All too often when people email business to business or business to people there emails resemble a flyer.

Just remember you are emailing from you to someone else so keep it conversational and enjoyable to read so you don't loose their attention.

In this blog were going to look at how to capture someone's interest and take them on a journey so you know without a shadow of a doubt the person is interested and you take them from your email to a hot lead.

Let's begin.

Open Rates are Inaccurate as Image Tracking Pixel are Blocked By Email Services or Clients

Step 1: Open rates are not a good figure to rely on for a couple of different reasons:

• Many email servers or clients block images and email tracking is an image pixel so you may think you have a poor open rate when the person has opened your email.
• Other email services cache your images for faster load times which trigger's tracking image pixels leaving you thinking your email was opened and it may not have been.

A better option would be to have your email providers tracking code on the back of your website which tracks email link clicks to your website back to your email service and tags the email address that opened your email and the link on your email they clicked.

Have your end goal at the top of the email so within the first 3 to 5 seconds so your email reader knows exactly how your product or service will benefit them and for them to learn more they need to click a link in your email to visit your blog which has the rest of the email story (Client testimonials etc).

Once your email reader clicks the link to go to your blog, the email tracking code pops a tag against your visitors email address which you can flag for an automation email or alerting you what email address is reading your blog should you want to phone the lead to see if you can help with anything.

Don’t Segment Your List - Instead Use Tags to Group Readers by Interests

Step 2: I hate list segmentation and yet I see many people push it as a benefit.

Here's the issue with list segmentation. Your email reader signed up to your default email list.

You send out several emails and eventually they buy from you, so you move them to a buyers list.

You now have two email lists and you have segmented your readers from buyers to non buyers.

However, after 6 months people on the buyers list don't buy do you move them back to your non buyers list?

It's an option, you could also have them in your buyers list as they bought and also have them in your non-buyers list as they have not bought for six months.

What if you send different emails to your buyers list and to your non buyers list?

The upshot is, if you segment your lists with multiple lists you're going to end up not knowing who you have emailed and who you haven't emailed.

There's a much better way to automate your list it's cold tagging.

Most email providers offer tagging just check with your email provider if they offer tagging if your not sure.

I like Activecampaign, Covertkit and GetResponse as they are very reasonable and support tagging and lead scoring but first let's talk about how tagging works.

You send an email to a client. As the email gets sent you tag the email address so you know what emails your client got.

The client opens the email clicks on the link in the email and is taken to your blog.

Your blog page has the email service tracking code and adds a tag to say the person checked out the blog.

You can set up an automated trigger where the clients email address's that have been tagged for opening a blog from a sent email link. To send a new email inviting your list members to another blog, sales letter, testimonials page, discount offer, a limited scarcity offer or something.

Another solution could be to just set up a trigger that emails you when both tags are tied to an email address.

So when a client or list member has looked at a sent email and then click through to your blog site to read more.

You get an email notification so you can phone up the client to ask if you can help with anything and hopefully increase your chances of a new sale.

Start Your Message in Email and Finish Your Message In Your Blog

Step 3: I briefly covered starting the email and finishing it in the blog here's how this would work for you.

If you sold power washers you could title an email “three steps to get the best power washer for you”.

In the email you break up models to different uses with links to each models featured blog e.g.

• Model 652 comes with longer hoses to reach roofs ideal for cleaning roofs Learn more.
• Model 653 are more power for shifting grease stains from driveways Learn more
• Model 654 are great for blasting fences to remove mildew and old paint before painting them Learn more 

You tag each model clicked to the sender email address, and yes some readers may click more than one link, for readers who click more than one link you can send a followup email.

Hey, I seen you had an interest in our Jet Washes, be great if you could click the link that best suits your interest (Driveway cleaning, Roof cleaning, Fence cleaning)

This way it helps you get focused with your next automated email.

At this stage you have kept the email short and straight to the point with everyone being in a hurry these days this is exactly what people want.

If they haven't checked out the blog you've left them in suspense and send out another email the following week, the more they see your emails the more chance they will open them or unsubscribe.

This improves your chance of taking the visitor from email onto the blog which is being more interaction with your reader to your content.

Not only that, this gets more visitors to your website and the more visitors to your website.

The more Google takes notice when you have Google Analytics tracking code in the back-end as google Analytics logs visitors and time on page, so the longer your visitor is on your page.

Which means your pages gives a good user experience which is also a massive benefit come SEO, as Google likes to show pages that are of benefit two others.

At The Bottom Of Your Blog Have a “To Learn More Link”

Step 4: at the bottom of your blog have a link to a sales presentation video. This gives a very personal touch and has a much better chance of getting the sale or a meeting whatever the call to action is that you require.

