[00:00:00] Hala Taha: Hey app, bam. We have a special episode for you guys. Today we're gonna be talking about all things email marketing, and I know what you're thinking. Video marketing is all the rage right now, so who caress about email marketing? But I'm here to tell you that email marketing is certainly not dead. In fact, it continues to be a powerful marketing tool In 2023, email marketing helps you reach your customers in a place they frequently visit their inbox.

According to Constant Contact, email marketing has the highest return on investment of any marketing strategy. Email, r O I is super impressive. Litmus says that on average you've received $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing and global email users are set to grow to 4.6 billion users by 2025. So now is the perfect time to refine your email marketing strategy.

Today I'll be playing clips from my recent webinar presentation, maximizing Email Marketing Success presented in part by Constant Contact. I'll talk about six steps you can take to improve your email marketing campaigns to generate more leads and grow your business. We'll start off by talking about the necessities.

Step one, defining your goals and objectives. Step two, building your email list. Step three, creating compelling and engaging email content. Step four, automating your emails. Step five, integrating AI in your email marketing strategy. And finally, step six, analyzing and optimizing your email marketing performance.

So let's get started with step one, defining your goals and objectives.

 did you know that 77% of marketers have seen an increase in their email engagement over the last 12 months? And to achieve a higher rate of engagement, you need to define your marketing goals When it comes to email.

Email has the potential to support lots of business objectives. So, for example, you can boost brand awareness, you can educate your customers, you can drive sales, you can generate new leads, gain new customers. So first things first, you need to figure out why you wanna use email. What are your main objectives?

Without having your North Star, it's gonna be really hard to design compelling campaigns that align to your objectives. And you don't wanna just be doing things just to be doing things. You wanna figure out exactly what your goal is for email. The next thing you wanna figure out is your target audience.

So it's very important to understand who actually buys from you. So if you're a brand new business, you're gonna wanna do research on your competitors. You're gonna wanna see who buys from companies similar from you. You might wanna do surveys with your social media audience and figure out what their pain points are, who they are, what's their demographics, their gender, their age, their location, their interests, right?

So if you're starting from scratch, you're gonna have to do some external research. Uh, you won't have any. Of your own data. If you're not starting from scratch, you wanna look at your past history. Who's been buying your products? What is their gender? What is their age? Where are they located? What are the uh, accounts that they follow?

What are their interests? And you're gonna wanna do research on your own customer base to determine what your key audience profile is. And you might find out that you have multiple different buyer's personas, and maybe you have two or three different buyer's personas that you wanna target. And that's totally okay because you can segment your emails and we'll talk about that later.

So for example, for my audience across most of the things that I do, let's say with my masterclass, right, they're typically corporate professionals or entrepreneurs and small business owners, they're typically on LinkedIn already trying to level up their LinkedIn game. They're typically 25 to 55 years old.

They're tech savvy enough. but they're not, you know, super young where they don't care about making money yet, and they're not super old where they're unable to learn a new social media platform. And so I've got specific guidelines in terms of what I'm looking for in my audience, and everybody should have an idea of who their buyer persona is so that you can then tailor your email campaigns based on that persona.

[00:04:06] Hala Taha:  

Again, to achieve success in email marketing, it's crucial to have a deep understanding of your audience's needs and preferences. Consider the demographics, psychographics, interests, and behaviors of your buyers. Once you've built a buyer persona for your email marketing campaign, you can move on to step number two, building your email list.

[00:04:26] Hala Taha: So first of all, when you're thinking about building your email list, it's always quality over quantity. And it's so much more important to have people that are gonna open your emails, read your emails.

Buy from you than it is to just have some large list that you can brag about, right? Because if people aren't opening your emails, you're gonna be sent to the spam folder. And then even your own target audience that would buy from you is never gonna see your emails to begin with. So it's really important to always focus on quality and try to get people who actually may be interested in your services and to attract them based on value and not by like tricking them or stealing an email list or scraping it off a social media site like LinkedIn.

That's a big no-no, because you're gonna have unqualified leads and it's gonna lead to low open rates or people unsubscribing or or flagging us spam. And that's gonna really hurt you in the long term. So number one, never buy email lists, never scrape your email lists off another social media site.

There's ways to do it on LinkedIn and things like that, and that can get you in a lot of trouble. You always wanna make sure people are gonna opt in, which we'll talk about that later. And you wanna grow your email list organically and strategically. So the best way to do this is through lead magnets.

And so essentially what a lead  magnet is, is typically it's a gated asset page. It's on a website, and in this website you are collecting information about your person who may be interested. So I'll give you guys an example. I have a LinkedIn masterclass course where I teach about LinkedIn, and so I have all these different lead magnets.

