Lesson: Content Marketing with Neil Patel

Step #6 Email Power: Why email is still king

Email is important because it's the number one channel that people use no matter what. Just think of it this way. The Facebooks of the world may come, Twitter, search engines may adapt, but the one thing that's needed especially in the B2B world is emails. That's how we communicate with each other throughout a company. So if you can send people emails knowing that they had to check their inbox due to work, there's a good chance that they're going to open up your email, click on a link, go to your site and maybe even buy.

The big power of email is you can get people into your website whenever you want. So think of it this way, people typically check their emails early in the morning, middle of the afternoon, and at night before they go to sleep. The reason they also check it at night is because they don't want to wake up to a big inbox that's full of tons of unread emails. So if you time your emails right you can get people to your website whenever you want.

Once you have an email address from the person, the first thing you need to do is send out an email right when they subscribe so that they know that you're emailing them, they know to expect, and it's very clear on here's what you're going to get and here's what you're not going to get. I'm not going to share your information. I'm not going to spam you, etc., and then abide by those rules. The moment that you stray away from them, there's a higher chance that your emails aren’t going to be read.

So when you look at email marketing, there are two main metrics. Open rates and click-through rates. Open rates is how many people actually clicking on the subject line and opening up the email to read your message. If you're getting from 30% to 50% you're actually doing extremely well. If you're seeing your open rates over 100% because sometimes you will see that, that means your email marketing software is tracking things inaccurately in which if I, Neil, open up the email twice, it will show it as two opens when technically I'm just one person. And if you're in between 30% and 50%, you're doing really well from an open rate perspective.

Now out of the people that I open, if you can get 20% to 30% of those to click through and go to your website which is a click through rate, you're actually doing pretty well. When you're doing email marketing you don't want to end up putting too much information within the email. If you put it all in the email, you're not going to get that traffic back to your website. Think of it this way. No one can buy from the email unless there's a technology that I don't know about that does it.

So if you can add a few paragraphs or one paragraph and get people to come back to your site or if you can showcase a product you're selling and maybe just do a quick snippet and get them to come to the website to look at the product, that's enough. You also want to limit the number of links within the email to around three plus the unsubscribe link which is four. If you do more than that I'm not saying your emails won't go through but you’re increasing the chances that you'll go into the spam filter.

When you are looking at email algorithms, Google, Hotmail, Yahoo!, they're the ones with the data and they tend not to share it with the email providers. So your email provider may show you open rates and click-through rates because they are putting a unique URL for each and every single link that they send out in the email so they can track that, but the stats are 100% accurate. They can tell you how many complaints there are in which people are saying, "Hey, unsubscribe. I didn't subscribe to this list." And that's considered a complaint but they can't tell you how many people are clicking on the spam button within Gmail or Yahoo! or Hotmail.

If you want to ensure that your emails don't go to spam, you have to have a few things. One, ideally try to do double opt in because it means that someone actually wants to subscribe to your list so that we're not sending emails to people that don't want them. Two, don't put too many links within your emails. If you add like ten links, there's a higher tendency that you're going into the spam filter. Three, there's free tools out there that tell you if any words that you're using within your email template are considered spam such as like “casino” and words like that.

Four, you want to make sure that you're actually sending out the emails from a dedicated IP that's clean and you got to warm up your IP address. So typically when you sign up for email provider and you're on a cheaper plan, they're putting your emails on the same IP as everyone else is also sending emails through other system. So if someone else is a bad seed and they're getting a lot of their mails marked as spam, that means even though your emails aren't being marked as spam, it will end up in the spam filter because emails from that IP which is shared with many companies, a portion are getting marked as spam. So always go for a clean IP that's just dedicated towards you.