You can finish off the video with one of the following ideas.

• To arrange a meeting call this number.
• To buy, click on the link below this video.
• If I can help you with any more information give me a call on this number.

As you can see taking a reader from an email to a blog from a blog to a video from a video to a call to action can be very powerful.

What's The Best Email Marketing Software?

Step 5: The best email Marketing software is this software you know how to use.

There's nothing worse than getting a software service or product but you don't yet know how to use or don't have faith in.

The only thing I would do with any email product or service is check they support automated tagging and also automated tracking.

For me I like Activecampaign and Convertkit as they are very affordable, do tracking and lead scoring.

If you haven't used lead scoring before it's the ability to score Leeds.

Here's how it works.

You give each action a value so it could be when an email reader clicks on a link in an email to go visit a blog, that's 10 points, then when the email reader is on the blog and click the link to visit a sales page, that's 20 points, you could then set up a trigger where you email readers that have 30 points.

The email could be set to notify you to give them a call.

Your Not Just Sending an Email - Your Setting Up a Marketing Funnel

Step 6: if you've never set up an email this way you may panic and think that's a lot of work.

The best way to start as get a pencil and paper write down the steps you need and crack on. Here's some basic steps.

1. Make sure your email service tracking code is put on every page on your website, normally there is a global space you enter it once and every page picks up the tracking code.
2. When your email service sends your email, make sure it ads the tag name of the email to the email address so you know who got the email sent later down the line.
3. On your email service add a rule that if a link is clicked on the email that opens up a blog page and adds a tag to the user's email address.
4. Once the visitor comes from the email to your website by clicking the link, this activates session tracking which means if the visitor clicks on to watch your sales video you can also have the sales video page add a tag to the email address meaning you can see if the blog page was opened, after reading the blog they then checked out your sales page for you to follow up with an email or a call.

Conclusion

My conclusion to these steps are... don't send one email, create a proper funnel.

Any decent email autoresponder will fit your needs, just check the tagging set up and email setup blog tracking.

Set up a sales video and boom this will make your job so much easier and is giving your email list so much interaction with your content and you're not being pushy.

Your content is leading them on to the next bit of content which is positive, will really boost your interaction and give you a better chance of getting that sale.

I hope you like blog and if you have any questions pop it in the comments box below bye for now.

Nearly breaking even is a loss. You don’t want to spend money on paid advertising if it’s not working.

Imagine you spent over £1,200 on Facebook marketing and the product didn’t convert as well as you had wanted and you nearly broke even.

That’s what happened to me and this blog is how I stopped spending money to test Facebook conversions and went all in on time to test if free traffic from Instagram could build my email list.

The idea is to get conversions working with free traffic then use paid traffic to upscale as the most expensive part of paid traffic is paying for leads when your funnel does not convert.

I’m going to cover all the free software I use while it’s limited and that’s ok. As once you start seeing results with free traffic you can switch to paid traffic to massively increase conversions.

Step 1 – Which HashTags to use?

There’s no need to get creative with hashtags. Do a search for your niche hashtag and look for people who have many likes and many comments. Go through the comments to make sure many of them are not automated and is in fact real people which let you know that channel and hashtag has real interest.

Search for your main interest hashtag e.g.

[spacer height=”20px”]

Pick one of the many posts that get returned and go look at there hashtags.

Once you click on the picture to see the description, you see all the hashtags that got views. Also the person will have a lot of followers. This technique gets me lots of free visitors to my Instagram profile each week. Look at the below hashtags for the above image:-

You want to find 3 sets of hashtags where the images have over 100 likes and 10 comments.

At this point you want to copy those three sets of hashtags onto a page separating by several returns.

The reason for several returns is, you are going to write an advert for each Instagram hashtag group. This will give you three posts a day.

More on this later when I cover posting with a free scheduler tool.

Best Way To Find Ad Content

When you are looking for interesting content I find the best way is to use a free keyword tool that you install into Chrome as a plug-in and that’s called “keyword anywhere”.

You type in your keywords into Google and it shows you related keywords that you pick which best suits the content you want to post e.g.

Now you have the best keyword phrases, paste them into Google and do a search. You are looking for articles or titles within the first ten or twenty you are URL’s.

You are looking for titles to give you ideas to write a new Instagram post around for example in the post below you could take 6 tips for writing an awesome business email as your Instagram text then in the Instagram description write your own content.

Call To action To Move Visitors From Your Image To Your Profile

The goal with Instagram is to get people to click on your Instagram image then jump across to your profile and then from your profile to your landing page. So currently we are at your image and you want to get as many people to click on the image to see your profile.