I have like a LinkedIn cheat sheet, right? I have like a hashtag guide and all these different things that I've created.So think about what people are always asking you for or what your clients really like with your work, and turn it into some sort of asset, whether that's an ebook, a quiz, a calculator, something that's actually gonna be useful for the client that you have and the problems that they're trying to solve.

Something that's actually useful for them that they can learn from and get a taste of your best work. So you turn that into some sort of asset that they can download off your website, and then you have a form. This form, you can make it. Ideally, you wanna make it simple so that there's not that many steps that people have to take to get this asset.

But then you also wanna think about the key things that you wanna collect, the data points about the person that you wanna collect so that when you're sending emails and marketing promotions, you're gonna be able to segment appropriately. So you might wanna collect their first name and last name for sure, their gender, their location, maybe their birthday if you like to get promotions out on their birthday, whatever it is.

You wanna have some sort of form where you're collecting data points, maybe their interests, what are the top things out of all the services that you do that they're specifically interested in. And then once they complete that information, they give you your email, they're allowed to download the lead  magnet.

So that's really how you should be growing your email list. Any other way typically is gonna have more unqualified leads and you're not gonna get data points on your potential client. 

 So you just wanna think about creatively, how you can collect emails in a way that's gonna provide value to the person and enable you to collect information about the prospect.

Okay, so opt-ins very important. A lot of email service providers, they won't even let you upload an email list without proof that you have opt-ins because it's, it's the law. It's, you're not allowed to basically just email people without them giving you permission first. Another reason why it's really important to get opt-ins is because if somebody didn't subscribe to your email newsletter, they can mark you as spam and you can get basically blacklisted by, uh, IP by like Google, you know what I mean?

Like, they're, they're basically monitoring whether or not your email list is legit, because there's so many people who buy email lists and it's, it's not allowed. And so if you don't wanna get blacklisted by Google and the other platforms, then you gotta get opt-in.

 In terms of opt-ins, you wanna create an attention grabbing header, offer value, like I mentioned, some sort of lead magnet that's gonna incentivize them to give you this information  Keep your form simple, but also try to get whatever information that's really important for your business in terms of conversion.

And then you wanna also make it easy to unsubscribe when the point comes. Every email that you have has to have an unsubscribe link that's mandatory and it's also better for you in the long run to only have a qualified list of people who are gonna actually open your emails. So here's some examples. Uh, Neil Patel came on.

Yap. He is a great email marketer. And so he says, want more ss e o traffic? Answer five quick questions and I'll give you a step-by-step seven week action plan showing exactly what you need to get more traffic. So then he is asking all these different questions and getting information about his prospects that he then is gonna use to segment in his marketing campaigns.

And for Yap, we just wanna make sure they subscribe. So it's just type in your email and you get the asset.  so let's talk about the power of segmentation. According to HubSpot research, subscriber segmentation is the most effective email marketing campaign strategy.

So segmenting is super important because essentially you want your messages to reach the right people with the right topic at the right time. And you wanna make sure that your emails are hyper relevant. And you may have different buyer personas. Your buyer personas may be at different points of the customer life cycle.

Some people might be new customers, some people might not have bought a product in years. Some people might be past clients. Some people might want your services. Well, other people want your products, like everybody has a different story. And you're gonna wanna basically categorize your audience into different lists that you can then target specifically to drive engagement and drive click-through rates, and ultimately drive r o I.

lead magnet forms is a great way. To get information about your prospects, you might have emails that are really old or like an old client database. So you might send out surveys to get more information about their new interests.

And then you also might wanna think about integrating your E S P with your website. So for example, constant Contact integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce, uh, and so many different other integrations. So if you were with Shopify for example, you can integrate and get data points, for example, on things that people clicked on, the last purchases that they did, if they abandoned their cart, whatever it is.

And you can start to create email lists based on all those behaviors and triggers.  

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[00:10:57] Hala Taha: To build successful email campaigns, you need an active and engaged email list. Remember, choose quality over quantity when creating a lead magnet or opt-ins. You wanna offer lead magnets that are relevant, useful, and make a subscriber's life easier, and make sure you position opt-in forms strategically on your website or landing pages where they're easily noticeable, such as above the fold or at the end of blog posts.

Now that you have an email list, let's get into step three, designing compelling Emails.

 Let's talk about subject lines. So if you guys are familiar with social media, and let's say like a platform like YouTube, you know how important things like thumbnails are, and subject lines are the same concept. You need something to capture people's attention so they watch the video, or in this case, open your email.

