Everyone wants to know the secret to a successful business, and here’s my advice: email marketing. Email marketing keeps you in contact with your most engaged audience – your email subscribers. Obviously, social media is a huge part of marketing these days, but for many people, it’s deflating. You have to spend many hours creating content and engaging with your audience on social media to get attention from potential customers, but often it results in frustration because your sales don’t correlate to the amount of time you spent online.

This is why email marketing is the secret to success for all businesses: big or small; just starting out, or well established. Every successful business needs to talk to its audience regularly and provide them with solutions to their problems. 

Do you have another way to contact your entire audience and know that they are seeing it? I don’t – which is why email marketing is very much alive and is the key to the success of your brand! 

Keep reading to learn the purpose of email marketing and some tips to get you started!

What is email marketing?

 Simply put, email marketing is using emails to create and nurture relationships with your audience, with the goal of converting them into life-long customers or donors. This means sending out emails with a purpose to your potential customers, current customers, and repeat customers. Each type of relationship needs to be consistently nurtured.

Think about the relationships in your own life. While you may not have the same kind of interactions with different categories of people in your life, you’re still engaging in these relationships as it makes sense. This is exactly how email marketing works, we just throw in some fancy words to make it sound more complicated.

I want to make sure we’re on the same page, so here’s some email marketing vocab you might see:

1. Email series/sequence: the most common is email sequence, but they are used interchangeably. A sequence is a series of emails that are sent over a determined set of time with the goal of converting the reader into a customer or donor.
2. Email funnel/evergreen: this is the roadmap from when a potential customer becomes an email subscriber to becoming a customer/donor. It’s a map dictating each email they will receive including sales emails and informative and helpful emails that guide them along the way.

While the purpose of email marketing and the general concept is easy to understand when you compare it to your IRL relationships, writing exceptional email copy that is personalized to each segment and converts is not easy —that’s why you hire a copywriter to help you with this.

What’s the purpose of email marketing

As I mentioned above, the purpose of email marketing is to create and nurture relationships with your audience. It’s assumed that if someone is willing to give you their email address they are a more engaged audience compared to followers on social media, therefore more likely to be converted. It’s exciting when someone is willing to give you their email address, but you still have a job to do. Honestly, this is where the real work begins. 

People don’t usually purchase from a company or decide to hire someone for a service the first time they visit their website. So, what do you have to do to get them to commit to purchasing? You build a relationship with them, provide them with information about your product or service, and give them real solutions to their current problems. This is where knowing your audience comes in. Sending them consistent emails which includes promotional and education copy will keep your reader engaged and give them plenty of opportunities to take the next step in their relationship with your brand.

How do you get people to sign-up for your email list?

I could write an entire guide on this, but to keep it short, providing a user with a freebie or a discount, incentives people to sign-up for your emails. It doesn’t have to be big, but it does need to be valuable to the reader. 

Here are some examples:

1. 10% off their next purchase (you can even time-box it)
2. Free guide available to download and sent to their inbox when they sign-up
3. 10% off their next reservation
4. Free merch when they sign-up (this can be good if you’re a nonprofit)

As you can see, the incentive isn’t crazy, but it’s enough to get people to sign-up because they are being offered a deal that they wouldn’t get without signing up.

Basics of email marketing

We’ve talked about what email marketing is, and its purpose of it, but what is it really? Here are a few examples of email sequences that all businesses or nonprofits should have implemented into their email marketing strategy. 

Welcome series

This series should be no less than 5 emails and should include the initial welcome to the list email, and then educate the reader about the brand’s purpose, what they offer, and the overall benefit to the reader. This series should convert the reader within the first 45 days. I recommend making this your most robust email series.  

Onboarding series

I like to call it the educational series. This takes the friendship to the next step. This series includes educational and promotion copy. Providing best practices for your products or unique ways to use your most popular products. It also includes special deals and introductory services that are easy for first-time clients to say yes to.

Abandon cart series

When someone leaves a product or service in their cart and doesn’t fulfill the checkout, this series is triggered to get their attention with the goal of getting them to make the purchase. This can include an incentive to complete their checkouts like a small discount or small freebie. 

