As with many other things in business, once business owners and marketers discovered the power of email to work online prospects to a sale, it began to grow to a point of being widely abused and losing more business than it gets.
Perhaps the biggest culprit is drip email, as it is too easy to set up and then keep blasting away at prospects until they buy something. Unfortunately, many more of them end up hitting that pesky Unsubscribe button. They do not want to find your emails in their inbox every few days, especially when they aren’t seeing any email subjects that are of interest or value to them.
Step 1: Throw away your current drip campaigns. Don’t try to repair a bad campaign; start over. Besides, the other steps here have you back up and running quicker than you think.
Step 2: Locate or develop the right site content. This step is about working prospects who have come to your website and for whatever reason given you their contact information. They must want to know more if they haven’t bought yet. Make sure that you identify the best content on your site that sells your product or services. You’ll be pointing to this content in your new drip email campaigns.
Step 3: Develop an email for each (valuable) content page. You should never send out an email that doesn’t direct the recipient to useful information on your website that prompts buyers to take action. Create better calls-to-action on your pages to convert prospects to buyers.
Each of your emails will not provide some information of value, but their goal is to draw the recipient to either contact you for purchase or go to the page destination where you’ll hit them with another CTA. Do not create more emails than you have strong content and CTAs, and don’t use the same one twice.
Step 4: Tell them in the first email how many are coming. Now you may think this is counterproductive, and it could be if you’re going to be sending them a dozen or more. Ideally, you’ll create strong emails with catchy subject lines and finally get a sale when they go to the content linked in the email. If you’re doing this right, you can tell them in the first email, when you’re thanking them for signing up, that you’ll not be bothering them a lot, only sending them # emails with the top things your customers have used to make a purchase decision.
This method, when tested, showed a significant decline in unsubscribes when the email includes a statement like “You will only be receiving # messages over the next # weeks, each with an item of information that customers have told us helped them to make a decision.” This first contact knowledge with a stated number of emails takes away that nagging question of just how many of these are they going to send.
Follow these email best practices, and you should find that your unsubscribes will drop and your sales will rise.