Email marketing has transformed. It is the most viable marketing channel to make good online income.
Why? Because it is affordable and yields a high ROI. Statistics say you earn an average ROI of 4200%.
With the right strategy, knowledge, and skills each online marketer can make a profitable income via email marketing.
Let’s dive into some of the best practices in email marketing.
The Art of Optimizing Lead Generation Forms
Each marketer aims to generate quality leads. Placing a lead generation form on a web page does not require extraordinary skills. A simple YouTube tutorial can do the trick.
The key to a successful lead generation form lies in providing value to the visitors. Most B2B companies put an embedded form at the top of their homepage as a practice. Watch the example below.
But what about individual marketers? Clearly, there’s a difference in the lead generation process of an individual and a company.
Creating lead generation forms is not as easy as putting a ‘Submit’ button. Instead, take a more strategic approach. Let’s understand it in simple steps:
1. Using a robust-email builder
Email marketing software is one of the most essential marketing tools for marketers. Now, there are many email marketing tools for online and affiliate marketers out there. Which one to go for?
Marketers do not have a buried treasure at their hands. Therefore, you might prefer an affordable email marketing tool. At the same time, you cannot compromise with the features.
Make sure you perform in-depth research before opting for any software. Look at the features, price tiers, and reviews. Perform a comparative analysis of different email marketing tools and opt for free demo.
2. Choosing the form type
It is a good practice to put an embedded form at the top of your home-page. The visitors do not have to beat around the bush to sign up for your subscription.
In case you do not have a website, you may go for creating a landing page with a built-in lead generation form.
The most essential thing to work on is having quality content to feed your visitors. Your visitors are more likely to give you the information if you have something to give in return.
You may use a lead magnet in the form of a free ebook or guide to get their information. Here’s what the very famous affiliate marketer John Chow has put on his website:
Furthermore, it doesn’t suffice in putting a form at your homepage. You can incorporate a pop-up form or scroll-in forms at your top-performing web pages.
Here’s an example of a full-page pop-up form from John Chow’s Blog page.
3. The number of fields
The golden rule is to keep the fields minimal. Visitors do not want to spend extra time filling their personal data. Make sure you don’t’ exceed 3 fields in a form. According to research, if you put more fields, you will add on to your costs per conversion as well as decrease your overall conversion rate.
Ask the information that resonates with your requirements.
The Need for Different Landing Pages
Do you think building different landing pages is difficult?
Absolutely not.
But first, let’s focus on why you need to build more landing pages? Here are three effective reasons:
1. Understanding the intent
Your visitors have an underlying intent to visit your web-page. They might be looking for some specific content, just browsing, or have an intention to buy a product that you have referred to.
This becomes evident by the type of information they are consuming or the page that they are visiting. If they are visiting your resource section, then they might be searching for specific information or topic. There is less chance that they’ll buy the product you are promoting. But if they are browsing your listed products, the chances of a sale increase manifold.
It is a good practice to create landing pages according to different verticals, industries, use cases, or professions as per your requirements. This helps in pinpointing the interest and intent of your visitors.
Another affiliate marketer Pat Flynn built different landing pages according to the use-cases of different marketing fields. Here’s a snapshot:
2. Boosting traffic
When you personalize the landing pages according to visitor’s intent, it helps to direct quality traffic and the right set of audiences to your web page. For instance, if you created a landing page for medical professionals, the page will drive engagement from the same profession.
3. Easy Segmentation
Thanks to advanced email marketing tools, you can easily segment the visitors that signed up at different landing pages. Some of the tools give you an option to automate your segmentation process.
Meaning, if you create different landing pages and a visitor signs up on any of them, you can leverage action-based triggers to put them into different segment lists.
Taking the above example, if a visitor signs up at your ‘medical professionals’ landing page, you can automatically put them in a segmented list based on professions.
Maintaining Segmented Email Lists
This is where your lead generation forms and landing pages come in handy. If you have a well-optimized lead generation process, you don’t have to start the segmentation process from scratch.
The data collected through your forms serves as a foundational ground for segmenting your email lists. Make sure you never buy an email list as it increases the bounce rate and activates the spam alert.
Segmenting your email lists into target groups is the defining factor of your email engagement metrics.
Why?
Because you will create personalized email copies based on these segments.
Before jumping to segmenting your email lists, create your buyer’s persona ready. In simple words, the buyer’s persona is your ideal customer’s personality. If you are promoting an enterprise software and a student signs up at your web page then he/she cannot be the personality of your ideal customer.
Marketers have to put in extra effort in defining their target customers. If you are marketing multiple products, you have to create different personas accordingly.
For instance, if you are promoting two products from different industries, let’s say, a laptop and enterprise software, then you will have to create two different buyer’s personas.
To create your buyer’s persona, you must have the demographics, psychographics, sign-up date, and the pain points of your prospect.
When you have enough information and knowledge about your target audience, you may divide your contacts into different email lists based on age, industry, profession, gender, income level, company, location, or more.
Make sure you draw a line for the segmentation process. It is a good practice to create defined segmented lists. But don’t overdo it by going into the tiniest details.
Writing Effective Content
Subscribers do not feel elated with direct sales pitches or promotional emails in the first go. Bombarding them with promotional offers will not do the trick.
To gain the trust of your subscribers, you need to provide them with valuable content. People find emails more trustworthy. In fact, according to consumers, “Email will unquestionably be around after a decade as compared to social media, cable TV, or other channels”.
To maintain the above statement, don’t go for a hard sell. Instead, run a full-blown email sequence that covers all the aspects of the buyer’s journey. Make sure you send welcome emails, onboarding emails, free rich-content resources, and then the promotional pitches.
