The One Secret To All Email Marketing Profits
By: Michael Batalha
Tags: Email Marketing, Marketing, Email Marketing Tips

Do you want to boost your email marketing profits? Well, you’re in the right place because I’m about to reveal the one key behind all profit-increasing strategies.

Here’s the deal — when you go and start learning how to increase your ROI, you’re going to run into hundreds of different things you can work on. One article will tell you to implement better content to increase profits. Another article will tell you that the secret is better segmentation. And yet another one will tell you that it’s all about email delivery.

And all of these articles are telling you the truth in some way… Improving any of these aspects will improve your bottom line profits. However, the issue is that focusing on any of those in isolation means that you’re “missing the forest for the trees”.

The actual truth is that all of these things have something in common. They’re all tools, methods or symptoms of the one thing that increases your profit.

The one thing that does increase your bottom-line profits is better email engagement. And everything else is either a symptom or a cause of better engagement. Sometimes it’s even both.

To prove this point further, let’s go into some of the main ways that you can increase your email marketing profits, and see how it all ties back to subscriber engagement.

Why better content produces raving fans and increases profitability

Let’s make this as simple as possible. As an email marketer, everything you send to your subscribers is either an offer of some kind or valuable content.

The fact is that to have any chance at email marketing, most of what you send to subscribers should be content of some sort, with a few offers here and there.

In fact, your content is why people subscribe to your email list in the first place. And the quality of the content that you deliver will be the reason that they remain on your list or choose to unsubscribe.

When people get obsessed with learning about a specific aspect of email marketing, they lose sight of the bigger picture

For example, if they want to improve their “content” they start learning more about different content-production skills. This might include working on their writing skills, studying copywriting, or even learning more about visual design. However, they never stop to consider what is their actual goal to doing any of this.

And don’t get me wrong, all of those things are quite useful. It’s just that you need to understand why you’re improving your content. And what does it mean to say that your content is “better”? How do you measure this?

Levels of engagement — that’s how you know if your content is any good. You’re not learning how to write better content because you want to be recognized as a “good writer”. Your goal is to produce content that gets higher engagement from customers.

How personalization boosts email profits

If you’ve read any of our content, you will know that we harp on the value of personalization and segmentation. And there’s a good reason for that.

Whether we like it or not, corporations have spent billions of dollars in the past decade delivering super-personalized experiences to internet users. The internet user of today expects a personalized experience “as a given”.

If your email communication feels like “bulk communication”, the subscriber mentally files you in a cabinet which comes very close to “spam” and “junk email”.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to adopt the finest levels of personalization immediately

Most people tend to go into one of two extremes. Either they think that worrying about personalization is useless and they send bulk-campaigns where everyone on the list gets the exact same email at the same time. Or, they go to the other extreme and get paralyzed by trying to implement the highest levels of ultra-fine personalization from the get-go.

This is a similar situation to the one we discussed earlier in our article on broadcasts vs automations. And just like we mentioned in that article, you will want to get out of this extremist “either-or” kind of a mindset.

Yeah, it would be really cool if you could personalize things to the level of a Fortune 500 corporation. However, there’s no need to set that as your goal when you’re just starting out.

In fact, it’s perfectly fine to take it step-by-step. It’s ok to start out by first at least using basic automation that just differentiates people based on when they signed up. Then, you can advance to having different paths and journeys for people based on their behavior and interests.

You can learn more about this concept in our guide on automating your email conversion process. Hint — that’s just a formal way of saying — build a machine that generates email marketing profit on autopilot.

What is it about personalization that makes your profits grow?

It all comes back to that one universal key to increased email marketing profits — a little thing called engagement.

The more you personalize their journey through your email funnels, the more they will engage with your emails. That in turn makes it more likely that they will buy things that you have to sell. And that’s just the direct benefit!

The more people engage with your emails, the more likely they are to forward or recommend them to friends. That in turns grows your list for free, which increases your profits.

The better you personalize, the more people engage with your emails, and this signals to ISPs to deliver more of your emails. This increase in deliverability directly increases your bottom line profits. But more on that in the next point, so keep reading.

Why deliverability boosts your email marketing ROI

This is our favorite subject, and for an obvious reason — it’s the biggest secret to our success. In fact, it is is probably the main reason why so many big list owners keep moving their lists to Emercury.

Once you do email marketing for a while, you start to realize something crucial. You begin to understand that subpar deliverability is one of the biggest reasons that your marketing isn’t as profitable as it could be.

And that’s for a very simple reason — basic math. Imagine that you’re sending a million emails during a given campaign, and that this campaign produces 10 million in sales. Then, you find out that 15% of your emails aren’t even getting delivered.

That’s when it hits you. If you improve your deliverability, you could get a cool extra 1.5 million in additional profits each month. That is if you improved absolutely nothing else about your email marketing except your delivery rates.

Here’s the one secret nobody tells you about deliverability

Engagement and deliverability are intimately intertwined. In fact, the best way to increase your email deliverability rate is to increase your email engagement.

Now, that doesn’t mean that simply applying all the other engagement-boosting strategies is enough. Yes, having great valuable content and segmenting your audience will by itself boost your deliverability rate. And that is a great start in the journey towards good delivery rates. But it’s only part of the puzzle.

There is a reason why we talk about deliverability as a separate subject

There are certain things that are quite specific to deliverability. And I’m not just talking about the technical aspects like setting up your DKIM and SPF records.

