Last week, I attended a day-long intensive with my email service provider, ActiveCampaign.
The main email marketing takeaways are:
- Email marketing is not dead
- Over-automating doesn’t work
- Email marketing is for all businesses
- Chill on the open rate obsession
- Don’t make it hard – but do it!
Let’s explore these in a little more detail!
Key Email Marketing Takeaways
If you implement this, your email marketing efforts should improve!
1. Email Marketing is Not Dead
You may have heard or even believe yourself that email marketing is out-dated in our age of social media.
As the ActiveCampaign rep simply said, “Email marketing is not dead. Poorly constructed email marketing strategies are dead.”
I have to agree!
Far more of my sales come from emails than social media. If you’re not seeing results from your own emails, it’s likely more of a strategy flaw than the email itself.
2. Over-Automating Doesn’t Work
There’s a lot of lust online over totally passive and automated businesses.
(I did a whole podcast episode on this here.)
That lust for totally automated emails is no different. Though you CAN build passive income funnels and can make email automations hugely streamline your business, it’s about automating your information about your subscribers, not your business itself.
At the end of the day, your subscribers and customers are humans and losing that touch won’t work.
3. Email Marketing is For All Businesses
It doesn’t matter if you have 1 customer, 1000 customers, if you’re a podcast, a brick and mortar business, you sell products, services, and so on.
Communicating with your customers will always be the fundamental of any successful business, and an email list is the most modern and effective way to do that.
If are building any platform, you’ll be far more effective in doing so with an email list.
4. Chill On the Open Rate Obsession
My clients often ask how they can increase their open rates and I admit that its something I used to focus on quite a bit too.
As the ActiveCampaign team pointed out, open rates are really just an indication of how good your subject line is. It’s helpful to spend a bit extra time on your subject line.
And yes, we don’t want our emails ending up in spam.
But at the end of the day, focus on your email CONVERSIONS more than your opens.
5. Don’t Make it Hard – But Do It!
Email marketing can get overwhelming, especially if you’re just beginning to build out your strategy.
My advice is to pick one thing at a time that you’re going to incorporate and get used to it, then add something else in. Maybe this month, you’re going to add an automation to tag engagement and see how that goes.
It’s not about a race, but you can’t avoid email marketing if you’re serious about growing your business.
Conclusion
You can hear more about my time with ActiveCampaign and three simple but powerful actions to take this week on my latest podcast episode.
Interested in joining ActiveCampaign?
It’s by far my favorite email marketing service out there. If you are interested in signing up or switching, email me back and I’m happy to set up a free time to chat with you about your strategy.
Take the mystery out of it and start seeing results!
Have an amazing week!