To create an effective email campaign, you must correctly perform the basic steps: choose a reliable email service, adapt the content to be read on mobile screens, write catchy texts, collect a sufficient number of addresses of potential and existing clients, and segment the audience. But sometimes this is not enough: your competitors send similar newsletters, so you cannot surprise your subscribers with something new and interesting. In this article, you will find 20 tips that will help you come up with what to write in your mailings to clients and understand how to make sales letters bright and commercially successful.
Make your subscribers feel special. Invite them to sign up for an exclusive newsletter for your best clients. You can designate regular customers, consumers with a certain check amount, or owners of a certain product as the best.
Offer exclusive club membership to subscribers in personalized emails. At the same time, make sure that they do not look like the so-called “Nigerian letters”. Ask the client to confirm participation in the club.
Include in the mailing list for exclusive club members profitable offer, discount coupons, pre-order offers for a new product, etc. With the help of word of mouth, this will make club membership desirable for all your customers. They will strive to fulfill the conditions necessary to receive an invitation.
Your subscribers receive dozens of emails a day. They are unlikely to pay attention to every offer to download something for free, take advantage of a 3% discount on the purchase of a turbojet lawn mower with the function of medium-distance air travel, and also ignore questions about the desire to earn millions without effort and initial investment. Advertising noise does its job - people develop deafness to marketing messages.
It’s another matter if you can show your concern for the client in a letter. How to do it? Here are some ideas:
- Let them know that the special offer ends in 24 hours. Perhaps the customer forgot that he wanted to buy a lawn mower at a discount.
- Explain why it is important to use your product.
- Offer your subscribers valuable information. For example, imagine how many men will thank you if you offer them gift ideas for their loved ones on March 8th.
Pay attention to the title of the letter. It should let subscribers know that you wrote something valuable.
The secret to the effectiveness of this tip is personalization. You should reach out to the client personally and ask them to explain their choices, provide feedback, or help you conduct research.
Shop e-books“Litres” asks you to leave a review for each book purchased. Moreover, the authors of the first reviews of new works receive bonus money to their account.
The ReadRate service offers you to take a thematic test.
And Optimizely marketer Jesse Becker suggests asking her anything.
These include reviews, research results, cases, awards, ratings. Please note the following letter:
“Litres” announces a book that ranks first in the ratings best works 2014 from famous publications and the Amazon online store. The Russian-speaking audience did not have time to read this book. There are no reviews on the book sites Litres and ReadRate, there is only one super positive review on LiveLib, and no one knows anything on Facebook.
Social proof works: the audience falls for the Amazon rating and the word “super bestseller”, although real reviews There are still very few Russian-speaking users about the book. Surely the book sells well.
It was said above that personalizing emails helps to receive feedback. Personalization doesn't stop there; it improves the overall effectiveness of your email campaign. Email is designed for correspondence between people. Keep this in mind when writing sales letters. Use the following recommendations:
- Write on behalf of real person, not the brand.
- Make sure your messages are relevant to the individual.
- Address the user personally.
Another example of personalization is the ability to receive personalized recommendations from the LiveLib service.
Effective emails ensure high click-through rates on links in emails and conversion of subscribers into consumers. Take a look at the Death to the Stock Photo project's letter designs. The conversion button here is located above the message itself.
What happens if the client is not interested in the offer? The authors of the following newsletter provide the user with an alternative.
For what? This increases audience engagement. Above is an example of a Death to the Stock Photo email that asks the subscriber to first download a package of free photos and then begin reading the email. There are other successful examples of mailing lists with downloadable content.
Readers will certainly pay attention to the financial forecast, beautifully presented in the form of a white paper.
Do your customers want discounts? Let them download.
Do this with calls to action. They significantly increase CTR and email conversion.
You can use more aggressive CTAs.
Use the urgency factor, the words “free” and “no registration.”
On the one hand, your subscribers should understand the meaning of the message after reading the topic. On the other hand, you should intrigue them and force them to take the necessary actions out of curiosity. Look how Za Rulem magazine encourages a subscriber to open a letter.
