I am working my way through an email marketing masterclass right now.
Email marketing remains, even today, one of the best ways to engage your site visitors and help them along the path to becoming clients.
But as consumers have become savvier and their digital lives considerably more cluttered, it is increasingly difficult to reach them in a meaningful way.
So I stay abreast of changes in the industry, especially as the old tactics for getting them to sign up and actually read the content you’ve worked so hard on just aren’t working quite as well any longer.
Josh Earl , one of my favorite copywriter gurus says…
“There’s so much information flying at us all day from all directions that our our filters have to get more and more sophisticated—it’s a survival mechanism.”
All that said, this class is really interesting and insightful, and I’m quite enjoying it (and learning all kinds of new little email marketing gems that I can’t wait to pass on, so stay tuned…)
But let’s go ahead and dive into one of the cornerstones of any email marketing campaign…
and talented photographer
The Welcome Email
If you’re not familiar with what I mean when I say “Welcome Email,” I’m simply referring to the very first email someone receives from you after they subscribe to your email list (or after they’ve completed the click-to-confirm step if you’re using double opt-ins).
Let’s say you stumble on a website you like. You’re enjoying what you’re reading, and you’re really interested in what they have to share. It’s a subject you’re definitely wanting to learn more about. And lo and behold, they’ve got an enticing opt-in offer that you actually want because it looks like it’s going to solve a problem you’re grappling with in your business right this very minute.
You enter your name and email address and click the big, bright ‘Yes – I want it!’ button.
And then nothing.
You hop over to your inbox, searching in vain for that email. The minutes tick by and the email never shows. (Or worse – it’s there, but all it says is “Your subscription to our list has been confirmed.”)
Pretty quickly, you’ve completely lost that train of thought and moved onto other things. Oh well.
And if you do receive something from that person a day or a week later, what’s the likelihood that you’re going to remember why you signed up for it in the first place?
It feels rude to not be acknowledged when you’ve put yourself out there. Like making eye-contact with someone in the grocery store, smiling at them, trying to establish some semblance of being an open, outgoing person, only to have that person completely ignore you. (This happened to me a lot when, many years ago, I moved from super-friendly Texas to still-friendly-but-not-nearly-as-outwardly-outgoing Washington state.)
Now that other person is most likely not really a rude person. Chances are, they were busy in their head, running through the 8000 things they’ve got to do once they get home, the meal ideas they tried to map out for the week and remember whether they’ve got all the ingredients in their pantry, all the while trying to recall the 5 things they actually came into the grocery store for.
In your business, you don’t ever want to be the person that doesn’t smile back and acknowledge someone who makes the effort to connect with you.
Enter the ‘Welcome Email’.
A welcome email is your first foray into a subscriber’s inbox, so let’s make it a good one.
A good Welcome Email hits 4 main targets for you:
- It delivers your opt-in offer
- It sets expectations
- It gives you an ‘in’ in their inbox
- It gets them excited about being on your list
Deliver your opt-in offer
You might also call this your incentive, your lead magnet, your freebie, your giveaway, etc.
It’s got a lot of names, but regardless of what terminology you use for it, it’s a promise you’ve made to someone – that you will share this valuable, useful piece of content with them in exchange for a coveted spot in their email inbox.
So this ought to be the first thing that goes into your welcome email – a fast and easy way for them to get their hands on the information they were interested in.
I get miffed when there’s a really enticing opt-in offer that I want to read but for whatever reason, it never materializes in my inbox.
(As a web developer and having worked with email marketing services a lot, I know that there are a slew of technical reasons why this might happen. The systems aren’t perfect, and sometimes the holes in them aren’t evident, so even a savvy email marketer might not know to work around them. So if you have a more mature website and/or have multiple opt-in opportunities on your site, be sure to think through all of these possible scenarios when mapping out how to deliver your opt-in offer.)
Set expectations with your reader
Be sure to include a little snippet about how often they can expect to hear from you and what they can look forward to in each message.
Are they going to receive your weekly broadcast email along with a full on autoresponder series (which can be anywhere from 3-20 emails)? Or are you strictly a once-a-month kind of person?
Everything I’ve read and learned says don’t be afraid to email too much, so if you can handle it, emailing once a week (or even more often) is perfectly acceptable. Just don’t say that you’ll be sending something once a month but then bombard them with daily emails.
Part of setting expectations involves establishing your tone or voice and sticking to it.
One of the things I do at the start of any new website design is work with my clients to establish a style guide – a catalog of their design preference by figuring out things like what colors they like and will work for their brand, what fonts they prefer, how they want to come across to their site visitors, etc. These decisions feed into just about everything we end up doing together design-wise so there is consistency across the board.
The same thing goes for thinking about establishing a consistent tone for all of the copy on your website and in your emails.
Are you going for the gentle, trusted professional or the witty, brash guru? Pick one and stick with it.
The easiest way to do this? Be natural and write like you talk. If you don’t swear like a salty pirate in real life, don’t try to use that in your email messaging. Be yourself and don’t use corporate-speak in an attempt to sound professional. (This is a habit I’ve been trying to break myself for years now.)
Once you get the hang of writing in your own voice, it’s so much easier to write because you no longer have to run all of the copy in your head through that artificial filter as it goes down on the page.
Ask them to whitelist you
Whitelisting simply means that they’ve specifically designated your domain as a trusted email source from within whatever email application they use. It greatly increases the likelihood that your email actually finds it way to their inbox (rather than their SPAM folder or Promotions tab).
You can go a step further and link to instructions for how they whitelist something in different email clients and on different devices. Aweber has a great set of instructions here: https://blog.aweber.com/how-to-whitelist-us
Generate excitement
As you’re wrapping up the email, build some energy and tension into it. Get them looking forward to seeing future emails from you.
You might talk about some of the other topics they can expect to hear from you about.
You might leave a teaser for the next email in your autoresponder series.
Or you might just include a heartfelt statement about your gratitude for having them be a part of your email list (although don’t put it in those terms – no one really wants to be a ‘part of a list’.)
Bonus Tip: Include your USP Unique Service Proposition (aka – one-liner, Unique Value Statement, etc) – in all of your email communications
I can’t tell you how many generic email lists I’ve unsubscribed from because I have no idea why I might have signed up in the first place or even who the person is. And I sure as heck can’t tell that from their most recent email that showed up randomly in my inbox.
Don’t assume that your subscribers just remember who you are and what you do. This is especially important if you’re not blogging and/or emailing them new content every single week.
Don’t waste this opportunity to generate some momentum using your email marketing funnel with a generic or lackluster email. It’s a first impression that you’re not too likely to have the opportunity to correct if you don’t get it just right.
