies, we had no idea what we were doing. After a couple of false starts and some tips from experts, we’re (closer to being) email marketing ninjas. Here’s how we did it.
1. Make Your Subject Lines Compelling And To The Point
If your email were a confident young man in a bar, it’s subject would be the pickup line that gets it a date. As a marketer, you’ve got to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Their Inbox is constantly being bombarded with new mail.
Your recipients WILL delete your email unless your subject line gives them a compelling reason to open it.
Oh, and just like that single guy, your email only has seconds to make an impression. Ergo, your subject line is almost more important than what’s inside.
Your subject line should:
- Tell it’s recipient EXACTLY what to expect inside.
- Be compelling enough for your intended audience to read further.
- NOT be misleading.
- Include localization, such as a city name (if applicable).
- Avoid words like “Free” or “Percent Off”.
- Stick to 50 characters or less.
For a more tips on dating subject lines, check out MailChimp’s blog on subject line best practices.
2. Don’t Sell. Teach.
Okay, now that your emails have a better open rate, how do you convert your readers into clickers? Again, remember that your audience wouldn’t have opened your email in the first place if your subject line was salesy.
[Tweet “Give your audience what they want…KNOWLEDGE.”]
I don’t know about you, but I click on links because I want to learn something that will help me. So what does your audience want? That’s what you need to ask yourself. I’ll give you an example.
One of my target audiences is other independent insurance agency owners. I get a kick out of helping them grow because that helps my industry grow as a whole. Here are some examples of content that has been successful in teaching my audience.
- 6 Secrets For Recruiting And Retaining Young Agents
- How Insurance Agents Are Using Social Media [Infographic]
- The Insurance Agent Of The Future
- 5 Ways To Build Client Rapport Using Social Media
3. Develop A Marketing Calendar
I don’t know about you, but I tend to procrastinate. Developing some kind of schedule for your email marketing is a good way to stay on top of everything and hold yourself accountable.
Whether Google, Outlook or any other calendar, use it to:
- Plan your marketing themes over time.
- Paste links to meaningful content you want to reference.
- Collaborate with others on your marketing team.
[Tweet “Marketing, above all, takes consistent effort to earn results.”]
Once you throw some dates on your calendar, you’ll probably find the task of creating marketing emails to be more enjoyable. Now you can add content over time instead of cramming at the last minute.
4. Track Your Results And Learn From Your Mistakes
Anyone can send out a bunch of emails and hope for the best. But you’re smarter than that, right?
Use an email marketing company that makes it easy (and fun) to track your results. In another post, I discussed a bunch of things you can track using MailChimp’s mobile app. They also have a really handy Chrome Plugin that allows you to check your most recent email campaign’s stats right in Chrome without having to open a new tab and log into MailChimp.
At a minimum you should track:
- Number of opens
- Number of clicks
- bounce rate
Other than those, you’d be wise to pay attention to send time performance and email platforms your recipients use over time. Those will help you make some minor tweaks to your marketing efforts, including layout, that may provide significantly better results.
5. Share Your Best Performing Email Content To Gain More Sign Ups
This is something I recently made a habit of doing. The concept is simple.
- Review stats from your past email campaigns to see which pages on your site got the most clicks from your campaings.
- If you don’t already have an email sign up form on your most clicked content, put one on there. (I use PopUp Domination, which integrates with my email marketing vendor.)
- Once your signup form is on those pages, share the heck out of them on social media!! The more eyes you get on those pages the more new signups you’ll get.
Conclusion
If you own a small business or work for a company in a marketing capacity, you can’t afford to ignore email marketing. It’s not dead!
Hopefully, implementing just one or two or these ideas will improve your results. But the most important thing is, once you start, be consistent. It WILL pay off!!
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