The Importance of E-Mail Marketing
Why we’re doubling down on email marketing – are we crazy?
Like you, we run businesses. Not just marketing businesses where we tell you what we think you should do, but actual businesses that sell products. This means we have to put our money where our mouth is. And we know how hard it is for you to do what you do, listen to our advice, and put it into practice. Sometimes with mixed results.
You have to market to have business success. Period. If you don’t market, you won’t have a business – or you won’t have the business you want. That being said, there are a lot of ways to market. One of the tried-and-true ways of marketing has been e-mail marketing. But as the years have progressed, the killer app of email has fallen out of favor with marketers who flocked to social media outlets, which offered seemingly amazing visibility for free. The truth is, email marketing – like social media marketing – is a mature space. Organic reach is down. In-boxes have priority and promotional tabs that mean your message might not ever get seen. But, we’ll bet you still use e-mail every day for business communication, you still read and click through to educational content and you still look for good offers in your promotional inbox when you’re ready to buy.
Email marketing is still successful – in combination with other marketing tactics, and it’s one you should consider doubling down on.
We have experimented this month with increasing email frequency and tying that to limited-time offers with small coupons for clients with product businesses. We’ve also experimented with increased email frequency with unique content (such as video or podcast embeds) for service businesses. And we’ve also experimented with clicking that little button in your email client that says “share on social” and we’ve found surprising results!
Email works. But it takes a solid strategy, planned content calendar, and consistent execution.
If you know your conversion rate average from either sales-to-close rates or conversion rates from your web analytics, you can calculate how much traffic you need to have to achieve your sales goals. Working back up the list above, you can then calculate the amount of subscribers you need to have based on your click rates.
Download our Excel worksheet to calculate just how many new subscribers you need based on your 2019 sales goals.
Encourage new prospects to sign up
Deploy multiple subscription lead flows on your website. Having several offers active on your site in ways that encourage sigups ensures you can meet your subscription goals. We recommend that you have at least one pop up, one exit-intent and then on-page opportunities to engage customers with offers that lead to subscription signups. Which offers you choose or how you deploy them depends on your inbound marketing strategy.
Plan your content calendar
We use Trello to plan content calendars. You’ll start with your website and blog content (which could be written, visual or video) and use e-mail marketing to share snippets with links to your web site. We produce a ton of content for clients, always weekly, so we know how to plan content. You can plan this out in your calendar, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. Just make sure that you identify what you’re producing, when you want to get it done and who’s the person responsible for doing it.
Execute your content calendar
We actually put appointments on our calendars to map out content development times. We usually plan to have one blog post per week, and one larger content offer (case, whitepaper, workbook, planner) per quarter. Planning for the appropriate amount of time is critical. We recommend a minimum of 2 hours per 1 page of content development. So if you are planning a blog post of about 1,000 words, you’ll need 3-4 hours to produce, edit and launch it. Over the course of a week of work, that means you’ll spend at least an hour a day producing one piece of content. If this seems like a lot of work, you can work on a hybrid content creation program that allows you to be the subject matter expert, while having marketing pros do the writing.
