Email Marketing: Knowing What to Send and When

If you already have a list of subscribers who are passionate about your niche, it’s time to set up a series of emails that you program your autoresponder to send out according to a pre-set schedule. This is known as an “email swipe”.

There’s no limit to the number of emails you can send out. Your subscribers keep getting them until they unsubscribe from your list. As long as your emails provide something your customers want, they will continue to keep opening them.

And, as long as they are opening your emails, rather than deleting theme without reading them, you have the opportunity to sell the products you are promoting to the people on your email list.

What Emails Should Do

The emails you send out should serve one of two purposes:

  • Reinforce your subscriber’s loyalty by giving them something of high value for free
  • Promote a particular product or service

Effective email swipes contain both types of emails. If you send out emails that just promote products and services, your subscribers aren’t going to get a lot of value from your emails and they will be more likely to unsubscribe.

Instead, alternate these promotional emails with ones that provide free high-value content that they can actually use in their everyday lives. Your subscribers then will be more likely to open your emails and to purchasing the products or services you promote when you send promotional emails.

Toggling between these two types of emails successfully requires a lot of skill, much of which comes with experience.

Keep in mind that once the person on your email list makes the choice to delete your email without reading it the first time, it’s going to be harder and harder for you to get them to open any subsequent emails that you send.

That’s why it is critically important that you keep your emails interesting enough and provide enough value so that the people on your list will have no choice but to open your emails every time you send them.

What Kind of Content to Include

Free high-value emails should contain either original content that you have created yourself or content you have purchased or commissioned from freelancers, PLR or some other source. Your emails can even simply contain links to informative content your subscribers will find useful.

By the way, this strategy works the same when marketing in other platforms as well, not just email. You can provide high-value content and keep people looking forward to your next submission on places such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and many other formats. The principle is the same.

Consider your emails swipes as a newsletter that you send your subscribers. A newsletter contains interesting and helpful articles about topics that interesting. If your content is high quality and your subscribers enjoy it, they are going to be more open to buying the products and services you promote in your newsletter.

How Often Should You Send Emails?

While there is no agreed-upon schedule for free content and promotional emails, use a 3:1 proportion. For every promotional email you send out, send out three that provide free high-value content designed to build loyalty with your subscribers.

Promotional emails should have a structure similar to a sales letter. Have a clear Call to Action (CTA) that says exactly you want your reader to do: Buy a product, subscribe to a newsletter, invest in your company, etc.

Promotional emails need to have a link where your subscribers can click on to buy the products or services you are promoting.

Content of Promotional Emails

The content you promote in your promotional emails can be either original or something you commissioned another person to create for you. You also can promote affiliate products, which are products sold by somebody else but promoted by you. When a subscriber clicks through and buys one of these affiliate products, you get paid a commission.

Affiliate products are popular among email marketers because they don’t require you to purchase anything up front or worry about delivering the product to the buyer. All you do is promote the product and when a sale is made, you get paid.

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