Unlocking Business Growth with Email Marketing Strategies (Part 2) [LNIM248]

In Episode 248 of Late Night Internet Marketing, Mark Mason continues from where he left off in Episode 247 discussing the importance of email marketing for online businesses. In this podcast, he shares practical and effective strategies every online entrepreneur should adopt to get the most out of email marketing. 

**Key points and action items:**
- Understanding why email marketing is crucial for your online business.
- The importance of getting into someone's inbox and getting emails to be opened by subscribers. 
- Crafting great copy in emails that creates curiosity and encourages action. 
- Offering immense value to subscribers through email content. 
- Practicing consistent testing and improvement of email subject lines and content. 
- Ensuring mobile optimization for emails. 
- Upselling or preselling within emails. 

**Links Mentioned:**
- latenightim.com/247 [Listen to Episode 247 here]
- Facebook group 

**Additional Notes:**
Following confirming the effectiveness of email marketing in online businesses, Mark extends a challenge to his listeners. He urges listeners to identify three actionable steps they can take within the next ten days to improve their email marketing game and share these in the Facebook group. He also encourages listeners to implement a manageable and effective email marketing strategy that resonates with their business and audience. 

The episode closes with a bonus segment where Mark shares personal updates and upcoming plans, such as his son's interest in Amazon FBA and the future of the Texas Rangers, his favorite baseball team.

Transcript

Mason: 0:00

Episode 2 48. Late Night Internet Marketing. This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to continue what we started some time ago in episode 2 47. In episode 2 47, we told you all about why email marketing is so very important for your online business. In episode 2 48, we're going to help you get leverage over that problem and tell you the things you must start doing right away to get the most out of email marketing for your business, all this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

0:47

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. You've been working for somebody else, but you want a business to run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burn. And now, broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, Mark Mason. Hey, Hey. Hey, how is everyone doing? Greetings and salutations. From the little studio in Dallas, Texas. I am your host, Mark Mason, and I am so happy to be back on the mic right now. It's the end of baseball season in my Texas Rangers are actually in the playoffs, they played well this season, not the best team in baseball, but I'm hoping they can catch a little October magic. And have some amazing success in the baseball season. And, you know, one of the interesting things about baseball season right now is guess what's in my email inbox. Yep. You guessed it offers four season tickets for the Texas ranger. Sure. They're on social media and I'm sure they have Rangers podcasts where they're talking about the availability of season tickets, but the thing that the Texas Rangers are counting on to sell, I don't know, maybe millions of dollars of season tickets for the 2024 season is email marketing because they know that I'm a qualified lead that has bought tickets before. And that if they email me, I will open that email and consider their offer. And that's exactly what you should be doing for your business. And we talked about how important email marketing is in episode 247. If you haven't listened to that episode yet go to Late Night. I am.com forward slash 2 4 7. To listen to that episode. This episode, episode 2 48 is a continuation. The second half of that topic. And it's the second half of an online presentation I gave to a mastermind of people that are interested in online marketing. It's a pretty high level mastermind. And I made a presentation about the importance of email marketing as I described at the beginning of episode 2 47. And this is the second part of it. The things you should do. For your email marketing to move your business forward. So let's get into that now and I hope you enjoy the second part of this presentation.

Mason: 3:45

So you see the lifetime value of a customer on an email list is just overwhelming, unbelievable, and enormous. Email marketing is truly the most important thing in your business, and whatever you're doing with it is not enough. And now understanding the lifetime value of email list customers, you can immediately see that maybe statement number one's not so bold after. In fact, I'd say it's obvious you need to be doing more with email marketing.

