Do you want better email marketing results?
Have you ever wanted to build a more meaningful relationship with your audience?
Would you like to be a top blogger perhaps? A full-time internet marketer who can sell thousands of ebooks?
Or perhaps you already have a business and you just want to generate more interest and more business for it?
Welcome to Fearless Affiliate.
My name is Irma and I help new bloggers to learn the ropes. There is a lot to take in that first year of blogging, from choosing a niche to changing your mindset from worker bee mentality to that of successful entrepreneur.
I like to focus on practical information and positive thinking, so if that sounds good to you please sign up for my weekly newsletter of tips and free stuff for bloggers. In return you will get the password to my resource library of PDF printables for bloggers like my Google Analytics Cheatsheet or my SEO Checklist.#win-win
So sign up now and grab your list of 21 Email Marketing Hacks!
Why Is Email Marketing Important To Bloggers?
An email list is an incredibly powerful tool that will help you to create blogging success…if that is your goal.
Email has the ability to influence and impact your audience in ways that no other form of marketing can. It is also incredibly simple to get started with thanks to the complete lack of up-front investment needed and the great tools out there to help you get started.
Related Post: How To Use MailerLite
The statistics make it clear: email marketing is the top dog when it comes to making profit and building trust.
Just consider a few of these email marketing metrics:
- Email marketing has a ROI of over 4,300%! (ROI = Return on Investment)
- 91% of North American consumers check their email once a day at least
- 66% of consumers in the North America over the age of 15 have purchased at least one thing as a direct result of an email campaign
- When surveyed, internet marketing companies say that email marketing is more profitable than:
- PPC (PPC = Pay Per Click)
- Content marketing
- Display advertising
- Mobile ads
- Direct marketing
- Social media
Look at any of the blogs on making money online or running a blog.
You will find that they all recommend email marketing as one of the single most important things you can invest your time and money in.
And yet there are still a lot of people out there who aren’t putting their faith or their time into this form of marketing.
Why?
One big reason is that people simply don’t understand what email marketing is capable of or how to make the most of it.
Many of us are not that engaged with the email marketing we receive and this makes it hard for us to imagine how it can work for us as marketers. And it might be something that you’ve dabbled with in the past but had no success from.
A lot of people are misguided when it comes to email marketing and don’t really understand how to use it.
In this blog post, I’m going to teach you why you should work on building your list asap.
I’m not talking about the technical aspect of how to set up an auto-responder or what email marketing is for. I’m talking about the way you approach email marketing and how you can change that for the better so that you start to really make a splash.
This is powerful advice and it is going to put you ahead of the majority of other internet marketers in your niche. So, hang onto your hat and let’s get stuck in…
The Real Power of Email Marketing
The real power of email marketing is not that it allows you to message your audience directly. Or that it allows you to bypass Facebook or Twitter. These are big positives of course but they are not the thing that gives email marketing the edge over other similar forms of marketing.
What really makes email marketing impactful is that it is much more personal
And that it involves so much more trust.
Getting someone to follow you on Twitter is easy. All they need to do is click a button and if they want to unfollow you, that’s easy too.
Related Post: Relationship Marketing with Email
But getting someone to give you their email address is considerably more difficult.
The reason for this is that an email address is much more personal and we don’t want just anyone in our inbox. This is where we talk to friends and relatives and it is something we always have access to.
No one wants an inbox full of crap sent by an anonymous person. Or worse, a bot. Ugh.
Many of us already feel that we’re inundated with spam and can even feel stressed if we get an email because of it.
If your followers have agreed to give you their email address, then that is a massive sign of trust.
And when they receive that message, it completely changes the dynamic. They now feel as though you are talking to them and they feel that they have got much more privileged access to whatever you are doing.
Really, it is only true fans that will hand over their email.
That means that you now have the most engaged kind of audience possible, and you can speak to them directly.
Selling to people who trust you is also going to result in a higher number of conversions.
Seeing as it’s so cheap and easy to write an email and the conversion rate is likely to be so high, it’s not really any surprise to see that the ROI of email marketing is that crazy 4,300% figure!
Your subscribers are going to immediately feel like they are a part of something. They have joined your ‘inner sanctum’ and there is a sense of excitement and belonging that comes from being a part of something.
Do you know what one of the best ways to get someone to like you more is?
It’s to ask them to do you a favor!
Now, you would think that this would be the other way around, but actually, when someone does you a favor, it creates a certain ‘cognitive dissonance’. They will want to explain to themselves why they just went out of their way to help you and thus they will reason that it must be because they really like you!
The same thing happens when someone gives you their email address. This will feel like a strange thing to do because they just invited you to start selling to them – and that’s not something they like!
Why would they have done that unless they were massive fans of your brand?
