Email Marketing

The most critical considerations when planning your email campaign are the source of your prospects or mailing list and the nature and quality of your communications.

Your marketing list

Usually, the most effective option is to build your marketing list using a well crafted and attractive opt-in offer which allows you to capture the details of interested people directly via your website.  Optimising your site for the right kind of traffic in advance will help you determine whether you have generated a strong level of interest and opt-ins. Building your own list also means that everyone on it has chosen to hear from you - their search, resulting in them landing on your website, was targeted to what you offer.  So you have already taken the first step towards answering their question and demonstrating your credibility as a potential trusted supplier.

But this process takes time.

If you don't have time to build a marketing list organically, you must buy one.  There are a large number of list brokers of varying quality and the response rate from a bought list will typically be far lower than from your own opt-in list.  But it can be a good place to start if you are building a customer-base.

The perfect email opt-in for your clients

Things to consider to craft the perfect opt-in for your audience include:

1. Offer valuable incentives: These can include free downloads, free shipping, free trials, 10% discounts on goods/services, access to exclusive content. 
2. Keep it simple: Attractive, easy to navigate, mobile friendly opt in with clear calls to action. 
3. Double opt-in: Keep your list clean by sending a follow-up email to ensure the users want to receive your marketing. 
4. Test different opt-ins: Trial out different incentives, headlines, design and calls to action to see what works best. 

Pre-qualifying your marketing list to attract dream clients!

Sounds a bit too good to be true but there are many ways you can pre-qualify your potential leads so you can focus on the ones that will convert into profitable clients. There is nothing more frustrating and costly than spending time on sales for ‘wrong-fit’ leads. Done well, it will mean you do not waste time on poor prospects and the type of client you end up with will be a much better fit. There are a number of ways of achieving this including the following:

Step 1

1. Who is your ideal customer? If you have not done this already, do it now! What is their problem and how can you solve it? Good questions to think about this include:
    
   • What is your ideal market?
   • What are your customers looking to achieve?
   • What are your customers' pain points and struggles?
   • What is the outcome your service/product will provide?
   • What key features and capabilities do you have that alternatives do not?
   • If you did not exist, who would your customers use?
   • What value do your customers get from you and why do they care about this?
   •  What is your ideal customer demographic: age / gender / earnings / career stage / jobs / income?
   • What is your customer's budget?
   • And a final but very important question, who do YOU like working for? 
     
     
2. Marketing Campaigns & Content: Create all your marketing for this customer. Focusing on this customer will ensure your marketing is not generic, which all too often can be ignored. Make sure the client fits the bill and is ready for your services: 
   
   
   • Create content to ensure your potential customers are ready to take that next step with you. They may not be ready, so you can share information that helps them get to the right place to start, or simply keeps them from wasting your time. For example: “10 things to put in place before you hire a website designer”
   • You can also ‘put-off’ wrong clients, a good example of this is to share your pricing so you are not dealing with clients who do not have sufficient budget. Remember to also share information about why you are worth these higher prices eg. “Why our services are more expensive than you see on Fiverr”. 
   • Share details about your process. An example that is relevant to our business is the price of our SEO Audits. Many companies run a website through an online tool and it ‘spits out’ a generic report. Some of this information is relevant, but it does not dive into the details of your website and the competitive marketplace. We often spot golden opportunities and spend time on puzzling technical issues that an automated software is not capable of doing. We share detailed SEO audit information with our clients to justify the cost of our audits. 
     
     
3. Success stories, case studies and testimonials: Be strategic on how you use these, for example, look at the pain point that started the process.  Often these are similar across an industry/client base so can be really key to attracting well qualified clients. Match this content up with your keyword research (and search engine optimise the content), especially questions phrases, which can help elevate your visibility in search engines and AI overviews. 

Step 2

Use a quiz to pre-qualify your leads

Understanding who your ideal client is and creating the content to market to them is the first step. But not everyone who gets in touch with you will have read this content, so using a quiz as a lead magnet can provide you with a huge amount of data, and pre-quality the best leads.  

