Overview

The following post will help you convert more sales and generally have more successful email campaigns, I’ll be assuming you already know the basics such as email distribution methods and email sign up forms. If not, you can learn the broad strokes of email marketing here. Used correctly, email marketing can be an extremely useful addition to your marketing toolbox, although it often gets a bad rap from it’s spam counter-part, there are several things you need to know in order to use it in the most effective and image-enhancing way.

Key-points of Email Marketing

• The Mailing List
• The Message
• The Close / Landing Page

The Mailing List

Your mailing list is obviously a very vital aspect of an email marketing campaign and should be a key focus of yours. Always think about cultivating the best list, and how do you do this? It’s simple, make it a “no-brainer” for prospects/clients to sign up. This can be done via incentives such as discounts, or information/resources that impact your customers.

Once you’ve strategized your proposal for clients to sign up, make it simple for them to do so. Create a sign up form, that requires the minimum (name and email) information and is a one click process. Another important factor in cultivating your mailing lists is categories or segments, each time you create a new sign up form based on an incentive (we’ll use discount on bulk items as an example) create a new segment for “bulk purchasers”, I’ll explain how this comes in handy later on.

Be sure to avoid spam-methods of creating your list, such as web crawling and purchasing bulk lists. These methods give your a company a bad image to those prospects, usually fail in converting sales, will begin bad rumors regarding your service, and may also be illegal depending on where you live. All you have to do is motivate your website viewers to sign up and make it easy for them to do so.

The Marketing Message

Once you have a mailing list to work with you will need to develop your marketing message. Your marketing message is basically the actual text or content you deliver to your mailing list, it’s what explains and offers your promotion or your sale or whatever it is you are trying to convey. It’s very important that you integrate your mailing list into planning your marketing message. For example, if you offered bulk discounts to those who signed up for your mailing list – base your marketing message on multiple products, multiple sales and make your sale/promotion being most beneficial to bulk purchasers. Use the segments/categories created when first developing your lists to base your marketing messages, the more specific you can be with your target, the better results you will have.

Let’s take a look at creating a marketing message for SevenCube, lets pretend that SevenCube has been placing email sign up forms on our email marketing pages, with the headline of “Solutions for new businesses”.

We use the following outline as a guide for our marketing messages:

1. Need or Problem – Describe their problem
   eg. “Not reaching enough people?”
2. Motivation – Why do they need to solve this problem?
   eg. “Increase sales, reach more viewers”
3. Solution – What will solve the problem?
   eg. “Email marketing campaigns”
4. Incentive / Offer – Why solve it with you?
   eg. “30% off for first time buyers”

Answering these four questions will usually give you enough to elaborate on and develop your marketing message. As long as you cover these topics in the message, it will convey a persuasive proposition – how you go about stylizing and wording it is up to you. One aspect that I’ll go over a little more in the following section is the “call to action”, it’s very important that you make it easy for your prospect to take advantage of the incentive or offer – this can be done with placing your phone number throughout the message or a direct click-able link that takes them to the landing/purchase page.

The Closing / Landing Page

Now that you’ve developed your list, created your marketing message and got their appetite going for your services – it’s time to close the deal. Throughout your marketing message should have been several click-able links or URLs in which the customer was directed to “learn more” or to “buy now”, by them clicking on these links you already know that they are interested in the promotional offer / sale, which makes the close a lot easier – inexperienced people simply refer their prospects to their main page or a contact form, often losing their prospects interest or impulse purchase. Be sure to refer the prospect to a landing page that is specific to the offer made and to the segment which the message was sent to – there isn’t much more to the landing page other than the marketing message, it should simply elaborate on the marketing message and have an order form or a one click action to “sign the deal” or make the purchase.

As important as providing the prospect with a custom page to learn more details about the promotion, it is also vital in measuring a campaign’s success via hits to the landing page, conversions made from that specific order form and which links were clicked on the email.

So for your next email marketing campaign, be sure to use the above as a guideline in a more thorough, active and successful campaign.