The Art of Email Marketing

According to a recent study, 40% of those surveyed reported that they checked their email inboxes between six and twenty times per day; and many of them made regular use of their smartphones to do it. That means that, on any given day, people are at home or at work – or they are going about their business and they’re occasionally looking down at their phones to check their mail. If you want your business to receive more attention online, email is the perfect way to do it. With email marketing, you have a chance of reaching those 40% of people who can’t help but check their email during dinner, exercise or while working.

The art of email marketing will allow you to influence a dedicated audience using a simple and free (or low-cost) tool that anyone can use to advance their marketing reach online. If you hope to be successful at email marketing, as in you hope to be making money online in the near future using this ubiquitous medium, you must get to know your audience. Knowing your typical email recipient’s likes, dislikes, fears, passions and motivations will help you develop email copy that will truly resonate with whoever happens to lay eyes on it. That is the art of email marketing – the art you’re about to learn right now.

Knowing Your Audience

As we’ve covered, the art of email marketing starts with your typical email recipient. This is your target customer, your average buyer, and you will want to profile that person if you hope to reach that person on a deep and intimate level. The great news is that you live in a new and exciting time where social media and other free and low-cost tools – much like email marketing –are at your disposal and can be used for innumerable research opportunities.

Whatever industry your company represents, there are people discussing that industry right now on social media and on popular forums somewhere across the Internet. Your job is to find those individuals and glean all the data you can from these free and low-cost resources so that you can make your email marketing more on-point.

You are looking for pain points. That is, those instances where your customer faces a problem or situation where your product or service could provide relief. A typical pain point for a person seeking online dating help is spending Saturday night alone with the television and the family dog.

A pain point for a business owner seeking an industrial floor cleaner for the business’s VCT tile would be muddled floors that take away from the company’s professional appearance; which can then hurt business.

These pain points should be used in your email marketing efforts to make the content hit its mark much more effectively. The idea is to make the reader resonate with the material and feel as though you are speaking only to him/her; even though your email may be sent to dozens, hundreds or thousands of people.

This is the art of email marketing, but it doesn’t stop there.

Engaging Subjects

Your recipients will read your subject lines before any other aspect of your emails; so you had better make them good. Use personalization to help your subject lines truly stand out. That is, use the function that many email marketing platforms give you these days where you can insert the person’s name, buying status or other personal markers into the subject line and email marketing bodies themselves. This technique is highly-effective and recommended if you want more of your emails opened rather than passed over or deleted outright.

Test various subject lines to see which ones resonate with your audience. You will be able to gauge your open rates within the email marketing platform to see which subject lines work better than others.

Speak to Your Recipient One-on-One

Your recipient has read your subject line and has now moved on to your actual email. Talk to the recipient like he or she is sitting across the desk from you. Use the person’s name when you can, and use pain points to make the content seem far more personal. Then, provide valuable content that the recipient can use.

Valuable Content

Every email you send out should include a tip, trick, coupon or something else the recipient can use. Give the person a reason to open and read all of your emails and more will get opened and read.

Short and Sweet

Keep your emails short and to-the-point if you want more people going through them. The average person goes through dozens of emails daily and that’s a lot to filter out, especially when the content is long. Get your point over with, sign off and let the person know that you will be back soon with more engaging content just like it.

Links and Promotion

Go easy on the links and any sales promotions until you are sure that you have your readers on the hook. The idea is to provide enough valuable email marketing content so as to have the average recipient looking forward to each email that comes in. Then you can start recommending products and services that can help you achieve your goal of making money online.

If you try to sell to your audience too early, your recipients could become frustrated with you and they’ll look for that unsubscribe button at the bottom of your email faster than you can say, “See you next time!”

Sell sparsely, leave even fewer links and work to build trust with your audience that will translate into far more money earned over time.

That is the art of email marketing. Find your audience’s pain points, use customization wherever possible, speak to your audience one-on-one and offer value. If you can condense those elements into easily-digestible emails that arrive regularly in your target audience’s inboxes, then you just might be making money online before you know it.

First, start researching your target market; then, find an email marketing platform and start crafting engaging emails that can be sent out at regular intervals. Then entice subscribers, communicate with your audience and, when the time is right, start recommending your offers so that you can earn money online the right way.

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