If you are following on from our last post you will hopefully already understand the benefits of building a list and have started building your own. The next question is, what’s the most effective way to cultivate and monetize your lists?
Without using effective email marketing strategies, you risk burning through your valuable email list with little to show for it. You might consider your email list as your brand’s golden goose, you will need to feed it well, take good care of it and carefully extract profits without harming the goose!
Email Marketing Strategies
As mentioned in the previous post, the value of building email lists is tremendous. With a high-quality email list in your hands, you can drastically increase your revenue and brand loyalty – as long as you know what you are doing!
Unfortunately, many Amazon FBA sellers fall short in a number of ways. They start collecting emails and building their lists, then they…
- Neglect it completely. When they do decide to use it, they experience significantly lower open rates and many unsubscribes.
- Get over excited. They begin ruthlessly promoting the hell out of their products and burning through their list as subscribers write them off as spammers.
Think about your own email inbox. How many times do you receive emails during the day and how do you react? Which ones do you open and why? How many do you simply shrug off and ignore?
Every single one of your email subscribers will be going through the exact same process. Implementing the right email-marketing tactic is going to greatly enhance your results.
“Cold” email lists are almost worthless. If they are only receiving a blatant plug for a new product once a month, your results will be poor.
To keep your email list “warm”, you need to build and maintain a certain level of familiarity without becoming overbearing. Your emails must catch their attention, and be engaging and educational.
Only after your list is warm should you start to sparingly send promotions and offers to your subscribers.
Thank The Heavens For Email Marketing Automation
Keeping track of sign ups, entering them into a database, segmenting into groups and sending specific campaigns to each would be a complete and utter nightmare- if it wasn’t for software.
Once you’ve devised an email marketing campaign, it’s time to set up an automation system to make it scalable. Emails are triggered upon set conditions, guiding all your subscribers through your campaign without the need for intervention.
However, almost any event can be set to trigger automated messages. Common examples include order confirmations, special promotions, giveaways, or contests.
Let’s say a customer opts-in for a coupon offer you are promoting for one of your Amazon products. You could set it up to send them a welcome email introducing your brand. You may then ‘drip’ out a series of educational emails over a week providing them with value for free.
Once they have received their product you could have an automated email sent out asking them if they were satisfied with their purchase and if they were willing to leave a review.
Now you are also in a position where if you promote another product to this customer the chance of them taking you up on the offer is substantially greater.
But before you can get going with automated email marketing, you’re going to need powerful software you can trust to handle your list!
Using Email Marketing Software
There are many companies offering email marketing solutions each with a variety of features. This software enables you to create email lists, segment subscribers, send out emails and other related services. Most services also provide insight into your email marketing performance by displaying open rates, click-through rates, and other useful analytics. The most popular services usually offer free trials or freemium versions, however, monthly fees for premium services are still reasonable.
Pop-up opt-in forms are also a feature of many services. They are triggered by events or timers on your website and encourage readers to opt-in for your email list. Just make sure you’ve got an attractive offer or a lead magnet to back it up to maximize conversions.
MailChimp is one of the most popular choices available. MailChimp allows you to use templates to design emails, build lists and track how they perform. All the necessary steps that need to be taken from the technical side are all in one convenient location. All you have to do is fill the templates in with great content.
Getting Your Emails Seen and Opened With Catchy Subject Lines
After you have started building up your list with AMZPromoter and other email capture strategies it time to start sending out emails. But what should these emails look like?
First of all, keep your “from” name as your company’s name. Remember, we’re not trying to trick your customers into anything. Besides, if they receive a random email from a “Rick” they don’t know, they’re probably sending it straight to spam anyway.
You might think that the body would be the most important aspect any email; but surprisingly, it’s not true. An overwhelming majority of users only notice the subject line before anything else. So even with the world’s greatest email content, no one will open it if the heading didn’t capture their attention.
The subject line should be short, sweet, and something they care about. If it’s a welcome email, welcome them. If it’s a sale, tell them it’s a sale. If you’re trying to keep them warm and build trust, be interesting and highly personal. But always remember to get to the point!
The more personal you can make your emails, the better. Make great using of segmenting features of email marketing software features by creating tailored campaigns. If you can craft your subject lines and message body to focus on smaller demographics, your conversion rates will be much better.
Customers will remember certain types of emails. So if you are cycling repetitive subject lines, don’t be surprised when your open rates are go south. Within each campaign, you should strive to keep your subject lines fresh, even when repeating a similar message. If it appears new and exciting for you, it’ll be new and exciting for them too.
Try to keep an email short (under 250 words); because the chances are, they’re reading it on their phone when they should be working.
Finally, don’t forget to test new emails before sending them. There are few things as embarrassing as a whole list of subscribers receiving the wrong messages!
Amazon’s Welcome Emails
When you first sign up for a customer account with Amazon, they immediately send an email to help introduce you to their brand. Their subject – “Welcome to Amazon! Take a tour of our features”. Rather than trying to trick or shock you into opening an email, this initial email gets straight down to business in a welcoming and friendly manner.
New users will be interested to know what the business they have to offer and what makes them different. Upon opening the email, they are greeted with simple and easily digestible sentences. They use an incredibly brief summary that takes new users through the most important features, with hyperlinks embedded into the bullets. Furthermore, the message is personalized using the recipient’s name at the top of the message.
This approach, while seemingly basic, works incredibly well. Being personal, short, and to the point, is well appreciated by their subscribers. This is even more vital when you consider users on mobile devices, where emails can appear longer than usual and people have less attention span. They don’t immediately pressure readers into purchasing, but they make it easy and available if they wish.
So throw out any ideas of cold, impersonal and purely sales driven tactics. A nurturing approach will yield far better results.
Additional Tips For Effective Building an Email Marketing Strategy
Your emails campaigns should focus on a three-step engagement process. First, you have to them interested in what you have to say. Next, you have to keep them engaged and opening your emails by showing them relevant content. Finally, you need to graceful guide them back to your Amazon listing or other offer. Focusing on these three behaviors will do wonders for you and your Amazon business.
Getting good open rates for your emails can be a little tough in the beginning. The best approach is to experiment with different ideas and track the results to find what works best for your brand.
When customers are interested in your products and brand, they will gladly sign up to your list (although you may have to give them a gentle nudge with an offer of a free gift or discount). Once they have signed up, all you’ve got to do is keep them engaged. Send interesting emails, relevant to them and occasionally present them with an offer.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a long game, but incredibly lucrative once you’ve got it dialled in. Target potential and past customers at every stage, keep them engaged and interested then enable them to buy.
Let your automated emails do the heavy lifting and you’ll see higher sales rates than ever before! If this process was able to drive an additional 25%+ revenue to your business, what have you got to lose?