After a user has taken the quiz you will be able to segment them into groups and market accordingly. They may be ready to ‘buy now’ so getting in front of them soon will be key. You can test out a variety of ways to see what converts best. Some respondents may not be ready to use your products/services, but are still valuable contacts. This group can go into a sales funnel with automated emails targeting them, using lots of that content you have already created. Nurturing over a period of time can often convert this group of people. 

Remember that your quiz will need to be short, engaging and add value to your audience. If you do this well, you can also ask a few key questions to pre-qualify your leads.  

Email marketing system options

There are a number of email marketing platforms to choose from, and some will be more suitable than others for your usage. They range from simple lightweight platforms to comprehensive marketing software that include a wide array of tools such as SMS marketing, CRM features and e-commerce advanced automation. We will help guide you and make recommendations for the best fit for your business. 

When choosing a system, there are a number of things to consider including:

1. What do you want to achieve?
2. What features do you need?
3. Does it integrate with your existing software eg. website, CRM, marketing tools?
4. Is it easy to use, including attractive email templates and page builders for content. 
5. How big is your email marketing list and how big is it likely to grow to?
6. What is your budget?
7. Deliverability: Make sure you choose a platform with high rates of email deliverability
8. Automation: Ideally it should reduce your workload with autoresponders and workflow automations. 

Many of them have free trials and some include free options when you have a smaller number of contacts, so you can test them out before committing to a paid subscription. 

At Channel we have experience with many of the large email marketing platforms so can help guide you in this choice. 

Integrations and Automation

Your email marketing is not limited to only sending newsletters. For example, an integration with your online store can encourage sales through abandoned cart reminders, or automated vouchers when a purchase has been made to encourage repeat purchases. Affiliate marketing also ties in closely with your email marketing

Legal considerations

Email marketing done badly can be very annoying, as the spam that many of us receive attests.  So it is essential that you build up a strong legal framework around the proper actions to take during your marketing campaigns. Using an email marketing platform is a good start to ensuring compliance and good practice, you  will also need to include explicit opt-ins, terms and conditions, privacy policy and be GDPR compliant. 

Email copywriting

The best emails are written to encourage the recipient to return to your website.  It is important that the email is not too long and contains an offer that is appropriate and compelling to the recipient.  Ideally, it will correspond closely to what the recipient originally subscribed for, so you are continuing to deliver, and over-deliver what they wanted in the first place.

Other useful considerations in copywriting are to use names so you can address recipients personally.  This can make a remarkable difference to the success rate of your campaign.

Other email marketing terms

1. Autoresponders - a system that automatically responds to your users at pre-defined intervals, saving you work and implementing the mechanics of your campaign even when you are doing other things.
   
   
2. List hygiene - the process of keeping your list accurate and up to date.  If your campaigns send to a large number of non-addresses, not only are you clogging up your own and everyone else's servers with useless traffic, but you can also be marked up as a spammer.
   
   
3. Deliverability - with spam being a major problem, a variety of systems have evolved to trap and prevent it.  It is inevitable that a proportion of legitimate messages also get trapped by the spam filters, so it is essential that your campaign is structured to provide maximum deliverability. Always verify your domain with your email marketing platform, and authorise it as a source that is allowed to send emails from your domain. Most platforms have a step-by-step guide on how to do this. Also ensure your domain has a good reputation, is correctly configured with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and does not appear on any blacklists (MXToolbox.com is a fantastic tool for checking and troubleshooting email issues). Not sure what any of this means? We’re here to help!
   
   Deliverability is a common pitfall and can be confusing, but do be aware not all emails will make it through to your target recipient regardless. Always check your “bounces” following any campaign, and clean your list of failed deliveries.

Integration - the pre-requisite of success

The most important aspect of an email campaign is that it integrates well into the rest of your online marketing effort.  The process begins when a person types one of your target search phrases into their search engine and ends with a successful long term customer relationship.

Email marketing needs to be a seamless part of this process, and at Channel Digital we aim to help you implement and use the appropriate system to your level of skills, your market, the size of your list, your technical infrastructure and your budget.