Step-By-Step Email Marketing Secrets (28-Min Training) 2024
Sabri Subi breaks down email marketing fundamentals for customer acquisition and profit. He covers delivery strategies, getting emails opened, and driving engagement, with tactics you can apply immediately to your list.
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Strip me down naked, Take my contacts, take my list, take my relationship, my joint ventures, any brand equity that I have built up over the years. And you said, Sabri, you only have one tool. You only have one tool to go from zero back up to where you are right now. This is the one thing that I would keep in my arsenal. Hey guys, Sabri Subi here. And in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you my number one channel for acquiring customers. And that is responsible for more than all of the other channels combined in my business in terms of the profit that it brings in. But before I dive into that, let me just start by saying that when it comes to advertising online, that everything is changing so quickly. What used to work on Facebook a year ago no longer works today. What used to work on Google a year or two years ago no longer works today. As you look into the future, one thing is for certain is that there is going to be a never ending stream of change. And I get asked all the time in my business like, hey Sabri, like what's the newest channel? Like, where are you getting the best roas in this day and age? Like, where is the area that I should be focusing on in my business and what is that new tactic that I could deploy to start getting customers? Where is it that you're basically focused on is the question. And really I answer that by saying, like, look, when it comes to advertising online, I don't look at what is going to change and what is changing because change is the only constant. It's the only constant variable that there is going to be online. Instead, I try to focus my time and attention on the things that aren't going to change because the things that are always changing are the things that have the shortest half life. That is, if you spend a disproportionate amount of your time and energy in any ads manager, whether that be Facebook or Google or TikTok or wherever it be, you know that in a year's time, what is currently working now is going to be radically different. So all the time and energy that you invest in understanding the mechanics of what's actually happening in those ad platforms, you're not going to get any compound interest over a 3, 4, 5 or even a 10 year time horizon. So it's got a very small half life. You invest all this time and energy on it and then you stop getting dividends that in 12 months time when everything's changing. So, so instead what I like to do is I like to look at those areas that aren't going to change. And I invest a disproportionate amount of my time and energy on understanding those things so I can continue to get a return not in a year, but in five, 10, 20 years down the track. Because it's those human psychology, it's understanding the fundamentals of how the Internet is put together and, and how people congregate and how they act online. They're the areas that you're going to get the most outsized returns. Because looking at compound interest, that is like one of the great wonders of the world. It's where you really start. Things start to ramp up over a long time horizon. So I try to spend a lot of my time on longer time horizon activities. Now, with all of that said, what I will say is that when it comes to this number one advertising channel for my own business, that accounts for more profit than all of the other advertising channels combined, is that if you were to have to strip me down naked, take my contacts, take my list, take my relationship, my joint ventures, any brand equity that I have built up over the years, and you said, sabri, you only have one tool. You only have one tool to go from zero back up to where you are right now. This is the one thing that I would keep in my arsenal that would speed me up the quickest, that I hold the most value around and that I believe has the most equity out of anything that I own in my life and in my business. And that thing is my email list. And more specifically, the channel of email marketing. Now your eyes might roll back and you might be thinking, oh, email, like dude, like this is such an old marketing channel. It's not the sexiest thing out there. And it might be that TikTok ads is a new thing or placement on reels on Instagram or whatever it might be. But realistically those things are just noise when it comes to to roi. And when it comes to what kind of returns that you can get from your email list. You see, email is just like this workhorse in my business. It's what makes all Those advertising channels 2 to 3x more profitable. That's right, 2 to 3x. It sucks in the majority of the sales. It allows you to foster relationships at mass scale and it's incredibly efficient. It doesn't hypertrophy like a lot of these ad platforms. When you start to turn up the volume on your ad spend, you notice CPMs go up your cost per clicks, go up your cost per lead, your roas dips. It's Unlike that with email. It's the most beautiful thing from whether you're sending an email to 10 people or you're sending an email to 10,000 people. The thing just scales. And the reason that I'm so bullish on email is because we are in the day and age where there is a war going on and there is a war for attention online. And a lot of people talk about, you know, attention being the new currency online and you know, the value of attention. But what most people don't discuss is how to value different types of attention online. Now let me break this down for you. When it comes to the newsfeed and you're using an interruption based marketing, whether it's Instagram or it's TikTok or it's Facebook, you're pushing a message out in front of your audience, interrupting