When we discuss mailing and warm-up strategies, we do it intending to improve your deliverability rates. But how does it actually work? The actual mechanism has to do with engagement.

In fact, aside from a few technical identity-related factors, most deliverability comes back to engagement. That’s what ISPs are looking for when they decide how many of your emails they want to deliver.

Let’s look at something like a custom ramping-up-plan

In a situation like this, you might want to send 100,000 subscribers an announcement about a new product. If we were to send all 100,000 at once, the delivery rate won’t be as good, which is why we would use a ramp-up plan.

When we work out the ramp-up plan, we decide (for example) to only send the campaign to 5,000 of your highest responders first.

Why do we do this? Think about it for a second and see if you can come up with an answer. Yes, it all comes back to engagement. These people are likely to have a high engagement rate, which in turn signals to the ISP that this is something people want to hear about.

This, in turn, lets you send the next 10,000 emails the next day. And if you’ve done things right, those should get some good engagement. So then, you send 20,000 more the day after, and so on.

*-Note the above ramp-up plan is just a random example to illustrate the relationship between deliverability boosting techniques and engagement as a mechanism. Your actual ramp-up strategy might look quite different. This is why at Emercury we come up with custom ramp-up plans for different situations.

How giving value increases conversion and loyalty

If you haven’t learned this lesson yet, you better listen up as this might be one of those pivotal moments in your development journey as a marketer.

Giving more value to your customers increases your sales. Period. Now that’s easier said than done, however, you have to realize that today this isn’t even an option.

Long gone are the days where it was possible to build a “successful business” with marketing that provides no value to a potential customer. And this is for two reasons:

Humans have a strong built-in drive to seek and appreciate value All your most successful competitors have realized this and are giving massive value to potential customers

The fact is today’s consumer is supremely informed and quite comfortable looking up the different options. If they sign up to your list and get nothing of value, and then your competitor bombards them with value, guess what happens? They won’t even open up your emails anymore.

Why does giving more value through your emails work so well?

Because it creates engagement. The more value you give, the more engagement you get out of your subscribers. And that then creates an entire cascading effect of higher profits.

For example, as your engagement grows, so does your deliverability, automatically. The ISPs see that your readers are hungry for your value-filled emails, so they prioritize them and deliver them to more people. That in turns directly boosts your profits.

But the benefits don’t stop there. As people get used to engaging with your emails more, they start developing more trust and loyalty towards your brand. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that they will buy something when you get around to the selling part of your funnels.

How email automation helps you get more sales, upsells and cross-sells

Let’s face it, nobody likes doing mundane repetitive work if it can be automated. And that’s a big factor behind the popularity of email automation nowadays.

However, I think that this is a case of focusing on the wrong benefit. The main benefit of automation is that it can help you achieve unprecedented levels of engagement.

You can get (almost) the same kind of response as if you were personally emailing each and every person, but doing it at the scale of an email marketing campaign.

Take for example segmentation based on behaviour

The fact is that a person is far more likely to buy something which resonates with them and their own personal needs and preferences.

An obvious case is if you have an eCommerce business with several categories of products

With the help of automation you can build journeys that treat people differently based on which emails they open, and which links they click (or don’t click).

You would build your automation in such a way that if people click links for products in category A, they would get tagged as being “interested in category A”. Your other automations would then treat people differently based on whether they have a certain tag or not.

Another example can be a business where you have subscribers with different goals

Let’s say that you run a newsletter that helps people with fitness. Some of your readers will be into fitness because they want to get stronger and faster. Others are into fitness from a weight-loss standpoint.

You would automate your segmentation strategies in such a way that people who show more interest in weight loss would end up in that segment, and those who are into the muscle build aspect, end up in the appropriate segment as well.

All of this is very easy to achieve with our automation builder. More on that in our guide on automatically converting your list into a horde of paying customers.

So why does automation boost profits? Is it just about saving on “labor costs”?

That’s actually the smallest part of the whole thing. Yes, automation saves on a lot of work hours. However, the major way in which it boosts profits is through increased engagement.

In fact, when we help our customers implement automation, we like to say that we’re automating “engagement boosting processes” and creating “automated engagement producing systems”. And that’s how you want to look at automation yourself as well.

Are you noticing a pattern yet? It’s all about engagement. Boost your engagement rates, get higher profits

That’s why we here at Emercury are “obsessed” with helping our customers get the best possible engagement with their subscribers.

Whether that is through helping them craft better strategies, defining segments or building automations — we’re here to help our customers turn their email lists into hordes of raving and engaged fans. Because this is where you see the true beauty of email marketing.

We’ve helped hundreds of businesses boost deliverability, maximize sales and boost overall revenue. And this is something that we look forward to doing for you as well.

The good news is that we’re currently giving away “Forever-free” accounts. This is a special account where you get almost every feature we offer, even most features that others reserve for the highest tier plans. The only major limitation is that you’re limited to 2000 subscribers.

So you can say this is a pretty outrageously generous offering as far as free plans go. So be sure to grab yours before we change our minds. Get your forever free account right here.

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Michael Batalha helps email marketers with strategies getting the most return out of an email address. He does this using his Maximize Delivery Framework (tm). He has successfully created his own lead generation platforms and leveraged email to scale his own leads and now shares that same method he has used with other email marketers.

He has successfully created numerous startups and sat on the board of the Entrepreneur Organization. He has graced the pages of Forbes and Fortune and has a real passion for working with entrepreneurs and building businesses.

Follow him on twitter @mikebatalha for tweets on awesome marketing tips.