My wife has one habit that drives me crazy.
She loves to cook when there is an appreciative audience and she also likes to try new things. That’s all well and good. But every time we plan a big party or family gathering, she tries out a new recipe. Cooking dishes she’s never made before when a large group is coming over and we really care about the results, it is nerve wracking.
Just a few weeks ago, we celebrated my Dad’s 90th birthday. Twenty children and grandchildren showed up at our house to honor him and have a big birthday dinner. My wife tried out not one, but several new recipes. Fortunately, the dishes came out fairly well and one, the veal stew in a red wine sauce, got rave reviews. Phew!
I’m all for experimenting. But when it’s important to hit a home run with a crowd, I want a recipe that’s been tested. I want a proven plan that I know will succeed every time.
Which brings me to email marketing. I highly recommend that you experiment on a limited audience, but when you want to ratchet up your sales and your profits, use a tested recipe to generate the response you need.
I wish someone had handed me the recipe that I’m about to reveal; my business would have grown that much faster. Instead I learned by making mistakes. But, thanks to my experience, you don’t have to.
When I first started using email to try to trigger sales, only a small percentage of my emails were opened, few were read and even fewer people bought from me. Over time I tracked every email I sent, and bit-by-bit I figured out the recipe that now brings in more sales than I ever imagined possible.
I use this recipe to craft the emails we provide to our affiliates when they promote our products. Last year this email recipe made us Brian Tracy’s top-selling affiliate.
Understand what that last sentence means; our email recipe outsold a host of other top marketers, including Jay Abraham. You don’t have to be a top marketer to use it effectively; one member of my MasterMind Group used just one element of my recipe and boosted his email response rate by 4200%.
Have I got your attention?
The Proven, Profit-Generating Recipe for Email Marketing
Once you have list of interested prospects, following up with regular email is the best way to build shelf space in your prospects’ minds and turn interest into profits.
To use it correctly you need to understand that it’s a simple tool and at best it can only get your prospects to take a simple action. Realize that the purpose of your email isn’t to sell, but rather to generate interest and get your prospects to take just one action.
A well-crafted email can tap their interests, create a perception of need and motivate them to want to find out more and click through to your sales pages or opt-in form.
Single purpose emails work best. Focus on solving one problem at a time and get your prospects to take a single action. Focusing on multiple problems or promoting multiple products at a time or giving your prospects multiple actions results in confusion and a lack of action.
How are you going to use your email to grab your prospect’s attention, keep it and get them to take action?
Entertain, educate and motivate.
Entertain your readers and they’ll open your emails and read them through. Entertain them with stories and examples; educate with an idea or tip that your prospects can readily use and you’ll gain credibility and trust.
Then motivate them to take action. Point the way to the next step to use the idea you’ve shared or to get more information by clicking through to the sales page for your product or service.
There are 4 steps to put this recipe to work for your email marketing. I’m going to describe them in detail below and include action steps so your next email brings in more sales.
1. Make sure your emails are opened
If no one opens your email, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the copy is in your email — or how great your offer or your products and services are. The subject line is the key to getting your prospects “in the door” and getting them to read the rest of your email.
How do you know if the subject lines you’re using are working? What’s a respectable open rate for email marketing?
Good question, and the answer is: it depends. It depends on how you’ve built your list, how qualified your subscribers are, how long people have been on your list and how often you mail to your list. Many people get open rates of only 2-5% with their emails.
Internet marketers with large lists, who mail their lists a few times a week often get a 15-20% open rate. Some members of my MasterMind Group get open rates as high 34% with lists of 3000 to 5000 subscribers.
Which subject lines work to maximize open rates?
Subject lines that give helpful information and avoid selling get prospects to open emails.
Using your subject line to sell is like shouting “Buy My Stuff!” in your prospect’s face before they know exactly what you’re selling, how it can help them, whether it has any value, and whether they can trust you to deliver. A big mistake!
To get you started thinking about your own subject lines and give you ideas, I’ve listed successful subject lines below. Try adapting them to your own business. Send them out and then check your open rates. Don’t assume they will automatically work for you just because they’ve worked for other businesses. Every audience and list is different. Experiment, split test and compare the results.
Leverage the winners, the subject lines with the best open rates. For example, I know that the subject line “What Nobody Tells You About Selling” has good open rates, so I’ve used variations of it with equally good success.