Howard Zoss is intriguing fellow marketers with the unprecedented rise in popularity of online video.
Tip #10: Use the same subject line for all emails
This recommendation is suitable for you if two conditions are met. First, your audience must trust you unconditionally. This is possible if you have been working in the market for a long time and have an impeccable reputation. Secondly, the content of letters should be similar friend on a friend. For example, you could send your clients an email every week with the subject line “5 best products of the week" or "The most popular materials for the past week."
This tactic has a simple meaning: subscribers get used to receiving emails from you with a certain subject, they easily recognize them and find them in their inbox.
Referral links work because their use leaves all parties benefiting: the referral, the referrer and the business. The first one gets profitable terms service, the second tries for bonuses, and the third stimulates sales.
Tip #13: Offer your audience a lot of useful information
Regularly surprise your audience with large emails useful information. Do this once every two weeks or once a month. This way you will train users to wait for your messages and pay attention to them. Remember, you don't have to make every letter huge. For example, you can send standard messages to users twice a week, and once a month create a large digest of publications on the site or an analytical report.
Large letters are difficult to illustrate with illustrations, so check out the following links for examples:
Tip #14: Remind Users of What You Do and Who You Are
If you work for Google or Sberbank, skip this point. And if you have a small or medium-sized enterprise, be sure to follow the recommendation. Remind users how you can help them.
The Liters book store includes a reminder in every letter:
The Advego exchange made a detailed advertising cheat sheet in one of its letters:
Tip #15: Leverage Your Partners' Brand Awareness
Imagine that you have just opened an online store where you can buy electronic gadgets. Naturally, the audience does not know the name of your project. But she knows the brands that produce gadgets: Samsung, Apple, LG, and so on. Use this in your newsletter. Here is an example implementation of this tactic:
Here's an example of a more subtle use of brand recognition:
No, you don't need to be a god or a billionaire to do this. To make your subscribers happy, it is usually enough to give them some modest gift. The main thing is that users do not perceive it as a marketing ploy.
These are the kinds of gifts people don’t need:
But this is better:
And Privatbank successfully used an important event- Soccer World Cup.
“Litres” timed the sale of books at a discount to coincide with the premiere of the film adaptation of one of the works.
Say “thank you” at every opportunity. Thank users for making purchases, for reading emails, for leaving reviews, etc. This has a positive impact on your subscribers and builds loyalty.
For example, Svyaznoy even thanks you for adding items to your cart:
And the FotoMag store is not limited to words of gratitude:
Users do not like to read promotional emails. You can solve this problem by making commercial messages look like neutral ads. For example, let us know that it is on sale new product, prices have been reduced and delivery terms have been updated.
A bookstore you know regularly sends neutral letters about new books going on sale:
Shop household chemicals reports that products that the client was once interested in have gone back on sale.
Any mailing costs money, so only companies do it, and for the sole purpose of selling. Only now they achieve this goal different ways. I identify three types of mailings for myself: gaming, useful and sales.
Firstly, gaming. In this case, companies create an interesting literary character who tells different stories in letters and shares with readers his opinion about everything in the world. This type of mailing, for example, was carried out by Aimobilco and Budista. Game mailings entertain readers and sell a product at the same time. The game and sales are necessarily separated, just as an interesting film is separated from advertising. Only great masters know how to mix product offerings well into an interesting article.
The second type is educational magazine, for example, about the business we do at Megaplan. We find, reprint or write useful ones ourselves, interesting material and deliver it to the audience. The ultimate goal of such a newsletter is to create a loyal audience that is more likely to use the services of a company they know from a good newsletter than to choose a completely unfamiliar one. Its main task is to make it interesting for readers.
The third type - the most ineffective - is direct sales mailings. They make a specific product offer to the reader. Those for whom it is not suitable simply click the “Spam” button and permanently remove themselves from the mailing list. Recently, copywriter Dmitry Kot published a book about mailings, in which he says that a proper letter from a company should contain 80% useful information and 20% product advertising. A situation in which both the wolves are fed and the sheep are safe: some react to the offer, and those who are not interested in the product simply read the educational part of the newsletter.
