Email Marketing Automation Guide: Make $100,811 on Autopilot

 

Admit it or not, eCommerce is the future of business. With the use of technology, almost everything is shifting from traditional to online now. It offers a cheaper and more efficient way of doing business by directly selling to consumers. If your business is not online today, you are probably missing out on a lot of money-making opportunities.

However, eCommerce business opportunities are not as easy as may sound. Unless you do proper product opportunity research and use strategies that differentiate yourself from the competition, it can be challenging. Unlike most gurus and marketers who portray eCommerce as a get-rich-quick scheme, by inflating the top line (revenue) of the business to huge numbers in a short period of time to later sell you a dream, your bottom line (profit) is actually the most important. As the saying goes,

“Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality”

Email marketing is the best method of fulfilling the goal of sanity. Running an email campaign could possibly be the most effective and cost-effective way of turning prospects into REAL buying customers and making one-time shoppers into loyal supporters.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to make 6 figures a year in your small business without lifting a finger. You’ve got that right. Automated emails!

Why Use Email Marketing in Your eCommerce Business? 

Marketing automation is one of, if not, the highest ROI marketing channel out there. Why do you think there are so many spammers out there? Spammers are even willing to take the step to hack and phish your email server so that they can be sending out emails as you and just to be doing emails.

Well of course I’m not going to be talking about how to get you to become a hacker/spammer for a quick win. I’m going to be sharing about how to create immense interest in your email subscribers, so that they will keep opening your emails, clicking on them, and buying from you over and over again. I’ve been running eCommerce businesses for more than 5 years now and of all the marketing methods I’ve employed to grow my company to a multi-million dollar business, email marketing is the one that I’m the most excited about. These are the reasons why:

Convert Sales

If you are not using email marketing, you are probably missing out on the opportunities to directly advertise your business to those people who are interested in your products. Compared to other digital marketing strategies, email marketing is still one of the marketing tools that give the highest return on investment of your effort and capital to converting leads into sales because you can segment your list and personalize your emails. Imagine that if you were to send out an email and only your loyal and potential customers are the ones receiving it, would you be getting a very good response? Definitely. It becomes easier for you to encourage your recipients to take action and get into the next step which is to buy something from you.

Get Returning Customers

Getting returning customers is another benefit you can get when you use an email marketing approach. Based on my experience, it is easier to get returning customers if I stay in contact with them, especially with first-time buyers. However, it is a tedious task. But through an email marketing strategy, I can easily send out emails to keep them updated about my business especially if there are special promos like clearance and holiday sales as well as amazing offers like VIP and loyalty benefits, free shipping, and buy-one-take-one.

Win Back Customers Who are Close to Dropping Out

Email marketing is a good method to use when you want to win back your customers who are losing interest in your products. Winning your customers back is important after a churn event. But sometimes, it is not always easy, especially when you want to win back customers who have been lost as a result of a negative experience. The key is to understand why the customer left in the first place. If you can understand what led them to leave, you will be in a much better position to win them back. With the help of email marketing, you can easily reach them out. If you notice that your customers are close to dropping out, immediately send out your re-engagement emails. You may send series of emails like the following: 

• “Hello” Win-Back Email: To remind them that your business still exists and that they are still part of your email list. 
• Incentive Win-Back Email: To give them another reason to re-engage in your business. 
• Feedback Win-Back Email: To ask their opinion on how you can improve your service. 
• Cleaning-House Win-Back Email: To inform them that this is your final effort of reaching them out and convincing them to re-engage.
• Unsubscribe Win-Back Email: To give your customers an option to unsubscribe if they do not want to hear from you anymore. 

Build Relationships and Give Value with Customers to Keep Them Engaged in Your Email List

The good thing about email marketing is that you can easily build relationships with your potential customer, spread better brand awareness and give them value to keep them engaged. For example, you can send out a weekly email newsletter and other personalized content to your customers featuring your products and their benefits. You can also send out survey forms to ask for their feedback on how you can improve your service or ask for a product review. Also, during special occasions like holidays and birthdays, you can easily send your email with personalized subject lines to them.

