It’s possible to accumulate a hundred thousand subscribers without seeing a substantial increase in your conversion rate. However, it’s also possible to make thousands of dollars in sales off an email list of just a few hundred.
What’s the differentiator?
Knowing how to convert your subscriber list into customers.
Once you understand the basics of building your subscriber list, it’s time to transition your focus to converting them. The following steps can help turn your list into a highly profitable component of your marketing strategy.
- Focus on collecting the right subscribers
You’ve likely heard the statistic that email marketing offers a 3800% ROI, or $38 return for every $1 invested. And considering that email is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter at acquiring new customers, it can be tempting to try and acquire as many email subscribers as possible. But this isn’t necessarily the best business decision.
All subscribers are not created equal. Unless they’re at least somewhat interested in using your product (or sharing it with other potential clients), they’re a waste of money and energy.
If you focus on building subscribers rather than building the right subscribers, you may resort to quick growth strategies like offering monetary giveaways or free products with mass appeal. Although these activities can sometimes work with consumer products, they are certainly a frivolous endeavor for B2B brands. When you offer something with broad appeal for free, you’ll end up with participants who aren’t actually interested in your product.
Instead of trying to acquire anyone and everyone’s email address, strategically analyze how you can optimize the collection of the right email addresses.
- Segment your subscribers
One of the most effective ways to increase the conversion rates of your emails is to segment your audience. It turns out that 77% of email ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns that offer the right product to the right customer at the right time.
How do you segment your subscribers? By using a CRM tool like Infusionsoft, AgileCRM, or Hubspot that will allow you to track where subscribers came from, what campaigns they’ve interacted with, and how they’ve interacted on your website.
Over time these pieces of software are able to develop a very clear picture of each user, what their interests are, and the types of products or services that may actually interest them.
Once you have this understood, you can then target your subscribers with information on and offers for the right products at the right time to maximize conversions.
- View email as a long-term relationship tool
If your emails focus exclusively on spamming subscribers in an effort to get them to buy, you’ll quickly lose followers and reduce the ROI of your email campaigns.
Instead, recognize email for what it is – a tool to help develop long-term relationships with followers.
To do this, start by making the emails personal. Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. When you use people’s names and any other information that you’ve collected from them, you’ll be able to make the content resonate more. After all, we all like being called by our names.
Next, focus on providing incredibly useful content. Offer advice and content that can entertain, inspire, and educate your audience. As readers learn to expect value from their interactions with you, they’ll pay more attention to the emails they receive from you.
Dan Norris of WPCurve.com realized that most people who use WordPress are interested in content marketing. Therefore, his email and blog provide advice on this topic and anything related to specialism. Business enthusiasts subscribe to his emails and share his content because of the specific value it offers. Then, when these entrepreneurs realize that they would appreciate additional WordPress support, they purchase his service.
- Track analytics to improve open and click-through rates
With the amount of data available to marketers today, it’s easier than ever to monitor the performance of your email campaigns. Evaluate your most effective subject lines, content, topics, and links to discover the elements of your highest-performing emails. Then, do more of it.
You never know which elements of your campaign may have the greatest influence on open and click rates. With 68% of Americans saying they base their decision to open an email on the ‘From’ name, even the name you use to present yourself in your emails can have an impact on open rates.
To maximize reader interactions, A/B test as much as possible to evaluate which titles, formats, and topics seem to appeal most to your readers – then focus on doing more of what works.
When one campaign receives a particularly high engagement rate, evaluate its different elements and try integrating aspects into your next campaign to see what seems to attract the most engagement. Every time you find an element that does well, expand upon it to try and make your campaigns even better. Over time, your data-driven approach to email marketing will result in an incredibly efficient and profitable email marketing strategy.
- Make the Call-to-Action obvious
The final step to a high-converting email campaign is a CTA that is very clear, succinct, and transparent. After engaging with a recipient through a well-crafted subject line and email, it’s time to guide them to the next step in the sales process. Do this with a CTA that includes text, images, and links.
Now that most email marketing tools allow for transactional content within the email, don’t hesitate to sell directly to them. In fact, transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email and can generate 6x more revenue.
Finally, use A/B testing and data analysis to determine the effectiveness of your CTAs. Track the click-through rate and sales delivered through your emails to evaluate what works and what needs improvement. As you discover the most effective strategies over time, you can further develop these to help grow your following and improve your bottom line.