The best way I found of doing this was to put a call to action at the bottom of every image. I posted “Free Download in my Profile” and this boosted my click through rate from images to my profile from virtually nothing to 202 profile visits from Dec-11 to Dec-1, that’s only 7 days.

You can test different messages to see what works best for you.

If you don’t have any photo software, use Canva.com, it’s free, easy to use and has a phone app.

Link Your Instagram Profile To Your Landing Page

Put a free download into your Instagram profile to get click throughs, I’m still testing my click through rate and want to show you what I got in 7 days:-

• From 202 Instagram profile visitors.
• 19 visitors clicking my free download link.
• 5 new email subscribers.

To put this into perspective, for the 202 images that were clicked bringing visitors through to my profile, if I used paid Facebook adverts, I would be paying around $3 a click, that times 202 clicks would have cost me $606 for 5 email signups, in a week.

So, yes, I need to keep tweaking my profile offer to improve email signups, can you see how powerful this is?

If your trying to build a customer base with no budget, thats 20 leads a month for free.

That being said, take a look at my subscriber growth. If you were going to run a paid campaign to a bigger boost in email signups, by using free traffic and testing different text, you can see by looking at the signup conversion chart below I have a much better chance of converting paid ads to sign-up’s:

Keep in mind these are still cold leads, you need to convert them to warm leads before you make sales.

While in this post i’m just talking about Instagram free traffic, I’m also generating free traffic from Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest, but that will be more blogs covering one free traffic source at a time.

The key takeaway her is that once you get your free traffic converting at a rate you are happy with, you can start paid advertising to drive traffic knowing you will get an instant boost on conversions.

Word of warning. If you add paid traffic, make sure your conversions get your ad cost back. If not on the lead in offer, at least on the upsale. If this makes no sense at the moment, just stick to free traffic.

The Best Free Give Away You Can Offer

While I see other people offer:-

• Free consultation time
• Pay postage only for free items
• Video recordings of high ticket events.

I like to offer handouts written in Google docs then publish them in the Google doc, DO NOT share them as a shared Google doc has a limit of 100 views then stops for 12 hours, whereas a published Google doc has unlimited views.

To publish a Google Doc. Go to File > Publish to the web…

The link you get for the published doc messes up the format, you need to paste the link into https://gdoc.pub/ which generates a new URL for you to share as a well formatted handout which updates automatically when you update your Google doc. Here’s what I mean.

If I publish this Google Doc, the format messes ups e.g.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQVyLDopdvVO0d_5M3Z0WLwG7fqV_eHgEE4w786zL5WwLgpfXqMLSo41uB5Tsg-Xdye7WLqxmTpBVyu/pub

When I run the above URL through https://gdoc.pub/ I get the below formatted URL:-

https://gdoc.pub/doc/e/2PACX-1vQVyLDopdvVO0d_5M3Z0WLwG7fqV_eHgEE4w786zL5WwLgpfXqMLSo41uB5Tsg-Xdye7WLqxmTpBVyu#

Which has the same formatting as your Google doc, super quick and great for handouts.

Now You Have Cold Email Leads – Time To Make Them Customers

Taking a new email signup to a sale is a whole guide on it’s own and looking around the internet you will see everyone has their own ideas on the best process.

End of the day it all boils down to three things:-

1. Does your product or service save them time or money?
2. Does your reader trust you?
3. Can your reader afford the cost?

If yes to all three, enjoy many sales. If no to any of these, you have work to do.

The reason for not making sales is your lead does not see you as the best go to person for the product or service you offer.

As I don’t know you, or your level of experience, the best way to sell to your list is to talk about real situations in the form of a story.

We have been telling stories to keep our families safe in fun ways from caveman times to modern times from the Green Cross Code to Stranger Danger etc.

If your not sure how best to structure your story, I would recommend this book from Amazon for a couple of reasons:-

• It’s affordable
• Once you buy the book you have free access to the template website where you fill in the blanks and your story is created.

The book is:- Building a StoryBrand – https://amzn.to/2GzHZHf and the reason I give a tip on each instagram post to give you value and start building trust from the get-go.

Conclusion & Well Done

Well done sticking to the end, I have covered allot in this post and want to help you even more in my Facebook group where you can ask questions and talk to others to share and learn from everyone’s experiences for free. Click here to join: Link To Facebook Group

6 Email Marketing Best Practices – NEW Strategy for Today

In today’s blog I want to talk about how you can make the biggest impact with your auto-responder so you can deliver great content to your email list.

These steps will help you to build trust quickly which helps you promote your product or service which helps you get ahead faster while giving great value and being seen as a leader in your niche.

Tip #1 Don’t Build Targeted Lists – Tag Email Addresses To Get Laser Focused

Time and time again I see experts telling people to organise their email list by multiple lists.

