We can hypothesize all day long about how successful email marketing is.
Some are gonna say, “It totally works for me!” While others claim, “My open rates are worse than my chances of finding gold in the Yukon!”
Why the differences in opinion?
IMHO it has to do with customer type. But even more importantly, a lack of education in using the tool. There are things about email marketing that must be understood.
If I were to walk up and hand you the most expensive set of golf clubs money can buy, it doesn’t turn you into Tiger Woods — The guy who just laid claim to his 5th Masters win this year.
Is it the fault of the golf clubs that you can’t hit like Tiger?
No. Yet this is how some people react to email marketing. They believe if they buy a laptop with an email editor, they’re suddenly marketing experts.
It doesn’t work that way.
You can’t just buy a club, go to the driving range, whack emails into oblivion and expect dollars to fall from the sky.
Email marketing must be studied and mastered to see the success you want. What niche group are you sending emails to? Are they receiving what they opted in for? Are you connecting with them using tried and true approaches? Are you using automation to engage vs just blasting out information?
I personally follow a couple marketing gurus: Perry Marshall and Darren Hardy. These guys send out a lot of good emails. I open probably 5% of them.
Does that mean I’m not interested?
No. It means I’m overloaded and busy. But here’s the point you cannot ignore: Every 5% or so they’ll get me to open and hook me on a product offering. I just spent $2000 on training from one of them. Yesterday I registered for an online class from the other.
If the marketing teams at Perry Marshall and Darren Hardy were to only look at my open rates, it would be a fail. But the fact that I stay on their lists, and eventually purchase products is a huge success. At the end if the day, sending me those emails only costs them a few cents, and it was totally worth the money they invested.
Would you drop everything to read the email you just sent to your potential customers? If your answer is no, you didn’t work hard enough.
There’s no way around it.
Be engaging. Tell stories. Don’t be enamored with your own writing. Assume it’s bad, because it probably is. Don’t jump into sales right away. Get personal and connect with people in the first few emails.
Write, test, rewrite.
Everyone knows what basic automation is. Send email #1 out immediately. Send email #2 out the next day, and on it goes. Big deal. Real automation is intelligently interacting with people as they progress through your content.
Did they fail to open an email? Have your system wait a day and then send them a unique response. Did they click on a specific link? Have your evergreen setup respond to them based on that click.
Trust me, intelligently engaging with people works. You will see results.
Creating a successful email marketing campaign isn’t easy.
But you should be happy about that.
If it were easy, everyone could do it. If you’re willing to put in the work, do some research and learn more about marketing, your email results will change.
If you’re new to Follow Hook, you can send emails from within Follow Hook, or integrate with Mailchimp or ConvertKit to take advantage of their sophisticated features.
So stop reading this blog post, and start marketing better.
Happy writing!