them based on some kind of intent that they have shown. Whether it's demographics or their in market audience. We won't get into all of that. But more specifically that attention is the lowest value attention because it's interruption. You are basically forced yourself into that person's world. And the attention is very finite. They're in the newsfeed, there's cats, there's half naked supermodels, there's people doing all types of crazy stuff on the Internet. And your message is competing with that directly in that feed environment. And it's very finite to kind of how you can flip that attention. Then if you look at further down the funnel metric, something like a Google search, that attention is a lot more valuable because that person is is in hunt mode. They're on Google, they're looking for a specific solution to a problem and a query that they have inputted into Google to try to find some information. Then as you go even further down the funnel, it is a prospect that is on your email list. It's the next best thing to having an actual client and an actual relationship with a paying customer. And the reason for that is if you think about attention in isolation in the inbox, the attention is very isolated. They click on your subject line, they open up your email and they're fully consumed. If you do a good job. I'm going to show you how to do a good job in this video with the message that you put in front of them. There's not ads flying out everywhere. There's not all of these endless distractions and entertainment that is like literally a thumb push up the screen to get to that. And most of the time when they're on the newsfeed whatever is coming below that is going to be infinitely more entertaining than whatever it is that you've got. Just the harsh reality of how things work online. But in the inbox it's a different situation. People go to the inbox to work. A lot of people use their inbox as a to do list. So if you've got something of value in there, something that is entertaining, then immediately what you have is more entertaining than the work that they are probably putting off to do inside their inbox. And you've got their undivided attention, if you know how to treat that attention. And what I have found, and not just me, but many marketers, if you look at email as a channel, is that that value of that attention shows up in terms of ROI and in terms of ROAS. On average, marketers show that for every $1 spent on email that it yields $44. Where else can you advertise online and get that kind of return on your investment? Like, it's absolutely crazy. And the that I believe is because it's the value of that attention, it's the concentration of it that matters. So it's not that just attention is the new currency and all that currency is at the same value? No, no, no. There's exchange rates on the attention. And what I have found that shows up on the balance sheet is that email is the thing that really just provides the most outsized returns out of anything else you can do online. Let me run you through how to do it. Alright, so when it comes to email, the good news is that there' three things that you need to be concerned about. And the first one is getting your message delivered, then the second one is getting it open and then the third one is getting it read. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do all three of those in this video. Alright, so when it comes to getting it delivered, there are really just a few things that you need to be thinking about. So the first thing is sender reputation. And this largely rests upon the company that you use to send out your emails, whether that's a mailchimp or an active campaign, or an infusionsoft or a HubSpot. You really want to be looking and comparing reviews and having a look at what people are saying online in terms of the ISP scores on them, the deliverability, the inboxing, and overall the reputation of that company with being able to inbox emails. So the next thing is looking at your bounce and also your complaint rates. And that's really like the number of Emails that you're sending out on a weekly or a daily basis that actually bounce. And that might be because you don't have any email verification or validation on your forms where you're actually validating whether or not this is a real email address and it's not just a spam. If you're collecting lots of email addresses online by using high value content offers or webinars or what have you, and people are putting in fake email addresses, that's going to largely impact how many emails that you send out per 1000 that bounce back. If it's a very high number, it's gonna send a message to the ISPs and be like, hey, this is trash emails. And you're gonna get a very bad bounce rate. And that's gonna be clear signal that you're not one of the good guys fighting the good fight. The next thing is the complaint rates. If you're sending out crappy emails, which I'm gonna show you how not to do in this video, then you're gonna get a lot of complaints. You're gonna get a lot of people saying, hey, like this is spam, this is trash. Did not enjoy this experience at all. And I pray to the Internet gods that I never gave my email address to this person because they are just abusing it and that's really what they're going to be looking at and they're going to kind of be gauging you on whether or not you're one of the good guys. And then lastly, is recipient engagement, I. E. Are these emails getting opened? Are people forwarding these emails to a friend because they've just got so much value in it, they just can't help but share them? Or are they moving them to a sense saved folder that they can read later on? Are they starring it as important? Are they whitelisting you? Is it a very enjoyable experience? And then the user is like, this is awesome. And they're just engaging with that email as if you were one of their best friend. And that's just. You need to get that