The danger of this may not immediately be clear However what happens is…

You organise your list members by interests, by sales, by failed sales.

Over time, you end up with multiple lists. Each list having its own auto-responder series.

So far all looks good and with each list having its own auto-responder series.

Do you have your list members in one list or duplicated in more than one list as they may fit multiple lists?

The issue with having people in multiple lists is. One list could send the person an email serious then another list sends the list member an email from a different series where the user is trying to follow one series and ends up getting confused as the mix-and-match of emails confuses both email sequences.

The result is your list member stops opening your emails or unsubscribes.

At this point you have lost them.

A better solution is to have your auto-responder tracking code on your site and set up automation for tagging as emails are sent, or a blog on your website gets opened from an email link.

This way you build a profile of each user and what they look at on your site which had them most interested.

As every page on your funnel your visitor looks at from your email link gets tagged to the email address by your Auto-Responder.

Meaning you can have an automation setup that emails based on users who have tag 1, tag 6 tag 9 and tag 11. Then email an invitation to your sales letter or video.

Tip #2 Automate first and track later or you will let your list down (Seasonal Promotion, Events)

when you start off with a new list or campaign, the excitement is blazing you want to get stuck right in which is great.

The problem shows itself after you set up your list you then need to set up your email funnel to drive people on to your sales page.

It’s at this point too many people get caught up with tracking.

They look at different tracking models e.g. UTM tracking third party tracking email auto-responder tracking migrating your auto-responder with your website for tracking.

While all these tracking solutions have their own benefits. People end up procrastinating rather than write their email flow, causing new email list members to see a couple of emails then nothing.

A better approach would be to write 5 or 6 emails at one time and have those 5 or 6 emails set up as one email a week making sure your first subscriber does not catch up with the latest weeks email then write another 5 or 6 emails and put them in two weeks.

Keep repeating this email writing process and you will stay ahead of the game and visit tracking when you have that window where the first subscriber has not caught up to the last email.

The key thing to remember here is. You can always change tracking if it’s not what you expected as many people get confused with the original tracking they setup.

However, unfortunately many people do not take the time to become experts at tracking which is a must, to keep costs down and conversions up.

Tip #3 Personalise – Even if you don’t have their name – Tags tell you a lot

I understand it’s a must to personalised emails for higher conversion rates and sales down the line.

The issue comes with cost versus quality let me explain.

When your landing page only asks for the visitors email address more people subscribe and if you’re driving people to your landing page from paid advertising you want to squeeze every subscriber out your advertising budget.

On the flip side if you ask for the person’s first name and email address you get less email subscribers but you can personalise your emails right from the get go.

Does this really matter, for me the verdict is still out and different niche’s have different interests so test what works best for you.

That being said. What I do is… I tag my email list when I send out an email and my emails have cliffhangers to show my email list readers who click on my email to go to a blog which I track with my email system which is Active Campaign and has tracking code on the back of my webpage which takes the email address and adds the tag of the blog the person visited to the email visitor.

You can see the below visitor download my Opt-In Download PDF as the System tagged them automatically then added them to my Intro Set email auto-responder.

I do this process from one list and group each user into my categories based on tags. Using tags are super simple yet very effective at giving your reader focused content on auto-pilot.

This lets me see what content each of my list members consumed and I know that a group of tags together means a list member has checked several blogs on a topic and for those who check several blogs on a topic I can set up an automation in my active campaign that says something like if an email user has this type this type in this tag sent this email or if an email user has this time this time and this time send a different email.

By doing this, you end up with multiple interests being addressed I’m really focusing personally on your readers interests which improves conversion rates build trust and sales.

Tip #4 Clean Emails Work Better On Mobile

I was looking at a website using Google Analytics that has over a 1.1 million visits a month.

What’s interesting is that the amount of people who signed up to that site was nearly a 48/48 split between mobile and desktop with tablets at a negligible 4%.

Based on mobile conversions being so high I would ultimately advise when writing emails to keep them clean.

Too often I see emails being sent that resemble flyers which have a terrible conversion rate as half the content does not load on a mobile.

Your list want speed and good performance, people do not have time to download images and just skip to the next email to get through all the emails normally when commuting or on lunch or in the canteen while on a break, etc.

Tip #5 Subject Lines Matter – Use Google & YouTube who already use AI to get the best Order

We all know subject lines matter and we spend so much time trying to perfect the perfect headline.

So I thought of a better solution.

Type your headline into Google or YouTube and let Google and its AI algorithms sort through millions of pages to bring back the top 10 Google listings with headlines showing you the top 10 results based on user interest and high click through rate which is ultimately the result you are trying to achieve.

Now, it couldn’t be simpler. My advice here would be – why reinvent the wheel when Google can do it all for you and is number one in the industry for finding the best content for you and everyone else.