Sample Email Subject Lines
A. The Best-Performing Subject Lines From Our Last 100 Emails
• How To Improve Email Response by 4200%
• What’s New This Week 10/25-10/30/09
• What Newton Discovered About Marketing
• Eliminate The 2 Biggest Obstacles To Sales
• Do You Need Help? – from Charlie
• 3 Steps to Successful Website Marketing
• How To Eliminate Objections To Price
• 3 Things You Should Know…
• Google This…
• Is Your Website Killing Sales?
• A Strange and Unusual Request from Charlie
B. From My Collection of Marketing Favorites
• The Top 5 Reasons Small Business Marketing Fails…
• Tip of the Week: A Buyer Tells You How to Sell to Him
• 11 Critical Ideas to Boost Your Shopping Cart Performance
• Get Google Advertising & Traffic “Free”?
• How Healthy is Your Business?
• Smarter PPC Tactics to Save Your Cash
• Killing your business babies
• Getting deadbeat clients to pay, 11…
• Write Magnetic Headlines with These 7 Tips
• What We Can Learn from Infomercials
• Are your business habits an anchor or catalyst for growth?
• How to Arm Yourself for the Next Market Downturn
• How election tactics can help promote your business
• What Can Skydiving Teach You about Marketing?
• 11 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Web Site
• Here’s How to Really Irritate Your Online Competitors
• Kill Your Business Idea Before It Kills You
• Getting better results on the phone
• A Highly Profitable Skill… For Lazy People
• How to Eliminate Rejection
• The Most Important Wealth-Building Element of _____
• The Most Important Piece of Equipment Any Marketer Can Own
• The Logical Case for Increasing Your Prices
• How NOT to Start a Retail Business
• Sales Words That Cripple
• How (Not) To Lose Clients
• What Buyers Really Want
• Reduce Customer Anxiety, Increase Conversions
• 4 More Ways to Get Maximum Impact from Testimonials
• Why Other Marketers Are Making More Money
Looking for still more subject line ideas?
Go to www.ezinearticles.com and view the most popular articles. For example, when I wrote ‘Writing Copy That Sells’, these were the most frequently viewed titles in the Business: Marketing category:
• SWOT Analysis — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
• Hello, My Name Is… What Your Name Tag Says About You
• Slogans: Creating and Using Them in Life, Career and Business
• How to Create a Countdown Marketing Calendar
• Six Ways to Attract New Customers to Your Restaurant
• Today’s Definition of Marketing. Has It Changed?
• Marketing and Advertising Techniques of Super Bowl Advertisers
• The 7 Commandments of Marketing
• Successful Marketing for Introverts
• Web site Promotion Strategies for Targeted Web Site Traffic
• Customer Lifetime Value – The Key to Maximizing Your Profits!
• 5 Steps for Developing a Marketing Tag Line for Your Product, Business, or Web Site
• Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Market Segmentation
Action:Test Subject Lines
From the above lists, pick five subject lines and adapt them to your business. For example, “What Nobody Tells You About Selling” could be modified to “What Nobody Tells You About Your Credit Rating”. Then test them and track your open rates.
1. _____________________________________________
2. _____________________________________________
3. _____________________________________________
4. _____________________________________________
5. _____________________________________________
2. Use the right recipe to get results with your emails
What should you write about in your emails that will move your subscribers closer to becoming buyers?
Simple.
Share helpful tips and ideas. Prospects can smell a salesman a mile away. If they sense that you are trying to sell them with your email, they’ll stop reading.
Instead of selling, focus on your audience’s interests. Write about their concerns, the problems they want to solve, and how you can help them get where they want to go.
For example:
Suppose you’re a mortgage or real estate professional. Your topic could be “10 Steps to Owning Your Own Home in 6 Months or Less.”
Selling health & fitness supplies or supplements? Then a series about “The Poisons in Your Pantry” will spark interest.
Is your target market men over 50? How about “Natural Ways to Supercharge Your Energy – Without Seeing the Doctor”?
Your Lead Paragraph
The first sentence of your email should make your prospects want to read the second sentence and the purpose of the second is to get them to read the next. It’s like getting a ball rolling downhill. If you can get your readers past the first paragraph there is a good chance they’ll read your entire email.
One strategy for doing this is to lead with questions. How does it work? Here’s an example:
What’s Blocking Your Growth?
