Email marketing is always going to be one of the best ways to create engagement and trust with an audience. The reason for this is simple — an email address is something that is personal to everyone, just like when you go out and check your mailbox every day, you also check your inbox. The feeling and emotions that get triggered from such emails is how you feel about your relationship to the sender of that mail. A perfect example of this is when you receive a postal letter from a friend or family member, versus how you would feel if you received a spam commercial advertisement from a local realtor trying to sell you a home in your area.
With all of that being said, content creators and brand marketers must approach their audience and email marketing with the same touch and care as if they were sending out postal mailings to a friend or family member. The last thing you want is for your subscribers to see your email and instantly look for the unsubscribe button. Not only is this process a requirement, it’s also a skill that takes much time and practice to master.
One set of content creators that continually do well with email marketing and building a relationship with their audience, is bloggers. In this week’s latest email marketing expert interview, we are going to be talking with Mi Muba, who runs a few high-traffic blogs and continually creates powerful content for your audience. While most people would look at Mi’s success in the form of his online content, it’s actually his email marketing and list building skills that help him continue to grow and scale to new audiences.
Be sure to read through all of his expert tips and wisdom below.
1 – Please briefly tell us about yourself and how you got started with online marketing.
I am Mi Muba and I have been doing blogging since 2010 and managing my three blogs 1) Be A Money Blogger on make money blogging 2) Pollution Pollution on go green and 3) Sarmayakar on capital market awareness.
I have been published as an expert in more than 50 roundup posts and one of the most sought after money bloggers who equally guides on A to Z blogging in addition to blog monetization.
2 – Is email still the most effective marketing platform today… and how has it changed over the years with the addition of social media and mobile?
When the supply of any product increased massively what smart suppliers do? They try to sell at the doorstep of customers. It was done before the internet. But now one can build an e-commerce site to sell any product or service to make readers buy from their homes.
But after huge growth in e-commerce people get confused which site to visit and which one not. Here email marketing solved their problem and they now first see those offers they get in their inbox. This is the power of email marketing that no any other method could compete with it.
3 – With so many different email platforms to choose from, what should marketers specifically be looking for?
They should look which one help you achieve your email marketing goals with minimum missing. Your every client is special so is your every email subscriber. So you must not lose a subscriber. You also must not grab a subscriber that eventually unsubscribe you without any reason.
4 – What is your preferred method of collecting emails and building your list? (pop up forms, subscription boxes, co-registration etc)
It depends upon niche of your blog. If your niche relates to money, visitors do have patience to go through an offer either it appears suddenly, repeatedly or very broadly to hide their whole screen. If it’s a casual niche like advocacy of a cause there people get irritated on repetitive offers.
On my money blog I use pop up subscribe forms and on the green blog just put the email subscription offer at the end of my post. Both methods have proven to work extremely well for gaining new subscribers to my lists.
5 – What are your best tips for writing effective email titles/content that get opens and clicks?
Never follow the herd instinct. If a top blogger is following a specific style it doesn’t mean you would also get the same level of response.
Still, people first see who is saying and then they check what is being said. If you guarantee to make your readers become rich they first would see how much rich you are. So your email title should be rational and achievable with fully hitting their desires, dreams, fears and frustrations.
6 – Based on your own experience, is it better to send long form or short form written content in emails to your mailing list?
The best form is the one that could retain the interest of readers. At the doorstep of customer entire showroom could not be taken. In same way an email should tell the readers why they should use a product to achieve something or solve their problem, what is the best product for this purpose and why they buy from you.
7 – What is the best way to setup an effective autoresponder series? (content, days in between, call to actions)
An autoresponder series should have:
- A welcoming email soon after subscription
- An introductory email after a week of subscription
- Then a weekly email providing valuable tips for free for the first month
- Then fortnightly mail offering premium solutions for next two months
- Finally, your regular fortnightly emails to help your subscribers with premium offers.
- A special email on every religious, cultural and national day either with a sales pitch or without it depending upon its relation with your niche.
- An occasional monthly email linking best resources on a topic to just help your readers with no sales pitch.
8 – If you had to start over from scratch and only had $1,000 to start a new mailing list, how would you spend it?
I would buy the top quality list builder and also would buy a supporting tool that fully monitors how my email subscribers are responding. Also, I would spend half of the amount to optimize my email list that means to help them solve their problem in any way. You optimize when your sole objective is to help your subscribers.
9 – Lots of site owners and marketers have mailing lists, but they aren’t making money with them. What are they doing wrong?
They pick a product on their previous history of selling through email. A list despite being limited does have a diversity and all subscribers don’t want accurately same products. So an email marketer should select diverse products to serve needs of every subscriber in different slots.
10 – If you could tell online marketers and brand one thing that could improve their email marketing and list growth, what would it be?
Never be satisfied on 5 or 10 per cent success rate on your email marketing. Keep exploring new and newer methods to fully serve each email subscriber.