So use the power of Google and speed up writing email subject lines.

Tip #6 Best Time To Send Emails – I don’t bother, But Do Set emails to go on subscribers local time

When is the best time to send emails? This question gets asked over and over on forums read-it and a host of other websites.

The main answer here is it all depends on your niche or niche depending where you’re from. By all means send out emails and do a multivariate test where you split your email list buy 20% 20% 20% 20% or 30% 30% 30% or 50/50 and send out different times to see what works best for you.

For me, I choose not to do that. I prefer to check my auto-responder is set to the local time of each country of each subscriber on my list which I believe is on for most email services by default. Best to check for yourself.

When the user subscribes to my list. My list re-sends any emails in my automation on that time.

The reason being is that it’s a safe bet when the person joined your email list, that will be the same time they are normally on their phone checking emails which to me is a good time to send my automated emails.

The key thing to remember is that email Marketing is all about consistency to build trust which ultimately leads to a sale of a product or service by sending emails on the time the user subscribed and keep doing it gives you the best chance of getting that email seen also quality of email content plays a massive part and using cliffhangers at the bottom of your emails keeps your list interested on what’s coming next or the next call to action of the email onto a blog.

Conclusion

This is my 6 email Marketing best practices and if you follow them, please leave a comment to let me know how you get on.

New Facebook Group – I answer all questions…

Click on the link below and join, have a chat or ask questions, even share success stories you may have had yourself.

Facebook Group:- https://www.facebook.com/groups/davidrm/

6 Email Marketing Tips and Tricks That Realistically Improve Open Rates!

In a world where many people listen to Spotify instead of radio, spend insane amounts of time watching YouTube and fast forward catch up TV when adverts come on.

It’s becoming harder to get your message across and help others.

In a world with more noise each day here’s my 6 email marketing tips and tricks to get higher open rates.

Tip #1 Scrub your email list for non-openers after 5 sends else the ISP will think you are spamming – Tip from Neil Patel

I don’t want to waste people’s time so weak after week with people not opening my emails I decided to remove them from my list trouble is I needed to work out the balance between the person not being interested in an particular email I send once a week or the person not being interested in anything I offer and only signed up because they wanted my free download.

Some people recommended 6 months and some people recommended a year and have no email opens then get them off your list.

I found an interesting article by an expert called Neil Patel who recommends if an email does not get opened 5 times in a row.

So, you’re sending out weekly emails that would be 5 weeks and no opens! Get them off your list.

At the end of the day your list is prime property and your paying for it.

You don’t want non-interested people on your list and by cleaning up your list you improve the quality of your list by only keeping interested parties on it.

Tip #2 Spam check your emails before adding them to your auto-responder

I got caught out big time with this one. Here’s what happened.

I ran a campaign and people subscribed to my list in return for a free PDF download, and those people who signed up for my free eBook download didn’t get my eBook.

After a bunch of emails I tested what was going on. It turned out that the email with the download was being email to spam folders. The reason being was, I had a couple of words the spam filters didn’t like.

How I fixed this was. I Googled a newsletter spam tester and many pages were listed, the top link was free to use, it gives you a unique generated email address each time you use it to send your email to be analysed.

Once my email was scanned in seconds, I found out a couple of words that are classed as marketing or sales.

Once I changed them for other words, my emails worked fine.

Based on my experience with spam scores I would highly recommend you spam check all emails before putting them into your autoresponder.

Tip #3 Check your email Subject line reads casually as emails from friends have high open rates

I have talked about the importance of subject lines before in emails and is its so powerful I’m going to talk about it again in this blog.

One of the best ways to find an email subject line is to do a search on Google or on YouTube for a key phrase that closely matches what you’re trying to achieve.

The benefits of this is, Google and YouTube use AI to cross reference millions of pages and videos then bring back the 10 best, most viewed pages/videos using an array of algorithms.

For me, I find this is the best way to get a headline with all the necessary key words to be competitive is, just tweak one of Google top ten listings so that it reads well and formatted in a way that’s of interest to your audience.

Tip #4 Write in different style to find the style that works for you

When you write an email think about the styles you write in. This could be “Problem”, “solution”, “outcome”.

You may use a character and that character could be something like increasing pricing or technical difficulty, just make the character into something that’s a real issue with people who could benefit from your product or service.

Then go on to talk about the benefits and finish off with two benefits out of six, with a message, to read the other 4 benefits click here.

Then you look at your stats after driving 100 or so people to that email and you see how many people took action. If it’s a good conversion rate you stick to that style of writing because over the weeks, people start to get used to your style and how you write so keep it consistent.

Once people get used to your style of writing, they get to like your personality and look forward to your email tips.