fundamentally right if you're going to do well with email. So another thing to think about is the actual formatting of your email when it comes to ISPs, whether it's Yahoo or Gmail or Outlook or whatnot. If you own an email address, which I take it you do, if you're watching this video, you know that spam is at an all time high. Like you can't open your inbox without just seeing so many spam messages. But what's even more frightening is if you go to your spam folder and look at the number of spam messages that are automatically getting filtered out, these ISPs, they're getting very, very good at detecting what is a real email versus what is a spam email. So when it comes to like the formatting you think about like, what is it that most like spam messages out, like the emails are typically going to be highly formatted. There's going to be lots of images in there, there's going to be a logo on there, they're going to be impersonating being PayPal or Facebook or Amazon and trying to funnel out your money from you basically. And they always try to make it look very, very professional and like it's come from a corporate company because they're typically pretending to be somebody else and that's what they're flagging for. So if you're sending out these typical emails that most people do, they've got their company logo up the top and there's HTML formatting with a light gray background and a white background that pops it off and then there's pictures of products and God forbid, prices on there and it's just very, very image and HTML rich. More often than not that flags to the ISPs. Yeah, this guy is a spammer because that's the type of people, that's the kind of messages that these people send out. So that is something that you want to be very, very conscious of not doing. I'm going to show you what to do. That's what you don't want to do in terms of actually getting the email deliver because you're going to be flagged as likely having a high probability of being spam. Alright, Step two is actually getting it open. So I want you to stop for a moment and imagine that you've woken up, you've had your morning coffee, you've sat down at your computer and you fired up your email. Or maybe you're still lying in bed and you're one of the people that checks the email first thing in the morning and you open up your iPhone and you open up the inbox. What is it that you see and more importantly, what is it that you do? This is what most people do. Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, archive, delete or swipe archive. Swipe archive, swipe archive. And why do you do that? Well, it's typically because it's from some company that's trying to sell you some stuff. So you already know the intent of that message and you really file it into, yeah, this is like a commercial message. I don't need to even read this. It's not even really important. And you just flick it to the side, you archive it, delete it, and it's gone. It's nothing more than just a memory whispering in the wind. But then if you think about what are the emails that get opened every single time, like, what is it like how I got to check that that's really important. It's typically emails that appear or are personal, whether that's from a friend or a family member or a colleague or an old high school friend or whatever it might be, those are the emails they get opened. So if people funnel their emails into both personal and also commercial messages, what do you think we want to do? We want to make our emails appear to be personal and to actually be personal in nature. Well, how do we do that? Well, the first thing that you want to do is pay very close attention to how the commercial messages appear in your inbox before even getting it open. What is it that you see on those emails that stand out as a blaring obvious cue that that is a commercial message? Well, the first ones that I see is that they use letter case in the subject lines and that's where every single word has a capitalized letter to start it. Or God forbid they use all caps. Or sometimes people try to be really cute and use emojis in the subject lines. But typically when I receive emails from my friends, they're not sticking emojis in them. What are they doing? It's usually all lowercase. There's no kind of grammar or formatting at all to the subject line. It's kind of just like a comment that they just shoot through. Or if you get a message from one of your parents, are they capitalizing all of the subject lines? God bless them if they are. Or are they letter casing it? Typically not. It's very informal, like, hey, check this out or you'll want to see this. Something along those lines. Or it will just be what it's actually about in the subject line. But that's the very first thing that you want to do is somebody can see smell from your subject line and your pre header text that your email is commercial in nature, then you're not going to get it open. And one of the other big telltale signs is if in the pre header text, that little bit of text that sits just below the subject line, if it says like preview and HTML, it's like bang like, you're done. People know immediately that this is a formatted HTML email or this is View in browser. You immediately know that's a commercial message and, and therefore the chances of that email getting opened goes down dramatically. But the biggest thing above all else to getting your emails opened is that it entertains and it provides value to your audience. Because most people, if they're getting an email from you, this isn't the first time that they received an email from you. And if they've received an email in the past and it wasn't a pleasurable experience, if it was some boring lackluster crap, or if it was just you trying to ram some offer down their throat, they're going to be like, I know what this email is about. I'm not looking to buy now. I won't even open it. I will just archive or delete that puppy straight away. So