Triple Your Sales With Email Marketing Mastery (10 Ways To Improve Your Email Marketing)

Let's talk about the critical role of email marketing in driving sales and building customer relationships. We discuss the common pitfalls businesses face, such as neglecting email marketing in favour of social media, and then provide actionable strategies to enhance email effectiveness. 
Key topics include the importance of having a strategic plan, utilizing templates, focusing on design elements, regularly analyzing performance metrics, and segmenting the email list for targeted communication. I want to encourage businesses to invest time in email marketing to unlock its full potential for growth and customer engagement.

Email marketing can generate significant sales for businesses.

• Many businesses under utilize email marketing compared to social media.
• A strategic email plan is essential for effective communication.
• Templates can streamline the email creation process.
• Design elements greatly impact email readability and engagement.
• Regularly sending emails helps nurture customer relationships.
• Analyzing email performance metrics is crucial for improvement.
• Testing different email strategies can lead to better results.
• Segmenting your email list allows for more targeted messaging.
• Building a strong email list is vital for long-term success.

Let's actually make money from your Emails.

Head here for the Nail Your Email Marketing.

00:00
The Importance of Email Marketing

07:15
Creating a Strategic Email Plan

15:48
Design Elements for Effective Emails

22:26
Testing and Analyzing Email Performance

29:28
Building and Segmenting Your Email List

Big Talk About Small Business
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• 10:39 [Ad] Big Talk About Small Business
• 11:24 (Cont.) Triple Your Sales With Email Marketing Mastery (10 Ways To Improve Your Email Marketing)

Transcript

Mel Robbins (00:03)
Alright, let's talk today all about email marketing. Now, this is one of those things that I, it baffles me a little bit because I see so many of my clients, product businesses in general, spend so much time on their social media content. They complain that it takes a lot of time to create content, yet they don't spend any time or hardly any time on their email marketing. Now, I don't know if you've seen the stats, but there is a number out there that the average time

The average number of times someone opens an email every day is 15 times. Now that's the average. There may be people who open it many, many more times than that and obviously less than that as well. people are checking their emails regularly. People are checking their emails regularly. And yet it is one of those things. Some people that I speak to, they either email once every month, maybe once every two or three months, or they email maybe once a week or a fortnight.

but they only send sales emails. And so there's a lot of potential there in email marketing. And I believe that if you focus on your email marketing as much as you probably spent on, or I believe if you took a little bit of that time away from what you spend on your social media content and applied it to some of your marketing, your email marketing, that could have a huge impact on your business. Ideally, you are gonna be able to generate 30 to 50 % of your total sales from your email marketing.

Now, if you're a brand and you are sending direct to consumer email, so that's your retail customers, that is something that

Now there may be two types of emails here I'm talking about. So if you are a brand who wholesales as well as retails, so you sell B2B and B2C, you might have two different types of emails that you have set up. If you're a retail store, an e-commerce store, whether it's physical or just online, then you are just sending B2B, you're just sending, sorry, you are just sending B2C, you're just sending direct to your customer, direct to the consumer. So those emails are going to look slightly different as well. But.

Ideally, you'd be sending at least one a week, if not more. The smaller your list, you may be able to get away with sending them less. So let's say that if your list is under 500 people, you may just send one a fortnight to begin with and then build up what you actually send to your customers. But the thing is about this, it is the way to actually nurture your customers. It is a way to build community. It is a way for them to understand who you are, your values, what makes you tick, what...

your inspiration is behind your product, who the people are who are using your product, what they think about it, what are some trust factors or how does it actually work, what makes you get inspired to create this product in the first place. There's so many ways that you can connect with your customer through email that you can't do through social, but also trying to use content and create content.

so that it works in all areas of your business. It's not just all separation as well.