Seasonal promotional series

Organizations with a large marketing budget are sending ongoing promotional series for at least their most popular service or product, but I think everyone should be sending out seasonal promotional series. This includes a series of emails that are highlighting seasonal products or focusing on specific services for a set amount of time.

Repeat customer/donor series

This series is sent to customers that have purchased more than once. Emails include content around special deals for VIP customers and introduces them to lesser-known products or new ways to use current products.

Win-back series

This series is sent to customers that haven’t purchased for a while. You get to determine when this series is triggered, but the goal of it is to re-engage the customer by providing them a limited-time deal, or a special freebie if they purchase again. 

These are types of email series, but two additional tips for successful email marketing is:

1. Automating all of your email series to be sent on their own with a predetermined logic
2. Segment each email series as much as possible, so that you can relate to each group and provide personalized emails.

Again, this is just to get your feet wet in the world of email marketing. There is much more to say, but this will help you in the beginning. Now, let’s talk about WHO should be using email marketing.

Who is email marketing for?

This is a bit of a trick question, and everyone is the short answer.

Email marketing is for everyone because each type of organization or brand is selling in some capacity. Okay, I know that wasn’t the smoothest way to say that, but it’s true. Whether or not we want to believe it, we are all selling something. 

Businesses are selling a product or service. But, selling doesn’t have to be an ugly word. Selling is just as much research as it is being a people person. The computer isn’t writing your email, a person is. So, that person should know who they are writing to. Good sales mean that you know how to help the person reading your email and you are providing genuine options to solve their problem. See? Nothing gross about sales – it’s really about helping people. 

Nonprofits are also selling themselves. You may not be selling a product or service to the person donating, but you are selling the value of your service to the population you’re serving. There’s an extra challenge here though: you need to know the value of your mission and service because you have to convince one population to give you the money to service a different group of people. The value isn’t for the person donating – it’s selling the value to the serviced population. More of a reason to be constantly in your potential donors’ email – to teach them all about what you’re doing and give them plenty of opportunities to become part of your legacy.

Big and small companies need email marketing. Of course, depending on the size of your marketing budget an email marketing strategy for a large and small company will look different, but everyone should be using it. 

Small businesses should be using it for welcome emails and sending consistent emails (whether that’s weekly or monthly – although, I think you should aim for weekly or twice a month as a minimum) – the key is consistency and utilizing smaller series within each of the starter sequences.

Bigger businesses really have no excuse for not having robust email marketing. With a larger budget, they have the option to dedicate money toward investing in ROI.

Investing in email marketing should be exciting (not burdensome)  – the ROI is huge! It’s reported for every $1 you spend on email marketing that you make $35-42 back! Wow! If I wasn’t a copywriter, that would be one of the first tasks I outsourced. 

Email software for automation and segmentation

I just hinted at automation, but automating your emails means setting up the emails into an email software and then determining what triggers the emails to be sent.

Here’s an example of a welcome email:

1. The first email in the welcome series is triggered to send 5 minutes after the new subscribers hit “submit”
2. The second email and each email after is scheduled to be sent every 2 days after the initial email.
3. The next email sequence (usually a regular newsletter or a promotional email series) will be automatically sent 2 days after the last email in the welcome series is sent.

Automating your emails takes the time out of sending each email and allows the software to do the work for you. This means your copywriter creates your emails, put them into the format in the email software, creates the logic, and then the software does its thing! 

Here are a few examples of email software I’ve used. This is not a paid endorsement – just examples for you to check out! If you’re planning on working with me in the future, these are software I’ve used already, but I am open to learning new ones. 

1. MailChimp
2. Klaviyo
3. FloDesk
4. I haven’t used these personally, but I know that WIX, Shopify, and Square online have internal email services you can use.

Let me help you!

If you’re not interested in writing your own email copy or have absolutely nowhere to start, then contact me, and let’s chat about working together!  Email marketing is one of my primary services as a copywriter, and if you’ve made it this far, you agree that I know a thing or two about successful email marketing.

Let me help you and take the guesswork out of a successful email marketing strategy and work with me. We’ll determine your business goal for each email series, dive into who your target audience is (I can help do research on this to provide clarity), and create captivating and compelling emails that will provide genuine solutions to your audience. This is how you get your audience to convert into life-long fans.

Let me help make it happen. Schedule a call with me today!