How To Make Email Marketing Work For You

Today on Bernadette TV, my top tips for making your email marketing sizzle. Welcome to Bernadette TV, where we help you be the best you can be in our business and your life. Today we're talking about email marketing.

There are so many benefits of email marketing for a small business. Email is immediate, low-cost, and you can track your results. That said, all of us are far too familiar with emails that waste our time, pitches that annoy us, and downright spam. Those don't work.

How Can You Make Email Marketing Work For You?

Today I'm sharing my top email marketing tips for making your email marketing sizzle.

First, get your email opened and read. The first thing you need to do is to get your email opened. The best written email in the world counts for nothing if it doesn't get read. In a recent survey by MailChimp, the highest industry open rate they reported was 48.5%. That means that more than half the time your email probably isn't even getting read.

Two Ways To Increase Your Open Rate

• Establish a great relationship with your email subscribers by delivering quality content.
• Have a great subject line.

Your subject line is like the ad for the entire email. Honestly, we could devote a whole episode to this topic, but here are two proven subject line formulas.

One, provoke curiosity. For example, "Why it's time to say goodbye" or "I'll admit it. I was wrong." These both provoke questions in the mind of the reader and hint at a story behind it.

The other way to do it is to promise a benefit. For example, "How to keep going when you've got nothing left to give". Not only does this promise a benefit, it also relates to the reader's emotions. Or, "Get your inbox to zero with this". That's another example of an email subject line that promises

a benefit.

As a bonus tip for you, avoid these three words which have been shown to negatively affect open rates: "help" "percent off" and "reminder." Who knew?

Don't Sell In Your Emails

The next thing you need to do with your email is have a clear call to action. A big mistake that people make is they try to sell from the email. Let's face it. A short email can't possibly explain all the benefits of what you're offering and overcome every objection. That would be a bit like telling a salesman he had to go close a sale but only had one minute to pitch.

It is far better to move your reader on to the next action in your sales sequence, which in online marketing is often clicking through to the online sales page On your sales page you can build rapport, establish the need for what you're offering, present your solution, overcome objections and close the sale. You can't do that with an email.

So think - what do you most want people to do as a result of reading your email? If it's to click through to your sales page, then everything you say in your email should be about the benefits they will gain from clicking through. Do you see the difference? Instead of trying to sell the entire solution, you are selling the next action, which is clicking the link.

Something else you want to bear in mind here is to just have one call to action. There's a saying, "A confused mind never buys." Don't have lots of different links to different pages. That will just confuse people. Ask yourself what the one action is you want your reader to take as a result of reading your email.

Here's an example of one of my emails, where the one action I want the reader to take is to click on to my training video:

Notice how I sell the benefits of clicking the link and what my subscribers will gain when they do. Now notice, I do repeat the link and call to action several times through the email. That's okay to do and I encourage you to do it, but it should be just one single next action. No choices, okay?

That was like an email master class in under four minutes. Now it's over to you. I want you to put these tips into action today with the very next email you write.

Here’s Bernadette Doyle's video, the source of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83sLuVoh_8Q