By Maverick Steffen | Daily Marketing Advice

Email marketing lists take a lot of time to develop (and sometimes a lot of money, too!).

This is why you need a really good email marketing strategy. After all, when you buy groceries from the store, your strategy is to eat them and not let them go to waste, right?

Unfortunately, many companies buy or build huge email lists, and let a huge portion of that list go to waste, mainly through the dirty "U" word: Unsubscription.

So, let me teach you how to build the perfect email marketing strategy for your organization.

 

1- Clone Your List

What you first need to do is ensure you have 2 of the same list. One list you will be sending useful advice to, and the other list you will be promoting new offerings to.

You see, people may love your advice, but hate your specials, or vice versa. However, if they unsubscribe from one list, they'll still maintain permanent residency on the other.

Makes sense, right?

 

2- Create a plan for both lists

A) Your Advice List

Your "Advice List" should be consistently receiving well-written tangible advice that they can use from you.

For example, my "Monday Morning Marketing Memo" goes out every Monday morning to over 10k businesses worldwide. In it, I give business owners the best up-to-date information to help them increase their revenue. I always add inspirational quotes, a picture of myself, and an easy path to contact me when the reader needs help with their marketing.

I get at least 5-10 new clients each month from this list. One week I drove $42k in revenue from that list, alone. So yes, it really pays off.

Now, some of you may be saying, "but Matt, why would they need me if I keep giving them all this useful info?"

The bottom line is you may be able to teach a lot of your list some things, and some of your list a lot of things, but you'll never be able to teach your entire list, everything. I know you heard something like that before.

So don't worry, because after weeks of reading your great advice, who do you think they come to when they need help that pertains to what you do? Exactly -- the point of this list is getting people to know, like and trust you.

Ensure it always arrives with the same frequency, for example: Every other Friday morning at 10 am. This builds consistency, and trust. This is what people on your list will say, "Wow, this guy/gal is really consistent... I trust him/her!"

 

B) Your Promotions List

The key to using this list is the following:

1- Unpredictable frequency

2- Special offers your list can't find anywhere else

3- Deadlines

So, what you want to do is constantly be producing products and services around what your list wants, and what is hot in the market.

You want to send these promotions at seemingly random times, unlike your first list. However, you should send a total of 3-7 emails for every promotion you run.

For example, you could be an accountant, and the day after taxes are due, you could start offering your services at a discount for consumers who missed the deadline.

For this, your email content should be structured accordingly:

1- April 16: Subject: Did You Miss the IRS Deadline? That's Okay? Body Content: On April 20 until April 25th, I'll be discounting my services for those who missed the deadline....

2- April 18: Subject: re: It's Okay if You Missed the IRS Deadline... Body Content: On April 20 until April 25th, I'll be discounting my services for those who missed the deadline....

3- April 20: Subject: Today My Special Offer Starts! Body Content: Contact me today for a 35% discount on services. Let's get those taxes in ASAP!

4- April 24: Subject: One Day Left to File Your Late Taxes! Body Content: Tomorrow is the last day!

5- April 25: Subject: Today is the Last Day to File Your Late Taxes! Body Content: Today is the last day!

So, as you can see, you can easily arouse people's attention to what you're offering, based on its importance to them.

This is why I STRONGLY urge you to only use this list to push distinct products and services that meet the following criteria:

1- Recipients can't get it anywhere else

2- You know a good portion of your list needs this offering NOW or some time in the near future

3- You know recipients are highly interested in this offering because you're about to follow my advice in #3...

 

3- Use Your Advice List to Drive and Detect Demand

Each week you will be sending advice to your list based on recent news in the industry, your new intellectual property, your latest success, etc.

So, each week you'll see the open rate of every campaign, and you'll be able to forecast which of your offerings will sell well with your list.

For example, one week I sent an email to my Advice List that talked about my system for getting email subscribers to "like" the the sender's Facebook page.

It was genius advice, and the open rate that day was a blistering 62%!

As a result, I quickly threw together email blasts that promoted this service, and ran it to my Promotions List the very next week.

Within the next 2 weeks, 27 people purchased this service.

This was a huge success based on the intelligence I gather from my Advice List. So if you run a weekly newsletter, you'll have 52 swings each year to develop at least one killer offering that will sell very well to a list of people you have direct access to.

You should be structuring a new offering each month in this way.

 

4- In Closing

So, your email strategy is pretty straightforward:

1. Clone your list, and send one list regular advice (Advice List), and the other, irregular offerings with a deadline to buy (Promotions List)
2. Use your Advice List to determine what offerings people may be most interested in
3. Build offerings once a month based on what your Advice List's recipients seem to desire the most