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How to make your email marketing more profitable in 2018
Back to list of articlesYou’ve surely read the title and thought to yourself that we’re going to present a series of techniques which will boost conversion rates, improve open rates and train you on how to create an overall better email marketing campaign.
This is somewhat true, however it’s not our main scope for this article.
In making sure that I help you achieve better profits in your 2018 email marketing campaigns we’re taking a rather different approach to increasing profits, one that’s often forgotten in the rush for gold that many modern marketers feel - cutting down on costs.
Back to the basics: profit = earnings - costs
You might have an “aha” moment right now, or you might think that I’ve lost my mind, but there’s method to my madness. One of the most important assets of a great manager is being able to turn the same profit with fewer resources, and this is what we’re after here.
To put it short - we’re after cutting down on costs, not necessarily increasing earnings (although with email marketing following these steps will inevitably take you to higher earnings too).
If you’re doing email marketing you’re already on a great track to getting more sales.
Email marketing is accountable for 13% of all online sales. Taking into consideration that social media can only bring you as much as 1%, and that only direct website visitors and organic traffic are better performers, you should just focus on cutting down on costs and let email work the magic for you.
Let’s look at some important steps you need to take in order to ensure you’re on the right track to improve your profit margin.
1. Save by curating your list
This...again...is a concept that’s unfortunately frowned upon in the marketing community lately. List curation has become a practice that’s constantly being overlooked by marketers or even worse - completely ignored.
While we can see why having a bigger list might look to most like an opportunity to get bigger earnings, statistics prove that bigger lists usually come with much lower open rates and even smaller conversion rates.
Skilled marketers know this, and it’s a lesson which will save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars across the whole span of the year. Let’s take a step back and explain the process, best practices, and why this should be a technique you never stop applying.
What exactly is ‘curation’?
Curation represents the process of going through your list of contacts periodically and removing those that show no signs of turning profitable.
What does this mean exactly?
Well, it depends a lot on what you’re trying to achieve with your email marketing, but a common denominator is usually the open rate. If a contact hasn’t opened the last 15 campaigns you sent for example, there’s little to no chance that he will one day wake up and say “hey, what an interesting email I got from this great company - let’s buy”.
It’s time to cut your losses and stop sending to these contacts. Over the course of the year this will help save up quite a bit of money you would otherwise invest in your email campaign.
For some the breaking point might be after 5 emails, for others it might be 30 email campaigns and a re-opt-in series. It all depends on what your usual target is, what type of product you’re promoting, and how you go about obtaining your email addresses.
2. Save by building your email
I know very well how important branding is for businesses - for start-ups and established brands alike. This, however, is absolutely no excuse to have huge teams of people to handle your email creation anymore.
There’s no point in paying for a designer and a coder when you can just as easily use a tool like the BigBangThemes email builder to get a fully branded email template ready to go in a matter of minutes rather than days. Such template will be compatible with your FreshMail account and can be sent out to subscribers of your choice.
Simply give your designer access to such an email design tool, and he’ll be able to drag & drop elements and build you a great looking template.
Did I mention the fact that you’d only pay around $20, and spend at most 5 hours worth of designer work? That means that you can now cut down on at least 10-20 design hours for the creation of your templates, and an additional 10-15 hours worth of email coding expertise. All money in your pocket.
3. Save by keeping clients engaged
It’s just as true that there are plenty of email marketers who simply ruin their marketing lists. Along the years I’ve seen marketing campaigns that would break even the most engaged client within the first 5 touches tops.
You need to take into account that you need to have at least a 33% value content to promotional content ratio in your email marketing efforts.
This means that one in every 3 emails should provide the type of value that convinced your clients to subscribe, because very few people ever subscribe for a bombardment of offers and promotions. The blow of promotional campaigns can be somewhat softened by telling a story. You can read more about this excellent technique of storytelling in email marketing.
You might ask how this would be relevant to our article - but keeping clients engaged is an invaluable step in our attempts to improve profit margins, and good subject lines / content can be the difference between an open rate of 35%, or under 15%.
These few techniques can save you thousands of dollars across the span of 2018 if applied right. Our best advice would be to keep your focus on doing these right, and let your clients guide the direction of your email campaigns.
The best way to mould a marketing campaign being to read through the lines and adjust based on open and conversion rates.