The Pursuit of Greatness
With Email Marketing
Written by Franco Varriano.
1. Overview
Some people want to be average, others want to be great, but greatness is not a single event that happens on a specific days, it’s a process that involves the mastery of a specific field/practice through repetition. Malcolm Gladwell coined the 10 thousand hours rule in his classic book : The Outliers. Essentially, many masters in their field invested at least 10,000 hours in their craft to achieve greatness. We all have the ability to master anything we set our minds to, we simply have to invest time into the craft.
What does this mean for email marketing? It simply means that you can become a great email marketer but you have to invest some time to master the game. The good news is that there are thousands, if not millions, of people that mastered the game before you and are sharing so you don’t make the same mistakes. The main component of this exciting journey is learning, the faster you learn, the faster you grow. In short, the key learnings you must learn in order to grow your email list are the email list, email automation, and results optimization. Those 3 keys alone will help you grow your business and turn you into a good email marketer on his/her way to greatness. This week, we are exploring those key elements and provide actionable tips on how to implement them on day 1.
2. The Goal
Every master was first a beginner with a dream. In ecommerce, the goal is clear: convert prospects into customers, and influence customers to make another purchase. In other words, our goal is to master the art of email in a way that most prospects buy as soon as they receive the email and makes customers buy again.
3. The List
After choosing the right email marketing platform that works for you, you then have to grow your email list. Last week, we wrote about Growing Your Email List, and we gave actionable advice for stores who already launched. For those that haven’t launched yet, you can easily apply these steps to get started on your email list. Here, a bit of hustle and social media savviness is more than welcome. You can build your list by simply asking people to give you their emails, hence the hustle. We’ve seen many entrepreneurs build their lists through cool surveys shared on social media. A survey works particularly well when you’re getting started as you can also learn more about your ideal customers. As you know, social media helps you build your audience. Assuming that you have a consumer facing product, you should use Twitter Cards to embed your email sign up form in your twitter account (and pin it). You should also add your email sign up form to your Facebook page and promote your email form on Instagram with link in the bio.
4. Email Automation
Email marketing automation will help put your email marketing operations on autopilot so you can focus on other tasks. We separate automatic emails into two categories, Customer Success Emails (CSE) which include:
- Welcome message for new subscribers
- Order confirmation email after a purchase
- Shopping Cart Abandonment Email
- The shipping confirmation email
- Customer Feedback email
And the Revenue Generating Email (RGE) which include:
- The Reward email
- Upsell after purchase emails
- Milestones emails (i.e: 10th purchase)
- Targeted campaigns
You might also have a general newsletter in which you add real value to your customers. As you can see, we’ve listed more than 9 different types of email. Imagine receiving 9 emails from the same company within a couple of days, you would most likely unsubscribe.
The truth is customers don’t mind customer success emails as they’ve become quite the norm, in fact you look unprofessional if you don’t send them. But revenue generating emails can become annoying quite fast, especially when they’re full of irrelevant content. Relevance is the key to success in email marketing.
The age of mass email is done. We’re in the age of personalized content and your customers have high expectations whenever you visit their inbox. The right email marketing tool should help you send personalized message to customers at the most appropriate time (the time when the customer is most likely to open the email).
5. Results Optimization
As your email list grows, your results will change. At Rare.io, we like to refer to the key metric of email marketing as the Power 7 of Email Marketing. They simply help you keep track of your effort and help you improve. The 7 keys are: The number of emails sent, the open rate, the click-through rate, the conversion rate, the bounce rate, the unsubscribe rate and the rate of complaints. While the number of emails sent gives you an idea about the size of your audience, the open rate gives you an idea of how you’re doing inside the inbox against dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other emails. A trick to increase your open rate is to work hard on your subject line and leverage best timing features when emailing customers. The Click Through-Rate (CTR) gives great insight on how customers engage with your emails. An easy way to increase the click through rate is to send relevant content like individual product recommendations to customers. Recipients want to engage with relevant messages, remember, the one size fits all era is dead.
The conversion rate is your bestfriend, the higher it is, the better it is for your bottom line. Results optimization here has one sole purpose: increase the conversion rate. The bounce rate, the rate of complaints, and the unsubscribe rate tells you a lot about the things you are failing to master with your email marketing operations. They are in place to help you send better emails and you should do everything in your power to decrease their percentage as much as possible.
To summarize the optimization part, by simply increasing the amount of emails sent (audience), the open rate and the click through rate, you are automatically closer to a better conversion rate and a growing business. At the same time, by decreasing the rate of complaints, unsubscribe, and bounce rate, you gain more confidence to send even more awesome emails.
6. Conclusion
Like we’ve said before, testing is always key in email marketing. Testing is actually the main currency in the learning process, the more experience you run, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you become. The better you become, the closer you are to reaching greatness. Remember, no one ever achieved greatness by playing it safe, now go out there and start sending emails today.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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