How to Get Unmatched Email Marketing Results – Part 1
Email’s been around forever and as much as people complain saying, “Email dead,” it’s still the least expensive and most effective way to get consistent digital marketing results. That’s good news for small business owners. You can target your ideal audience, prospects wanting what you do best, without breaking the bank.
Most of us likely know the basics of email marketing. What you may not know is how to get the most from your email marketing with less time, effort, and money spent.
Here is what my team and I here at Jorge Diaz Online and Larry Jacob Internet Marketing recommend. It’s what we’ve picked up from working with customers for over 10 years.
I’m sure these pro tips will be helpful.
Recommendation #1 – Practice Good Email Hygiene
This sounds like something from a safe sex manual, but it’s today’s most critical component for getting results from email marketing. Not doing this is the single biggest mistake we see a lot of business owners make.
The Internet email powers that be, i.e., Google Mail, Yahoo, etc., are constantly changing the rules. Before the big deal was to double opt-in or confirm email opt-ins. You had people fill out a web form to opt into your list. Then you would send them a confirmation email they would click on to confirm they wanted what it is you were going to send them. That step confirms the email address is a real address and also confirms you didn’t just enter them on your list without permission.
That’s still something you can do, but that’s not all the critical anymore.
What is important is that you remove email addresses from your list that never open messages. Systems like Google Mail and others, track the open rates of your email broadcasts. They know when an individual isn’t opening them. They can tell if a good number of people aren’t opening your messages. If you don’t practice email hygiene that makes a decision about you. They think, “This guy’s not keeping their list clean so we’re going to ding him and keep future email messages from arriving in the inbox.
Ouch, right? Well, that’s the new rule and we all have to live by it.
It isn’t as bad as you might think. If you send email messages frequently, more on that in the next recommendation, you really want the people on your list to be opening them. If they are not, they either aren’t the right people to have on your list or your content needs to change to meet their needs.
You could decide to review your list every 6 to 9 months and put everyone who hasn’t opened a single email into a separate list. Then you treat them differently and stop sending them your regular stuff.
Marketing automation platforms like Keap and Infusionsoft by Keap, include a feature to manage this automatically for you. You just click on a few configuration options and they automatically opt people out if they haven’t paid attention to your messages for say 6 or 9 months. That complies with this automatically keeping your list clean. It keeps you from keeping super old-timers on your list that never ever open an email.