How to avoid getting spam
Spam is advertising that turns out to be useless. If a person responds to the “cheap Viagra” spam, for him it is not spam. Mailing is a very risky thing because it implies an invasion of a person’s personal space. And if it turns out that what you wrote reverently and lovingly is not relevant for the reader, then it turns out that you have generated spam. To reduce the number of complaints, you need to strive to ensure that the newsletter is interesting to the widest possible circle of your readers.
For example, I understand that most of our audience is not interested in reading about the specifics of Megaplan’s work, so I write articles on broader topics related to business issues. The company's products and services, special offers and promotions, as a rule, are of no interest to anyone. It's another matter when you write in general about life and the world around you. This is much more relevant, and people are more interested in reading about it.
Formation of the base
Mailing efficiency indicators largely depend on the quality of the database. You need to be prepared for the fact that only 20% of the base are “real” people, and the remaining 80% of users left their “dump” addresses instead of workers or simply never open the mailing list. I once heard the following phrase: “A magazine should be such that people want to pay to read it.” This key principle. The highest quality database consists of people who subscribe to the newsletter themselves. They clearly understand why they need it, and read it of their own free will.
You MUST provide your personal email. People love to communicate
with real people, and not just leave comments to unknown people on the company’s Facebook page
It is extremely difficult to collect such a database. This can only be done if you treat the newsletter as a separate product that needs to be sold - prove to customers how they will benefit from it. More often it happens differently: the database is collected from addresses left during registration or written on business cards collected at conferences. As a result, 2/3 of the base receives a newsletter that they didn’t really want.
Rules for good mailing
A newsletter is not a magical thing that immediately attracts customers to your site. It's basically just a letter in a box. However, there are several rules that help increase its effectiveness. Firstly, everything related to sales of new services and promotions should always go under the line after useful content. I never suggest people buy something from Megaplan before I give them something useful from myself. This is how the principle of reciprocity works.
Secondly, I never mix advertising or commercial offers into a useful article. This is a prohibited technique, you can’t do it like that. The reader sees
that you are trying to secretly sell him something, he loses trust in you and sends the mailing to spam.
3.6 billion accounts
registered
on the ground
64% of recipients
open an email because of its title
Monday
the most effective day for mailings
In addition, mailing is a conversation between person and person. There is a simple rule: never send anything that you wouldn't show your mom or wife. I always remember that they will read this, and I will never publish something for which I would be ashamed in front of them. Therefore, I don’t try to “sell” the product, I try not to fake it, not to use bureaucratic language, not to be familiar. When designing the newsletter, I do everything possible to make it easier to read: I break up large chunks of text into paragraphs, add subheadings, sidebars, quotes, and sometimes add pictures to the text. All this together adds up to a good, honest and pleasantly designed newsletter.
In general mailings, I always indicate personal email: any letter should have the possibility of direct communication with the author. People love to interact with real people, not just leave comments to random people on a company's Facebook page. Readers won’t write to you just like that; they need motivation: a specific question, a topic and a reason to communicate. If I ask readers about something in the mailing list, I receive 40-50 letters in response. During my entire time working at Megaplan, I received only five to seven aggressive letters from inadequate people. Usually people in letters praise, give advice, criticize, and all this is generally very useful.
Where to begin
The first thing you need to do is understand why you need it in the first place. Next, you should answer the question: does your company have something unique that it could share. It could be personal experience employees and manager, the presence of an expert, some resource that will make your newsletter stand out from the rest. That's the only way she can become effective tool promotion.
At the preparation stage, you must decide who will be responsible for the newsletter and how often it should be done. There is no optimal indicator here; it all depends on your capabilities and the topic of the newsletter. You can experiment with frequency to see when people unfollow more. In general, it’s easy to overdo it on the Internet, but difficult to underdo it, so sending out once a month is also normal. The main rule is that it should be released on a clear schedule. You can’t treat it like something minor that can wait a day or a week. Irregular mailing simply won’t work and will be a waste of money and effort.
