Starting a newsletter or a new email program is a daunting process. Find out what four basic levers you can pull for ongoing success.
4 steps to kicking off email success
Email sending and marketing can be daunting, regardless of whether you're starting out or an experienced campaigner.
You'll know the feeling if you've prepared a campaign for many readers at once.
What should comfort you, to begin, is that any email sender you've ever received an email from has also been there before.
If you're a seasoned veteran, you'll know that this can still be daunting, because there's always something that could go awry.
The best way to ease the anxiety and increase your chances of success is to stick to the basics.
Today we'll look at four critical steps to ensure are completed for ongoing email success.
Are you missing any of these steps in your new email strategy? 🤔
Step 1: Define clear objectives
You often hear of different ways to set goals and objectives.
There's the SMART goal-setting framework, goal pyramids, the OKR method and a ton to choose from.
Regardless of your preferred method for setting goals, one thing is clear: You need a solid objective in your email strategy.
Where to begin with this?
Here are a few key objectives you can set based on the type of email campaigns you'll be sending:
Increasing sales
Driving website traffic
Building brand awareness
Nurturing leads
Winning back readers or customers
Creating referrals
And the list goes on.
If you're intentional in every action you take in your email program, you'll create opportunities for incremental successes, leading to the eventual long-term success of your email strategy.
Step 2: Attract the right audience
This is one of the biggest challenges for any email sender (and may also be one of the main reasons you'll want to sign up to join our community).
We share our Ultimate Database Growth Playbook for all new sign-ups, and this is covered in detail in this previous Volume too, but what's the point of sending emails if you don't have an audience to share them with?
There are so many ways to grow an email audience, but this would wind up being an insanely long email if we covered even a few.
Let's chat about some quick principles to follow when growing your audience:
Always have an incentive: Sending pretty emails isn't enough. Ensure your chosen strategy entices new subscribers with real added value.
Make it easy to join: When designing your database growth strategy, refrain from making it difficult or time-consuming. Do you really need someone's surname when asking for sign-up details?
Look for entry points everywhere: Wherever you engage with your potential audience, find ways to feed them into your list. If you don't ask, you won't receive. Make sure your audience everywhere has an opportunity to sign up.
Growing an audience doesn't need to be difficult. Your strategy simply needs to ensure that you're consistent in your efforts to do so.
Step 3:Know who you're speaking to
Every piece of email advice that we give emphasises that your audience's needs ALWAYS come first.
So, how do you cater to the needs of the various members of your audience?
It begins with segmentation.
We covered this in a previous Volume, which you can read here, but you have two ways to broadly segment your list:
Known data: This data includes everything you learn about your audience when they first enter your email list. These known data points often include what you've asked for initially, such as where your subscribers are situated, which channel they signed up from, what incentive they signed up for and other factors such as which types of emails they've signed up to receive. Based on this, you have an idea of what type of content to share and how to funnel them into taking the action you'd like them to take.
Learned data: Once you begin sending emails, there are tons of ways to use the emails you send to learn about your audience. I'm not only talking about asking them to update their preferences or tell you more about them (which are both effective strategies) but also the way they interact with the emails you're sending. Use what they're clicking on in your emails, what they're buying when you promote your offer, how they respond over time and even which types of emails are being opened and clicked (or not).
When you consider the data you have and apply this to your email strategy, you'll show your audience that you care about who they are and what you're sending, building loyal fans over time, not just members of your audience.
Step 4: Create compelling content
This may seem obvious, but the continued success of your email strategy will always be linked to the value your emails carry over time.
How to do this? We shared tips on creating an effective email way back in Volume 2, but you can use these 3 key points as a checklist:
Write clear, compelling copy: Our friend Matt Thomas wrote about this for us, but if your copy is well structured, you're already halfway to email success.
Make it visually enticing: People buy with their eyes. Unless your strategy is to use plain-text emails, include relevant images, animated GIFS, video content and consistent colours in every email you send.
Make it personal: I don't mean just adding someone's name to your emails. Tell stories and personal anecdotes, and share your failures too! Your audience will relate to your content which leads to an emotional connection and inevitable email success.
It's not about the next email your readers receive, it's about the next ten. If you keep them hooked and engaged, your email strategy will lead to business growth and a happier, more engaged audience.
Get back to basics by applying these 4 steps to kicking off email success in your strategy.
Before you go! If you're looking for a place to begin growing, this is for you. Learn the fastest ways to grow your email list today by using the tried and tested Email Database Growth Playbook.
Click here or on the image below to get your FREE copy👇
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