Let’s take one element at a time.
1. Subject Lines
Many subscribers judge the email by its subject line. Writing a compelling subject line can boost your open rates. Don’t write long subject lines as it gets truncated in the preview section. Watch the following examples:
Use a conversational or personalized tone in your subject lines. Digg has been doing wonders in coming up with an engaging subject line.
Another way is to slip in some statistics to incite the curiosity of your subscribers.
You may also go for A/B testing. It is a wonderful way to carry self-driven research. Send an email to different email lists with different subject lines to find what works best.
Last but not least, don’t use spam words or shouty all-caps in your subject lines.
2. Email Copy
Most subscribers prefer to skim through the email content. Therefore, use short sentences in your email copy. Adding personalizing elements appeals to the subscribers. They gave their personal data in return for hearing exclusively from you. Make sure you provide value to them in the form of quality content and engaging resources.
To establish a trustworthy relationship with your subscribers, putting the price tag directly in front of the customers is not a great strategy. Instead, list the benefits that the subscribers shall receive.
Writing an effective email copy can go down the drain if you do not use a responsive email template. Make it a practice to send a test email before sending it to your subscribers.
3. CTAs
Many times, your emails do not perform well because of confusing CTAs. An email is written with clear and precise intent. If you want your visitors to explore your resource section then do not confuse them with multiple CTAs such as registering for an event or a product promotion.
Make sure your CTAs do not make your subscribers go from one web-page to another. Keep it a one-step process to boost your click-through rate.
Avoiding Spam Filters
Many marketers get trapped in the web of spam filters and are not able to detect the reason behind the same. Email spam filters have become strict and there are ample reasons for your emails to land in the spam folder.
If you have used spammy words in your subject line or email copy, your emails might come under radar of spam filters. Words such as “free”, “won”, “lottery”, “prize”, “click here” and more are considered spam words. A simple Google search will give you a list of words that you should not use in your emails.
Furthermore, if you use unresponsive email templates or do not put alt-text in the images then your emails can get stuck in the spam filter. Make sure you put authentic links such that they do not redirect to any suspicious sites.
To pass the authentication tests such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance), you need to maintain a reputed domain. While DKIM checks your domain’s authenticity, SPF is responsible for checking the sender’s authenticity.
Another reason for your emails to land in the spam folder is the compliance factor. There are different email spam laws that marketers have to follow. These laws are according to different geographies. For instance, the CAN-SPAM Act of the US, the GDPR act of Europe, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, and more.
Using Email Automation
Making your potential prospects wait is never a good idea. Therefore, communication should happen instantly. Email automation helps to establish a relationship with your prospects. It further increases the chances of generating a good income.
Let’s see use-cases of some excellent automated emails:
1. Welcome Emails
Most of these emails are automatically generated. These emails are based on built-in triggers whenever a user performs an action. When a visitor signs up at your web page, a welcome email is automatically sent to their respective email addresses.
These emails are usually text-based and might contain a lead magnet, a free ebook, quality blogs, or more. Here’s an example:
2. Resource-Rich Emails
These emails are a part of the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. These emails contain quality resources to educate the users and nudge them towards realizing their pain points. As a marketer, you may send individual or curated resources of different brands you are trying to pitch for.
These emails need not be image-heavy. Simple text-based emails can also work wonders.
Here’s an example:
3. Cart-abandonment
You can leverage email automation to send cart-abandonment emails. These types of emails are quite effective in nudging the prospects to complete the purchase.
You may have witnessed these emails when you leave your online shopping cart without making the purchase. Individual marketers can send cart-abandonment emails on similar grounds. Here are two examples:
Tracking Email Metrics
Tracking your email metrics is essential to identifying the pain points in your email marketing strategy. At times, your emails record low open rates, high bounce rates, and low click-throughs.
The reasons can be attributed to low-quality leads, email deliverability issues, unresponsive templates, faulty segmented lists, and more.
You may leverage a comprehensive email marketing tool to keep a tab on your email metrics. After performing a full-blown analysis, make sure to re-segment your email lists based on your prospect’s behavior.
When you successfully identify the loopholes, you may use the gained knowledge in your next email campaign.
Sending Re-engagement Campaigns
After analyzing your email metrics, you’ll realize the fact that there are many leads in your email base that are unresponsive or have gone cold.
Unresponsive leads increase the bounce rates and hurt your email’s performance. High bounce rates may lead your emails directly to the user’s spam folder. Hence, some action is necessary. The best way is to send re-engagement emails.
For that, you may send lucrative offers, confirmation emails that they still want to hear from you, feedback emails, account archive emails, and more.
Cleaning your Email List
If your leads continue to be unresponsive after sending a re-engagement email, then either it’s a fake one or the prospect is not interested.
This step is necessary to identify the fake, or unresponsive leads as it spikes up the bounce rates and lowers the email’s performance.
When you clean and rearrange your email lists, chances are, you’ll experience better email metrics. Don’t be hesitant to archive or remove the unresponsive email leads.
Lastly, you can aim for hyper-segmentation to ensure a top-notch engagement among your prospects.
In a Nutshell
Earning a decent online income is not a tough task to achieve. You just need to adapt the skills and gain in-depth knowledge about the digital world.
While there are other marketing channels to drive more income, email marketing is quite pocket-friendly and effective in terms of establishing long-term relationships with your loyal prospects.
What do you think about earning online income or affiliate commission via email marketing? Put your thoughts in the comments below.
About the Author
Shivani Srivastava is a content marketer by heart. She is passionate about writing anything in the field of the technological landscape. She’s written this guest blog for SendX.