WordPress Self-Hosted vs Third Party-Hosted Email Marketing Tools

In recent years the WordPress community has been increasingly developing the idea of sending out emails from WordPress. This is not new as WordPress already does this with transactional email such as lost passwords, WooCommerce invoices, new order notifications, etc. However, people started to think of ways they can send out not just transactional emails but marketing emails as well through WordPress. Unlike third-party hosted email marketing platform, this is a gamechanger, especially once these tools are fully mature. Read on to find out why.

WordPress Self-Hosted is Cheaper

WordPress self-hosted email service provider is cheaper because normally you would only be charged based on the number of emails you send out from your email campaign and automation. Being charged based on the number of emails you send is a lot cheaper than being charged based on the number of subscribers you have. 1,000 emails would cost you only around USD 0.10 by using Amazon SES while through SendGrid that is only around $0.25 each. Also, if you own your VPS server, you can even send out an unlimited number of emails. If you are a small business looking for a power but yet the most affordable solution, WordPress-based email marketing service would be the obvious choice.

Self-Hosted is More Tedious to Set Up and You May Need Technical Help to Set It Up

Yes, self-hosting is more tedious to set up because you will need to hook up your WordPress site with an SMTP relay service also known as an outgoing email server with an SMTP plugin such as FluentSMTP and WP Mail SMTP . You need to have a plugin like Autonami CRM which is a popular email marketing software to be sending out the emails for you. In other words, you need to set up multiple things together in order to send out emails.

WordPress Self-hosted Solutions are Not Ready for eCommerce-Based Emails Yet

Currently, WordPress self-hosted do not have good solutions for eCommerce-based emails yet mainly because of the email designer and lack of in-depth segmenting, predictive data, A/B testing, and targeted forms and popups. You cannot design an email separately for mobile device and desktop view. Also, there is no good email designer that is integrated with an eCommerce system which means you cannot insert product/s directly on the email itself. So every time you want to add a product/s, you need to manually insert the product image, the URL, title, and the price.

Vbout is the Best Email Marketing Service

When it comes to email service provider, there’s one name that really stands out, Vbout. With its powerful functionalities, it helps email marketers increase their sales and traffic through email automation. In my opinion, Vbout is probably the best email service provider available so far because it is super easy to use and specifically built for eCommerce. Do not buy into the hype of email marketing software like Campaign Monitor, Benchmark Email, Zoho Campaigns or Klaviyo. They are incredibly expensive for the limits or features they offer.

With Vbout, it has an option that allows you to design an email that is visually good both for mobile and desktop view. Also, it has a personalized recommendation option that allows the product/s to be shown only to those interested people or those who are likely to buy the product/s. It has many integrations that allow online businesses to sync their list and create highly personalized emails by analyzing the customers’ transactional and behavioral data, and sending it to the target audience.

Aside from that, Vbout offers a complete must-have and powerful feature that you can’t get from others. Some of its outstanding features are the following:

Multiple Pre-Built Flows

Vbout has better pre-built flows for welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, thank you emails, and review requests, etc. However, as an email marketer myself, I highly recommend customizing your own flow and tailor-fit with your website. But if this would be a hassle for you, the templated flows work right off the bat regardless.

Advanced Segmentation

Vbout has powerful segmentation tools that allow you to segment and create super-targeted emails based on their transactional, behavioral, and even predictive data.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

This is one of the advanced features offered by Vbout that helps email marketers segment their contacts based on updated spending and predict customers’ future spending based on their previous expenditures.

Deep Marketing Automation Flow

Vbout has trigger and conditional split components that allow you to set up deep marketing automation flows. With splits, you can filter out your recipients based on their behavior. Then, you can create two parallel paths for those who, for example, would check out the items in their cart or those who would totally abandon the items. In this way, you can customize your messages for each group to guide them in their journey.

Also, Vbout allows you to send one flow to another, and back again, essentially creating a loop until your subscriber performs an action to exit both flows. I use this to maximum results for getting Google Business Profile reviews.

In-Depth Reporting

Vbout does in-depth reporting on metrics for active on site, bounce emails, clicked email, dropped email, marked the email as spam, opened email, and received email as well as unsubscribe rate. Vbout automatically removes bounced emails so that it never affects your email deliverability rate.

Personalization

This is not really a selling point but an essential feature of any effective email marketing tool. Vbout makes personalized emails better and easier so your customers would definitely feel that they are valued. 

