It’s important to have a careful balance when it comes to email marketing. You want to earn great money with your emails… but you want to develop relationships too.
You’ve been on the wrong end of things as a list subscriber yourself, I’m sure. Some marketers send way, way too many marketing emails to you. You might have even unsubscribed from a list run by a marketer you otherwise liked because it got to be too much.
You don’t want to offend your list members like that. Sure, you’re never going to please everyone, but that doesn’t mean you want to fall into a “churn and burn” pattern. The marketers who do that don’t care about anything but the sale. They don’t care if you unsubscribe because they’ll just get more people on their list to wear out.
On the flip side, you’ve probably joined lists before because you were really excited about what a marketer had to say. You were really interested in learning more about them and their strategies. If given the chance, you’d buy everything they had to sell simply because you were so impressed with them.
But you wait, and wait, and wait… and the emails don’t come. You’re disappointed. Your initial excitement about joining the list crashes down. You soon lose interest in the marketer or forget about them altogether. When (and if) they do email you, you might forget who they are or you might just go ahead and click the unsubscribe button because they aren’t giving you what you wanted or expected.
There has to be a happy middle, right? As an email marketer, it’s important for you to find that balance. Email people enough that you stay at the top of their mind but don’t email them over and over again just to try to get sales.
It also matters how and why you email them. If you just send out emails promoting affiliate offers you’ve hardly vetted day after day, you’re soon going to lose that trust. There has to be that give and take.
If you only ever email them bits of information here and there and never promote or offer helpful advice, you aren’t going to make money. This might surprise you, but you also might bore your audience. They’re going to buy stuff. If they don’t buy it from you they’ll buy it from someone else. Your audience wants to buy—and they want to buy through someone they’ve come to know, like, and trust. That person might as well be you.
There’s no perfect and exact advice of how often to email your list subscribers or what to say to them. What you can do is study your audience, find the right balance, and get into a flow that works for you and for the people on your list.
Study Your Audience
What works for me might not work for you. Your audience might want to hear from you just about every day or they might only want to hear from you every other day or once a week.
I recommend you study your audience. Pay attention to what other email marketers in your niche do. You’ll probably find that everyone has their own style. You ultimately just have to decide what’s best for you.
If you’re providing value and promoting things that will truly help your audience, then you might be fine mailing once a day. But if you find yourself mailing just to mail or just to try to squeeze a few more bucks from your audience, you may want to take a step back.
Think about what your audience needs and wants—always. If you were in their shoes, how often would you want to hear from you?
If you’re totally stuck for what to do, you might want to start by mailing every other day and see how that works for you. Pay attention to your open rates and the responses you get from those on your list.
Set a Schedule for Yourself
Once you decide how often you’d like to mail, set a schedule for yourself. You’ll want to stick with a consistent mailing schedule to sort of train your list members with what to expect from you.
It might be best if you load most of your emails up and schedule them via autoresponder. That way, you’ll have emails going out even when life gets busy.
Sometimes, you’ll veer from this schedule and that’s okay. There will be times when you want to send out a spur of the moment broadcast email.
The point is to hold yourself to a consistent schedule for the benefit of you and your audience. Stick to this schedule and you’ll see much better results from your efforts as an email marketer.
Write Some Relationship Building Emails
When you’re writing emails, remember to include relationship building content in there. You aren’t just emailing people to so you can earn money. You’re also emailing them to help them in important ways.
Think about what they need and what they’re struggling with. Invite an open dialogue. Ask them questions and survey them every once in a while.
You don’t want to be just some person who sits behind a computer screen writing marketing emails. You want to be someone who these people learn to really respect and trust. You want them to look forward to opening your emails because they’re going to learn a lot from it.
Write Some Marketing Emails
Remember that, in addition to helping people, you’re also involved in email marketing to make money. Don’t be afraid to send out marketing emails. The people on your list are going to buy from someone; it may as well be from you.
Find products that can really help your audience. Make sure you only promote things that are really high quality. Not everything you promote will be right for every single person in your audience and that’s okay. As long as you believe in what you’re promoting and know that it’s going to benefit a certain segment, you’re fine to mail it out.
You might want to include some marketing in every email you send out or you might want to save it for every other email or whatever works for you. As a marketer, it’s important to be clear about what you’re promoting and pre-sell them on the product to increase your conversion rates.
It’s possible to market in every email AND build relationships in every email. Your marketing emails can be written in a way so that they’re helpful whether the person goes on to buy or not.
Find a Happy Balance
Treat your list the right way. Figure out how often you’re going to mail and track your results. Remember that there are real people receiving your emails. These people have real desires, lives, passions, and problems. You want your email arrival to become a bright spot in their day.
They should know they’re going to learn something, come away with a mindset shift, and get recommendations on products that can truly help them.