ea28de02-dcbe-4837-aa06-f49cae319e5c: 4:14

So how can you do that? Let's get some leverage over this email marketing problem. Now, the first thing you have to do is to get into someone's inbox, and I made a conscious decision not to address inboxing in this presentation. So here you are, you're in someone's inboxing. What's your job? I told you what your job is. Your job is to get people what they. What do we need to do to help people? We need to do three things. First of all, we need to get them to open the dang email. They've got to open that email or we can't help them. Once they open the email, if they simply close it, we didn't help them. So we've gotta get them to click the link. That's the second thing we've gotta do. And even if they click the link, if they don't take the action that we're recommending, if they don't buy the thing or opt into the next thing, or whatever it is that we're trying to do so that we can help them, we have failed. So we must do these three things. So what I wanna do is talk to you about these three things and how to. The way you can help them open the email is to have a great subject line, and that line needs to match exactly what your customer avatar wants and is expecting from you. In order to get them to click the link, you need to create great copy that creates curiosity and desire and urgency that makes them want to take that next step. And if you want them to take the action, you have the opportunity to pre-sell the offer to make it so it's a no-brainer once they reach the offer for them to go ahead and take that next action. These are the tasks that you need to complete to get leverage over your email marketing, and I'll make the third bold statement. Copywriting is almost as important as email marketing. So if there was another thing I was going to tell you that you should get better at, it's copywriting because copywriting in everything that you do, whether you're making a presentation to a Zoom call full of mastermind people or you're actually trying to sell something, Copywriting will help you live a better life. So that's the second thing that I want you to do, is to think about copywriting and make it more and more important in your internet marketing journey. So how are we gonna get them to open this email? We know we're gonna use copywriting on the subject line, but how are we gonna do that? The idea I want you to think about is I want you to treat your subject line like a movie. Give them a preview of what's gonna happen when they click. If I see a movie trailer with, a spaceship and a little green guy, I'm gonna click on that, right? I want to see that movie. I'm gonna go see the movie. If there are machine guns and car chases, I'm gonna see the movie. And when I get to the movie theater, I'm expecting machine guns and car chases. Hand grenades are an extra bonus, right? I mean, I know what I'm gonna get when I look at that email and that's what I want in my subject line. I want that email trailer mentality. So here's some tips for killer subject lines, and we're gonna get really specific here in a. But in general, my five favorite tips, and this could easily be a list of 20, but like I said, we only have 30 minutes here today. Make sure they're short sweetened to the point and you don't want them to run off the page. Think about it, when you're opening the email, when you're looking at the list of emails in your inbox, if you can only read half the subject line, you're not going to click it because half of it's off the page. You need to make your subject lines incredibly relevant. Your prospector avatar is on your list for a reason, and you need to make your email subject lines relative to what you know they want. After all, you are trying to help them. You know what they need help with because they're on your email list. They need to be relevant to that, you need to match. Your message to your market. This is what we say in marketing. You need to match the message to the market, your market as the kind of email addresses that you collect. Incidentally, this is why buying email lists never work because there's no market intent in that list. It's just a pile of junk and nobody knows what anybody on that list want. You need to create a sense of urgency. Why do I need to click this now? Why shouldn't I slide down and click another email? That's more important. I mean, you do this when you wake up in the morning, right? You open your email and you've clicked the most important one First, be the most important email by creating urgency in your subject line and be very specific, and I'm gonna show you examples of. Use specific numbers and dates and times and, and evidence that what's in your email is actually interesting. And then finally, test, test, test, test, test, email subject line effectiveness is really hard to predict. We know what works in general, but you'll be surprised, and I promise you, as your list gets big and you have enough data, you're gonna want to do ab split testing to make sure that you have the right subject line for whatever offer you are making. So here's actual email open rates as promised from a campaign that we put together when we were in that luxury resort in Orlando and we were talking about how to promote Cartzy, I actually went through with that and I've collected something on the order of a thousand emails, and here are some of the actual email subject lines with their open rates. And you can see I have some of these elements, the first. Email is exactly what I think my avatar was expecting. I've got, some warning copy, which implies urgency. I've got a lot of curiosity in there. And as you can see, some of the open rates are what I consider to be really, really good near 50%, and some of them are not as good as I know, I could have achieved because I see I can get up to 50% almost. Why aren't they that good? Well, what can I do? What work can I do to make these emails better? I can test numbers on every line. You know, this is my own rule. Try to always use numbers, and I'll show you example of where other people you respect use numbers all the time. I could test pre subject lines, like something in brackets, and I'll show you some examples of that as well. And then, you know, you don't have the ability to bold things. That's something we usually do in copy. You'll see that in headlines all the time. So you can test caps on some of the keywords and that those kinds of things can help the subject line conversion rate. Here's some example from a marketer we know. Three hour warning, live, screenshot free traffic. That's essentially serving the purpose of a pre-headline. Eyecatching bold words all over the place that draw your attention. Crazy simple, live, you know, implying both urgency and trying to get your attention and numbers all over the place. Swipe, improve, and deploy. This is the battle cry, right? You want to go look at what people are doing that's working and go do that. And so what you really want to do in the email subject line space is get a Gmail account and subscribe to every list that you can get your hands on that's in your niche because every email that they send will have a subject line and the ones that jump out to you will give you ideas of subject lines that you can use. If you only do one thing from this presentation. To improve your subject lines, you should go subscribe to every email list you can find. Just make sure you use a new fresh Gmail account so. fill up your own real email all right? So once we've got them to open the email, we want them to click the link and here's some killer link clicking conversion rate tips. How do we get'em to click? First thing, marketing one oh one have only one call to action. I don't mean you can't have the same call to action multiple times, but don't tell'em, go here to do this, or go here to do that, or go here to do the third thing. You never want to do that. You always want to have one call to action, and the exception is webinars where they're picking a time. Other than that, never have, never have more than one call to action in an email where you care about the convers. Second thing is people ignore this optimize for mobile. You've got to make sure, I know you want to send that fancy email template. People don't care about that fancy template and they're reading on their phone. You gotta be very careful about that. Be specific about your call to action download now. Learn more. Go here, sign up and use urgency because this is all for a limited time