The person doing the mailing has two main tasks. Firstly, stylistic. He must be able to create intelligible, clear and understandable texts. Secondly, content. He must have a clear understanding of what is worth writing about. In this sense, he simultaneously takes on the functions of editor, journalist and analyst. His task is to find material in a huge information flow that deserves attention, transform it, add something of his own and, having written the text, understand whether it is interesting to his readers.
An ordinary PR manager will not cope with this task. Such a specialist should be sought among journalists and philologists, people who have creative and literary taste and are accustomed to working with text. To assess the adequacy of a candidate, ask him to write a test text and ask clients if they liked it. A good specialist will definitely ask in response what kind of audience you have, what topics interest them, what sites and magazines they read.
You shouldn’t plan what your newsletter will be like in a year and spend three months on expensive design, selecting authors and topics for the future. I recommend starting small and testing everything. Don't build a palace right away, start with a one-story house.
Work with hypotheses that are easy to implement and see what response they elicit from readers. The newsletter should be carried out sparingly, otherwise there simply won’t be enough energy and time for it. It doesn't have to be perfect and super cool. First of all, it should just come out and be of acceptable quality.
“Subscribe to the newsletter!” - scream pop-ups on information sites. It’s not in vain that they scream, because every subscriber is worth its weight in gold, especially for young projects. Each subscriber is a regular reader who will come to you again and again.
That's only if you run new project, a problem may arise - letters need to be sent somehow. Don’t sit down and do it yourself!
No, you don't need to bother yourself with such routine work. Because there are special services for mass mailings.
There are a lot of them, and today we will introduce you to the ten most popular ones. Let's focus first on the tariffs of each, but detailed analysis features and advantages - this is the topic of another article :)
Mad Mimi is a simple service for creating, sending, sharing and tracking emails on the Internet. Founded in 2008.
More than 40 million emails are sent from it every day.
The service offers 4 tariff plans:
Forms, templates, and email themes are available. Mad Mimi uses SSL to protect transmitted information - this is the same technology that banks and large electronic stores use to prevent eavesdropping, falsification or counterfeiting.
Without exaggeration, the most popular service is primarily due to its attractive rates. Operating since 2001, it is trusted by more than 12 million users.
The Russian version of the site is lame, so it is better to come here if you have at least basic knowledge of the language.
If you have 2,000 or fewer subscribers, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month completely free.
Another foreign service for email newsletters, with a convenient and intuitive interface. Uses cloud software technologies.
Streamcontact is reliable: the email will be delivered within required time no delays.
Using the service, you can plan mailings, create new ones, conduct testing before sending, track targeted mailings, and send messages automatically.
Domestic mailing list service, founded in 2002. Very popular among small and medium-sized businesses on the RuNet.
Tariffs for services are quite reasonable:
Provides a visual editor, detailed statistics, full subscriber management, automatic mailing, surveys and testing, and many other useful features.
Domestic project founded in 2008. UniSender allows you to send both email and SMS mailings, set up letter chains, and embed social media buttons in your mailings.
The service rates are very affordable:
For mailings from 50,000 contacts, conditions are discussed individually.
A unified platform for email campaigns, SMS, push notifications and transactional emails. The service is easy to use and is suitable for solving most standard tasks: sending an email newsletter that can be viewed, including from mobile devices; make a series of letters, create letter templates, conduct testing, and much more.
Newsletter by e-mail considered convenient and in an inexpensive way attracting clients. It is actively used by Internet entrepreneurs and others. How to make a newsletter via Email, how to increase its effectiveness, what myths are associated with it - read the article.
Basic misconceptions
It is generally accepted that mailing is easy and simple. It is enough to have a database of addresses and regularly send letters with offers to buy this or that. However, look in your drawer. How many emails do you send to spam? How much do you delete without even opening it? When you're in last time Did you buy something after receiving such a letter?