Some people that I see are just so scared to actually send emails to their customers. I even see, know, up on people's websites on their pop-ups that say, hey, sign up here. We promise we won't spam you. We promise we'll only send you, you know, occasional emails. And they're so apologetic. Like someone doesn't have to sign up to your pop-up. They don't have to sign up to your email list. It's their choice.

But if they do sign up, they probably do want to get emails. So don't ghost them and never send them information or only send them when you actually have a sale going on. Use it to get to know your customers, to speak to them more often, to connect with them more. Email marketing is such a wasted opportunity and so much potential for so many of the businesses that I see, so many of the product businesses that I, there's just so much potential. There is just so much potential.

There is just so much potential for the product businesses that I see out there and physical retail stores who could be doing more with email marketing. It's the reason I ran the challenge the other day. It's actually one of the reasons I ran an email mastery challenge last week, which was all about three days to increase the effectiveness of your emails, because people like me are saying, you know, here you should need to send more emails. You'll hear it from, you know, lots of people out on, you know, the

You hear it from lots of other people too, that email marketing is a great way to connect with your customers if you're doing a sale or if you're doing a promo or how to nurture your customers. But one of the definitely the big gaps that I see is that it's all well and good to send emails, but if they're not very good emails, they might not be working. And it may be the reason that you've given up on the first place or that you don't invest the time into them or that you just don't think it's worth it because you're not getting the return on that investment.

And it's not to say that every email you send is going to give you, five times the, you know, money it's cost you to send out the actual ROI on email marketing in general is 42 times to 45, 45 times. So for every dollar you spend getting $45 back in your email marketing, that is a stat that's, you know, through. That is some, that is a statistic that is out there. I read it the other day through MailChimp and through HubSpot as well. So there's definitely that data.

is there proven that if you actually spend time on it, it can work and it can actually be bring you a great return on your investment.

So if one of the barriers that you think you have is that you don't have enough time, have a little time tracker of how much time you spend on your social media content versus your email. And just have a little think about if that's a good use of your time. If there's like 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour a week that you can pull away from your social and actually dedicate to your email marketing as well. And I say that amount of time because if you've got the right system set up, which I'm gonna go through some of those shortly,

then that's all it should take you. It should take you between 30 minutes and hour to send the right email if you've had all these other things in place to help you with that too. So what I'm gonna show today is 10 ways to help you improve your email marketing, what that looks like, what are some of the design elements you need. Let's get into what all those things are now.

is to create a plan. It is really tough to only spend half an hour on an email every week if you have no idea what you're going to send. If you sit down at your computer and you think, I need to send an email, that's when it's hard, that's when it makes it tough, that's when it takes hours or so much time because you haven't got a plan. Ideally you would have your emails mapped out in terms of what type of things you're going to be sending at least 90 days if not longer than that.

In my Nail your email marketing program, which is one of the programs I use to help you with email marketing, it is all about the first thing is really understanding how your email marketing relates to the rest of your content, the rest of your marketing strategy, and putting a plan in place to map out your marketing activities over a certain period of time so that then your email marketing can match back to that as well. And so that you're not being reactive in, I need to send an email, but you've planned ahead, you've got an idea about what's going on.

The calendar matches up to your life as well. And that's a big factor and also matches up to, you know, events that are taking place in the world or, you know, in the calendar event of the year in the, in the dates that you write, whatever. Without the plan, it's really hard to maximize your time without a plan. It's really reactive in what you're doing. So making a plan for your email marketing is the first step.

Number two is to make sure that you use templates. Whatever email system you have, whether you use Klaviyo which I do think is the best e-commerce email system, it is the higher price point though. So if that is a little bit above where you're at right now, then I believe the next best suggestion is Flodesk. And that's got some beautiful templates in there. The price points are quite different. So if you're not doing any email marketing right now, I think Flodesk is a great option.