only. And finally, offer massive value. Be clear about what they're going to get. And I think this is something that's often done very well. They're gonna change your whole life, right? And so you're gonna click that link because you need to change your. Here's an example from a real campaign where I'm getting 30, and 22% click-throughs. And the real reason that I'm getting that is because I'm giving them exactly what they expect, I'm telling them exactly what to go do. And the call to action itself actually includes the benefit you can get your loan and. That could be stronger. I could have a better benefit, like, get your money or, solve your financial problem. But that's a start. the CTA includes a benefit and there is an absolute exact match between what the customer's expecting cuz they just opted into my list and what I'm giving'em here. And that's giving me a good email click through rate. I can improve it by moving the CTA up, especially for mobile. This is below the, That's terrible, so I'm gonna test that for sure. We see sometimes that naked links perform better than buttons, and so that's definitely something to test. I already talked about the shorter email, and maybe I could add urgency here. I don't know how long this offer's gonna be available, guys, so you better click the email right now. If you waiting to get back to this until tomorrow, which you will never do, then that offer may not be there So that's a really important idea that we don't wanna let people come back later because they never come back. And then finally, I told you we need to test that button text. It's not great. I wrote it at three o'clock in the morning. Here's a really good copy that I, I found and you can see that in this copy they talk about all the objections that you might have to clicking the link. Pre-deal with the objections is a great copywriting technique. They promise things like free traffic and they increase urgency by telling you the seats are limited. In the webinar, the call to action is incredibly clear, and they use this technique a little bit here, which we call an assumed close, where they say, we'll see you on the call. They're already assuming the conversion. We're gonna see you there. I'd actually like to see this a little stronger. I don't need hope. I'd say we'll see you on the call and I'm assuming the close, I'm already future pacing the activity. I'm gonna see you there, so you need to go ahead and click it cuz we've already decided you're gonna be there. Okay, so finally we need to get them to take the action. Once they get to the offer, we want'em to go ahead and do the thing we need'em to do and we get them there by pre-selling. So in pre-selling, you're talking about the future, you're using storytelling in some cases a very short story about what's going to happen if they take that next action to accept the offer. You're bringing out their pain points and reminding them, man, they really. Consider that offer seriously because they've got a problem and you need to remind them about that problem and amplify the problem. Sometimes we want to provide social proof about how like 17,000 other people have done, they need to go look at that offer and accept it. And then scarcity, as I mentioned before, is a great way to pre-sell the offer because we just don't know how long that offer's going to. If you go back to my email, you can see several places where I do this. I'm building trust to help aid in the conversion. they feel like they can trust me, so the offer must be good. If Mark's recommending it, it must be amazing. I tell them that I feel their pain. So I've got this empathy in my copy that not only helps them trust me further, but it reminds them of their pain. I tell them that I've already done all their work they need to do, and these are the best options for them. And I address the objection of, oh, I don't want to deal with this. It's gonna be hard by telling'em it's quick and easy. It converts, and in fact, you can see the conversion data here, but it should convert better. I want it to convert better by testing other offers, adding future pacing, adding urgency, and so forth. but this is a pretty good start. I think when you're in this kind of situation, you can see I'm testing three offers here. Offer number two is a new offer that I'm testing. And you can see it's generating a revenue per visitor that R P O V is 10 times higher than offer number one. And so thing one, in optimizing these conversions is value per conversion. Thing two is increasing the number of conversions, and I'm working through all of that. Here's more really good copy, and you can see their future pacing success. They're showing you this screenshot, not only so that you can see that what they're saying is true, like here's evidence that this really works, but they're making it. So you imagine yourself with a similar graph. And they also do a really good job of creating curiosity around people's major objection, which is where's the traffic going to come from? That's always the problem. And they talk about this massive source of traffic that they don't reveal. They tell you it's massive, but you're gonna have to get on the webinar in order to see this massive source of traffic. And then the other thing that they do really, really well here that helps pre-sell is they create all these credibility gaps. We're gonna do this and we're gonna show you that. And we're, and all of it seems unbelievable. And yet in the webinar, Aiden delivers on every single one of these, and by the time he delivers on all the gaps, you're kinda like, well, that guy just did exactly what he said he was going to do. So that is a way to pre-sell as well, create a gap and then fill it, thereby building trust. So when it comes to them deciding whether or not they should trust the action, you can do that. Okay, so now it's time to get going, right? We've got plenty of ammunition. You can take action now. And you may be beating yourself up because you haven't been working on email. Now that I've convinced you it's the most Important thing in the world. And all I can tell you is this. You're right. You should have done something 20 years ago. That was the best time to up your email marketing game. But the second best time is right now, right after this call, and that's what I want you to do and you can do it because I've eliminated all the excuses that people normally have you don't believe email works. I just showed you all kinds of evidence that it works. You don't know where to start. You've got all kinds of training. I've given you action items. There's training trainings all over the place. I, I mean, I, I don't know what to tell you. You've got everything that you. And another real excuse that I really believe was true is, Hey, on my English. Well, guess what? Chat g p t, man, I mean, it is amazing. You can even tell it what copywriting formula you want it to follow. It understands copywriting. So if you are a person who speaks seven languages and the third one is English, you don't need to worry about that anymore. That's no longer a problem. So here's my challenge to you, and I want you to take this seriously. Identify three actions that you're gonna take in the next 10 days to up your email game. I don't care what they are. Pick something from this presentation, something that's inspired you. Write'em down, write now. Go find a piece of paper, write these things down and do'em in the next 10 days. I want you to post those today in the Facebook group one, so I'll know that you got some value out of this presentation that would make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. And two, because we can help you and we'll hold you accountable and so forth and make those your goals for next week. Write'em down. This will avoid this sort of conference syndrome where you go to something like this and you get all these ideas and then a month later you've done nothing because life happens. As soon as this call is over, life is going to start again. You can avoid that by taking these actions. So now it's time for q and a. Unfortunately, this is prerecord. You can just go right over to Facebook right after this call and you can ask me all the questions you want about this presentation. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It means a lot to me and I hope that you get something out of it because I can get everything that I want in life if I just help enough other people get what they want and that includes you. Ciao.