Predictive Sending

Another game-changer feature of Vbout that when activated, allows you Vbout to optimize sending emails at a time when the subscriber is most likely to open and read your emails.

Integration with eCommerce and Other Marketing Tools

Vbout has a strong relationship with shopping websites and other marketing tools such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Zoho CRM, HubSpot CRM, Salesforce, Twilio, Google Analytics and many more. If your integration is not available, you can also integrate with Pabbly Connect to connect with 900+ over different apps. Once you are done integrating Vbout with your websites, you can easily sync your list and segment them to create a highly targeted audience.

My Strategies for Achieving 6 Figures in Email Marketing

As I mentioned above, I have been doing email marketing for years. It is one of my favorite marketing channels because it is relevant, easy, and profitable. I just have to set this up one time, and it keeps making money for me over and over again. Just like other entrepreneurs who started out, I, too, have undergone the trial and error stage. However, through time and effort, I was able to develop effective strategies that allowed me to achieve a 6-figure ROI. 

Unlike other email marketers who share with you a theory, I’m going to show you my practical tactics that actually do work. If you want to know what these are, keep reading so that you can also use email marketing to your advantage. 

How to Set Up Profitable Email Templates?

The first thing that I want to share with you is my email template. But before going into details, you should start by creating email templates in your email marketing system. You need this to save your time because it speeds up the process of generating emails quickly as well as makes your brand look more professional and consistent.

In my email templates, I would discuss the two most important parts: the header and the footer. I am using two kinds of headers and three kinds of footers. So, why do I have different types of header and header? The reason is that each has a specific purpose and I use them depending on what I want to achieve. Most marketers often do not give much thought to these. But based on my experience, having these headers and footers have helped me market and advertise my business effectively.

Header of Email

What are my email headers used for and when do I use them? 

Header 1 has my company logo and menu buttons. I use this header only when I am not selling anything or anything specific but the goal is for my recipients to visit my website and make a purchase. For example, I have a holiday sale and I am giving $5 off for a minimum spend of $200, then it means that my customer would be eligible for a $5 discount for any products they would buy in my shop. And since I do not know what products they would be interested in, I put menu links in the header so that they can click it and look for products they want to purchase. Menu buttons also help the customers who do not know yet what product to buy but have an intention to buy in the future.

On the other hand, Header 2 has my company logo only. I use this when I am selling something specific, like cart recovery for example. I do this because I know what product/s my customers want to purchase since those are already in their cart. My goal here is for them to actually check those out. If I put menu links in the header, these links would distract them from buying whatever is already in their cart because I am giving them the option to visit my website and look for other products. 

Footer of Email

Now, is the Footer. As I have mentioned, I have three types of footers. Generally, my footer has three elements namely, customer feedback, unique selling points, and social media buttons. But why do I need to have three sets of templates? And why do I use them? Here’s why: 

Footer 1 has customer feedback, unique selling points, and social media buttons. I use this when I am not selling anything but, in reality, I am actually selling something that is why I am giving a discount code. So, I put testimonials (customer’s feedback) here to earn the trust of my customers, especially first-time buyers. Next, I also put the unique selling points of my business. Lastly, the social media buttons. I included these buttons because I want them to follow and subscribe to my page so that even though they might not check their email accounts, they would still be informed and updated through my social media platforms. 

Then, I use Footer 2 if I am not really selling anything. So I only put the unique selling points of my business and the social media buttons. 

And the last one is Footer 3. I use this footer when I am selling something to my customers. I included the testimonial and the unique selling points of my business so that they would be encouraged to purchase. So you might ask why I remove the social media buttons. It is because, again, my end goal here is to earn. I want them to buy my products and not to visit my social media platforms. If I put the social media buttons, this would only distract them because instead of clicking only the button that would lead them to my website, they would also click these buttons and they might totally forget to make a purchase. 

Single- Opt-In vs Double-Opt-In: What Method Should You Use?

The opt-in form is the first hurdle you have to cross on the journey to effective email marketing. Before you can send your first email to your list, you need to entice people to give you their email addresses. There are two different ways to do this: Single-Opt In and Double-Opt-In. What is the difference between the two?

Double opt-in is the default setting for most email marketing services. The double-opt-in is a process in which the new subscribers must confirm their email addresses by clicking a link in the confirmation email after they have been added to a list.

