The Best Time To Send Your Marketing Emails & Up Your Click-Throughs

Email marketing remains as one of the most popular and effective forms of marketing, with 59% of B2B marketers saying that email is their most effective way of increasing revenue. The myth that email marketing is dying is far from true, which means that it’s a resource that every business should tap in to and take advantage of.

Continue reading “The Best Time To Send Your Marketing Emails & Up Your Click-Throughs”

10 Tips To Write Awesome Email Subject Lines (That Won’t End Up In The Trash)

Emails are probably the only exception to the phrase ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’.

We are bombarded with email after email in our inbox everyday, and most of them get swiped straight to the trash. The subject line is the first thing you’ll see, so it’s extra important to write the perfect one in order to stand out from the sea of emails in your inbox.

There are several characteristics of a subject line that you should aim for. It has to be compelling enough to make you open the email, short and concise enough not to get cut off on mobile devices, and unique enough to compete with the other emails you’re receiving.

If you’re at a loss of how to craft the perfect email subject line, we’ve got you covered with these tips, along with real examples from my own inbox:

Continue reading “10 Tips To Write Awesome Email Subject Lines (That Won’t End Up In The Trash)”

Refresh Your Email Marketing With 4 Simple Steps

Email marketing, if done right, can deliver great results for you and your business. Studies show that albeit the rise of social media, email is almost 40 times more effective at attracting new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s more than a little significant!

If you aren’t seeing results from your emails lately, you came to the right place. Read on to find out what simple changes you can make to boost your emails and reel people in.

Continue reading “Refresh Your Email Marketing With 4 Simple Steps”

Eliminate The Biggest Headache In Email Marketing

Email marketing is no longer what it used to be. It has a low conversion rate, which means that we need to have a huge email list to make up for the small percentage and drive sales.

Finding prospects is also incredibly tedious. Before I created my tool, there were generally 3 ways to find prospects:

  1. Networking events
  2. Email lists
  3. Manual search on Google

 

Networking Events

To build our network, we go to conferences, trade shows, networking lunches, business networking events and seminars. There, we hope to find people who are interested in our product. And usually we do. These events tend to give us a higher chance to close a deal, but they are very expensive and time-consuming.

 

Email Lists

The alternative to networking events is to buy email lists. However, email lists also come with their own problems.

  • They are ridiculously overpriced
  • They are obsolete or completely incorrect (Out of 10,000 emails, at least 6,000 bounce because they are no longer in use.)
  • These emails are so flooded with emails from hundreds if not thousands of people that the receivers are either stop bothering with unknown emails or have implemented strong filters that auto-junk emails

 

THE BIGGEST HEADACHE

The biggest headache in email marketing is COST. For anyone who has tried to find email leads without burning cash, you probably tried to manually search for emails on Google. You search for your industry and click on every single search result and scroll through the chunk of text to find an email address. But that is not effective.

I used to source for emails manually from Google, which took me 4 hours to get 50 emails. But now, I take 4 minutes to get 50 emails.

Now that I have eliminated the entire process, I save over 100 hours to focus on important tasks like meeting prospects and clients.

To explain without the technical details, I built a tool that extracts every single email within a single Google Search.

 

So here is how it works. For example, if I search “Property Agency Singapore”, I will do this:

If I want to manually select results to add, I click:

This tool is completely FREE for you to use.

 

We originally built this tool to recruit >40,000 vendors for our e-procurement marketplace. But now we are making it available for everyone. If you do sales or merchant acquisition, this tool is for you. Seeing is believing. Experience the difference HERE.

 

ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.

How To Reduce Unsubscribers For Your Email Marketing

When people unsubscribe from our email marketing, it can be extremely painful and demotivating. It feels like a form of rejection, especially when you truly believe in the value you provide to people and they just don’t see it.

But that is the reality of sales and marketing. You and I do not meet EVERYONE’s needs. We have a target group of prospects and we want to capture as much market share as possible. Sometimes it takes a longer process of persuading, but getting a “no” does not really mean “no”. It just means “not now, maybe later.”

