10 Email Marketing Lessons Learned

Good conversations lead to great conversions
When you’re writing your messages picture yourself having a conversation while sitting at the kitchen table with a friend. Tell them a good story that engages them and demonstrates the value of your offer. This is one of your first email marketing lessons.

It’s not important what your product does. It’s important what people can do with it
Don’t tell me what your email marketing software can do – that’s easy. Show me how it is adding value to other’s lives using good (real) examples and multimedia like videos for example.

Never ask someone to marry you on the first date
Good salespeople have a sense for when to ask for the sale and make no mistake, you have to ask for it, but you have to ask when the moment is right. That’s a sense you will hone over time with experience and by learning from other experienced marketers.

The inbox is a personal space – respect the space
If you don’t think the inbox is a personal space just step behind someone while they’re reading email and see how fast they close their inbox. You have to show that you respect this personal space or you will come off like a guy selling magazine subscriptions who knocks on someone’s front door in the middle of Sunday dinner.

Market onto others as you would have them market onto you
This is my golden rule of email marketing lessons. If you treat your subscribers as you would want to be treated you can’t go far wrong. Sounds easy enough right? But it’s not intuitive for most of us. We have to ask ourselves the actual question at least as an exercise: “Would this be engaging and valuable to me?”

Don’t cook what you wouldn’t eat
I’ve had some salespeople tell me differently, but I believe it’s a truism that you can’t fake sincerity. For 90% of us this is like trying to hold our breath underwater.

Know your subscriber
Build an image of who your main target subscribers are. Just a general image with a few points such as:
– Age
– General interests
– Priorities (family, success, health, hobbies)
– What they probably like to do and when they do it (if you understand better who they are, you will have a better idea of what they are doing, when they are doing it and why)

Don’t send crap
No one likes to have their time wasted with offers which are not relevant or not presented well. This is because it is like living in an apartment building and having a kid knock on your door offering to shovel your driveway.

If you share what you love people will love what you share
Remember the old saying about doing what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life? It’s true. When you are passionate about your product and you show that passion by sharing real valuable content, it shows and it works. This may be one of the most important email marketing lessons to learn.

To know what works best you must test
The fact is that even among enterprise brands, only about 20% of them do any real testing consistently. Therefore running A/B split tests are crucial to improving your offerings and your ROI.

Source