On the other hand, single-opt-in is a process by which the new email addresses will be added to a list without obtaining permission from the email owner.

So, what method should you use?

Others will advise you to use double opt-in to ensure good email deliverability and to avoid fake email addresses. However, based on my experience, double opt-in is the reason why I was pissed off and lost many potential customers before.

The problems with double-opt-in are: 

1. They may not receive the confirmation email. 
2. The confirmation link may not be working because it expires before the new subscribers receive it. Some email marketing services have set up the confirmation link to expire as well. 
3. People who have difficulty following instructions may not know that they have to actually click the confirmation link before they get added to the list.

One example is my store SeniorCare that is a niche store serving elderly people here in Singapore. My customers are not good with computers, the internet, and smartphones at all. They do not know that they have to click on the confirmation link sent to their email addresses. They get frustrated when they cannot order from my store and they feel that I am making the process difficult for them. Therefore, I do not really advise using double-opt-in. 

Instead, you can use “email zero”. “Email zero” is the first email your new customers receive from you before they finally get in. As shown in the picture below, this is about giving them some instructions to ensure the email deliverability of my emails. It should be a text-based email so that its deliverability is higher than those emails with pictures and special characters.

If you want to avoid fake email addresses, use email verifiers such as Truemail or MailRefine instead. 

How to Ensure the Delivery of Your Emails?

Have you ever experienced doing your email marketing campaign yet nobody or only a few from your email lists were able to receive it? Then you wonder what you did wrong for this to happen. You see, even if you did check everything before sending it out, there is still a little percentage that your email would not be delivered. Why? Because you are using technology and email marketing software that have their own limitations. Sometimes, it is beyond your control. But it does not mean you can just let it go.

As an email marketer myself, here is my secret tip:

Use a text-based email for the 1st email in the series

Also, do not put images in your first email series even though it would make your email look nice. Using images would not only make the size of your image large but there is also a high chance that your email would land on spam messages. It is not advisable also to use symbols like a dollar ($) and number sign (#) because, if not in spam messages, your email would go to the promotion inbox. Your goal is for your email to be received by your recipients and to be landed in the primary inbox so that they would be able to see it. 

Do not attach large files as well because there is a big possibility that your email would land in a spam inbox. Large file attachment is a red flag for spam filters. Should you need to send some documents, provide a link to pCloud instead.

Make sure you abide by the Can Spam Act by including your business contact information in the absolute footer of the email. This is highly critical to improve your email campaign and automation delivery.

Lastly, clean up your email list. Email scrubbing would not only ensure the deliverability of your emails, but this would also reduce spam complaints and your cost. 

How to Generate 6 Figures Automated Email Flows?

When it comes to email marketing, a lot of people may think that in order to generate 6 figures revenue, you need to constantly send out sales or promotions to your list.  They thought that the more you offer exciting deals, the better your results will be. It might help you earn more at the beginning, but this approach will not sustain your growth. Take for example the case of Groupon that provides daily deals. As shown in the photo below, their annual billings have dramatically declined from $7.58B in 2014 to $5.31B in 2018. 

As explained by Brittany Davis, this business approach would “merely attract one-time bargain hunters who are often put off by the full retail price (which would be at least double the price of a coupon that is discounted by at least 50%) and do not return until they encounter another Groupon deal that suits them.” 

In the long run, the company that attracts customers by offering deals would find it hard to expand its business to new opportunities. Instead of giving discounts, you need to give value to your email list. Value means valuable content and engagement like articles, product information, and testimonial. You should be able to educate them. 

Now, the question is “How do you generate 6 figures by just using automated email flows?” Generating 6-figures in email revenue may seem like a pipe dream to many marketers, but it is more achievable than you may think. Take a look at my transaction history from April 2018 to April 2019 below: 

The photo shows that out of 1,917 subscribers that I had, 1,351 of them were my returning customers. This allowed me to get a 70.4% returning rate during that period. The reason why I am getting this many returning customers is because of the email marketing system that I am using, which is Klaviyo. The key to success is automation. Automated email flows reduce time to market, deliver consistent messaging, and increase sales and revenue. The trick is getting your email follow-up sequence right, and that’s where this post comes in. This is where you can generate sustained and profitable results. 

