The 10 Secrets Of Successful Email Marketing

Introduction: Email Marketing – Your Route To Greater Revenue

Email marketing is a great way to achieve small business growth and increased revenue. Good email marketing can help you make more sales through your email marketing messages. This is why all of the big businesses in the online space have mailing list strategy.

Good email marketing strategy + a good, engaged list = SALES.

Many female small business owners fail to have effective email marketing campaigns set up, don’t focus enough time on growing their mailing lists by adding new subscribers, or don’t have a mailing list set up at all. Gah. 😩

Mailing lists and mailing list strategy sit at the bottom of a long to do list in daily business life for many female entrepreneurs. That’s a mistake.

Mailing lists and email marketing is a task often ignored in favour of other ‘easier’ business goals (like posting on social media), even though mailing lists have enormous power to drive sales for your small business.

In this blog post I’ll guide you through 10 Secrets Of Successful Email Marketing, that many business owners don’t understand, fail to implement, or simply ignore.

When you give your mailing list the appropriate focus, and use great mailing list strategy, the benefits of email marketing for your small business can be huge.

Most of the sales I make in my own business come through my mailing list, even though that mailing list is not particularly large.

Your list has huge potential, and I don’t want you to let the opportunity you have with a great mailing list strategy slip through your hands. 

I’ll help you unlock the full potential of your mailing list and email campaigns, with 10 key email marketing tips. They will help your email marketing strategy bring more revenue, greater community, and more growth to your small business.

Let’s dive right in to The Ten Secrets Of Successful Email Marketing.

1. Build A Targeted Email List

When you start any small business in the online space, having a quality email list will help you grow community, make more sales, and stabilise your business.

Having created a mailing list, your goal should be to have consistent strategy to send emails to your subscribers. You can create a mailing list for free on many platforms like Mailerlite, Klaviyo, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign.

Many of the ladies in my community really love Mailerlite.

The emails you send to your list should be a combination of quality content your subscribers will find useful, and marketing content to help your list members buy from you.

When building your mailing list, you should do so by offering something of value for free to your audience, to encourage them to subscribe to your list.

You should promote your freebie in all of your spaces away from your list (on your social networks for example), to encourage your audience to take action to get some valuable information from you, in return for them joining your list. 

If you need to learn more about building a targeted email list, you’ll find some valuable tips in these blog posts:

HOW TO DRIVE PEOPLE TO YOUR MAILING LIST FROM SOCIAL

WHERE TO START A MAILING LIST FOR FREE IN YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

WHY YOU NEED A MAILING LIST IN YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

2. Know You Audience: Craft Emails That Impact

When you have subscribers on your mailing list, it’s important to know who those people are, and the needs they have.

Understanding this enables you to craft the right message in each of the email messages you send to your list.

This helps your target audience see, that rather than you piling their mailboxes full of sales emails, you’re giving value in your email marketing messages.

That can then help your subscribers start to know, like and trust you, and more importantly look forward to, and open the emails you send, because they know that those emails will be good emails that help them in some way.

The valuable information you share in your emails needs to be useful to your audience.

Your email content needs to educate, or entertain, or resolve some sort of a pain or issue your audience has.

When you can do this in the content of your emails, you’ll find that your open rates (how many people open and read your emails) will increase. 

When you’ve learnt how your mailing list platform works, you can then go one step deeper and start to tag or segment your mailing list, based on the actions your mailing list subscribers take with you.

This means you can send even more targeted emails to your list based on audience behaviours.

For example, if someone joins my mailing list because they’ve watched my free Pinterest webinar, I can tag those people with the tag ‘Pinterest webinar watched’.

I can then send automated emails just to those people, to take them on a deeper journey into Pinterest strategy, ultimately encouraging them to join my Pinterest 101 membership.

This is the power of tags and segments on your mailing list.

3. Using Great Subject Lines

The first thing your audience sees when one of your emails lands in their inbox, is the subject line. That subject line is like a call to action to encourage your audience to open your email over the hundreds of other emails sitting in their inbox.

If your subject lines are generic and look the same as many others – the chances of your emails being opened, let alone read, is slim.

You have to think about how your subject lines can catch the attention of your mailing list subscribers, to the extent they want to dive further in to the emails you send.

My inbox is FULL of emails offering something salesy:

– 50% off.

– Last chance to..

– Buy now or miss this forever.

– Limited time to get this.

– Just a few hours left to purchase..

Those subject lines are fine IF I’M IN A BUYING MOOD. But often I’m not in that place when I’m scrolling through my inbox. 

However, if an interesting subject line on an email causes me to open and read the email, and inside that email is valuable content with a CTA (call to action) to buy something, that might then cause me to get my credit card out and make a purchase.

You have to dangle a carrot in front of your audience with a great subject line that causes them to open your email, followed by great content that they find valuable, before you start to sell them anything.

You can use AI platforms like ChatGPT to help you craft more compelling subject lines for your emails.

