According to the Direct Marketing Association, the return on investment for a well-run email marketing campaign is more than 38 dollars for every dollar spent. When you consider this type of return on investment, it becomes clear that you can and should use email marketing to get more prospects and sales.
Let’s go through some tips and ideas to improve your email marketing techniques so you get more prospects and make more sales. After all, you’re not going to get a 38 to 1 return on investment without using the right methods which include choosing the right audience, the right products, crafting the right messages, and sending them in the right way at the right time.
Create an Audience Avatar
Naturally, you need to know whom you’re talking to as well as what excites and motivates them. Creating a customer/audience profile and general image, sometimes called an avatar, can help you focus on the overall audience’s needs. You can also create a profile for different segments of your audience based on a variety of their demographics. For example, where they are in your marketing funnel and their buying cycle might be one type of profile.
You want to know whom they are, what keeps them up at night, how much money they earn, as well as how they spend their extra money. The more you know about the person the easier it will be to create messages, select and create products to sell to them and to personalize each message that you send.
To study your audience, join groups they are taking part in, join the competition’s email lists, and read as much as you can about the audience you want to work with that you can. The more you know the audience the more effective any type of content marketing, including email marketing, will work. The reason is that it is much easier to create messages for an audience you understand.
Know Your Products & Services
The other thing you need to do to get more prospects is to know how and why your products and services appeal to your target market. This does not just apply to ones that you create, but to everything that you promote, such as affiliate items. Promoting anything that is not suited to your audience’s problems, needs, or related topics makes them lose trust in your judgement and expertise.
Try out products you recommend so that you can be honest in your assessment of whether it is right for your audience or not. Get to know the product creators that you plan to promote via affiliate marketing. It is your reputation on the line. When you send an email recommending something, they are going to remember that you told them about it. Either you will develop trust with your audience or you will have wasted a little time.
Keep Building Your List
Even if you have a responsive list now, it is important that you use the information you know about your audience and products to keep building your list. The more list members you have that need and want what you offer them the more profitable you are going to become. However, it is imperative that you learn to target who you want on your list better. The more targeted your list members are the better results you are going to get in terms of email opens and actions taken on your CTAs.
There are many ways to build your list faster. One way that works very well right now is content upgrades. A content upgrade could be a PDF checklist, a white paper, or other information that helps make the content the viewer is reading on your blog more useful and valuable but requires the reader to sign up for your list to get on the item. This type of lead magnet is much more successful since it’s super targeted to what your audience is currently reading making them automatically more responsive list members.
Email marketing has the best chance to be successful if the best processes are used to execute your marketing. See more about our best email marketing processes here.