The following are the automated emails you can use:

• Welcome Email
• Digital Bribe Welcome 
• Abandoned Cart Recovery
• Customer Win-back 
• Upsell
• Cross-sell 
• Back-in-stock 
• Restock 
• Birthday
• Thank You
• VIP
• Loyalty

Welcome Email

Welcome emails are the first email (after the “email zero”) you send to your subscribers when they sign up on your website. This is also called “Brand Indoctrination”. You send this out intending to indoctrinate your brand to your subscribers.  

My Welcome Email is written positively and lightly. I thanked them for subscribing in the first paragraph. Then in the second and third paragraphs, I provided a glimpse of what my company is about, what we can offer, and the strength of my business. I included these so that my new customers would know what makes my business stand out among my competitors. In the last part, I gave a discount code only to the new customers as a way of thanking them for subscribing. 

Now the question is “How can I generate revenue through Welcome Email?” Here is the thigh, those who signed up are your potential customers and they are interested in your products. But because you are new to them, they need to become comfortable with your brand before they make a purchase. Welcome Email is very powerful in building trust and engaging customers. When they get acquainted with your store, it becomes easier for you to market your products to them. 

Digital Bribe Welcome

The Digital Bribe Welcome is the digital materials such as an e-book, videos, and audio that you send to your subscribers. If you have a content marketing plan for your eCommerce store, you would have blog pages and product pages. People who visit your blog pages are likely not interested in buying from you yet. However, you can offer them more information in the form of a digital bribe in exchange for their emails, then follow up with them and try to convert them into a sale later.

Pro tip: Cut your contents into bites to create valuable information. 

Cut up your ebooks into smaller blog posts and put them up on your website and drip them to those who opt-in as most people aren’t going to read the entire book. However, when you split it up into more manageable content, people are more likely to read it.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Based on my experience, add-to-cart recovery is a good email marketing strategy for making money because your customers already know what they want to purchase. When products interest them, they would click the “add to cart” button. However, not all of those products get purchased. Sometimes, it takes time for your subscribers to decide whether they buy them or not. 

According to the study of Baymard Institute, here are the top 10 reasons why customers abandoned their carts during checkout: 

1. Extra costs are too high
2. The site wanted me to create an account. 
3. Too long/complicated checkout process
4. Couldn’t see/calculate total order cost up-front
5. The website had errors / crashed
6. Didn’t trust the site to input credit card information
7. Slow delivery 
8. Unsatisfactory Return Policy  
9. Mode of payment is limited
10. The credit card was declined

Since these are the reasons why customers abandoned their cart, I make sure that I answer these concerns in the series of emails I send to them. For example, the first email I would send out is basically to remind them that they have something in their cart that needs to be checked out. Then, I would offer a discount code so that they would be encouraged to purchase the product before the code expires. If there is still no action, I would send another email asking them if they are having trouble checking out. The next thing I would ask is if they have queries about the delivery, warranty, payment, or the product itself. 

After these series of emails are being sent and still have no action, I would send a reminder telling them that their shopping cart would expire tomorrow. If it expires, I would send a notification that their cart has expired already. The last email I would send to them is an apology email. I would ask them to take a few minutes to take a survey and they would get a 10% off coupon if they participate to help me gain better insights as to why some people abandon their carts.

Customer Win-Back

Customer win-back emails, also known as re-engagement emails, are used to re-engage your subscribers when they are losing interest in engaging with your store, and are on the verge of losing them. Did you know that getting new customers would cost you five times more than keeping loyal customers? Yes, that is why winning back customers who are losing interest in your products is essential. According to Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, if you increase your retention rates by 5%, it increases your profits by more than 25%. As he explained, it is because returning customers are likely to buy more over time. But to effectively do this, before sending out your email, you have to understand how they behave. Some of them, upon receiving it, may be excited to hear from you while the others maybe not. 

In winning my customers back, for instance, the first email I send includes my best seller products. This is to give them an idea what’s the current trend since they are not engaging for some time. I would also include a discount code that would last for a day to give them a reason to buy something from me before the code expires. In this way, as soon as they read my email, they would visit my website and make a purchase. Thus, winning them back is a success. 

However, should they choose not to buy, I would send the last email to notify them that I am giving them a 2-day allowance to respond, or else the system would remove them and would mark them as Non-returning customers. 