Many of the most popular bloggers who offer educational courses and eBooks have mastered the art of adding a clear CTA to the end of every email. After guiding you through the many benefits and perks of purchasing their program, they end with temporary discounts or limited spaces to create an incentivizing sense of urgency. These large buttons and appealing discounts make it very easy for the reader to know what their next step should be.
The Best Free Email Marketing Services In 2023
Best free email marketing service for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you’re planning to scale it quickly. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.
An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.
Once you’re ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you’ll never have to switch to another app.
Best free email marketing software for segmentation
HubSpot
HubSpot has everything you need under one roof. The email marketing features are well-rounded and offer a lot for free: up to 2,000 emails per month, over 100 lists, and reporting. When you’re ready to scale, you can add additional HubSpot tools for CRM, full marketing automation, customer service, sales, and more.
The email tool throws you into the editor as soon as signup is finished, so you can get moving quickly. For those new to HubSpot or email marketing more broadly, the next stop is the user guide, detailing everything you need to know to build beautiful, effective campaigns in HubSpot.
Included in your 105 lists are 100 static and 5 “active” lists, which include super quick options to segment, say, hard-bouncers or recipients who open but don’t click.
Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite
MailerLite doesn’t offer pre-made templates for its free newsletter service, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than makeup for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.
Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There’s a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It’s a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.
Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows. You can create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.
Best free email marketing tool for eCommerce businesses
Omnisend
Omnisend is the best free email marketing tool I found for eCommerce businesses. The free plan is fairly limited on subscribers and monthly sends, but it includes access to nearly every feature the platform offers—all of which are thoroughly built for eCommerce. Once you connect your online store to Omnisend, the (email marketing) world is your oyster.
The app offers a number of behavioral segmentation dimensions based on store activity and shopping behavior, as well as pre-defined customer segments like high-potential buyers, visitors to a particular product, and more.
Navigate to the automation section to browse a number of pre-built automation workflows organized by type (e.g., welcome series, cart abandonment) or goal (e.g., convert subscribers, cross-sell, build loyalty).
When you’re ready to design emails, head to the drag-and-drop editor, where you can start from a number of eCommerce-focused templates or quickly build your own templates with quick-add blocks for product listing, discounts, product recommendations, and more. Omnisend also supports SMS and push campaigns, in addition to email, with A/B testing features for all of the above.
Best email marketing tool for free email automation
Sendinblue
The more you use your email marketing tool, the more you’ll need to rely on automation. It’s hard to come across truly free marketing automation software, but Sendinblue offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.
Even with this kind of advanced automation, you can get from account setup to actually edit emails in just a few clicks. Once you’re there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Then, either send them as email newsletters or use Sendinblue’s automation workflows to send them on a schedule.
You can’t send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts and split them into focused lists. Sendinblue also lets you buy pre-paid credits to send more than your daily email limit.
Best free email marketing software with an affordable upgrade
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns’ free plan isn’t as hyper-generous as it once was, but it’s still a great starting point you can scale from. You get 2,000 contacts, 6,000 sends per month, and 5 users. The free plan also offers robust audience segmentation and features for social and SMS campaigns.
The drag-and-drop editor works how you expect and includes support for dynamic content blocks. You can even personalize dynamic blocks based on your customer segments.
When it comes to automation, you’ll choose from autoresponders (one-email triggered sequences) or fully automated workflows. Both are available to build and map out on the free plan and include several workflow templates to help you build out automations faster. When you create a workflow, you can choose from templates for welcome and onboarding, nurture series, re-engagement, customer retention, eCommerce, and conditional workflows.
When you’re ready to activate automated flows, segment your audience, or grow beyond the subscriber and send limits on the free plan, Zoho offers the most affordable upgrade to a paid plan for as little as $3 per month.
Best free AI email marketing software
Benchmark
Cutting-edge features like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are usually reserved for high-priced software, but with Benchmark, you can add an AI helping hand to your email marketing operation without paying a dime.
The free plan includes 25 credits for the app’s “Smart Content” feature that uses AI to write your email copy for you. To use it, open the email editor and click Smart Content in the top-right. Then simply enter basic details for your email, and hit Generate My Content.
Free plans also include access to Smart Sending, a feature that uses AI for email marketing to increase engagement and improve your deliverability by optimizing your list with every send. This feature is automatically enabled on every account, so you don’t have to lift a finger.
Beyond AI features, Benchmark is a well-rounded app with a robust free plan that includes tons of quality email templates, user-friendly email automation, basic segmentation, and your choice of drag-and-drop, code, or plain-text editors.