If you're like, no, I need to make sure that I'm really nailing my email marketing. I'm really going to go, you know, do this properly. I'm building a bigger brand, go to Klaviyo and set that up now. Other ones options, which I don't love, MailChimp. There's things like ConvertKit active campaign. There's things like MailerLite, which I think may have just closed. There's also things like the Shopify email, but they don't give you that functionality of what the other systems do. And they don't match up with the automations and integrations and stuff either.

So ideally you would go on either Klaviyo or Flodesk in my opinion, based on where you're at and what level you're at as well. But every one of these different systems have templates inside them. And that's what you need to start to use to make your life easier. Starting from scratch and doing things completely new every time you go and send an email makes things tricky. It also sucks your time. So making sure that you have, whether it's between four to 10,

templates that you use and keep using those different ones.

Whether you go and use those four to 10 templates as a rotation, depending on what type of email you're sending. So let's say if you're sending a sales or promotional email, you might use a particular template. If you're sending an education email, if you're sending a reviews email, if you're sending a...

like a content specific email about, you know, what's something you're sharing about your blog or something you're sharing about a tips, all those sort of different things, you might use different templates. Having those set up already makes it a lot easier for when you go and produce your email. If you don't like the email templates that are available, there's so many different ways to go and find new emails. And I'll share a few in the show notes and the link below. But even things like Canva Canva has so many amazing templates out there. There's other people that offer free templates. I've got some

free email templates that you can access. There's so many ways that you can get some really cool great emails. Sorry, so you can get that great email already without having to, you know, spend money on a graphic designer, which obviously if you if you've got that available, that may be an option for you as well.

Number three is to consider your design elements. This is one of those areas that I'm like, my gosh, I really focus on this in my email mastery challenge because I was like, there's no point in those emails if they're not really good emails, if they literally shoot emails, which I said in the program, this is why I've created this. You have to have design elements and consider design in your email marketing. What that looks like is.

Five of the biggest mistakes I see people make with their design. They don't have a high enough contrast. Using a contrast checker to make sure that your font and your color of your background is readable. So many people have such low contrast that you can hardly read it. Now, I may be showing my age and the fact that I need to wear reading glasses and it's getting worse and worse. My eyesight is definitely deteriorating. But if you...

but the easier you make it to be read, and this goes for all your content, whether it's on your email, your website or your socials, it's got to have high contrast because people are just going to leave if they can't read it. If it's just like, forget it, I can't even see that properly. Don't make it hard for people. Don't put up a barrier for them. Like it's hard enough anyway. Just don't make it even harder for yourself. So that's number one of the mistakes, contrast. Make sure it's high and I'll share a link on how to check the readability and if your contrast is high enough.

Number two is number two is the size of your fonts. Use big font sizes. Again, make it easy to read, easy to see from a distance. People are walking along, reading your email as they're scrolling or on school pickup or, you know, making dinner. Make it easy to read. Don't make it too small. Have big sized fonts if you're especially for headings and for bold announcements. Big, large fonts and clean, easy to read fonts as well. So that comes back to that contrast as well.

Number three.

Number three is too much text. I attention spans are short. You cannot give me too much information in an email. Now this goes against everything that I do in my emails, but I will say that service based businesses and product based businesses are quite different. So you want to be, if you're a product based business, you want to get to the point faster. You want to have maybe paragraph of text in there as well. And you know, you, and you definitely want to have more imagery and click and

more call to actions than you do focusing on big chunks of text. If you are sharing say a bit part of a blog article, share one to two paragraphs and space out the sort of the wording so that it's easy to read again and you can send to people to your website to read more and to read further.

If you're trying to share a lot of information at once, use things like icons, use things like little infographics to actually share that information.

Number four in the biggest mistakes is people don't put their big announcements or big information above the fold. Ideally, you would put all the sort of key information above the fold in the email. So what that looks like is without having to scroll, I should be able to see that it's a particular discount or you've got a new arrival or that you've got something coming soon or that you've got a competition and I should be able to see a call to action button. So that's number five.

making sure you have enough call to action buttons without too many and above the fold. ideally you would have high contrast, big enough font. You would not have too much text. You would have the key information above the fold and you would have a call to action with high contrast above the fold to tell people what to do. So that were the five design elements that you need to cover. So that is even. We're only just up to number three. All right, let's go into number four.