For example, I put this prompt into ChatGPT:

“I am selling a Pinterest membership for female small business owners. I want to use that membership as a CTA in five emails, but I would like some really good subject lines for 5 emails that are not salesy, but are likely to cause people to click and read the email. Can you provide 5 great email subject lines I can use.”

Here are the 5 subject lines ChatGPT gave me:

1. “Unlock the Power of Pinterest: Exclusive Tips Await You!”
2. “Boost Your Business with Pinterest: Let’s Dive In Together 📌”
3. “Don’t Miss Out: Weekly Pinterest Perks for You 🌟”
4. “Your Secret Weapon for Online Success: Pinterest Insights Inside!”
5. “Ready to Elevate Your Business? Join Our Pinterest Community 🚀”

They’re not perfect – but they’re a good start. I would play with these subject lines to make them better, like this:

1. “Get Massive Traffic From Pinterest: Exclusive Tips Await You!”
2. “The Best Place For Your Business Is Pinterest: Let’s Dive In Together 📌”
3. “Don’t Miss Out: Burnt Out By Social? Try Pinterest Instead 🌟”
4. “Your Secret Weapon for Online Success: Pinterest Insights Inside!”
5. “Ready to Elevate Your Business? Pinterest Is Where It’s At” 🚀”

A great subject line grabs attention, and makes recipients want to unveil the secrets inside your email.

Your subject line is the single most important part of your emails, because good subject lines can skyrocket open rates. 

Successful email marketers craft subject lines that pique curiosity, or they’re personalized, and yes, sometimes echo urgency or exclusivity.

Picture your subject line as a 10 second elevator pitch. It must be compelling enough to get the audience to click and read.

4. Adding Value Through Content That Converts

Even when your mailing list subscribers open your emails, you have to keep them engaged.

Poorly written, rushed emails that give little thought as to what the mailing list subscribers wants and needs are, are unlikely to bring results.

The good news is, the more you learn to understand your audience – who they are, what they need, what they like, the better you can craft emails that will resonate with them.  

I have a blog post that helps you understand your audience in much greater detail, you can read that post here:

UNDERSTAND WHO YOUR AUDIENCE IS

Email marketing can be a game-changer for your small business, but the power of your emails lies beyond just mere promotions that sell stuff. 

A successful newsletter balances the sizzle of special offers, with the substance of great content that offers value. 

Crafting content that guides, informs, educates and entertains your audience will help establish you as an authority in your field, and that in turn fosters a deeper, trust-based relationship with your subscribers.

Think about adding value to your customers’ lives in your emails. How can you do that? 

For example, if you’re launching a new product, blend the announcement for that new product with tips on how the product solves specific problems or enhances the subcriber’s life in some way.

This approach helps ensure that your subscribers receive relevant content that resonates with their needs and interests.

It’s perfectly ok and indeed essential to market your products and services to your mailing list – that is what that tool is there for.

However, your marketing strategy needs to be more than just ‘here’s something you can buy’.

The more you can wrap sales marketing around giving value to your list in your emails, the more likely the audience on your list will make a purchasing decision with you.

Constantly over-salesy emails are likely to lead to your subscribers skipping past your emails, or worse, marking them as spam (which you do not want as this can impact email deliverability if it happens too often), and ultimately them unsubscribing from your list.

Build relationships and community with your list through the power of value giving emails.

This will help your list subscribers stay around, and give you better results regarding making sales from your email marketing efforts.

5. Email Design: Your Best Friend or Worst Foe?

I know female small business owners who create beautiful looking email newsletters.

I know others (like myself), who simply type text.

Both of these options can work, but what’s more important, is the content that goes into the design.

The best designed email newsletter in the world is not going to perform, if the content within it is of little value to the audience it’s being served to.

Valuable content first. Design second.

However you choose to or not to design your email content, you should make sure that it’s mobile friendly, because the majority of people will read your emails on a mobile device.

Whenever you draft an email, it’s always a good idea to send a test copy to yourself.

Open the email on each of your devices to make sure the design works. Read the email out loud to yourself to make sure the deliverability of your content flows.

Whatever format of email design you use, making sure your content is easy to read, easy to absorb is important.

It’s better to speak in a human voice (as if you were chatting to a friend at a cafe), than to make your emails overly wordy, reading like an encyclopaedia. 

Break paragraphs up, and use short sentences.

Many of your subscribers will open and scan your emails rather than read them slowly word for word. 

Bullet points and lists can help engage the reader, and make the content of your emails easier to absorb.

6. Metrics that Matter

Mastering email marketing includes keeping your eye on how your emails perform. 

Metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates give you feedback about the success of each of the marketing emails you send. 

Open rates show whether your subject lines have worked to entice your audience to open and read your emails.

A healthy open rate indicates that your subject lines have resonated.

You should take note of which subject lines are performing best, so that you can do more that are similar.

Click-through rates tell you how many of your mailing list subscribers have taken action from your email via the call to action you have in any email you send.

This is invaluable information, telling you which of your emails have given enough great content in the body of the email, and which of the best CTA’s you have provided, that have caused mailing list subscribers to take the next step with you.

Bounce rates show how many emails did not reach their end destination due to problems with your email server or the recipient’s email server.