So, you have to be thinking consistency consistency consistency and especially so with email.

Tip #5 Send plain text emails as images will get your emails put into the Gmail promotions tab

When you send emails, send them in plain text no I don’t mean to take the text format I mean use HTML because of tracking is done with the HTML and special URL links are used. Just don’t have lots of images in there.

I had a look at a website that had 1.1 million sessions over a month using Google Analytics, when I look down at the devices that were used, the breakdown was…

• Tablets had 4% of visitors
• Mobiles had 48%
• Computers had 48%

This is important and means that mobile phones are being used very heavily, so you want to make sure that the emails you send out are format nicely on a mobile phone.

Here’s how I do it. Use a size 14 font so it is big enough for the visitor to read, especially when she is over 35 as there is a higher chance people’s eyesight start to go at close contact like looking at a mobile phone or looking at a book closely will need glasses, whereas a size 14 font will make an email easy to read on a mobile without glasses. Which is great, especially if your reader is commuting and don’t want to pull out their glasses.

So you want to be keeping images to a minimum and don’t use all different coloured backgrounds keep it basic. White background with dark text.

Tip #6 Email addresses removed from your list, run them against a Facebook custom audience once a week

Previously I talked about if someone doesn’t open up 5 emails in a row.

So if your sending one email a week, that means your email reader has not read one of your emails in five weeks.

It’s time to get them off your list, after all your list is prime space which you pay for.

The issue is that your email reader may not be at a level yet to purchase your product or service.

So another thing I like to do is when I take somebody off a list is to put them into a spreadsheet and upload that spreadsheet once a week as a YouTube Custom Audience.

You need about 500 email addresses, so just keep adding non-responders and try different ads with different messages aiming at different levels of expertise that you offer.

This may show you as new ads get clicked that your non-responsive email addresses could be looking for more or less advanced content from you.

At the end of the day, non-responsive people on your list registered for your free eBook, so they were interested at some level of expertise you offered.

One thing I like to do is take a Facebook ad to a survey page landing page. How this works is. You have 4 or 5 selection boxes asking the visitor to click their level of experience, this is where you match each experience level to a different eBook.

Once the visitor selects their level of experience using a Google survey, you redirect them to a download page asking them where to email the PDF they selected.

This way you get to see what the unresponsive people are more interested in, which helps you focus your products or services.

And a plus is you get unsubscribes to engage again with your list.

6 Email Marketing Tips and Tricks That Realistically Improve Open Rates!

In a world where many people listen to Spotify instead of radio, spend insane amounts of time watching YouTube and fast forward catch up TV when adverts come on.

It’s becoming harder to get your message across and help others.

In a world with more noise each day here’s my 6 email marketing tips and tricks to get higher open rates.

Tip #1 Scrub your email list for non-openers after 5 sends else the ISP will think you are spamming – Tip from Neil Patel

I don’t want to waste people’s time so weak after week with people not opening my emails I decided to remove them from my list trouble is I needed to work out the balance between the person not being interested in an particular email I send once a week or the person not being interested in anything I offer and only signed up because they wanted my free download.

Some people recommended 6 months and some people recommended a year and have no email opens then get them off your list.

I found an interesting article by an expert called Neil Patel who recommends if an email does not get opened 5 times in a row.

So, you’re sending out weekly emails that would be 5 weeks and no opens! Get them off your list.

At the end of the day your list is prime property and your paying for it.

You don’t want non-interested people on your list and by cleaning up your list you improve the quality of your list by only keeping interested parties on it.

Tip #2 Spam check your emails before adding them to your auto-responder

I got caught out big time with this one. Here’s what happened.

I ran a campaign and people subscribed to my list in return for a free PDF download, and those people who signed up for my free eBook download didn’t get my eBook.

After a bunch of emails I tested what was going on. It turned out that the email with the download was being email to spam folders. The reason being was, I had a couple of words the spam filters didn’t like.

How I fixed this was. I Googled a newsletter spam tester and many pages were listed, the top link was free to use, it gives you a unique generated email address each time you use it to send your email to be analysed.

Once my email was scanned in seconds, I found out a couple of words that are classed as marketing or sales.

Once I changed them for other words, my emails worked fine.

Based on my experience with spam scores I would highly recommend you spam check all emails before putting them into your autoresponder.

Tip #3 Check your email Subject line reads casually as emails from friends have high open rates

I have talked about the importance of subject lines before in emails and is its so powerful I’m going to talk about it again in this blog.

One of the best ways to find an email subject line is to do a search on Google or on YouTube for a key phrase that closely matches what you’re trying to achieve.

The benefits of this is, Google and YouTube use AI to cross reference millions of pages and videos then bring back the 10 best, most viewed pages/videos using an array of algorithms.