if people, on the other hand, get your emails and they've received your emails before and they're like, they're awesome and they provide value and they're entertaining, they're going to be like, as soon as they see your name pop up in their inbox, they're gonna get a little happy shot to the neck, right? A little shot of dopamine, like, hey, you know, Supri's emailing me again. Let me see what this madman has got to say today. And then they go into your email. So whatever the pre actions are or the pre emails that you sent before this one, they set the tone of what your open rates are gonna be. And all you need to do is look at most people's funnels and look at the decay of open rates over time, where it's like, the first one's always the highest and the second one goes down a little bit. And by the fifth or the sixth or the seventh email, it's just, it's in the toilet, it's gone. And it's because those emails were typically crappy and they didn't provide a lot of value. Where if you do the opposite approach and you bombard your prospects with value, you'll notice that the open rates actually start to go up a little bit over time. And that's purely because you've built a relationship with them, you've built the expectations of what your emails means and they look forward to getting your email. Therefore, even if they don't get an email for two or three weeks, they actually go looking for those emails and they'll go check their spam box because your emails provide so much value. To them, and they entertain them so much that they miss them. It's like a void in their life that they no longer have. Believe it or not, I get countless of emails all the time being like, hey, I haven't been getting your emails. If I don't send an email for a couple of weeks. And that's a telltale sign that you're doing something right in your email. So while you can get all wrapped up in the tech and the deliverability scores and the reputation matter and all of that kind of stuff that goes with like getting emails delivered, the number one thing above all else that looks after all the other metrics typically is making sure that your emails are good and they really provide a little shot of dopamine when people see your name pop up in their inbox. Now, that segues us nicely into the third and final step, which is getting it clicked. Because if you're sending out emails, typically there's going to be some kind of call to action that you want people to do in that email. Whether it's to click to go to your website, whether it's to reply, whether it's to get a quote, whatever it might be, you're going to be making an ask. And if you get it delivered and if you get it opened but nobody clicks, then you don't close the loop on that revenue. So this is really the most integral and important part. And it's really the area that I see businesses commit the most amount of sense. And it picks us up from where we just left off in step two, which is making sure that your emails provide value first and secondly. And the most important thing above all else is that your emails are entertaining. Look, most people, they live boring lives and businesses just add to that boredom. They keep things so vanilla and so boring that no one would ever want to read their emails because they're just promotional crap. They're not really providing anyone any value. And their whole thing is about trying to make the sale, trying to be safe, trying to make no one unsubscribe from their emails. Who cares if people unsubscribe? There's always going to be a bunch of cowards that sit behind their computers and reply to you with some kind of scathing comments because they are unhappy. Criticism never comes from above, it only comes from below. You're only going to get people that are lower down than you. They're going to be criticizing and hating on you. You're never going to get hate from somebody that is above. And looking down upon you just doesn't happen. So don't let their opinions judge what you do in your email. And when it comes to making them entertaining and making them valuable, this is where a lot of people, like, get all caught up. Well, first of all, your emails should come from an actual human being. It shouldn't just be the company name. It shouldn't just be King Kong. It needs to be the actual individual behind that. Because people form relationships with other people. They don't form relationships with brands. And if you have a look at what's going on in the world, there is really a huge, huge pull to people wanting to actually do business with other people. And if they are doing business with companies, they want to know what those companies stand for. They want to know what their values are. And they typically poke around, they look at their About Us page because they want to understand the people that are actually behind that that company and what it is that they stand for. And it's absolutely no different when it comes to email. You just ask yourself, like, what are you going to be more inclined to open an email from a business or an email from a person? And if you think about the depth of the relationship that you're able to form, it's going to be a lot deeper with an actual individual that emails you every week or every day or every month with actually value and entertainment that they're going to provide to you. Whereas when it comes from a company, you know, immediately, okay, more or not, they're going to try to sell me some stuff because it says it in the actual sender name. It's coming from a company, not a person. So when it comes to actually writing the email, a few things that you want to think about is the tone. If you think about, like, you and what your brand stands for, what is the tone of that individual? Typically I say steer clear of anything that's too uptight, it's too professional or corporate. Because more often than not, people don't want to read emails from people that talk like that. They want