Improve your email marketing...

The importance of making relevant offers at appropriate times in your emails

Unless you have no desire (or need) to generate an income, then the entire raison d'être for having an email marketing system is to generate sales.

Every successful business uses email this way, so there's no need to feel 'salesy'. (If you don't believe me, scroll through your most recent emails from established businesses.)

There's a common phrase in marketing, I'm sure you'll have heard before... "Nobody likes being sold to, but everyone loves buying."

I know this is true for me. If someone pitches me hard, even if it's something I want or need, I'll walk away (or unsubscribe).

Conversely, if someone presents me with an opportunity to buy something I know I'd get value from, and let me buy on my terms, I'm all in.

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The simple sales process I use in Kit

Since you're a subscriber to my email list, at some point, I'll probably have presented you with opportunities to buy something from me - the offer would have been tailored as best I could to you and your needs.

I sell three types of products/services: courses, services, and a membership.

Each offering can fit into one of three price categories: low-ticket, medium-ticket, and high-ticket.

There are many factors considered when presenting you with an offer, including how you joined my list (i.e. which freebie you chose), what you shared with me when you joined (e.g. answering a poll), and what you've self-selected along the way since joining my list (e.g. which links you clicked, which topics you opted in/out of), and of course, the most important factor - what you already bought from me (if anything).

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How I make the 'offer' different for every subscriber

I use something that sounds quite techy called 'Liquid code'; however, in reality, it's not that difficult to learn.

Essentially, it allows me to configure my emails dynamically and have relevant offers placed into emails that are most appropriate for each subscriber.

To use a very simple example, a new subscriber who recently joined my list may go through the following sequence;

1. Subscribes to my email list by requesting my "Email Marketer's Start Guide".
2. Shares information to tell me they are struggling mostly with the tech side of things.
3. They continue to receive more value from my emails - they may click a link that begins to feed them emails about Kit (i.e. help with the tech).
4. I present an offer to buy my self-study course, "Kit Email Mastery".

That's just one of many potential scenarios, but hopefully you get the idea - by designing variable paths into my email marketing system, I can automatically present the most relevant offer to each subscriber, at an appropriate time.

I'm not into pushing sales continually in every email - and that's why you're unlikely ever to see a full-on sales campaign from me any more than perhaps 3 or 4 times per year.

Introducing a Kit feature...

Prevent your emails from being 'clipped'

You may not have heard the term 'clipped' before, however, in the email world it means that your email has reached a size beyond which some ISPs (Internet Service Providers - e.g. Yahoo, Google, etc.) may shorten it.

As a guideline, your email may be clipped if it exceeds 102kb in size, excluding images and attachments.

Normally, the email client (e.g. Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) will offer a link to manually load the portion of the email that was 'clipped'.

How to stop your emails being clipped

The simplest way to keep your emails below the limit is to keep things lightweight when it comes to your content. Using inline formatting like bold, italic, underline, etc. will increase email size, however, the main consideration is the volume of content itself.

As obvious as it may sound, the more you type, the more likely you are to reach the 102kb limit.

My recommendation is that you keep your emails under 2,000 words and you should be good to send.

How do I know what size my email is?

Good question - one that should have a simpler answer (i.e. it would be great if email marketing platforms showed this in the editor), but to discover the email size, you need to download the email to your laptop/computer/device.

This means you need to send yourself a copy of the email and then 'Download' the email to your device. Once downloaded, you can see the email size; (see image below)

Kit provides a warning during 'Preview'

When composing an email, you can click the 'Preview' button within the email editor. When the preview loads, and if the file has exceeded the recommended file size, Kit will display a warning to let you know your email may be clipped.

Another less obvious downside to your emails being clipped can be your email open rates not being accurately recorded.

With many email marketing platforms, the way email 'opens' get tracked is by the loading of a tiny (invisible to us) 'tracking pixel' into the email.

When this pixel gets loaded, it triggers a message to say the recipient has opened the email and gets recorded against the relevant subscriber. So, if the email gets clipped, the tracking pixel doesn't get loaded and the rates get skewed.

P.S. 'Open rates' can be inaccurate for many reasons, so they're not an ideal measurement anyway, other than as a trending figure - i.e. does it go up or down over time.

Ask me your questions...

What are snippets, and why should I use them?

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