Number four is to try and add in some moving elements. make sure, ideally you're trying to attract attention. You're trying to stop the scroll of them moving through, you know, past your information quickly. Having something moving, a GIF that sort of, you know, or a video that has a sort of flash or change in the view is going to attract attention. More and more of the bigger companies are starting to do this in nearly every email. And you don't want too many elements, but having one scrolling bar across the top or

one image where it is flashing between you four to five different products that you might be selling or you're releasing is a great way to grab attention and they are super easy to make. I've got a link on in my email mastery challenge again I went through how to make this and so if you want that link just let me know I'll put it in below as well how to make a gif how to make it quick and easy in Canva as well.

Number five is to be specific. If you're not sending emails very often, what I tend to see is that people will send one email every, let's say eight weeks or 10 weeks, and they send the longest email with about 27 different events or things have taken place in their shop. Too much information. People don't know what to do, so they'll do nothing. Don't give people too much information in the one email. Ideally, it would have

one to two topics or one to two announcements or one to two bits of information to share in that one email. And this is where you may send more over a period of time because you've got more to share. So keeping it neat and tight into one email again, attention short, you don't want to give people too much information. They won't click anywhere if you've given them like 27 different things to read and to sort of focus on or follow up and look into more information for. Give

Be specific and keep it to one to two bits of information at a time. If you're a physical retail store, sometimes that can be hard because you may have had like 10 different deliveries of 10 different brands. But this is where you've got to try and pick your, whether you might have a GIF and it shows like five different brands you've had drop in and ask people to click through to your new arrivals and have a look at the rest of it. Don't put everything in that one email. So keep it short and keep it sweet.

Number six comes back to what I talked about before, like send your emails regularly. Use a bit of that time in your week instead of posting one more thing on social media, half an hour to an hour, an email a week and actually be consistent in what you're sending out. The more consistent you are and the more people open your emails, the more likely they are to be higher deliverability. The more engaged people are going to be, then people are going to look forward to your emails.

The less you just send sales emails, then the more people are going to be like, what else can I find out in here? What's interesting? How do I use this product? How does someone else style my product? Sorry. How does someone else style this product? What are some great gift ideas that they're sharing? Or maybe they've got a giveaway this week. be so have that plan and send your emails regularly so that your customers start to look forward to them and they open them more often as well.

Always check your stats and that d-

So always check your stats and review that deliverability. Always check your stats and review those analytics. It is so crucial to start to sort of once you are using email marketing more, to start to understand what's happening, to go back and check is my open rate okay compared to the average? Is my click through rate okay? Am I getting huge amount of unsubscribers on particular types of emails? And again,

I will just say here, do not worry about unsubscribers because we don't want to focus on them, but it would be good just to have that analytics and understand what may be happening in particular times as well. So know what your data is, understand what yours is. There was one.

once I grabbed some information from MailChimp the other day which I don't like their emails but I don't mind you know obviously they know their stats as well but one of the stats their data points were average open rate was around 30 % average click-through rate is around one to two percent and the one more thing

So in a minute.

Okay, and that last one was the unsubscribe rate of 0.19. So again, we don't want to focus on that. And I want to make sure that you're actually sending emails and not worrying about unsubscribes, rather than worrying about the people on your list who you don't send anything to anyway. So you're better off sending more emails and having people unsubscribe.

They're not sending any at all. And of course, we always want to be working on how to build your list, how to add more people to your list, how to nurture the people that are on there. So we don't just want to spend time, you know, attracting people through your social media or your Facebook ads, but not then nurturing them through your email. So understand that you will get unsubscribed. That is OK. Let those people go. There's more people, it makes in space for more people to come onto your list as well and to find out about you. Please do not focus on that as a...

as a reason to not send your emails.

