You’ve built your target audience. And you’ve researched and understand your market. The product or service your offering completely aligns with their needs. So…it’s time to start your email campaign.
Define your email goals (check), set your KPIs (check), and determine your email strategy (check). Now you’re well on your way to a well structured email marketing plan.
- Know your purpose
- Establishing your goals
- Define your audience
- Collect data
- Design the email strategy
- Monitor performance
Now take a look at the marketing funnel below.
For a new business, your audience will be highly unengaged and unaware of your product or service. They’re currently shopping around for a solution but are not leaning in any direction. So you use that information to design your email campaign. Build it around the customer purchase journey as you tell the story of prospect to a sale. Think about it:
Beginning your emails- you’ll want to schedule out all emails ahead of time. Depending on your product will determine your frequency of send. (**I’m an email marketer in the event industry and we tend to stick with every other week)
The Emails…
First email. Start with an introduction. Very friendly, it may be wordy, but this is purely generating interest. You don’t need replies from this first email. The purpose is to give the audience a taste of your product or service.
Second email. Follow up. *Hint: a good trick of the trade, FW: in your subject line will advance the open rate. But it actually has to be a forward of the original email. It won’t help generate replies, but it gets you those opens you’ve been banking on. But an open is a first step to a response.
Third email. Product update. This is going to be an excited email. Breaking News! Maybe announce a new feature, a special/discount, add-on product or even just completed sales or a new client. The purpose of this email is to keep your company front of mind.
Fourth email. Push urgency. ”Oh no- time is running out. Supply is low, demand is high, sale is ending soon etc. You’re job here is to keep the email short, make it a little bit pushy while remaining professional and friendly at all times.
Final email. Deadline is here. Extreme urgency. Put the fear into the customer. Push exclusivity- everyone else has bought this product, you don’t want to feel left out. You’d be surprised how strong of a driving force FOMO can be.
The secret extra email. To be used only in times of despair because it may actually be a slight lie or exaggeration from the truth. E.g. You just released a few extra supply, some new content or a few passes (whatever the situation may be). This is to be very, very short.
Closing thoughts…
Email is still the preferred channel for marketing and largest form of lead generation. In fact, 89% of marketers say email is their primary channel for lead generation. Remember to walk the prospect down a seamless journey to a purchase decision.
- Get to the point. Eliminate 50% of the word count while keeping your message clear.
- Monitor performance and watch for unsubscribes
- Make emails your look real (seems obvious, but I’ve seen some bad emails)
- Avoid URLs in the email, hyperlink where possible
- Keep your copy short, use elementary level language (readers don’t like having to think)
- Subject lines should be no more than 50 characters
- Personalize as much as possible (or use ‘you’ & ‘your’ when possible)
As a beginner, this guide is a great first step to get your campaign kicked off and generating interest.
For more information on writing emails and other types of marketing, check out www.dotlayer.com.