What’s the biggest bottleneck every entrepreneur and business owner faces to growing their business? What is it that is keeping you from doubling your sales next month or tripling them this year? What’s the most common mistake that prevents 97% of entrepreneurs and small business owners from becoming a huge success and living the life they want?
…
A second approach is to lead with a client or prospect problem. For example:
“We just bought a full-page ad in our local newspaper promoting our computer sales and repair services, and as far as I can tell we didn’t get a single response. Why didn’t our newspaper ad bring in at least one sale?”
Phil, from Chicago
Want your ads or sales pitch to get people’s attention in 15 seconds or less? Who doesn’t?
If you could consistently sell your services or products in 15 seconds or less, imagine how much more money you’d make and how much free time you’d have to enjoy your family and your life.
…
Another approach is to tell a good story. People love stories:
The best sales presentation I’ve ever seen wasn’t a sales pitch, but when it was over I was sold for life.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to do the same with your marketing — sell clients for life without a single sales pitch?
I was in high school, attending a mandatory assembly about safe driving. We students were polite, but mostly inattentive until we saw the speaker toss an egg to a volunteer on the stage. By the time we heard “splat!” and saw the egg dripping from his hand, the speaker had our attention.
3. Share one key idea or concept
Want your readers to believe you? Tell them a story that demonstrates your expertise, and then share one blindingly obvious idea that hardly anyone uses.
For example:
To grow your business you need a proven system to succeed. I’m always amazed at how many entrepreneurs constantly try to attract new business without one.
You could be making ten times as much with a lot less effort.
Here’s another example:
The answer was simple: traffic alone isn’t the answer, whether you’re getting it from the search engines or pay-per-click advertising. You need more. You need an easy way to convert your traffic into sales.
“An Online Traffic To Sales Conversion System”
Most people make the mistake of trying to slap their readers in the face with their product or service, the solution they sell. When you define the problem your prospects face and then show how it’s the logical answer, you’ll find a lot more people interested in what you sell.
4. Get your prospects to take action
The purpose of your email is to get your readers to your sales page(s). How do you do this?
Include your calls to action in the body of your email. You’d be amazed how many people forget to provide any kind of call to action, or do it wrong. Here are two key mistakes to avoid.
• Avoid using your calls to action to try and sell. You’ll have plenty of time to do that on your sales page. Use this email to capture their interest.
• Don’t hit your readers between the eyes with your call to action too soon or you’ll scare them away. Use the magic words in your emails to capture their interest and to pre-sell them by showing that you understand their problems and provide the best solution.
Which Calls To Action Work
Use calls to action that leverage the issues you’ve been talking about in your email.
If you’ve been talking about 5 ways to cut taxes, leverage this with your call to action. For example, “Interested in saving up to $10,000 this year on your taxes? Get the details here >>”
Or if you work at an SEO firm and your email was about increasing traffic, your call to action could be, “Ready to double your traffic in the next 2 months, find the simple solution here >>”
Where To Include Your Calls To Action
In a typical email of about 700 words, I recommend including a call to action after the first 150 words, a second call to action after the next couple of hundred words and a third call at the end of the email.
Action: Turning Words Into Profits
Outline your next email below:
- Identify at least one problem that your prospects have.
____________________________________________________
- List the blindingly obvious solution you can share, that most people never use.
____________________________________________________
- Write out 2 or 3 calls to action to get readers to your sales page.
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
Let’s review the No-Fail Email Profit Recipe.
A. Once you have list of interested prospects, following up with regular email is the best way to turn interest into profits.
B. The purpose of each email in your marketing campaign is to get prospects to click to your sales page.
C. There are 4 steps to crafting the email that will entertain, educate and motivate your prospects and get them to the sales page;
- Write email subject lines that will get prospects to open the email
- Use the recipe for capturing interest
- Establish your credibility with one bright idea
- Get your prospects to take action
Advice From A Cook
Unless you’re already a master cook, the first couple of dozen times you go into the kitchen to prepare a meal or a special dessert it’s a good idea to follow a recipe. That way you’ll have a far better chance of cooking up a meal your family and friends will enjoy.
The same is true with your email marketing. If you want it to succeed, to generate a response and sales, don’t just wing it. Follow a proven recipe to get results. The key steps outlined above will get you started and can easily double or triple your response rate and your profits. Put them to use to get results.
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