There are lots of great marketing efforts you can undertake online.
PPC, SEO, social media and more are all great options, but one still stands above them all.
Email.
If you thought of email as social media then email would have a big lead in terms of the number of users.
Facebook has about 1.1 billion users.
Twitter has over 300,000.
Email has 2.5 billion.
And email generally gets better engagement than marketing efforts on social media. It’s really not that close.
This all might change some day, but it doesn’t appear as if that day is anytime soon.
So it’s good to be investing in email marketing.
If you’re struggling in that area then we have some habits to suggest as a way to make email marketing part of your company’s everyday effort.
1. Gather More Data
We live in a time of great data. Sometimes it can seem like too much. But in recent years we haven’t just had the ability to collection data, we’ve gained the ability to analyze great amounts of data and use the insights to make improvements.
With email it’s important to gather all the data you can. The usual things include send success or bounces, clickthroughs, opens, etc.
Look for all the data you can gather and setup regular times to analyze the trends.
2. Create A Calendar
This is a big one that I believe in. If you don’t create a schedule for your email you’ll eventually stop sending emails.
I’ve found that with content, writer’s block really comes from having to sit down and create something from scratch. It’s a lot of pressure especially if there’s a tight timeline.
If you need to send your regular email tomorrow and you just sit down today to add content to it you’ll struggle at least some of the time.
Instead, set aside time each month to create a full month’s worth of email content or at least the idea and direction. You could even do the brainstorming quarterly, but setup regular times for the brainstorming and separate it from the actual content creation.
And put all the ideas in a calendar.
3. Audit The Automation
Email automation is a great thing. You set it and forget it…almost.
Even your email automation can get outdated. Setup times to review and audit your automation. Every quarter or six months is good.
Go through all the text, images and anything else and make sure it’s still what you want to communicate with those email users.
Sometimes you may only need to tweak one or two things. Other times you’ll see that you want to make bigger changes.
And it’s also a regular reminder to test your email automation.
4. Create Regular Lead Magnets
We recently talked about lead magnets. They’re a great way to get new subscribers. You can have the basic signup forms for your email on your website. You can encourage people on social media to subscribe to your email.
But lead magnets are one of the best strategies.
The kicker is that lead magnets only work if you do them regularly. That’s my belief anyway.
One lead magnet can be great and it can work for you over a long period of time. I’ve seen ebooks and guides be successful for a long time.
But if you make creating lead magnets a regular habit you’ll see much better returns.
More lead magnets usually means more subscribers since you have more content to attract more people, but by creating more and more content you’ll be learning more about what works the best and you’ll keep creating better and better content.
So create a calendar for lead magnets. Brainstorm to fill in the calendar and create the lead magnets separately.
5. Test More Stuff, More Often
Creating a calendar is a theme in this post.
Testing is something that’s trumpeted all the time with email. The reason it’s talked about so much is that with email you can always learn something new. You can always experiment with something new, even if it’s a crazy, idea to see what might improve your effort.
You can test Content, Frequency, Send Times, and all kinds of things.
It’s good to be open to testing and experimenting, but I think you’ll only do it if you create a testing calendar. At least that’s the only way it’s worked for me. I might test once in a while without a regular schedule, but if I create a schedule, fill in ideas for testing, then I’m usually going to get it done.
Setup one test per week or even multiple tests per week. Sit down and brainstorm tests and re-tests and fill in the calendar a month or two at a time.
Conclusion
Email remains one of the best forms of online marketing. You can see in the stats that email is hugely popular with the world’s population. About one in every three people on the planet has an email address. That’s more than just about all social media combined.
And those email users are really engaged. They send all kinds of emails. Get them on your list and work on a few regular email marketing habits and it should really help your business.