to receive emails that are written to them like it's from their best friend. And this gets a lot of people very hot and bothered. They're like, oh, but I'm professional and there's a certain way to act and all of those kind of things. It's like, yeah, look, you don't need to drop F bombs in your emails, but ultimately you want to write like you talk like you were sitting down with one of your best friends and enjoying some kind of beverage and just think about how you would talk to them, think about the use of words that you would use. And that's typically how you want to engage with your prospects. They are people at the end of the day. They more often than not have partners or they're singles and they've got problems and they've got parents and they've got things that are on their to do list that aren't done. You want to just appeal and speak to them just like that they were an individual. And also don't think that you need to talk all business. If the email is coming from an individual. Share some stuff, make it personal. Whether it's your birthday or a story about your mother in law, who a Godzilla or whatever it might happen to be. Inject a little bit of personality and a little bit of swag into that thing. Most people are just so worried at offending people or coming off a certain way that their emails are just dead on arrival. No one wants to read them because they're just too safe, they're too boring. They are vanilla. You want to be that rich dark chocolate they find in their inbox that entertains them, that gives them some value and that they look forward to. Don't want to be like everybody else. Which brings us to the next point. You want to study the herd, study what your market is doing and then do the absolute opposite from it. Because the chances are that your prospect is not only on your email list, they are on all of your competitors email list or even your indirect competitors. And most of these time these people are just copying each other. It's just all rehashed garbage. And they all say the same things in different ways. You want to be completely different. You want to be the wild card. You don't want to be the vanilla. You want to be some different exotic flavor that doesn't look like what everybody else is doing. And the best way to do that is just to be yourself. Because being yourself is the only original thing. If you're just doing what everybody else is doing, by definition it's not original. So just be yourself, make it entertaining and inject as much value in it as possible. And then when it comes time to asking for the ask, like, hey, go and click this link, go check this out, go and buy this product. Because you've already done it in a unique way. You've got them to consume the email and reach the bottom of the email. Then the propensity for them to click is just so much higher because you've lifted all the heavy freight by getting them down to the CTA. Another rule of thumb is 80% value in the emails and 20% ask. Don't just hammer your list with promotions. Deliver value and then always have your CTA at the end of those emails. Now, another thing when it comes to actually getting your emails open is the time and days that you actually send them. So let me share with you the top three days and time of the week to send out an email to make sure that you have the highest chance of getting those things opened. The number one time and day of the week to send out emails is Tuesday at 10am, Thursday at 8pm and Wednesday at 2pm that's based on billions of emails sent. However, a word of warning is that everybody's list and everybody's market is typically unique and that you do want to test these on your own list. But the thing that I urge you to do is think about your prospect. Think about your prospect at an 8am on a Monday morning and how different that very same person would be on a Friday night at 10pm so you want to kind of think about that when you send out your emails to try and get maximum open rates. So there you have it. They are the three things that you need to be thinking about and that you need to be considering when it comes to email. Now, if you're not really going crazy on email marketing, I am so excited for you because there is a windfall of profits that will sail into your merchant account if you deploy these three things that I've just told you. And if you really think about it, not only on your campaign emails, I. E. The emails that are already in the funnels that you already got set up, but even with your broadcast emails, most people don't do broadcast emails, I. E. They set up a funnel, they have the funnel going evergreen, and then they don't manually send out emails to those people multiple times per week. And they are leaving huge, huge amounts of profit on the table. And the reason why email is just the most profitable advertising channel that exists is because you have likely already paid and liquidated for some of the advertising costs associated with getting that person onto your email list. And then they're just sitting on there and you've already liquidated all those costs. And anything that you get from that list moving forward is just pure profit because you've already paid for the most expensive part, which is to acquire that name on your database in the first place. So if you're sending out an email once a month, I urge you to push it to once a week. If you're sending out an email once a week. I urge you to go twice a week. What I have found is that the more that I send, the more money that I make. So there you have it. That is my rundown of how to craft killer emails. And regardless of where you are on your business journey, I hope this video helps. Hey guys, if you're enjoying these videos, please like subscribe and hit the bell button as we're dropping a video like this every other day on YouTube. And if you've got any questions, just leave a comment below with heysubree and I will do my best to get to it. It.
