How to convert more email readers into buyers
Email marketing is a great way to keep in contact with your contacts. Ultimately, it’s a great way to generate regular sales from a loyal target audience. In terms of cost, it’s really cost effective when compared to other methods, so offers a great return.
Of course, that is the holy grail, but getting to that stage and maintaining it requires work and planning. In this video, we are going to look at ten points to follow that will really help to set you on the road of successful email marketing.
Build trust before attempting to sell
When you first get started with email marketing, the temptation is often just to dive straight in with “here’s my product offer, step up and buy one”, often, new email marketers are amazed why potential customers aren’t beating down the door waving money.
No matter how good the price, product or offer is, email marketing is all about building relationships and trust. Going in with a heavy sales email straight away is a bit like proposing marriage on a first date – the uptake will be pretty low.
Great email marketing starts with building trust, you target audience will be more comfortable hitting the buy now button when they are used to seeing you as a regular in their inbox. They also need to find your emails interesting – what works is ‘warming up’ your target audience first with a series of information-based emails.
Taking the time to build this trust really helps to build confidence with your viewers, once established, they will convert into buyers.
Offer something exclusive for your subscribers
Email marketing is a great way to make your viewers feel valued, if they feel valued then they are more likely to buy something from you.
One of the most effective ways to develop and grow this with your subscribers is to offer them something that is not available elsewhere, or not available via your other marketing channels.
As an email can, be sent to and viewed by just one person, you can offer something unique just to a selected group of people – your email subscribers.
If these contacts are offered something that is not offered elsewhere, then they are more likely to make a purchase.
Look for trends in your campaign stats
Email marketing offers you complete visibility over how your subscribers are interacting with your send. You can gather such vital information, such as
- who read your email
- who clicked on your call to action buttons
- where they are based geographically
- what day and time did they open your email
- which one of your products are they interested in
with access to this information, you can then build a complete picture of the viewing behaviour of every person on your list. You can then segment your data-based ion peoples product preference, or their preferred day or time to receive an email from you.
With access to all of this, you can really present the right products to the right people at the right time. This depth of information is an incredibly powerful asset to have at your disposal.
Personalise your send
Further on the concept of building trust, personalising your email marketing is a great way to contribute towards this.
People are more inclined to purchase if the sender feel familiar and trusted. We all like to receive emails from people who know us, or have taken the time to find out what we like.
Personalisation does not just mean adding “dear Bob” to the first line of your email. As we’ve already established, you can identify what products people like – so you can send emails identifying products that are related to other items that they have previously viewed.
This really helps your viewers to feel that your communications are personalised to them, it really helps to build trust.
Personalisation doesn’t stop with who you are sending to, it’s also worth considering who you are sending from. Nobody likes to receive emails from norpely@ or marketing@. In the age of electronic communication, we all still like to deal with people rather than a faceless company.
Sending your email marketing from yourself offers significant increases in both deliverability and viewer engagement. Always use an address such as jon@abc.com in favour of sales@abc.com
Make your call to action clear and prominent
Your call to action is one of the most important parts of your email, after reading your email – what do you want your viewers to do?
It’s often overlooked and if it’s not there, can lead viewers to unsubscribe as they don’t understand the purpose of your mailer.
This call to action should be large, prominent and clearly visible. It should be a clear instruction to do something.
Don’t make your offer confusing
The best email marketing is short and punchy, the competition for your viewer’s attention is fierce and if your mailer doesn’t grab attention quickly then your viewer is often on to the next email and deleting yours.
It’s worth bearing this in mind when putting together your offering, it should be very easy to understand and deliver it’s message quickly.
Send at regular times
Again, focusing on building trust, if your mailings are sent at regular times, then your viewer gets used to expecting your communications. You become familiar, and as we’ve previously discussed, familiarity helps to build trust.
When deciding when to send, it’s worth taking a look at the stats of your previous campaigns, you can then start to identify times and days when your viewers are most receptive.
You can look at the times of reads and clicks – you may find that different groups of people are active at different times. It is then worth segmenting your data accordingly.
Include your full contact details
Including your contact details really helps to make your contacts feel comfortable with purchasing from you. Purchasing online is something that we all do nowadays, buying unseen does carry a degree of risk though, so we do all look for full contact details if we need to return the purchase.
As well as the obvious contact details such as telephone, email and website, it’s also worth adding your full postal address. It often reassures people to see your physical address – in the age of internet scams, it helps build the all-important trust factor if you viewer can see where you are based.
Introduce a time-based offer
When you have built trust and your target audience is then receptive to an invitation to make a purchase, it’s worth adding an offer expiry date or time.
What we really want, is for your viewer to act on your sales offer as soon as they see it. Often, they may see a great offer and intend to act on it later – but if they then move on to the next email, they may forget to come back to yours.
Adding something to help encourage your contact to purchase now really helps to add the incentive to act now, not later.
Use attention grabbing techniques in your subject header and preview text
The competition for your viewers’ attention is pretty strong nowadays, most of us receive a large volume of emails each day and we’ve all become pretty adept at very quickly scanning and deleting anything that doesn’t immediately grab us.
So, standing out and grabbing the attention quickly is vital. A great way to do this is to use symbols or numbers in your subject header line – doing this really helps your mailer to stand out in a sea of text.
Adding emoji’s to your subject header line is a really effective way to do this. Cut and paste a fitting emoji and try it in your next mailer, it really works.
Modern email browsers will also show the viewer a preview of the first few lines of text inside the body of your mailer. Spend some time getting this right, make sure it delivers your message and invites the viewer to read further. Asking a question is a great way to do this.
SUMMARY
Ok, so there we are, that wraps up our 10-point guide to turn your email viewers into buyers. Try following this with your email marketing and watch your conversion increase.