Technical knowledge on how to send mass emails is clearly not enough to achieve good results.
Firstly, the address base must be legal; subscribers purchased or received from a partner will not meet your expectations. Ideally, a target audience should be gathered.
Secondly, the letters should contain interesting and useful information. The form of presentation of the material is no less important. You need to write in such a way that you want to read the letter. Headlines are extremely important, otherwise no one will open the newsletter.
The plan is important. You should know in advance when and what you will tell your readers about.
A simple conclusion follows from this. You need to learn how to do an email newsletter correctly. Read books, take part in trainings and, of course, try in practice, look for your own approaches and methods.
How to send email campaigns correctly
The purpose of letters from a company is to sell your product. But this can be achieved in different ways.
- The first way is play. A certain fictional character is created - the hero of the letters. Stories are told on his behalf, and he can also share his opinion or impressions about something. The purpose of such letters is, first of all, to entertain the reader, but also to offer a product. Playing and selling must be kept separate. As an analogy, we can recall an interesting program with advertising blocks.
- The next path is educational. This is exactly the strategy that is followed in the Megaplan newsletter. Letters are a kind of business magazine filled with useful information. Articles are written by the authors or reprinted from other sources. Thanks to this approach, audience loyalty and an expert image of the company are formed.
- The third option is direct sales. It is considered the most ineffective of all possible. These are the emails that most often end up in spam. Even with this approach, only 20% of the information should be selling, and 80% should be useful. Otherwise the method will not work.
How to form a database and not become a spammer?
When choosing a newsletter, you find yourself on a slippery slope. Letters are a real invasion of personal space. People don’t like this, so they click the “Spam” button and complain. It is important to ensure that the information is interesting and relevant to readers.
How to make email newsletters useful? Don't write about your company or how good your product is. Take on broader topics that will hook your audience. About success, about life around you, share working secrets and techniques. Let your emails help people solve problems, even if they haven't purchased anything yet.
The effectiveness of mailing is directly related to the quality of the database. Accept the fact that a maximum of 20% of addresses will be working, and 80% are dump boxes that are not even checked. The database will be of higher quality if it includes people who signed up themselves because they were interested in something. To collect just such addresses, you need to treat mailing as a serious project that requires an investment of effort and time.
Regularity
Naturally, you need to contact your audience regularly. If you don't plan for it, then you shouldn't start. Most often, letters arrive once a month or once a week. It's better to send quality material, but less often than low-quality, but often.
It is believed that the most effective regularity is in the range of two letters per week to one letter every two weeks. Frequent calls are perceived as a sign of importunity, and if you remind yourself too rarely, they may completely forget.
Technical points
So, you have decided on the content of the letters and the frequency, and have collected a database of addresses. What's next? How to send a newsletter by email?
If the database is small, then a very real task is to send letters without using paid services. How to make an email newsletter yourself? Very simple.
When you finish your email, fill out the To, Cc, and Bcc fields. Addresses must be separated by commas. There is a limit on the number of recipients. For example, in Mail.ru there cannot be more than thirty of them.
In addition to the fact that this method is time-consuming, there is another danger in it. Spam filters perceive letters with a large number of recipients as unwanted. To bypass this protection, you need to send messages not in bulk, but send each one separately. With a large database, this is simply impossible to do manually. How to make an email campaign yourself in such a situation? You will have to resort to the help of special mailing services.
How to send email to everyone: links to services
There are three most popular today: SmartResponder, Subscribe, UniSender. All three are domestic. Thanks to this, they have a Russian-language interface and Russian-speaking technical support, which is very convenient.
They also all provide official documents for services, which is extremely important for legal entities.
UniSender and Smart Responder are democratic. If the database is small and there are few letters, then you are given the opportunity to use the services for free.
In addition to email, you can send SMS messages through these services. It is also very important that you have access to statistics: how many emails were opened, how many were sent to spam, how many people clicked on the site, etc.
Another advantage of the services is that they are actively involved in training their users on how to effectively send emails to unfamiliar subscribers. You will receive articles and books the very next day after you complete the registration procedure.
