There is a lot of noise in relation to email marketing so if you listen to our 10th episode of Content and Coffee Sean and I talk about how you can market by email and subsequently how you can grow your email list.

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So let's dive in.

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So why did we choose the topic of e-mail marketing? First off, e-mail marketing is an easy and fast way to get your product and service out to warm leads, especially if you’ve already established an e-mail list. Second, it’s cost-efficient. And third, if done right e-mail marketing can have a huge impact on retaining customers and driving new ones.

Mobile email opens have grown by 180% in the last three years. (Email Monday)

Clearly, email is a growing channel that is still effective to reach your consumers.

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Let's think about this data for a second. Email is not a free channel because you have to factor in email design time but for this example say you are sending out a template. Mailchimp and many other tools offer near free sends with up "X" of subscribers. The key factor about email is the way it is consumed and sent.

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The beauty of e-mail marketing is that it won’t cost you any more to reach 10,000 people than it would reach five people, and email newsletters can be really purpose-driven. It can take weeks to months to gain direct sales using other content mediums than it would be from e-mail marketing.

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When people opt-in for your newsletter, these people are telling you “Yes, I want to be marketed to,” meaning they are warm leads.

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So how do you market by e-mail? Well first off you need an e-mail list that’s substantial enough for e-mail marketing to even work.

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Let’s break it down.

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There are three types of goals that you need to focus on: 

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1) Building referrals

2) Building subscribers 

3) Generating direct sales

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The difference between referrals and subscribers is that subscribers are the people who are now on your email list, whereas referrals are people who are interested in your business and have been directed to you by current subscribers. As you’re developing the specifics around these goals, keep in mind your trajectory. Do you have a short-term goal and a long-term goal?  After you’ve fully broken down your goals, use them as a template to craft your e-mails so that they cater to these goals.

Give out all the information that's going to be useful to your audience and useful enough that they're going to share with friends.

Ex. Joe is reading your email newsletter on sales marketing and says “This is really interesting, Sally should read this in the marketing department,” and he then forwards the email off to Sally.

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From a sales perspective when you're trying to craft an email - you're directly communicating an offer to potential clients or customers. So you're selling the product or the service in the email itself, and anytime we’re doing sales the first step is to communicate your offer to someone who might purchase from you.

The great thing about e-mail is that you already have this giant list of people who are potentially interested. However, you still have to check off all the fundamentals of sales: a) to communicate value and b) have a good product-market fit.

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Stratify Your List

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Stratify your list in two or more different subsections. Customized to each one, for example by age demographic, profession, or even by the holiday.

Segmenting your email list is really important because it allows you to get smart with the way you structure your list. If you have 10,000 people, and half are previous buyers, you know that they're very interested in your product. You also know the other half is on the fence and are just subscribed for the information. Send a direct sales call to action to the 5,000 previous buyers, but send an information-based e-mail to the latter. This will help you to create a perception of scarcity.

The reason why scarcity is really important is that it creates an incentive to buy and buy now because if they know your customers are they in this case if they know that the offer is always there. They're not devised to act right away, and so it's really powerful principle and sales that really works.

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Use Your Personal Network

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Sometimes, the low-tech and simplest techniques are the best techniques. This applies perfectly when talking about how to grow your new e-mail list. The first way and best way to grow your email list is by using your own personal network.

Make an Excel sheet of all your connections. Include everybody that you think might be interested in what you’re doing. Don’t think too hard about it, it’s better to over pick than under pick. When I was building my list, it came out to be around 200 people. I scoured LinkedIn, and Facebook to gain some insight on the connections I had. Using my cell phone, I sent the people I chose all a quick message. I explained what I was doing, what my newsletter was about and if they wanted to be on it. It’s hard to turn down a personal request from someone you know. Around 130-140 got back to me and gave me their e-mail address.

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Use Content

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Another great way to build your email list is often through content. When you read through a blog post or article that you really enjoy, and there’s a prompt at the end asking you to subscribe for relevant content, chances are you’re going to be more interested in being on that e-mail list than if you never read a blog post.

Always ensure that there’s an appropriate call to action at the bottom of each piece of content made to capture emails. There are a variety of ways you can do this. For example, you can have a pop up with an offer right as someone is about to close the page. Or you can be simple and say “Subscribe for similar content.”

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Try Ads

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You can also grow your email list through paid Facebook ads. How does this work? You can offer a valuable piece of content, whether that be an e-book or an online guide for free in exchange for their e-mail address. I’ve actually been seeing this quite often, and it works gauging from the amount of engagement I see.

When you begin to get an idea of how much money each person on your email list is worth to you, you can start to develop an average conversion rate over time as you begin to sell your services and products.  For example, I know that everyone on my e-mail list is worth around $10-100 a year, and this can be quite useful.

I truly believe that e-mail marketing is one of those marketing techniques where it's easy to learn but hard to master.

If you're not doing e-mail marketing yet, you have to start. There’s really nothing to lose, especially when you’re guaranteed to start off strong if you’re targeting your own personal network first. It's really that simple.

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If you have any questions or just want to give us a rating on our podcast and blog post e-mail us at hello@ghostit.co!