Understanding why your prospects unsubscribe is important to learning how to keep them on your mailing list. I have compiled some ideas for you to refine your email marketing strategy and keep your subscribers engaged.

 

State Your Objectives Clearly

It is not enough to simply say “sign up for our newsletter.” What are your subscribers going to get out of it? You need to be very clear about what you are offering, otherwise you will have mismatched expectations or worse people feel like you are just spamming them.

 

Segment Your Subscribers

Do your subscribers only want to learn about a particular topic or product out of an entire range you cover? Do varying demographics and geographies affect your readers’ expectations? How committed are your customers? Are they loyal, sceptical, deal finders or just window shoppers? Segment your email list by meaningful categories.

 

Test Email Frequency

Do your subscribers appreciate daily, weekly or monthly updates? It depends on the industry and value you are offering. Which day of the week do you receive a higher open-rate and conversion rate? Test that too.

 

Test Subject Lines

Do clickbait subject lines work well? Or do they frustrate your readers? I wrote a full-length article about the new expectations of email marketing that your readers never told you. Hope it is useful.

 

Be Personal

Rather than going “Hey friend” or worse still “Dear valued subscriber”, use your subscriber’s name! Collect names along with emails. A simple guideline is to mention your subscriber’s name once in every paragraph or so.

 

Offer Real Value

Give useful and relevant information that value-adds to your readers. Give offers, discounts and promotions exclusively to subscribers to make them feel appreciated.

 

Use Creative Formatting

Get un-boring. Refresh your style continually for visual appeal.

 

Optimise For Mobile

Why are we still saying this? Most of us read emails on mobile, so if you haven’t already considered this step, please do it. It will really help you to engage >70% of your audience reading on mobile.

 

OH NOOO! THEY STILL UNSUBSCRIBE!

This is inevitable. Rejections are a harsh reality. BUT we can do our best to minimise unsubscribes. The following techniques can help you save some prospects from flying out of your nest.

 

Allow More Options

You need to get out of the mindset that subscription is binary, either “Subscribe” or “Unsubscribe”. Think of it as a full spectrum. Your subscribers have different levels of relationships with you, and it is important to treat them differently to minimise total “unsubscribes”.

The following Email Subscriber Relationship Spectrum was developed by ThunderQuote inhouse to help us with relationship management.

 

Recognise Unsubscribe Trends

You need to be sensitive to patterns especially when they cause people to unsubscribe from your newsletter. Often it is clickbait subject lines, routine and ugly formats and poor value offered. Pay special attention to the feedback you get.

 

Building relationships with your subscribers is not easy, but we can definitely use some of these ideas to improve and give subscribers what they really need.

BONUS: We built a FREE tool that helps you find 200 email leads in 10 minutes. If you want to supercharge your email marketing campaign, click on this link.

 

ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.

10 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Sales

You need a killer strategy for your email marketing campaign. Many mediocre marketing emails do not even get opened because your readers’ expectations have changed. To make full use of this platform, you also need to ensure that you do not fall into the trap of getting into the Promotions Tab.

If you struggle to make sales through your email marketing campaign, you are not alone. Here are email marketing best practices that will maximise your click-through and conversion rate. So let’s dive in. Continue reading “10 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Sales”

The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing And How It could Cost You Your Job

Technological disruption is upon us. The world is changing too fast for us to be comfortable with our jobs. Every industry is being disrupted. Transport, finance, law, medicine, manufacturing, you name it. Everything is changing.

We are long past the dawn of Industry 4.0. Early adopters of these technologies are already reaping the benefits even at the cost of jobs. Just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, blockchain, 5G and cloud computing were cliché buzzwords.

