Increasing online store sales: 5 steps to create the perfect email newsletter

A well-designed email mailing list helps to support the client at every stage of his journey through the sales funnel, prompting him and motivating you to target actions that are important to you. In addition, the automatic sequence of letters can draw the attention of the client (both real and potential) to your by-products, to some additional functions, well, in general, the newsletter can be adjusted to almost any of your needs. This is one of the main ways of constant communication with customers. How to create an effective sequence of emails for an autoresponder? This article by Jeremy Reeves, written in the first person, will be useful both to those who decide to supplement the service of their online store with automatic sending of emails, but do not know where to start, and to those who are already trying to “catch up” potential customers with emails, but the return on their current newsletter does not suit the owners of the service. How to increase sales of an online store (or some other service) via email distribution?

The right email will lead to the right results!

In this article, we will focus on autoresponders - "answering machines" in the e-mail distribution system. In the process of analyzing each step of creating a sequence of emails, I will give you some tips that will help you create the perfect sequence of automatically sent emails.

It all starts with the need to answer the question:

What is the purpose of automatic mailing?

It will be different for each person who will implement it.
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• Someone will try to sell a product with it;
• Someone will sell the service;
• Someone will simply try to establish long-term trusting relationships with potential customers in order to sell a product or service in the future.

Anyway, we can fit all of the above in one sentence.

The purpose of any automatic mailing is to promote a specific potential client further along your sales funnel.

Newsletters are not a way to make new friends. You are not going to become the center of the universe and be heard with it. You are not going to build your own brand through a series of emails. These goals may be attendant, but the main thing is different. The sole purpose of an automatic mailing is to push a specific potential customer further along your sales funnel.

Yes, in parallel, this may include all of the above things, such as the formation of your brand, but each e-mail in your letter sequence must be sent for some reason, and the purpose of sending it must motivate a potential client to take the next target action to advance through the funnel. This may be work on the level of trust of a potential client to you, so that later he purchases your product, or networking, so that when the client needs this service, he chooses your service. Whatever the target action of the client, it is your goal.

And we start with the first step.

Step 1: Decide on goals

Before you write a word for the newsletter, you should think and decide on your ultimate goal. If you want to sell products, this goal must sit firmly in your brain in order to form an understanding of how to achieve it. If you want to sell a service, you will use a different approach to achieve it, and you also need to think about which one.

Determine your goals is quite simple.

• Do you go to sell a product?
• Do you want to build a long-term trust relationship?
• Do you go to raise the hype around your business?
• Do you go to launch a new product?
• Do you want to break the market leaders?

Each of these five goals will require a different strategy, but if you do not know the final goal, it is impossible to work out a suitable one. In order to keep the mailing goals in mind when writing emails, visualization helps, for example, you can write down the goals and subtasks in a separate file or reflect in the presentation.

Step 2: Decide on a strategy

Your strategy will depend on the goals you want to achieve.

Someone like a realtor, for example, does not require a large amount of communication in an email, unlike someone who is trying to sell an information product. A company providing cleaning services must adhere to a different tone of distribution than the company organizing children's parties. But in any case, to achieve maximum efficiency, it is necessary to remember five important points.

1: Reliability and professionalism - people do not want to deal with amateurs. If you want to organize an effective automatic newsletter, you should think about how to show your level of professionalism in every moment of communication with the client. There are many options for how to do this - reviews of happy customers, true histories of using your product, appearances in the media and much more.

For example, what I like to use.

The subject of the email, if schematically, can be something like this: “You should congratulate Charlie!”

The letter itself:

Hi, <name>!

I wrote to you so that you did not forget to congratulate Charlie, he finally found a solution to the problem that bothered us all. He just bought <your product name>, spent an hour getting into the instructions, and started everything. Namely, he introduced the technique from the second module, with the help of which, as written in the instructions, <he can get the benefit that your target audience wants to achieve> without <typical problems for this solution>.
And what is the result?

Just a week later <he got the benefit that your target audience needs>.

Next come your words about how a potential customer can be as lucky.

2: Trust - It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust anyone in the world. True life stories are a wonderful way to increase your confidence in you. In my own letters, I prove to potential customers that I can be trusted, but I am not annoying. In this case, I refer to the story of how other copywriters mistreated clients.

Here is an example that I like to use. Feel free to adapt it to your needs.

I just spoke with one client on the phone. He complained that in this area almost no honest people left. I agree! I will not give names, but the client told me how he caught one of my competitors in outright lies. Perhaps this competitor <think of something he could lie about>.
Listen, I just don't want this to happen to you. In my opinion, this is disgusting ...

Next comes your words about why you can trust something, and do not forget to give examples.

3: Perseverance and constancy - you must demonstrate perseverance and constancy, because they contribute to building trust.
Think of the people you see most often. Do you trust them more than those whom you see less often?

Perseverance, of course, does not mean that you should write e-mails around the clock. The frequency may be different: once a day, once a week, once a month. It is worth doing this on every possible occasion, the more often the better. The main thing is stability, constancy. And how to choose the right time for your newsletter?