21:21

Okay, super awesome. I hope you really enjoyed that. I love those kinds of presentations and I love speaking in front of groups, whether it's virtually or in person. I love speaking opportunities and I don't get to do nearly. As much of that as I would like, but I wanted to share that with you because I think it could be really impactful for your business over and over again. When I talk to entrepreneurs, the one thing that I see whether they're running a Mexican food restaurant or they're running an online business, is that they are not taking advantage of email marketing in the way that they should. And what I want you to do the action that I want you to take away. The thing that I want you to do to cash. Uh, in on the time you've invested in listening to these two episodes, episode 2 47 and 2 48 is just to spend some time thinking about the following question. If you took better advantage of email marketing. And if it were easy, what would that look like? I think that's a really important question, especially that second part. If you dream up some overly complicated email marketing scheme that you need to work on, then what you'll find is that you might do that for a few weeks, but eventually that's going to go away and it'll die out. What you need is an email marketing. Strategy that will bolster your business, but is also maintainable. And that's my challenge for you until next week. I'm Mark Mason from Late Night Internet Marketing dot com. If you enjoyed this content and you'd like more find a like button or hit subscribe, find a way to tell. People that decide what content shows up in your inbox that you really enjoyed this. And you'd like more of it. And I'll make a deal with you. If you do that, I'll send more episodes your way. Until next week. Ciao. You can do it right when it's late at night. You've been listening to the Late Night Internet marketing podcast. Be sure to visit LNIM podcast.com today to leave feedback for Mark download. Download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time. I'm really excited. And if you're new to the show, there's the after the show shows. So if you didn't stop the, your podcast player, and you're wondering what all this extra time is at the end, it's the after the show show. Where we just talk about what's going on in the Late Night Internet Marketing universe? I have been working on some cost per action marketing, and that's taken me away from the podcast. Quite honestly, for some time, my son and I seemed to be starting up an Amazon. Uh, FBA business again, and I'll be talking about that over the coming weeks. I guess he's, he's really interested in Amazon FBA these days. And so he's 16 now and has some time on his hands. We're going to be working on that in between. Uh, CS two. and Fortnite and call of duty or whatever it is that he's playing this week. Minecraft, uh, We'll be, we'll be finding some time to build an online business. So I'm looking forward to that. Um, I'm also super excited about the Texas Rangers finally, for the first time, I guess, since. 2016, the Rangers are in the post-season. They clenched in Seattle, which is super exciting for me. My son's a big Mariners fan and most of you know, he plays high school baseball. So baseball is a big part of our life here in the Late Night Internet Marketing studio. And so we're excited about the coming baseball season. I'm from Houston originally, and it looks like the Astros are also going to make the playoffs we'll find out today. So that should be really interesting baseball here in Texas. So. Until next week, I hope that you hit that subscribe button and I get to, I get to speak with you again next week. Ciao.