For me, I find this is the best way to get a headline with all the necessary key words to be competitive is, just tweak one of Google top ten listings so that it reads well and formatted in a way that’s of interest to your audience.

Tip #4 Write in different style to find the style that works for you

When you write an email think about the styles you write in. This could be “Problem”, “solution”, “outcome”.

You may use a character and that character could be something like increasing pricing or technical difficulty, just make the character into something that’s a real issue with people who could benefit from your product or service.

Then go on to talk about the benefits and finish off with two benefits out of six, with a message, to read the other 4 benefits click here.

Then you look at your stats after driving 100 or so people to that email and you see how many people took action. If it’s a good conversion rate you stick to that style of writing because over the weeks, people start to get used to your style and how you write so keep it consistent.

Once people get used to your style of writing, they get to like your personality and look forward to your email tips.

So, you have to be thinking consistency consistency consistency and especially so with email.

Tip #5 Send plain text emails as images will get your emails put into the Gmail promotions tab

When you send emails, send them in plain text no I don’t mean to take the text format I mean use HTML because of tracking is done with the HTML and special URL links are used. Just don’t have lots of images in there.

I had a look at a website that had 1.1 million sessions over a month using Google Analytics, when I look down at the devices that were used, the breakdown was…

• Tablets had 4% of visitors
• Mobiles had 48%
• Computers had 48%

This is important and means that mobile phones are being used very heavily, so you want to make sure that the emails you send out are format nicely on a mobile phone.

Here’s how I do it. Use a size 14 font so it is big enough for the visitor to read, especially when she is over 35 as there is a higher chance people’s eyesight start to go at close contact like looking at a mobile phone or looking at a book closely will need glasses, whereas a size 14 font will make an email easy to read on a mobile without glasses. Which is great, especially if your reader is commuting and don’t want to pull out their glasses.

So you want to be keeping images to a minimum and don’t use all different coloured backgrounds keep it basic. White background with dark text.

Tip #6 Email addresses removed from your list, run them against a Facebook custom audience once a week

Previously I talked about if someone doesn’t open up 5 emails in a row.

So if your sending one email a week, that means your email reader has not read one of your emails in five weeks.

It’s time to get them off your list, after all your list is prime space which you pay for.

The issue is that your email reader may not be at a level yet to purchase your product or service.

So another thing I like to do is when I take somebody off a list is to put them into a spreadsheet and upload that spreadsheet once a week as a YouTube Custom Audience.

You need about 500 email addresses, so just keep adding non-responders and try different ads with different messages aiming at different levels of expertise that you offer.

This may show you as new ads get clicked that your non-responsive email addresses could be looking for more or less advanced content from you.

At the end of the day, non-responsive people on your list registered for your free eBook, so they were interested at some level of expertise you offered.

One thing I like to do is take a Facebook ad to a survey page landing page. How this works is. You have 4 or 5 selection boxes asking the visitor to click their level of experience, this is where you match each experience level to a different eBook.

Once the visitor selects their level of experience using a Google survey, you redirect them to a download page asking them where to email the PDF they selected.

This way you get to see what the unresponsive people are more interested in, which helps you focus your products or services.

And a plus is you get unsubscribes to engage again with your list.

Most of your money is made using email marketing yet many companies still don't set up their auto-responder to automate weekly emails in their business? Here's how Email Marketing can Help your Business!

Email marketing keeps your clients engaged and turns cold leads into warm leads by building trust and setting you up as an authoritative person in your niche.

...At least if you setup email marketing with that plan in mind.

Sadly, too many people think email marketing is a way to sell sell sell.

Don't do it, as Email marketing is a communication platform. If you treat it as your personal QVC channel, you will burn through leads like crazy.

Learn to communicate over email to achieve successful email marketing that becomes a powerful solution for your business.

Here's how I do it...

Email a tip a week to your audience, and as long as you stick to your niche, your email readers will have a higher attention rate.

One thing I like to do is  write a blog giving good advice, then write an email with something juicy in a story format with a problem.

Then, when I'm ready to spring the solution, I pop in a link that points to a matching blog. Something like, Click here to keep reading and see how x solved my problem.

Best part is, those email list members who click the link and visit your blog, your email system can tag them and fire off a trigger to email you, so you call or email your reader right when they are in your website.

What is email marketing and its benefits?

Email marketing is the art of telling stories that engage with your email list by writing about the problem, solution and journey that you or your customers have taken to get over a stumbling block, and how your product or service is a key player in the process.

The more people in your email list who click the link in emails you send and come back and visit your corresponding blog. Begin to see you as an expert in their niche. 