The timing of the mailing should be made in accordance with its goals and the scope of your activities, as can be seen from the diagram above.

4: Leadership - people dutifully follow the leader. The championship in a certain area creates credibility, and it makes people trust you. Leadership is again about trust. The easiest way is to gain a leading position in the presentation of your potential customers, showing them concrete evidence of your professionalism (see how everything is interconnected?), And immediately after this explaining to them specifically what they should do. And they will do it.

5: Personalization - no one likes boring common words. You build strong ties with people, build deep long-term relationships with people who are personalities, and each of them has his own charisma. Through e-mails, this can be done by drawing attention to your own personality, emphasizing your most prominent features in the letters. For example, if you have funny strange habits ... tell us about it! This may sound implausible, but it works.

Step 3: Make a clear plan for your newsletter.

After you have developed a clear strategy, you need to plan a sequence of letters from the autoresponder.


You can draw a plan schematically, for example, as in the figure above. The main thing is that everything is clear to you.

The question that you are primarily interested in: "How many of them should be just in the sequence?". If you compose letters yourself, it is quite easy to make a long sequence of letters. I personally have over 100.

But if you need to hire a copywriter, it is better to estimate how many letters ordered will really pay for themselves, which means how effective the mailing will be. It makes sense to order 10-20 texts, but if suddenly there will be more than 20 of them, and after the twentieth ROI starts to fall, you will think that this money could be spent more profitably. Only you know the answer to the question, how many letters you need.

Suppose you decide to send 24 letters within 6 months, i.e. about 1 letter per week. How to choose the right days to send emails? This will help statistics MailChimp: they have developed a special feature, which by counting and polling users determines the most optimal time to send emails.

Distribution of subscribers on the best for them days of the week as a percentage



Despite the fact that, in general, statistics do not play into the hands of weekend mailings, there are certain categories of subscribers who read emails on weekends. Most often it depends on the subject of letters.

The percentage of subscribers regarding several topics of emails for which the optimal time to receive a letter is a weekend.



In addition to the distribution of subscribers by the time of reading the letter as a whole, regardless of the distribution topic (it was on the diagram in one of the preceding paragraphs), MailChimp calculated the optimal time for sending letters that contain content related to the activities of the government, non-profit organizations, retail and various hobbies .

Percentage of subscribers regarding the subject of the letter - the optimal time for distribution during the day



After you have dealt with the optimal time for you to send, you should think up and write at least one convincing reason for the e-mail (some of your achievements, thanks from clients, something trustworthy) and mark it as this topic. of the week. And so for each subsequent week.
If possible, try to find a story that describes this “event of the week”. It works wonders.

Here is a small example.

• Week 1: Honesty
• Week 2: Results
• Week 3: Improving customer confidence

etc. etc.

Step 4: Write Your Emails

This item speaks for itself. By this point you should have a goal, a strategy, and a fully developed sequence. It is time to stamp emails in piles.

If this is your first time, you should concentrate fully. Pour coffee, find a quiet, peaceful place - and write.

YOU WILL BE REDUCED.

Do not worry. This is normal. Even I, a writer, can only write for about 30-40 minutes in a row, until my thoughts start to get confused. And this after so many years of practice! Take frequent breaks, but do not interrupt the wave of inspiration, if suddenly it covers you.

I strongly advise you to download more classical music and listen to it during the creative process. Atmospheric background music will help focus, work will go faster, and thoughts will clear up. (The classic works because it is music without words that can distract you from your business).

The easiest way to overcome the creative crisis that has arisen, the lack of inspiration, is to imagine that it does not exist. “Creative crisis” is an excuse for those who simply don’t want to work. But if you still feel that you are stuck on one line, just write everything that comes to mind, until some idea appears by itself. This may seem strange, but believe me, it works.

Step 5: Verify and Debug

The last step is to upload your emails to the autoresponder system, create a logical sequence, and start getting users to your funnel.
Let the newsletter work for some time (someone needs weeks, someone months, depending on the number of attracted customers), and after this time, begin to carefully work out your letters and measure their effectiveness.

What should pay attention to?

Low read emails. If on the average of the letters you send, the recipients open 25%, and in this newsletter this ratio is 10% - test other mailing topics.

Low index of clickability of links inside the letter. Same. Calculate the average for all your emails and pay attention to those letters that have a CTR (clickthrough rate) below this value. Try to think of new ways to increase the CTR, for example, by making the letter shorter, and the links more visible, increasing their number or even adding arrows pointing at them. Experiment.

High subscription bounce rate. It all depends on your style. Some practice “rejection marketing” (Howard Stern, for example) and target ONLY very specific clients. In this case, if you deliberately send letters that are negative for a part of the audience, you repel those who still would not have bought anything, but attract those who buy. But if you don’t like these techniques, select the letters that you received, after which most people unsubscribed, and try to understand why this happened.

An example of a competent letter for mailing - links are made in the form of visible call-to-action buttons.



By a certain point, when enough time has passed since the launch of the first letter in your letter sequence, you should notice that sales have started to grow. If this happens, then your business can be said to be partially automated, and over time it will work better and better if you continue in the same spirit.