But now they are here to stay. And they are disrupting every industry, including yours.
Continue reading “The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing And How It could Cost You Your Job”

5 Free Tools To Make Email Marketing Work Harder For You

Email marketing can become a laborious process that can seriously suck the joy out of your passion. Let’s keep things simple here. I have a few email marketing software tools that I highly recommend for any marketer to use. Coming from a start-up background, a lean team really needs some serious automation firepower. Let’s fire away.
Continue reading “5 Free Tools To Make Email Marketing Work Harder For You”

Trends That Will Dominate Email Marketing

The email marketing trend is shifting again. The strategies used 5 years ago will definitely not work today. The email marketing landscape is quickly shifting and unless you are staying ahead of the curve and keeping up with the next big thing, you will fall behind and quickly become the next Kodak.

Here are some of the key determinants of the huge upcoming changes in email marketing that we will see in the next 2 years.
Continue reading “Trends That Will Dominate Email Marketing”

Decode the Gmail Promotions Tab

Gmail has an incredibly smart filter that divides emails into Primary, Social and Promotions Tabs. The algorithms that go into determining the type of email uses multiple criteria which you need to look out for.

The Promotions Tab is pretty much a trash bin that hardly gets any attention. All your money that goes into paid subscription for email marketing tools will go to waste if you are unable to overcome Gmail’s promotions tab filter.

Here are the observed criteria that Gmail uses to categorize emails:

 

Personalised Names

If you greet your recipient by name, there is a higher chance that your email is a personal email rather than a promotional email. It is important to collect your subscribers’ names along with the emails so that you will avoid greeting them by their email ID which is a dead giveaway.

 

Pain Text

A personal email will normally use only 1 font type and size. After all, in my other post about Trends That Will Dominate Email Marketing, I mentioned that your readers are increasingly weary and cynical about email marketing. You should go for authenticity and plain text to lower your readers’ defences and speak personally to their emotions. Use up to 50 words per email only.

You will commonly find multiple font types in promotional emails due to their fancy formatting, but that is a huge red flag for Gmail.

 

Multiple Images

Besides using plain text, you need to use very few images to convey your message. Ensure that a single GIF or image is sufficient to illustrate your product.

Kill your company logo, fax icon, mobile icon, address icon etc. Avoid them completely. Make your email look completely like a personal email that you send to your friend.

 

Hyperlinks

Use only 1 hyperlink. There should only be 1 Call-To-Action link that leads to your landing page. Avoid all other links to avoid suspicion. Your “Unsubscribe” button should only be at the bottom of the email.

 

Sales Talk

Do not talk directly about your product. Instead share casually. The following phrases will immediately get detected by Gmail “Buy now and save 35%” or “Limited time offer” or “Click here to buy”.

You stand a better chance if you choose your words carefully, for example “Want to share this tool with you” or “I think this will help” or “consider this option”.

The whole idea is that you write like writing to your friend. Avoid pushing the sale, but present an option. The selling should be done on the landing page.

 

HOWEVER…

Gmail’s algorithm is always changing. There are some really intelligent guys at Google covering every single loophole in their algorithm. There is no permanent answer to this email marketing problem but we do have some tips!

DISCLAIMER: Even if you follow our guidelines, you may still end up in the Promotions Tab.

 

SO HOW…

There a few options for you. It is increasingly difficult to find loopholes in the algorithm and I think it is not productive to do so. You can do A/B testing to see what works, but I have a better idea.

During your welcome email (which likely ends up in the Promotions Tab), ask your subscribers to click and drag your email into the Primary Tab.

Incentivise them by telling them that you will give out a free gift in the second email that is available only to the first 100 clickers. That will create a sense of urgency from FOMO (fear of missing out).

But beyond the second email, you need to provide real value to your subscribers. You need to give relevant insights in your blog posts, free gifts periodically and a tightknit community on your website that your subscribers feel belonging to.

 

Concluding Thoughts

Quite clearly email marketing is getting tougher with Gmail’s strict algorithm. But that only filters out your spammy competitors, keep providing value and striving to make a real connection and you will succeed… just keep trying!

But to keep trying, you need more leads and this makes email lead generation all the more vital yet it’s never easy… We know and that’s why we built a solution – If you want to find 200 email leads in 5 minutes, use TQ Prospector Tool for FREE!

ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.