Email marketing is changing.
If you are a coach, a consultant, or an online course creator and you do not have an email list yet, let me tell you – you are leaving so much money on the table. It is so important for every business owner to have an email list. Quite honestly, your email list is one of the only marketing platforms that you can actually control to connect with your audience.
I know I say it all the time – your email list is how you as a business owner connect with your ideal clients and your audience on a regular basis without the constriction and control of social media. Even in this day and age, the email list remains the cornerstone of every successful virtual business.
No matter what new trick, trend, or app is out there – your email list is still going to be the most important piece of your business. And, when you use email marketing well, it can be a huge revenue source!
I am a bit of a geek when it comes to marketing trends. All marketing trends.
Late last year, the iOS 15 update was released. This update was designed to protect your privacy in your inbox. In the past, business owners could track the success of their email campaigns based on open rates. They could monitor and track whether or not someone opened an email. With the iOS 15 update, Apple took that data and scrambled it.
As business owners, what we’ve now learned is that we can no longer rely on having an accurate open rate. This is affecting other things, like our deliverability.
Without getting too terribly technical… most email providers will track your URL when you send an email. Then, they rate how good your URL is and how much it connects with your audience, based on the engagement from that audience. In the past, if you sent an email and you had an open rate from 20-30%, Google would say. “Check! This is a good email provider, we’ll make sure their emails end up in the inbox!”
Now, all of that information is scrambled and Google is no longer able to track that open rate. Instead, they are now looking at other ways that your audience is engaging with your emails.
So, what does that mean? The whole goal of marketing in general is engagement with your audience. If you can no longer track your email opens, it is far more difficult to see who on your list is engaging with your content.
2 things you can look at to check your list health.
1. Clicks
The easiest thing to track is your clicks. If you’re sending emails, my suggestion is that you add a call to action that asks your audience to click a link inside your email.
For instance, if you’re sending a video make sure that you are asking them to click on the video to view it on your site. Or, if you’re sending a blog post, send a small portion with a button or link that asks them to click to continue reading.
This will begin to tell Google and email service providers that your emails have valuable content and they will continue to deliver them to inboxes instead of spam folders.
This will help tremendously to get your message in front of the right person at the right time.
2. Content
Make sure that the content you are sending in your emails is interesting, relevant, and valuable to them. If it is not something that they are going to connect with and thus click on, it will tank your deliverability.
Keeping a healthy email list is important
Here’s why… if you’re sending an email to 1000 people and of those 1000 people, only two people open it, you have a rate of less than 1% engagement. This tells Google and your email service provider that those 1000 people just are not interested in you. This will drastically affect your deliverability. Your emails will end up dumped into promotion and spam folders.
This is why you want to keep your email list as healthy as possible by moving people who are uninterested in what you have to say off of your email list. Do this either once a month or once a quarter. If you don’t do this, it will affect how your emails are delivered.
Just keep in mind that the health of your email list is incredibly important. Having an engaged audience will keep your click rates high and ensure your emails end up in the inbox every time, which is ultimately what we want in this changing landscape of email marketing.