Transcription:
Hello everybody. Welcome to Hank’s Marketing and Business Tips. I hope you are having a great day.
I have been having a lot of discussions around networking, productivity, business leadership. Today, I would like to take a step back and talk about email marketing. Of course, I work in email marketing day in day out, so it is about time that there is a tip about email marketing.
One thing I learned is people that do not use email marketing effectively or have not used long do not follow many of the best practices. And, a lot of times they think that they can purchase lists or buy a list, or you know using the addresses of people that bought from them and to start sending them emails.
Well, yes, you can do that, but there are some negative repercussions to that. When it comes to email marketing, you need to make sure you Are sending relevant and engaging emails to people. The reason being is number one, there is the human factor. People are going to tune out if you are sending them emails that they did not expect, or if they are not of value. they are either going to mark your message as spam or they are just gonna totally ignore your emails, which does not help you in any way, because you will not be able to sell to them, correct?
So, another thing is algorithms. Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, all these email providers employ algorithms. And what they are doing is are looking at what types of email you are sending and how to engaged your subscriber base is. Let’s correlate that to credit score. Let’s say you are sending emails, and you have 100 recipients, and all of your recipients are engaged. Most of them are opening emails, clicking on links in there, maybe forwarding your email, starring it, etc. They are engaging with those emails. So your credit scores is high, right?
So, at this point you know Gmail, Yahoo, they are looking at your credit score and saying, “hey, this is a relevant sender to have good credit score, let’s keep their emails in the inbox”, unless someone has been marking a spam, they will no longer get those emails. With Gmail, they will still receive it, but it will be in their spam folder.
So, let’s say over time, your emails are not as great as they could be, you are not looking at people that are not engaged and what happens. Let’s say only 50 or 60% of your list is engaged, looking at and opening, clicking your emails, right? So, now your credit score is a little bit lower, you have a tarnished credit score. Those providers, especially Gmail, take a look at that, and what they are going do is, They are going to say that you are an irrelevant sender, and they will send most of your emails to spam folder. New people that sign up, they are going to receive that email, but it will be in the the spam folder. Especially in Gmail. And other people to start marking your messages spam and your inbox rates can go down, your sales are going to suffer as an effect.
So, best practices are to perform list hygiene by cleaning your list every now and then. To do that, what you would do is run a report of people who have not opened an email long time, send them a couple emails with a subject line like “are we breaking up?”. Have content such as “I noticed that you have not been opening emails from us please come back and save 20% of the coupon code”. Try to get them to reengage, and if not, go and remove them, because, like I said, that will affect your “credit score”.
So, and the end of the day, what you want to do is keep that credit score high, send relevant and valuable information, so people are engaging. Now, you might say, hey I know that I have a bad credit score, nut emails are still are going to inbox for a good amount of people. Yea, if people are engaged, if there is a small amount of people that are opening your email, starring, marketing it as important, etc., they are highly engaged, there is a chance they will continue to receive those emails in the inbox. Whereas new folks, which is very important, will not.
So, hopefully that was helpful. Hopefully the credit score analogy helped, because email marketing sounds simple, but there is is so much that goes on. Also remember that you want to send the right types of email at the right time. That is where marketing automation comes in. We can talk about that another time.
But that is all for today. Make sure you listen to previous recordings on iTunes or on HankHoffmeier.com/Alexa. You can always add me to your Alexa, by just going home and saying “add Hank’s Marketing and Business Tips and it will automatically be added.
We will see you next time. Thank you very much for listening.
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