Email Marketing Tips and Strategies for Success

Email Marketing Tips and Strategies for Success

These are the slides from a recent presentation on Email Marketing. A video of the presentation will be available later, but in the meantime the slides are available for you to view and download below. 

If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur and you’re looking to learn some ways to grow your email list and also learn marketing tips to help reach and grow your audience, this is the presentation for you. Now it’s nothing too technical or hard to follow. It’s mainly concepts and best practices along with some statistics to help you design, engage, and even automate your email marketing efforts. This presentation is high level and so anyone from any industry can take from this and put aspects of it into practice immediately. If you’re looking for a custom solution or strategy for your email marketing efforts, please be sure to contact us so that we can help. 

I Put My Email In Time Out

I Put My Email In Time Out

For the past few weeks I’ve been noticing how much my concentration is being broken by email. I will admit though that emails aren’t the only cause of my momentary distractions, but I do notice how my mood may shift depending on just the subject line or the sender of an email.

I’ve heard people talk about only checking email once or twice a day, and at first I thought that was bananas. But the more I really read into it and thought about it, it makes so much sense it’s sanity.

Serenity Now

Let me tell you about my typical workflow. My MacBook is always open of course, and I’ll have Chrome open with nothing short of 5-10 tabs. I feel like I’m better than my wife because she has at the very least 23 tabs open. Like just enough to read the first three letters of the tab like it’s a game show when selecting the right one. But let’s get back on task. So along with those apps being open, so is my email. And at any given moment an email will come in. It might be spam, it might be for an event, or one of the hundreds of email lists I’m on. Picture getting a freshly delivered email in any of my 8 inboxes throughout a 10 hour day. Yea, you get the picture now huh?

Managing my design or work sprints used to be pretty challenging, until I closed out my email. Now I will be honest with you, it wasn’t easy at first. I would go back and open it again every other hour, until stopped myself. Eventually I weened myself to only opening it 3-4 times a day and even stopped the push option on my mobile devices. On my iPhone if I want to see emails, I’ll open the app. But it won’t “ding” with a notification and neither will my laptop.

The end result? That was a boost in brain cells. At least that’s how I felt. I find myself able to start a project, and actually complete it with record time. What’s even better than that is the sensation of completion that I get after each task is done. If you’ve ever started your day with a bunch of items on your To-Do list, and you get to tick of the first one, it’s a great feeling and quickly becomes addicting. That’s what it feels like only checking email once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and leave it alone till the following morning.

If you’re still skeptical, I dare you to download our Productivity Tracker (currently in our shop for FREE) and document what you’re doing for a full day. You’ll be surprised (if you’re honest) how much time you may be wasting with emails.

Productivity Tracker

Increase Your Open Rates With Your Email Marketing [VIDEO]

Increase Your Open Rates With Your Email Marketing [VIDEO]

This is a quick two minute tip on how to increase your email open rates for your newsletters. When it comes to managing your business, there’s a bunch of outbound marketing efforts that you have to plan for. Email is still a great medium of transmitting information. The key though is to curate valuable content that your readers will come to expect and be able to take action on. The challenge that many businesses face with email though is that, people may be used to getting a lot of emails and not really paying attention to most of them.

You’ve gotta put yourself in the seat of an email subscriber, and imagine what their perspective is on their email inbox. Typically, when getting a bunch of emails from different sources, we tend to identify the senders that we know provide the best emails. Whether it’s because we anticipate some sales or deals, free stuff, exclusive information, data, whatever. And so because of that, we’ll usually skim through all our recent emails and go directly to those that we know and are familiar with to have value. This is how you have to position your email newsletters.

Using the 80/20 Rule, you’ll want to send out great content that is readily useful to your audience 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time is where you can promote your products and services. People know that you’re trying to sell to them, and they’re used to that. The key is to be more of a transparent source of information in a bite size or easy to consume way for your readers that are interested in your industry or products. Take a look at the video below and if you have any questions please feel free to contact us for a Strategy Session.

Remove Autofill Email Addresses in Mac Mail

Remove Autofill Email Addresses in Mac Mail

If you’ve been using Mac Mail for at least a year, you’ll acquire a lot of email addresses for people you have emailed or responded to. While many of them may not be in your Contacts list, their email addresses and names are stored in a cache of information that your Mac will suggest to you when you’re ready to create a contact in your address book from these interactions.

While that’s a great and helpful feature, it sometimes can be annoying when you’re trying to email a known contact and start typing in their name and the autofill or pre-fill address that comes up is an old email address. Or maybe their home email comes up instead of their work email. While you’ll be presented with a dropdown of alternate email addresses for this person, the default one that comes up may not be convenient for you and may sometimes lead to sending to the wrong address.

To fix this you’ll want to open up Mail, and click on the Window option from the top Menu Bar. From there you’ll select the Previous Recipients option:

Mac Mail - Previous Recipients Screen

This will bring up

Mac Mail - Previous Recipients Listed Addresses

 

Branding To-Do’s & Tidbits


For those outside the marketing realm, let me help define “branding”. Branding is a signature ‘look and feel’ that leverages all of the resources our industry has to offer to make sure that you will be noticed and recognized by consumers and like industry companies.

  •  Branding is an essential component to any business therefore it’s something you should consistently think about and ensure it evolves on an ongoing basis.  Taking time to think about and employ opportunities to promote your brand is both fundamental and key to its success.
  • Your brand and marketing materials should precisely detail & sell your product and/or service.  If they’re not, they’re wrong.  You know the old adage of “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it”…well if it is, it’s time to re-think and re-brand.
  • C’mon, get focused!  Your view of your product/service can sometimes be narrow and if it’s your “baby”, it can be hard to be a tough critic. So if you can’t afford to pay for a professional focus group, here is a suggestion.  Get together a group of professional friends from various industries and present your products/service. Offering hors d’oeuvres and beverages is a nice form of compensation. What’s most important though is getting their feedback in writing and implementing their suggestions (if they are good ideas…) into your brand/marketing strategies and promotions.
  • Know your street credibility ~ Your brand image as well as its reputation is vital.  It’s super important you know what your client base is saying about you…and even your competition.  Being armed with this information will allow you to evolve your branding & marketing strategies to thwart the effects of the good or bad press.
  • Promote your brand across all landscapes. This should include at a minimum:
    ∞ direct marketing via mailers;
    ∞ email campaigns and promotions;
    ∞ online & in-store promotions; and last but surely not least…
    ∞ social media, etc.