Upsell

Upsell is another email marketing strategy that you can use to boost your revenue. It is not really a type of email but an approach wherein you are suggesting to your customers to buy more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons on the product they originally want to purchase. 

If you are selling cell phones, for instance, instead of offering last year’s models, you are going to suggest to your customers to buy the latest model because it may have higher storage and better features. You need to make them realize that adding a little amount of a penny is worth it and a good deal.

Cross-Sell

Cross-sell is also another effective way to make money. However, unlike upselling, cross-selling is a technique wherein you are encouraging your customers to buy related products that they just recently purchased from you. Sometimes, these products may not necessarily be related to one another but can be complementary in nature. For example, if you are selling kitchen wares and your customer bought a baking pan, you can also ask them if they want to pair it with a hand mixer.

Pro tip: Pre-sell your customers before they make a second purchase

With Klaviyo’s Predictive Analytics feature, you can reach out to your customers and introduce upsells or cross-sells so that when they return to make a second purchase, they pick up the upsells instead or along with the cross-sells.

Back-in-Stock

Running out of supplies is normal and inevitable especially if the products you are selling are in demand. So don’t get discouraged when you experience something like this. You can still recover your lost revenue due to out-of-stock products and win back your customers from your competitors using back-in-stock email. Send an email to your customers to notify them that those products are already available. 

Restock

Restock or replenish emails are used to encourage your customers to make another purchase of the items they previously bought. For example, you can send an email to the customers who bought diapers weeks ago to give a heads up that they might need restocking. The key here is to send your email at the right time so that your customers would find your email useful and convenient. 

By using Klaviyo’s Predictive Analytics feature, I break up my customers into 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks and 8 weeks repeat customers segment. And I email them twice, once a few days before they would return to purchase, and then again much nearer to the day they would make another purchase.

Since the emails are sent to my customers at the perfect timing a few days before they run out of supplies, they are likely to click the “Shop Now” button to make a purchase.

Birthday

If you want to strengthen the bond between you and your customers, sending out birthday emails is worth the effort. So it is necessary that in your signup form, you ask for their birthdays. Everyone wants to be remembered on his/her birthday. Your customers would definitely appreciate this because you remember them during the most special day of their life and they would feel closer to your brand. You can simply wish them a happy birthday, or give special promos like a birthday discount. 

For example, if you are selling footwear, upon wishing them a happy birthday, you can segway your message to promote your products. The message content could be: 

Dear [Name of the Customer], 

Happy Birthday!

Congratulations and we wish you much success!

As you walk through another year of your life, may our [Name of Product] be your companion. Treat yourself with a new pair of shoes because you deserved it. 

Again, happy birthday!

From your [Name of Company] family 

This is just an example. Sky’s the limit when you are sending out birthday emails. The key is to be creative and sincere. 

Thank You

Thank you emails are typically sent after a customer buys your products or avails of your services to show your gratitude and appreciation. Aside from giving quality products to your customers, letting them know that you appreciate their purchase would make them feel valued and special. Every customer wants to feel that and therefore, this is the best way to build a strong connection and relationship with them. When you sound or look less sales-y, your customers would feel comfortable and can easily trust you. 

When it comes to my Thank You emails, there are a few things to achieve. Firstly is to provide the customers with information on what comes next after they have placed their order. Next, you want to show them where they can track their orders. You will also want them to leave you reviews on your products, Google My Business, Facebook Page, and other review medium sites as well as making them subscribe to all your different marketing channels such as push notifications, social media, and chatbots. Not everyone opens emails and clicks on them. What you want to do is to make sure that you try and reach out to them the best that you can.

VIP

As for the term itself, those customers who belong to this category should be treated VIP. For example, if you have a Holiday sale, you can extend your sale only to these customers. You can also give an exclusive discount. You can even run special deals that are exclusive to them only. You can generate revenue from them as long as you make them feel special. 

Loyalty

Customer Loyalty program is also another approach you can employ to your business to help you convert first-time buyers into loyal ones and encourage those loyal to keep buying from you. You can use a point system for this. For example, for every minimum purchase of $100, your customers may get 1 point and these points are convertible to money. They can use these points only when they are able to collect 1000 points. 

