This is one of the usual emotions I have heard from my clients.
Lakshmi, I don’t want to sell. I don’t want to send too many emails and bombard my clients with sales pitches.
But what if no one is ready to sell?
While selling is a natural process, various types of emails will not come across as selling but still do the job.
Now let me tell you some basic processes behind ethical email marketing and what exactly you should expect out of it. Read this story completely to know the correct process which took me 10+ clients and 1.5 years to find, practice and master.
A couple of years ago, when I started into email marketing, the immediate sources of learning for me were from the free resources in Hubspot, Sendinblue [now brevo] and other YouTube channels that spoke about how “Email Marketing” should be done.
I learnt everything diligently only to find many teachings to be contradictory.
This led to a lot of confusion. I eventually wrote many emails [encountered 1000s of doubts while I wrote] and had to battle all the questions in my head about the quality of my work.
After almost a year of this charade, I learned very little to actually make a list or make money out of that list.
I lacked in copywriting and I did not even realise that.
Then came a big string of clients, that were unsuccessful. The reason being “Flat email copies”.
The systems were properly set. Every email service provider teaches you to use their tools and settings effectively. But hey, will anyone read emails that fall flat?
Absolutely not.
Since I was not a great copywriter I ended up being an average email marketer.
When you get into marketing, people don’t talk about the real nature of the job.
Instead, they go all preachy about that one ad that brought in XYZ dollars to them or their clients.
Here is the catch.
Copy rules most of the marketing channels directly. The other components of every marketing effort are always like collateral and not the main part.
So if you want to market your business or you are learning marketing, copywriting is the first place that you should invest in.
With that thought out of our way, let us see what really makes your emails hot, hotter, hottest!
Now email marketing can be segregated into list building, nurturing the list and growing the list from inside.
This involves three to four different marketing activities.
For list building, you should pick a distribution channel that helps you distribute your lead magnet [a topic for another post].
This lead magnet will help you get the email IDs of people from your target audience persona.
Once you collect the list, you must verify them [by setting a double opt-in process].
This is proceeded by welcoming the people who enter the list with a great email. [the real juicy part of email marketing]. This process can make or break your email marketing.
The major ethics of email marketing lies in what you write in your emails.
You are being given ONE opportunity to prove that your product/service is useful for the audience and also not be salesy.
This is combined with unifying the customer journey and the stage of the funnel that the audience is in.
When you combine them all, you get the real opportunity to make sales with your emails.
Email Marketing is not just about writing those emails or pleasingly designing them.
The real email marketing is in the way you combine emails in your whole marketing process.
Your social media and email messaging should be in tandem with each other.
Although there are millions of sample emails for e-commerce businesses to model on, there are not many email samples [legit ones] that a service business can model on [like coaching or consultant businesses].
This leads to a place where email marketers or managers decide on what kind of emails must be sent and what to write as part of these emails.
Email Marketing ethics unfortunately cannot be carved in stone and remain unchanged forever.
Whatever works for one business may not be suitable for others.
So now the service businesses are left either to pick the best email copywriter out there or to stick to the AI tools that are available in the market.
Now if you have read this far, I have a question for you. You can write your answer in the comments.
What do you do as part of email marketing?