When you have your email system tag those list members who visit your blog, you can send a super targeted followup email.

Eventually you end up with a target audience of leads who are warming to your personality.  Which builds trust and improves your chance of a sale.

Is email marketing still effective?

Email communication is how businesses communicate and is still effective. The problem with email marketing is marketers treat their email list like a last minute marketing newsletter trying to promote and sell like direct marketing. Which is not effective.

The first problem is no one wants to be sold to, so you need to think of email marketing as a way to keep your list in the loop with what's happening and what would be the biggest benefit you could offer to your list reader. 

I find the best way to do this is by emailing a tip a week. As consistency matters. 

I send out one email tip a week minimum. The second big problem is many marketers send out fancy looking emails which has the following issues:-

• Fancy emails with images are slow to load on mobiles.
• Images don’t always load depending on the email client or network coverage.
• Messages are very one sided. Like you are asking for the sale without first building trust.
• Some images can land your email into the promotion tab on Gmail.

When you email out tips you build trust which turns cold leads into warm leads and has a much better chance of leading to a sale, should you have the right product or service which saves your reader time or money.

When writing emails to keep your list engaged, think more along giving entertainment and value. 

An example of this could be, send out an email with a customer success story, setting your customer up as the hero who had a tough break, and you are the coach, Yoda to Luke if you like, then when you are just about to uncover how your client hit success from your product or service. 

Then you link to the blog with the full story.

This takes interested readers from your email and brings them back to your website. Which you tag or setup an email notification to notify you the person is on your site. Letting you give them a call or email, depending on the information you have collected.

Word of caution here, the more information you collect the less subscribers you get, best to collect an email, possibly a name and give a reason why e g.

My ebook is e-mailed out automatically, pop in your email address and you will have your own guide in the next two minutes.

As long as people have a reason to enter their email address, there is a much higher chance they will which gives you higher email signups for the same ad cost.

How do you market your business through email?

Send out email tips weekly to keep you fresh in your email readers mind so when they're ready to buy a product or service you offer you become the go to person in their mind.

I use the Three One email method where you send out one tip a week for three weeks and on the fourth week you email out an invite to your sales video or letter.

The idea is the free weekly tips by email builds trust with your email list and the fourth email invites them to your sales video or letter.

Providing your product or service saves your reader time, money or both.

This builds trust and keeps you fresh in your email readers mind. Then your email reader once ready to buy a product or service you offer, you will be fresh in their mind and the go to person which gives you a better chance of getting the sale.

How much does email marketing cost?

Email marketing costs the price of attention. Wither you spend time list building from free traffic sources or use paid advertising sources to build your list depends massively on cost and interest.

Adding to the mix, does your copy have visitors jumping onto your email list or running a mile?

That's where conversion tracking comes in to see where bottlenecks in copy are.

When businesses start to email and track conversions, the process normally goes something like this.

• We have xx employees
• We have been established for xx
• We are the industry leader at xx

It’s all about them. Once the tracking results show poor conversions, companies start testing different email styles from newsletter styles, fancy graphics and font styles.

Then go back to the basics as conversions are still poor.

It's only when you realize that everyone is in a hurry and looking for answers that a clean email with a link back to a blog gives your email reader a speedy email to read and make up their mind if this is for them and if so, click the URL in the email that links back to your blog which your Autoresponder adds a tag to the user email marketing them as a possible lead who have a higher interest.

What is a good open rate for marketing emails?

Between 20% and 28% is a good open rate providing you are emailing one tip minimum a week to your email list to have them know like and trust you.if you constantly email sale after sale to your list you will be around or below 1%.

Your open rate comes down to the quality of content. It was best explained to me this way. Are you helping your email reader or yourself. A selfish attitude will see a poor response where as a selfless attitude with build a trusting customer base.

What is the success rate of email marketing?

If you are using Facebook ads, your audience to click through rate should be 1% or above. Traffic from a Facebook ad to landing page to email sign-up, you should target as close to 40%. It took me 6 weeks of testing and tweaking to get to 32% It all depends on your message, niche readers interest and value of importance. Once you get all that sorted out. Your email list to sales conversion depends on your approach and price.

It all differs on your message, product interest and experience. This is why no one puts sales conversion figures unless walking you through an actual campaign.

Disclaimer

While this blog covers tried and tested methods, sales are never guaranteed as there are so many factors e.g.

Copywriting - If your text comes across unrealistic, your reader thinks you are not yet an expert in your craft, so be careful when making claims and never use claims you have not proven yourself.

Storytelling - Have you learned the art of keeping your reader interested throughout your email marketing funnel? I find the best way is to start at your offer and build your campaign working back to your paid ad text. That way each step of your funnel or flow as some call it, leads into the next stage very well.