Thus, your subscribers become instantly more engaged. This is also why any sales funnel – a series of steps designed to get someone to pay for a big ticket item – will always involve a mailing list at some point.
Related Post: Create A Sales Funnel
1,000 True Fans
You might have heard of the blog post ‘1,000 True Fans’, written by Kevin Kelly.
This famous marketing text claims that all a business needs is 1,000 true fans. If every fan purchased $100 worth of product(s) from you, that would create $100,000 of income.
Now imagine what having more than 1,000 true fans can do for your online business.
True fans are people who will shout about your brand, buy everything you create and who will share your links online.
True fans become your promoters, your testimonials and more and this can result in more and more momentum for your brand over time.
Email marketing is the perfect way to create those true fans because it gets people to sign up and to agree to become a ‘part of something’.
It also creates a form of marketing where your audience feels that they are speaking with you directly and that they could respond if they wanted to. This isn’t some account manned by a robot!
I highly encourage that you invite your audience to write back, to share their thoughts and to get involved
This will further strengthen that kind of brand engagement that can lead to huge sales and massive growth.
Likewise, you can also encourage this more by using the right choice of language. You want to emphasize that sense of belonging, of being a movement and of being something greater. Do this by telling people to ‘sign up and join the revolution’ or to ‘sign up and get involved!’.
You are almost giving your audience some ownership over your brand in this way.
Create a real relationship and by doing this you are making something much more powerful than just a company trying to sell people things…
Related Post: Personalized Email Marketing for Beginners
How to Write Perfect Emails
This is where the power of email marketing comes from and it is the kind of spirit you’re going to tap into in order to get people to sign up and to feel excited as they do.
First, you should always try to maintain that feeling of speaking directly to your audience and of being part of something together.
This is where doing an avatar exercise is handy.
Grab my handy 8 page Avatar Worksheet to help you create your perfect customer profile. Fill out the avatar worksheet so that you are ready to write awesome emails to people who cannot wait to read them.
Email marketing is much more personal than advertising or other forms of marketing because it’s right in the inbox.
That means that you will need to use much more personal language – make sure that you use the names of your recipients (most auto-responders will allow you to do this) and structure your emails like letters.
Ask how your readers are and then invite them to write back.
You’ll find that by using names and the right structure, spam doesn’t think you are trying to sell something. At the same time, you’ll also be more likely to end up in the main inbox rather than the ‘promotional’ inbox.
When you send an email that has a subject line like ‘Here are a few interesting updates’, this grabs attention because it feels personal, genuine and interesting.
On the other hand, if your subject line says ‘The ULTIMATE way to grow your biceps revealed!’ then you know instantly that this is someone who badly wants you to open the email and who is probably desperate to sell something as a result.
Writing from a first person perspective also allows you to tell stories.
It is often said that storytelling is ‘SEO for the human brain’.
What this means, is that the human brain is evolved to love storytelling and to find it highly engaging. Before the invention of pen and paper, we used stories to record our history. People would listen and hang on to every word.
We like stories because we instinctively think they must be relevant to us. Someone else’s experiences will always be likely to hold tips and advice that we can take for ourselves.
That, and stories are always more emotional.
When you come to try and sell, you’ll learn that you sell best through emotion and not through reason.
If you tell a story of how you finally found the perfect system to help you declutter and now you feel great about yourself, that gets people invested in your transformation. And it makes them far more motivated to want to buy that same system from you.
So, whatever tip or advice you want to share in your message, make sure that you phrase it in a way that makes it into a story. This will instantly be much less dry, much more engaging and much more interesting!
Oh, and one last crucially important tip is to always provide some kind of value in each and every message.
Whether that is an actionable idea or tip, useful advice or money off. In order to get your audience to want to read your next messages, you need to ensure that the information in your last one made them feel that it was worthwhile clicking on it.
Think of this in terms of a ratio too – the quicker they get that value, the better the ROI has been for them. Keep your letters short and sweet then and pack them with as much good stuff as you possibly can.
Conclusion
Did you complete your avatar exercise? Are you ready to tackle email marketing now? I have several posts on setting up various aspects of MailerLite. Start with:
Related Post: How To Use MailerLite
MailerLite is an email service provider that will give you tools to create weekly newsletters, landing pages, embedded opt-in forms. All while tracking your data with Google Analytics help.
Please share this post with anyone that you think will benefit from it. And please sign up for my FREE weekly newsletter of tips and free stuff for bloggers. You will get the password for my Resource Library of freebie PDF’s, like my Google Analytics cheatsheet or my SEO for beginners checklist. #win-win!
Ok, that is it from me. Now it is your turn – I want to know your thoughts on personalizing your email marketing. Do you segment? What did you struggle with when setting it up? Do you have any email marketing tips to share?
Don’t forget to follow me on Pinterest
Have a great week and happy blogging!
-Irma