Right, so number eight is to always test. Test, test, test all different things. Whether it's the design elements you've put in there, whether it's the subject line that you've used, whether it is the time of day or the different days of the week that you're gonna send your email, test all different things. And this is where certain systems will have things like A-B testing. So you could send, create two different subject lines and all it...

send out both and start to track both and those with the better stats, it will just start to use that one as the preferred. You may look at just your analytics in general and think about is my customer my target market? When are they opening their email more? Are they moms who don't open it between 6 and 8 p.m. or are they all opening it at 9 p.m.? What is it for your target customer? Testing different things to see what might work.

And definitely don't be afraid to send them on like a Sunday or, you know, or early in the morning. So everyone is different. So just maybe testing different things to start to understand what's working and what's happening. And that's where your analytics come into really knowing what to look for and checking the stats and the email systems have great stats. So it shares that with you anyway.

And number nine I've sort of talked about is that once you are sending emails regularly, improves your deliverability for the, that the people, that the people on your list are gonna get them into the inbox. They're not gonna hit the spam box. They're not gonna get blocked. They're not gonna bounce. So the more you, the more often you send your emails and the better the content that you create in your emails and you encourage people to open your emails and click through.

then that will improve the deliverability as well. And it's a bit of a chicken and egg, like where do you start, you know, what's happening, but you've got to get started with your emails. If you haven't sent out any emails to anyone in like six months, don't send maybe like seven emails in a week because that's going to sort of, you know, have a spam filter come up and go, well, what is she doing? What's happening here? So gradually build up to it again and make sure that you segment your list.

And that leads me into the next one, which is to make sure that you segment your list. You do not necessarily want to be sending every email to every one of your customers. You want to start to build your database of clients. You want to start to make sure that you segment who they are, where they're coming from, what's different about them. What are some characteristics that sort of are specific to that segment? When I, what I mean by that is let's say that you have a physical retail store, you might have particular clients who just love

certain brands. So they're going to be on that particular brands list. You might have a list of VIP customers. If you go back into your data of your Shopify or whatever, you know, system you use for your, your website, and you might be able to see that you've got a top 50 customer who just, you know, have they have ordered so often and they order all the time. So segment out those people and have them be your VIP, have them be your VIP list. You may have a segment which is has not bought for the last six months.

so that you can nurture them in a different way and send them different emails to what you might send everyone else. You may have it set up by if you've had a market, that particular group of people who've come in from that market are maybe a local customer as opposed to, you know, an online customer who comes from a different country. So definitely have segments of your audience all broken up and it could be through tags or it's all called different things in the different email systems. But essentially you wanna have a whole list and then little different sections.

of people that sometimes you send to everyone sometimes you only send to some people so keep that in your database of people as well.

Now, I haven't even touched on the automations in your business yet, and I think I'll go through that in a different podcast.

Now haven't even touched on what automations and flows you should have set up in your business. I have done that in a different podcast, which I'll link below as well. It's talking about all the different types of automations you should have set up. these are a great thing to... And having those things set up as well can really generate quite a lot of income for you without you doing too much. You're spending time setting them up in that first place, but they can really work behind the scenes, helping you bring more income into your business through your...

through your email automation flows. Now.

Now, the other thing I haven't really talked about yet is to how to build your list. And again, I've got another podcast specifically on that. But what I will touch on is that making sure that your design, making sure, making sure that the design elements of your pop up on your website and please make sure you have one. I know I had one client who she was like, I hate them now. I do not want to have them on my website. I'm like, it works. Please put them on there. Please. Can we just test it out?

