Are you using email marketing to drive member signups?
If done correctly, a strong email strategy will increase the flow of people into your membership sales funnel, turning complete strangers into paying members.
In simple terms, they'll come into your world, consume a free piece of content…
Maybe by reading your blog, listening to your podcast or downloading a lead magnet…
And they're left wanting more, so subscribe to your email list to receive regular updates from you.
And once they're on your list, that's when the hard work begins…
Because it's not enough to have these people simply reading your emails…
You want to inspire them to take action…
To press the ‘join here' button your sales page and enter your membership community…
But how can you do this?
Here are six ways to level up your email marketing efforts so you can convert more subscribers into paying members…
1. Email more
Often people hold back from emailing because they’re worried about overdoing it.
And as a result they end up not doing enough!
They overthink it and turn every email into a huge deal.
And then the ‘what ifs' start coming into the process…
‘What if they unsubscribe?'
‘What if it's not been enough time since the last email I sent?'
The truth is, yes, you can overdo it and send too many emails…
You don’t want to annoy them, but on the flip side they’ve subscribed to your list for a reason:
They want to hear from you!
And they’re interested in what you've got to say.
So you're actually doing them a disservice by holding back emailing them new content and sharing ways you can help them.
So don’t go silent once they’ve signed up to your list…
Send those emails!
You sending emails more often…
You don’t have to email every day…
Although there are some that swear by that tactic and have great success with it, like Rob and Kennedy.
You just need to email a bit more than you might currently be comfortable with.
Most modern email marketing platforms have tools that give people a way of telling you that they’d rather not receive certain types of emails or hear from you a little less often.
Whereby you can ‘tag' them according to their preferred email frequency, and use this info to determine what gets sent to who.
So you could incorporate something like that if you’re worried emailing your list too much.
2. Add a P.S. to your emails
If you're not already utilizing a P.S. at the bottom of your emails you send, you're missing a trick…
This is prime real estate!
For some reason, people are drawn to the P.S. and often pay more attention to that than the rest of the email.
This means they’re more likely to click a link in that section.
Good things to include in your P.S are call-to-actions or sales plugs.
Even if your email isn’t a sales orientated and you don’t mention your membership, a plug in your P.S. means you don’t have to detract from the value within the email.
If you really want to step up your email marketing campaigns, we have some copy and paste templates inside Membership Academy.
So if you're not already using a P.S. at the bottom of your emails – please start today!
3. Use stories
Great storytelling can go such a long way in marketing…
It can make your emails feel so much more relatable, entertaining, and relevant to your audience.
You can include personal stories either from your own experience or your membership.
It also helps to share a problem that you've overcome, a conversation you've struggled to have, or a misunderstanding you've experienced.
These stories can be funny, serious, heart-breaking, or a mix of all of those…
It just needs to speak to your readers.
Stories give context to what we’re saying…
They also bring personality, can motivate readers or get someone to think about something from a different perspective.
Having a narrative to follow in your email can engage people far more than a bullet point list of tips…
So, try to move away from sterile, matter-of-fact emails and work some stories into the emails you send.
4. Create open loops across multiple emails
This is when you start a story in one email and share it over a series of sequential emails…
You don’t put all your tips or the story in that one email…
You open a loop, get things started, and then leave readers wanting more…
But don’t draw it out so much that people lose interest…
You need to strike a balance…
But equally if you’ve got a great story to tell…
Or a bunch of tips that won’t fit into one email, then share it over a series of emails instead.
Just make sure to round them off with a teaser or a cliff-hanger to keep subscribers interested in reading the next one.
5. Experiment with different versions of the same email
Make use of all the fantastic email marketing tools and their features to experiment more.
Try out different approaches, content, subject lines, audience segmentation, and so on.
One of the main ways of experimenting with emails is using something called split testing…
This is where you create multiple variations of the same email with some differences in each version.
It could be entirely different content or just a different subject lines or P.S sections…
Once you have your different emails, you can set your email marketing system to send different versions to your subscribers.
So, some subscribers receive version one, others version two, and so on.
Experiment with those emails…
After a while, go into the stats to see how each version has performed in terms of open rates and click-throughs.
This helps you pinpoint what works and what doesn’t, which is vital information for the future.
So if your testing shows that emails with a shorter subject line get more open rates than those with longer subject lines, you could stick to short subject lines going forward…
After multiple tests of course.
6. Include conditional content
To work this email marketing magic, you’ll need a tool like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit, which lets you add tags to individual subscribers.
One of the great things about this is that you can use these tags to control which part of your email content someone sees.
So, you’ll be able to specify that certain sections of your email are only shown if a subscriber has a particular tag…
If they don’t have that tag in their user account, they won’t see that part of the email…
So your email content becomes more tailored to the recipient.
A good way to use this is if you send an email newsletter to everyone on your list, whether they’re a member or not…
If your subscribers haven’t signed up to your membership yet, you could put a tag on them that means they receive the part of your email that’s a sales pitch to join.
This means that your existing members won’t see that section because it doesn’t apply to them…
They’ve already joined.
Another example is something we do ourselves…
We have different segments for the content of our blog at The Membership Guys – Planning, Building, and Growing.
These represent very different needs and interests…
So if we see someone’s reading a blog about planning, we’ll entice them to join our list with a free Planning Guide.
If they opt-in for that, we tag them as “interest planning.”
If they read something about building, we offer them our Plugin Comparison Chart and tag those people as “interest building.”
And then, if they read something growth-related that’s aimed at people with existing memberships, we offer them the Retention Checklist and tag them appropriately.
So, when we send out emails with a list of links to handy articles, we’ll show certain ones to our “interest planning” subscribers and different ones to our “interest growth” subscribers.
We're not just changing the content they see…
We're changing the entire marketing campaign for each type of person.
This ensures content is more relevant to each individual, which in turn makes it more likely they'll open our emails, click on links, respond to calls to action and ultimately join our membership.
These are simple but effective tweaks to make to your emails…
Which in turn will help you get more people signed up to your membership!
So if you currently don't have a strategy for email marketing or don't include it in your sales funnel, hopefully I've just persuaded you to get started…
If you do use email marketing but could do better, the six points above will really help you level up your efforts…
Email is such a handy tool to help you grow your membership…
So it’s always worthwhile revisiting your strategy and trying to make it as effective as possible.