Best Email Campaigns Tactics

Okay, now that you have an idea of what types of email you should be sending out to your subscriber and how to create email campaigns in Vbout, the next thing you need to know is how to ensure the success of your email marketing campaigns. And to do that, you need to have strategies or tactics to best run successful email campaigns. Here’s how.

Inform Early

As the saying goes “Early bird catches the worm”, so if you start informing your customers early, you have a higher and better chance of success. Sending out your email campaigns early to your subscribers allows you to advertise your products or events (like sales promotions) in a more favorable span of time. Remember that you are not the only one selling that product or have that kind of service. If you don’t inform them early that you have this and that, they might look for others that offer the same product or service as you. 

In my practice, I send out my email campaigns at least three (3) days before the actual events. In my opinion, this is just enough time for my customers to be aware of the sales promotions or product launching. If I send out too early, chances are my email would be among the piled-up emails in my customers’ inbox or the information would slip away out of their mind. If I send it out too late, they might feel pressured to visit and browse my website.

Start of Sale

Another way to ensure the effectiveness of your email campaign is to send out another email at the start of the sale. Let’s say for example you send your email three days before the actual event, the thing is your customers might still forget about it. Remember that your customers are all busy with their lives and there is a higher chance that after receiving your email, they would totally forget about it. So to avoid that, you can send out another email during the start of the sale for them to be reminded and excited about your promo period.

Last Hour/Last Day

Every customer is different. Some would prefer to buy your products as soon as they receive your email, while others would prefer last-minute online shopping. So sending out emails during the last hour or last day of your promo period would definitely not be a waste of time and effort. Based on my experience, having a last-minute reminder gave me a higher chance of success in my campaign. Why? It gives a feeling of urgency to my customers. It urges them to open, read, and make a purchase of the product that they want from my store because it would be their last chance to avail the amazing deals I have for them.

Extension

So you might ask, “should I extend my sales?” Yes, you should because giving the last push to your promo period is beneficial to your business. Not only would it give your customers another chance to grab their favorite products, but it would also give you a chance to tweak your products and allow you to examine your sales cycle especially if you do not reach your target sales. Extending your promo period is like saying to your customers “Hey we have noticed that you failed to avail our product during the promo period. But since you are loyal to us, we will give you another chance.” 

For me, I usually give 5 days extension to my VIP customers. I send out another email so that they would be aware that the promo period has been extended. 

End and Thank You

Ending your email campaign in a thank you message is a type of post-purchase email that you can use to show your gratitude to your customers. It is a simple yet powerful gesture to let your customers know how much you appreciate their support and loyalty to your business. It is also an effective way to build connections and relationships with them because you would sound sincere and less sales-y. The more your buyers feel that they are valued and special, the more they trust you and your brand. Your simple thank you message can go a long way.

Content Calendar

When we talk about a content calendar, it is basically your preferred schedule for your content. For example, what type of email you want to send out and how often. It is essential that among your team, you have a shared calendar so that everyone has an idea of what needs to be delivered. For email marketing, what I can suggest for you is to use an online calendar platform such as Google Calendar.

Cleaning Your Email List

If you are sending out your email campaign and you notice that your open rate and click rate is low, maybe it’s time to clean your email list. It is because cleaning up your email list is another way to ensure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Cleaning your list periodically will bring better delivery and open rate as well as reduce the cost of email marketing.

Why Do You Need to Clean?

Cleaning up your email list means removing all bounced emails and unengaged email contacts. You should be doing this couple of times each year. You need to clean up your email list because of the following:

To Reduce the Cost and Increase Your ROI

Whether you are using WordPress self-hosted or 3rd party hosted email marketing solutions, having a larger email contact base will definitely cost more money. You will be sending out more emails since you’ll also be sending out inactive email contacts and that affects your cost if you are using WordPress self-hosted solutions. While 3rd party solutions charge you based on the number of email contacts you have.

To Get Better Reporting

Have you ever wondered why sometimes the report you are getting after a campaign does not make any sense to you? That is normal because inactive subscriptions and spam complaints would really affect the accuracy of your statistics. So to avoid that, you should make an effort to clean up your email list. Remember that inaccurate data will never ever help you in your marketing efforts. 