This can be the result of privacy settings on email platforms, but these metrics are worth keeping an eye on, because if bounce rates are too high – you need to figure out what’s causing this issue and resolve it.

7. Email Automation: The Untapped Potential

I often witness many small businesses struggling to keep up with the demands of email marketing, making no use of automations that are available in every email platform.

Having automated email sequences in place can help keep your emails in front of your subcribers, and keep them engaged with you.

An example of this is when new subscribers join your list.

If you have an automated welcome email sequence in place, you can immediately start to connect and engage with those new subscribers, without having to be present creating emails for those people every time someone new joins your list.  

I have a blog post about welcome email sequences that you might find useful. You can read that here:

7 TIPS TO CREATE A WINNING EMAIL NURTURE SEQUENCE

Your mailing list provider will have tools that give you the opportunity to build out as many email automations as you wish.

These can be nurture email sequences, email sequences to keep people on a journey with you when they’ve purchased a product or service, or signed up for a freebie.

The opportunities for automation are endless, and can be key to helping you send emails to your email recipients without the demand on you becoming ever greater.

8. Email Frequency

This is one of the most regular conversations I have about mailing lists with the ladies in my community, for various reasons.

One of the common topics we talk about is frequency of email sending.

There are so many female business owners who almost refuse to email their list more than once a week, for fear of offending their mailing list subscribers, and causing people to unsubscribe.

However, when I look at my own mailbox, I see many of the biggest businesses/coaches I subscribe to send emails every single day, often multiple times a day.

The likes of Dan Kenny (marketing genius), Russell Brunson (of clickfunnels), Bill Mueller (email marketing expert), Troy Broussard, Perry Marshall (80/20 rule) and many, many more of the big names in the industry are all prolific email writers and senders.

They send regular emails to their lists because they know their lists are key to selling products and services.

I get that you may not feel able to move to emailing your list every single day, but I would say the minimum you should email – bare minimum, is once a week.

You have to remember that it’s your goal to keep your business front of minds eye with your audience.

That means having a regular email schedule you can stick to, that isn’t anything less than sending one email a week.

At the time of writing this post, my email frequency is 3 emails a week, plus any automations I have in place that fire off when my target audience takes any sort of action with me.

I would prefer to send more emails – at least one a day, 5 days a week. I’ll work up to that.

I’ve never had any major unsubscribes from my list, no matter how many emails I send.

A couple of unsubscribes happen here and there. That’s par for the course, just like we gain followers and lose followers on social. 

Remember that anyone unsubscribing from your list is indicating that they’re no longer interested in what you do/offer.

That’s ok.

Why would you want to keep those people on your list anyway? People come, people go. It’s nothing personal to you.

My experience has taught me that there’s no universal rule for email frequency – it varies widely based on industry, audience, and the content in your emails.

Do what you can. Have a consistent emailing schedule. Try for bare minimum one email a week. Test more. See what happens.  

9. Respecting Privacy: Building Trust With Your List

It is essential that you work to foster trust and long-term relationships with your email subscribers.

Think of your list like a community that you engage with, nurture and give value to, to help them stick around. 

Make sure you gain email subscribers through honourable and legitimate means.

Give your email subscribers more value than they get from you on social, to encourage them to want to open your emails, to see what you are offering them in each.

​Never, ever send unsolicited emails (like those sleazy sales messages that drop constantly in your DMs from random strangers trying to sell you their stuff 😬).

You will not foster good relationships, nor sell plenty of your products and services this way.

Get subscribers on your list with good strategy (following the tips outlined in this post).

Give huge value in the emails you send.

Write about topics your audience wants to hear about.

Give call to actions to products and services you know, and they know, will help.

Respect your list. Never share that list with, or sell that list to anyone.

Let your subscribers know you value them being on your list, and that you respect their privacy.

10. Growth And Improvement

Learning how to get better at;

– adding people to your list

– writing great emails your subscribers want to open and read

– selling through your list

should be a never ending journey.

There’s ALWAYS room for improvement.

Don’t get lazy or slack.

When you make building your list, emailing your list, nurturing your list, selling to your list an absolute priority in your small business, over time you will find that the revenue you can earn purely from your list alone, can totally transform your small business from struggling to sales, to regular revenue in the bank.

The great Dan Kennedy once said that every time he needed more money in the bank (to settle a divorce, buy a new racehorse, or something else), his first thought would be about what email he could send to his list to sell some of his products and services.

Because Dan is the master of email marketing, that strategy never failed to get him out of a hole when he needed to increase revenue.

Conclusion

Start small with your email strategy if needed, but keep learning and testing how to get better at email marketing.

Do this to give your small business the opportunity to bring considerable income in via your mailing list, whilst at the same time building a loyal fan base of mailing list subscribers who are happy to stay on your list for the longer term.

Whatever efforts you’re putting in to your business in other spaces that you’re seeing great success with (social for example) , mirror that same level of commitment to your list.

You will be forever thankful if you do.

SMALL BUSINESS GUIDES TO HELP YOU GROW ONLINE: