Email marketing is powerful, sustainable, scalable, and it’s the only digital marketing channel that brings in 4300% ROI.
No other marketing channel comes close. Nothing can beat email.
But email marketing only works as well as you should when you do it right. It certainly won’t work if you thought that it was “like any other medium”.
Emails are personal. Subscribers’ email inboxes are like their homes — not everyone is invited.
When you are invited, however, it helps if you make that invite work for you. Here are a few things that you should never ever do.
Don’t Send Worthless Emails
No one subscribes to email pitches and sales pitches.
Your subscribers signed up because they want to hear from you — news about your business, new products, new updates for existing products, tips, insights, and information that they normally won’t get even if they looked.
It’s alright to send in emails with an occasional pitch or so but don’t overdo it. If every email you send out is a pitch for your subscribers to buy, no one will end up buying. See some sales coming in?
It’s “luck” and that’s not a sustainable marketing strategy.
You wouldn’t send a good friend sales pitches with your gmail account all day long, would you? Why do it from your email marketing software?
Treat your subscribers as friends.
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Don’t send emails when you are not welcome
In 2018, this might be rather too obvious to even write about, when it comes to email marketing. But we will since we happen to know just how many businesses still think that it’s their right to send emails to people without their consent.
Some countries have strict laws about businesses flouting laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act. While other countries don’t, sending blast emails to purchased lists doesn’t even make any sense.
With email marketing, you build and nurture captured audiences — the kind of people who know, trust, and like you.
These are the people who are likely to buy from you sooner or later. You don’t want to send emails to the entire world; you’d only have to send emails to people who’ve shown interest in what you have to offer.
So, why break the rules or upset people by spamming their inboxes?
Stop mocking your visitors
Check out the example from The Cosmopolitan Magazine. Giving away the secret list of 17 life-changing hacks is cool and they know what they are doing with their Call to action button.
They could have just let the exit option be something simple like “No thanks” or “I am not interested”.
Instead, they’d mock you.
They’d state something like “No thanks, I am hot enough as it is” — and that’s not meant to be a compliment.
Pop-ups help you build email lists fast. Pop-ups are one those things that are instrumental to help generate leads for your business.
Despite the hatred for pop-ups, you know that they are still effective. They just. You can use them to generate leads for your business. But there are good ways to use pop-ups and then there are bad ways.
When you do pop-ups right, you can win. Here’s an ecommerce company that generated 1.1 million dollars in revenue, all thanks to pop-ups.
Pop-ups work anyway, if you do it right.
Whatever you do, just stop mocking people and making them feel lazy, stupid, or something that they are not.
If and when you are ready to do your list building, check out our massive list of list building plugins that you could put to use right now to generate leads, build your email marketing lists, and to grow your business
Don’t Use Deceptive Subject lines
Chad White of Litmus App points out above just how many email subscribers (over 1361 American adults, aged 18+) felt cheated, tricked, or deceived into opening an email.
Deceptive subject lines will boost your open rates but will kill your business eventually.
When you get a subscriber’s permission to send emails, don’t take it for granted. Don’t even assume that it’s alright to send them whatever you want.
They gave you permission to email. Honor it.
They trusted you. Keep that trust.
They love you. Love them back.
They want to hear from you because they think you know something they don’t. You don’t have to be deceptive, misleading, quirky, and clever about “letting them know”.
Learn how to create high-impact but not manipulative subject lines. While you are at it, we have a free compilation of some of the most opened subject lines.
Don’t Hide Unsubscribe Buttons Or Links
Your relationship with your subscribers is just like it is with any two humans — you can’t force people against their will. Even if you did, you won’t get what you really want from that relationship.
While you are doing everything you can to opt-in, give them an option to opt-out too. Cleaning up your email lists, purging inactive subscribers, and making sure only those who are interested stay on your list also makes sense for your business.
Apart from keeping email list hygiene, you’d not want to spend more money to nurture leads who are disinterested, fallen out of favor, and those who don’t want to hear from you anymore. It costs a lot of money to maintain databases, to send emails, to craft well-written emails, and to do digital marketing in general.
Companies like Hubspot and many others actively weed out inactive subscribers and they even have dedicated campaigns to clean their lists.
We think you should do it too.
To learn how to get your email marketing done for you, click here!
How is your email marketing shaping up? If you’d like, download our Email Marketing Handbook and get access to exclusive insights and tips on email marketing now!