Now you not only know how to create a newsletter based on Email, but also have information on how to make it interesting, effective and help promote your business.
Email newsletter is a tool that allows you not only to deliver letters to subscribers, but also to find out what is interesting to your readers and what is not. They also earn money with the help of the newsletter, sometimes more than from the website.
However, today we will talk about how to make an email newsletter yourself on your favorite site. Don't be afraid, it's waiting for you step-by-step instruction for Dummies. Which will allow you to learn all the intricacies of this craft.
The first question that many people have is why use an email newsletter service and is it possible to get by with just your computer? - The answer is of course no!
3 reasons to use email marketing services
1. Having an editor to create a beautiful letter. This means you don't have to dig into code to create attractive emails.
2. Modern Yandex mail, Gmail, Mail and Rambler use DKIM signature and valid SPF authorization (some are registered in DMARC). That is, sending letters through your server does not guarantee that at least someone will see the letter (it may end up in Spam).
3. The last advantage is the provision of statistics: how many letters were received, how many were read and other factors, depending on the service.
Which email marketing service should you choose?
An important factor is how many subscribers you will have 50-2000 or 2500-5000 and how often you are going to send emails once a month or several times a week.
What I mean is that if you have few subscribers and rarely send mailings, then you can organize a free mailing list. However, if you think big, you will have to pay for the services anyway.
Not long ago, I talked about things you should try to increase your conversions.
However, here I repeat that it is best to use, where all the latest features are implemented and it will be free up to 100 subscribers.
— allows you to create a free email newsletter for up to 2,500 subscribers. I think these are one of the best services which can be recommended.
What does Unisender email creation look like?
Creating a special email for a domain
Of course, you can use regular mail registered to you, but it will not look nice. If [email protected], recommends reading the article or looking at promotions on the website.
Therefore, we make sure to create an email similar to [email protected]. This inspires more trust among readers, such letters are less likely to end up in spam and provide a certain amount of branding for the site.
How to make an email for a website?
The first method: if you have sprinthost, timeweb, beget or any other good hosting, then you just need to go to your hosting control panel and create an email. The process takes 3 minutes.
Creating a subscription form on the site
Last and extreme important step, because using the subscription form, people will agree to receive your letters. Your goal is to create the most beautiful shape, which attracts attention.
Such forms can be created in any email newsletter service and can be easily copied to the website. Since I use UniSender, I’ll include a lesson on creating a subscription form for this service.
How to create a subscription form in UniSender
However this method has a minus, namely limited form design and loading of unnecessary scripts on the site, which is not very good. Therefore, I offer another solution for webmasters.
You can create your own subscription form, and then connect UniSender to a new beautiful form. To do this, you will have to copy a few inputs and you will be ready!
Video on integrating your own form with UniSender
After you have chosen an email service for mailings and installed a form on the site, most likely the set of subscribers will be slow and I would like to immediately protect you from stupid decisions.
Mistakes that every second person makes
Mistake #1— The first thing that comes to mind for many webmasters is, where can I find subscribers? And after searching the Internet, they start downloading email databases or adding their friends to the mailing list.
This leads to the fact that people, without giving consent, receive letters from some site, which will ultimately lead to this site being blacklisted. And in the future, all letters will go to the Spam folder, and not to the target audience.
Mistake #2— having seen enough cool cases on email marketing, where they sell 100,000 rubles using mail, some run and shove affiliate links directly into the mail in order to sell the services or goods of others.
Sometimes this really works, but the main purpose of the newsletter should be informational and force the subscriber to go to your website, where everything is explained in detail (the result will be 3-5 times better!)
Mistake #3— there are people who just start a newsletter, whatever it is, and invite subscribers to read latest articles or look at the latest products, unfortunately this is ineffective (I would say that it ends up in the Spam folder).
You have a 40 character title, where the first 3-5 words should convey the key idea and arouse curiosity. Therefore, try to create interesting headlines, they play a key role in email marketing.