Need help with your email marketing? Here are the 18 best email marketing templates for ecommerce, B2B SaaS, coaches, consultants, and tons more!
In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received every single day. By 2022, that umber is expected to increase to over 347.3 billion.
And lest you think that all of those emails are spam (well… many of them probably are), consider that, according to Data Marketing & Analytics, you can expect an average return of $42 for every $1 you spend on your email marketing efforts.
Not bad, huh?
Ultimately, though, your email marketing efforts will only be as effective as your sales funnel.
Why Your Email Marketing Is Only as Good as Your Sales Funnel
Every email needs to have a purpose.
Before you ever click “Send,” ask yourself this dead-simple, maybe-obvious question: “Why am I sending this email?”
Is it to get sales? Is it to re-engage disinterested subscribers? Is it to build brand authority?
Deciding why you’re sending the email is the first step to making your email marketing efforts a success: making sure that every email has a clearly-defined purpose for a clearly-defined audience.
Once you know why you’re sending an email, the next question is: how are you going to accomplish that objective?
Beyond crafting an email that subscribers can’t help but open and click (more on that in a minute), where are you going to send people after they click? How are you going to pull them further down the funnel?
And therein lies the answer… when you want to make sales — which is, after all, the primary objective of email marketing — you should send your subscribers to a carefully crafted sales funnel.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a series of pages you use to funnel prospects into paying customers.
And there are different kinds of funnels for different things. There’s the tripwire funnel for selling products, the application funnel for collecting applications, the webinar funnel for building an audience, and the product launch sales funnel for launching new products into the marketplace (plus tons more!).
When you’re using email marketing to make sales, then you should be sending those prospects to a sales funnel where every page pulls them closer toward conversion — you can build your first sales funnel for free over here!
But… how do you get them to click?
The Anatomy of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Every email that gets lots of opens and clicks (without using spammy, dishonest marketing tactics) does a few basic things right.
Every successful email has an honest and enticing subject line, a consistent and on-brand design, copy that makes you want to click, and a single compelling CTA.
More specifically…
Compelling Subject line
David Ogilvy once famously mused that,
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Think of the subject line as the headline of your email — it’s the first thing people see and it’s the main reason they will click (or not click).
Your subject line should be enticing for your target market, but also honest about what people will find within the email should they open it.
One of the largest studies on subject line success by Smart Insights analyzed 700 million emails and found that using these keywords often result in higher open rates.
Branded Design
The design of your email really only needs to do a few things — it needs to immediately identify WHO sent the email (i.e. your business) and it needs to be consistent and on-brand with your other marketing materials.
Consider this email from YouTube…
Or this email from Taco Bell…
Or this email from GameStop…
And a basic pattern starts to emerge. Namely, the business logo somewhere near the top of the email with brand fonts and colors throughout the rest of the email.
Or if you are in the early stages of building your business and don’t have branded materials yet, there’s no reason you can’t stick with the basic black-text on a white-background format (that works great for consulting and coaching businesses, in particular).
Enticing Copy
As with all great sales copy, the only goal of your first sentence is to get the prospect to read the second sentence. And the goal of the second sentence is to get the reader to read the third sentence. So on and so forth.
Seem artificial?
It shouldn’t. In fact, the main reason that your email marketing copy should entice your target market to keep reading is because what you have to offer will genuinely benefit them.
The person shouldn’t keep reading only to find out that they’ve been duped — make big promises and tell compelling stories that you can actually fulfill. That is how you make a sale. – Read more