To Increase Open Rates and Click-Through Rates

Well, it’s obvious that when you do email scrubbing, the only ones left on your email lists are those who are actively engaging in your business. Even if you are left with a smaller list, your open rates and click-through rates will increase. Again, this is because you are sending emails only to those who would be glad and excited to hear from you.

To Lessen Email Bounces

If some of your emails bounce back to you every time you have a campaign, you definitely need an email clean-up. One of the reasons why email bounces is because the email address is no longer active. Having lots of email bounces will cause your email delivery rate to drop as you may come across as spamming by spam blacklist databases. Delete those inactive emails so they won’t affect your email deliverability. 

To Avoid Getting Lots of Spam Complaints

You’re getting lots of spam complaints? That means some of your subscribers mark your email as spam. Sometimes, they forget to sign up on your website or they don’t want to hear anything from you anymore. If you are getting too many complaints, the next time you send it out, your email will automatically go to the spam folder of your recipients. Avoid this hassle by cleaning up your list. 

How to Clean?

Now that you understand the importance of email scrubbing, the next thing you need to know is how to clean up your list. Though cleaning up is quite simple, you still need to be extra careful so that you would not end up losing those email addresses of your active subscribers. So how to do that? 

Check Your Lists from Newest to Oldest

In this way, it would be easier for you to segment them. Group together those who are actively engaging with you, those who belong to a special group, those who recently unsubscribe you, etc.

Look for Duplicate Email Addresses

Duplicate email addresses are inevitable. Your subscribers may unintentionally re-sign up on your website, mostly because they forget that they have already signed up. Mostly, email marketing service like Vbout can automatically delete duplicate email addresses. But if your automation platform cannot do this, you can use MailRefine to save your space and your money.

Pay Attention to Fake Email Addresses

Fake email addresses are like duplicate email addresses but much worse. They do not simply eat up your space but they also add up to email bounces, spam complaints, as well as skew your statistics. No recipient will ever receive your email. If they are still part of your contacts, remove them. As mentioned above, you can use email verifiers such as TrueMail and Clearout instead of using double-opt-in. 

Double Check if there are Typographical Errors

Maybe the reason why your emails are bouncing back to you is because of the typographical errors. Though it would be a tedious task, double-checking your contacts one by one would be worth the effort (or ask your assistant to do that for you). Typos in email addresses are normal especially if you input them manually. For example, instead of yahoo.com, you put yaho.com, or instead of dot (.), you put a comma (,). Again, I recommend you to use tools like TrueMail to help with bad syntax. 

Goal Setting

In setting your goal, you should ask yourself these questions: “What do I want to achieve in my business?” and “How can Email Marketing Strategy help me achieve that?”. 

Your answers to these questions should be going to be the starting point of your goal setting. You should never jump into action without knowing the answers and listing them down. Goal setting is really important. In fact, this should be the first thing that you need to do. Without a goal, you are like a ship sailing without a destination. 

Also, it is important to avoid setting goals that are impossible to achieve due to your own limitations. You should always consider your time, skills, and resources so that you can make realistic plans. As much as you want to challenge yourself by setting big plans, you should avoid doing it. The downside of creating big plans is that it will be harder for you to actually achieve them. And when things don’t go as planned, you will get discouraged until you finally decide to drop it and just go with the flow. Unlike if you start making realistic goals (but not too small that you would end up doing nothing or not progressing), you can surely achieve them. 

For example, you can start building up your email list by having 250 email addresses. This is a good number to begin with because you can maximize your free plan subscription in Klaviyo that allows you to have 250 recipients. I can confidently say that if you set up your automated emails well, you would be making money already with these 250 recipients that would allow you to cover your paid plan should you need to upgrade. When you reach this goal, increase your target to 500, 1,000, or 10,00 email addresses. Having this milestone in mind can motivate you to get your email marketing work and achieve your goal.

Final Thought

Email Marketing is probably the best marketing strategy for a small business. Based on my experience, nothing is as good as email marketing when it comes to generating revenue due to the ability to increase the customer lifetime value. It is a great marketing channel that extends your profitability when you run frontend ads so that you can outbid your competitors on Facebook and Google Ads. Your email list and customer database are an asset to your business, and most companies are valued because of their customer database. Without an email marketing process in your business, you are leaving tons of money on the table without an asset that can be valuable and sold off in the future. If you desire to excel in email marketing for your business, check out Decisive Email.