And of course not everyone likes them, but they can really have a huge impact on building your database and building your list. So make sure though it is again, high contrast. is focused on the right thing. If you just say to me, up to my email list, cause you'll get news. You're not going to get any people sign up. You've got to have some incentive. It doesn't have to be a financial one or a discount. It does help though, but you can also have a different sort of lead magnet, or maybe you do a quiz on your website.

and you're building your list in different ways. Maybe you have a voucher that you give away once a month. Definitely have something though to encourage people to sign up on your list. And ideally you would have a pop-up, you would have a, in your homepage of your website, you would have another, like a bigger section, and then you would also have it as a footer in your website too. So that's just three ways that you could have it on your actual homepage of your website.

And you definitely want to be sharing that often on your social media to encourage people to get on your list. Offer your subscribers something different so they do get something special so that you do treat them as special that they are VIP. Make sure that you do give that to them and share on social what you might be about to share to your subscriber list to encourage people to get on that list so they get first access to stuff as well. So definitely always talking about it on your social, encouraging people to sign up, having that be an automation on your Shopify that they

are signed up unless they tick otherwise, that really helps as well. So that's just some ways to actually get people to, you know, be on your list. And as I said, I've got a whole podcast episode on it. All right. So let's just go through though, the 10 ways that we talked about to improve your actual email marketing.

Right, we first of all, had number one, make sure you have a plan that makes it so much easier and time efficient to actually have a plan. You're much more proactive rather than being reactive all the time, which will save you energy and time. Number two is to use templates that are available and have your own versions of your own templates that you use regularly and rotate through so you're not starting from scratch every time. Number three is to make sure you consider those design elements I talked about. You've got to send good emails. They cannot just be a

random blasts out with the worst contrast and way too much information in them.

Number four is to add some moving visual elements to attract attention. Not every email, not every time and not seven in one email, but definitely start to think about how can you add in that visual element of what we're so used to seeing content like now. Adding that visual element, that's number four.

Number five is to be specific. Do not send too much information. drives me crazy when I can see. Number five is to be specific. Do not send too much information. One to two topics at max. Number six.

Number six is to send regularly, keep them going often, nurture your list, send different types of emails, don't send a sales email and don't send just what you're actually selling every single time. Number seven is to always understand your analytics, review them, check them, make note of them. And then number eight is to test, test, test different things all the time to try and figure out, you know, what's the best way. these can be gradual, small little changes that can make a big difference over time.

If your email marketing starts to increase your sales, if you can start to generate a little bit of income through your email marketing every week, every month, over time, and you're always constantly improving them, over time, that's going to add a fair bit to your bottom line, or your top revenue sales as well.

Number nine is to look at how you can improve that deliverability. know, try and say out of the spam folder, have particular words that you don't use in your subject line. Always test your subject lines. I've got a whole list of which ones you can use as well in my program. Nail Your Email marketing. I really dive into all of these things in a lot of detail.

And number 10 is to make sure you segment your audience. definitely you don't have to do this at the start, very start, but as you try and up your list in different ways, you may have one that's called pop-up from your website. You may have one that's called market list. You may have one that's called friends and family. Like definitely have different segments on your list. Now I hope that you can, I hope that you're listening to this and thinking, okay, I should spend a little bit more time on my email marketing. I should think about how to make sure that it contributes to my

sales a little bit more and how to understand that it can actually build up that return customer rate on your website too. If you look at your return customer rate and it's under 30%, you've got room for improvement for sure. And even if it's above, obviously you can always better your customers more as well. All right, so if you want any help with your email marketing, go and check out my nail your email marketing program, which is in the show notes. And I also have a special promo one where if you're doing a promotion or a sale, I have a best sales yet template section.

where it goes through every one of your emails that you need to generate huge amounts from your next sale that you have or promotion that you have.

And what I'm going to share is the link to my email mastery as well. If you want to take that challenge, you can go through all the design elements that I touched on earlier as well. All right. So here's to making more money from your email marketing. Here's to increasing your sales in your product business. Here is to not spending more time on your business, but utilizing your time more, utilizing your time wisely. All right. I hope that helps. I look forward to sharing more with you next episode and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.