Are you sending out a newsletter? If you are, is it a regular thing, or more of a sporadic (an email that gets sent sporadically instead of on a regular schedule?).
If you aren't connecting with your clients and prospects regularly you are missing out. According to a study from Eloqua/Benchmark, email messages bring 1350% more traffic than social messages. If that seems far-fetched, think about it. The people who are on your email list are YOUR community. They are the people that cared enough to sign up for your website in the first place.
You are sending out regularly, but the newsletter doesn't seem to be effective. Here are some mistakes you could be making.
(want to know how to triple your sales with just 4 email sequences? Get instant access to my webinar)
Mistake #1: You aren't personalizing your emails
Even though you'll get more opt-ins if you ask for emails only, you are making a serious mistake if you don't get people's first names as part of the sign-up process and use them in your emails. You get extra points for using the name in the email, not just in the headline. Inboxes are crowded and although everyone knows the email comes from an autoresponder, using someone's first name will help you stand out in the crowd.
Mistake #2 Your newsletters are too long.
Yes, you are a coach, and that means that you have a lot to say. You want to help people make a transformation and you have information to share. The thing to be aware of, is that generally people are scanners not readers. So if your email is LONG and a giant paragraph people are not likely to read it. Plus, most people are reading your emails on their phone. How long are you willing to scroll?
Mistake #3: You’re sending emails from your company
Yay, you have a team to support your coaching business! That's great. The temptation is to start sending emails from Your Company with the email address – support@yourcoachingcompany.com. Don't do it. People are 137% more likely to open an e-mail that comes from a real person. If you really want the replies to go back to your team, you have a couple of options. The first is to have the from name be from you, but the address be your support account. We are starting this in our company. Emails come from Michele Scism – but the address is clientcare@decisiveminds.com.
Mistake #4: There is no call-to-action (or a muddled call to action)
One of the most common mistakes I see in e-mail marketing is for emails to go out with no call to action whatsoever. Even if you are just directing people to a blog post, you need to have a specific call to action. If you don't, you aren't training your clients correctly. They will get used to just reading your emails and not acting on them (and remember email marketing is a great source of traffic for your site).
The other thing, I see a lot of you do is have multiple calls to action in one email newsletter. You advertise a webinar, and a different podcast, and someone else's teleseminar. We've found it to be more effective to advertise one thing at a time in our newsletter. So, I will talk about an event in my personal note, we will highlight an article on that same event and then finish the newsletter with an ad for that event. Not only do more people click through, we have a much better idea of which emails are the most effective.
Mistake #5: You Think Your Newsletter is About YOU
The biggest mistake I see people making is that they think people really care what they are doing. Actually, they don't they care about their problems and how you can solve them. That's it.
Before you hit the send button on a launch promotion or newsletter, answer these questions:
- What’s in this for the reader?
- Why would a busy person care to open this email?
- Does it benefit them personally?
- If so, how?
- If not, what do I need to change?
Make your newsletter about your client and their problem and you'll get good results.
Want to triple your sales with 4 email sequences (hint: newsletter is one of them!) Check out this webinar I taught on how to write email sequences that convert.
