Let me tell you a secret to email list marketing. Regardless of the size of your list, your income will depend only on one factor: your ability to get list members to click on your offers.
Even if you have a list of a million people and you have an open rate of 99%, you’re still not going to make any money if people do not click on your offers. They have to click because the more people click, the higher your chance that somehow, some way, somebody would buy something.
The bottom line with online marketing is conversions. Nothing else would do. This is why you would really need to do this one thing to get more mailing list members to click on your offers.
Obviously Promotional Emails are Too Obvious
If you send email after email and it’s obvious that you’re just trying to get people to buy stuff, you are betraying your list members. Remember, when people joined your mailing list, they wanted a relationship with you. They have problems and they are looking for your solutions.
In other words, they’re there to be helped by you. They’re not there to be sold by you. They don’t exist so they can put extra dollars in your pocket. It’s the other way around. Well, at least that’s the appearance you should give.
Unfortunately, this is all sabotaged by the obvious commercial nature of your promotional email. If it is too obvious that you’re just trying to get into their pockets and fish out a few extra dollars, you’re doing it wrong.
Stop Writing Emails That Don’t Get Read
Pay attention to your open rates. They will tell you, like a flashing red neon sign, whether your emails are getting read or not. If people are not reading your emails, then you definitely need to work double on figuring out why this is the case.
Maybe your subject lines are too generic. Maybe your subject lines are not personal enough. Maybe your subject lines are flatly irrelevant to the niche focus of your email list. Whatever the case may be, get to the bottom of the problem. You need to do it soon, otherwise, your email marketing business is going to go belly up.
Stop Pushing Your List Members to Unsubscribe
Unfortunately, if you send email after email and you refuse to get to the bottom of low open rates, chances are, you’re just pushing your list members to unsubscribe. The first few times,
they’re going to look at your emails and they’re just going to disregard them. They might think to themselves, “well, this person sent me a free book, so I might as well give him or her the courtesy of receiving these emails.”
But eventually, it will get old. Eventually, it will get tiring. And unfortunately, during this process, something very important gets overlooked. In fact, you might have even forgotten about it already.
You may have forgotten what the email list is for. It’s not about you. It’s supposed to solve the recipient’s problems. It must be all about the recipient.
How to Reconnect
Now, it may seem that at this point, your mailing list may appear hopeless. You may have been sending dozens of updates that are purely commercial in nature and have been largely ignored by your member base. You might even be tempted to think that all hope is lost. You might even look at your list as completely non-responsive.
Well, what if I told you that there is still hope? Seriously. You just need to change the nature of your updates going forward.
How do you this? How do you “reset” your email list? Very simple: reconnect to the purpose of the list by telling stories. That’s all you need to do. I know that sounds simplistic, but it’s powerful.
You have to understand that human beings understand and process reality through stories. You can blast somebody with all sorts of data, political jargon, technical terms, and they couldn’t care less. However, the moment you tell a story, regardless of how anecdotal it is, people sit up and pay attention because that’s how we’re wired.
Bring it home with stories. Stories do a great job of performing the classic sales formula of A-ID-A. When you tell a good story via email or through a video or through a blog post, you grab people’s attention.
Next, you filter them based on their interest. When you’re telling a fishing story, chances are, people who are not into fishing will tune out. That’s perfectly okay because you’re just focusing on selling to people who are interested in fishing.
Next, your story awakens desire in people. Everybody has problems. By focusing on a specific set of problems and opening their minds to a specific solution, you open desire. You get them to that “aha moment” where they say to themselves, “I have this problem and this dude has the answer. Aha! I got it.”
And then finally, you call them to action. You make them decide to take action. These are beautifully done through email-based stories. This is the key. If you leave out storytelling in your emails, you deserve to fail. Seriously. Because you are just sending out legal spam.