So open rates is one of the most important analytics or that you wanna study for your email and that you wanna keep driving to increase. You wanna always make sure that you have open rates that are 30% or more is like the benchmark. And if nobody's opening your email, then all the work that you did for your email campaign sort of falls flat.

So subject lines are essentially your first impression and the most effective email subject lines engage curiosity. They include promotional offers and they're personalized to each recipient's. Interest. The other thing that I wanna talk about with, uh, subject lines is this concept of pattern disruption.

So same with social media. You wanna stand out in the feed on social media when it comes to subject lines. You wanna stand out in the inbox. How can you be different? Are you using emojis? Are you being really casual? Are you using somebody's first name? Are you saying something that is like shocking that's gonna get somebody to open the email?

You always wanna think about how to stand out, and that's really pattern disruption. How can you be different from everybody else? So let's talk about subject lines that engage curiosity. curiosity driven subject lines, peak interest and compel customers to open your emails. This is similar to a hook, right?

So is there a secret that you wanna tell them? can you use a superlative, like the best of something, the worst of something? The, you know, the lowest, the highest. So you always wanna think about things that are gonna get people curious about what you're gonna say, the information that you're gonna share.

And so here are some examples. Are you making these common mistakes in your marketing strategy? I've been hacked. Here's what's going on. This one is like more like shocking, right? Like you've been hacked. I made a huge mistake. Then it makes people curious about what was a mistake that they made. You know, so you always wanna think about, like I mentioned, how do you stand out in the feed?

If you have some, like really markety, salesy, boring subject line changes are people are just gonna skip it over.  the other thing to think about is that a lot of people don't like to be sold to. So if you have a more casual subject line, it's probably gonna have more success because it's gonna feel like it's more authentic rather than, uh, some like boilerplate marketing message that feels like you're being sold to.

you can also do things like subject lines that promote offers and urgency and scarcity. Uh, so this is basically playing off people's human behavior. One thing to note is that when it comes to like, Subject lines and hooks. People love numbers. We're numbers oriented as humans, so putting numbers in your subject line tends to work.

If somebody is specifically interested in a certain product or has a certain interest that you flagged and you're promoting a discount, that's gonna work to get their attention. Although that's salesy and promotional, it's offering them some sort of incentive. And if there's a limited time offer, if there's limited amounts of seats, if you have some sort of criteria that's gonna create urgency or the fear of missing out, that's gonna work really well.

So I just wanna kind of highlight the  Difference between urgency and scarcity. So urgency is basically giving a deadline. Promotion ends in 24 hours. You've got two days left to take action. Offer will expire tomorrow at midnight, right? So creating urgency. And then there's scarcity. So we've got a limited amount of seats, only two seats left.

 so giving a sense of, uh, scarcity and urgency because people want what they can't have, right? And so you wanna play on that human behavior when you're thinking about your subject lines, okay? Personal subject lines personalized.

So people now really expect for things to be personal. And so all these different attributes of your potential prospect you can save in your email service provider. So there's different data points. So their first name, their birthday, their location, their gender. you know, their interests, the things that they click on your, your emails, the last time they checked your email, the last time they logged on your website, what they clicked on your website, if they abandoned their car.

There's so many different data points that you can save. And then you can take these little attributes that you have in your email service provider and start to personalize your emails.

So a common thing that people do for subject lines is include the first name as a data point that,  gets personalized. And so you can say like something like, Hey Todd, holla, we found something perfect for you. Or, here's podcast recommendations based on your preferences. A special gift for you, Hala, right?

So it's like just taking the extra mile to personalize it based on the different data points that you've collected about your users.

Okay, so emojis. Back to what I was saying, pattern disruption, emojis essentially express  emotions, ideas, and concepts. One thing about emojis is essentially it's like using a human face. Faces are so powerful on social media. This is why influencers show their face. This is why on social media, like more engagement happens when you use a human face.

People love to see that human connection and emojis are essentially that for font, right? So you wanna leverage emojis to bring emotion into your subject lines and to also like add some spice, add some fun. And so emojis increase your open rates by engaging the reader. They help you express yourself.

They help you showcase your brand personality, and so you can test different emojis. What I'd recommend though is to make sure that your emojis work. Not every single emoji works in a subject line, so you're gonna wanna test that before you send it out in mass and make sure that your emoji works. And again, pattern disruption, what emoji can you use that nobody else is using, that's gonna really make you stand out because probably a lot of people are using this celebratory icon or the fireball icon.

But like the other day, I did an email newsletter and I used the investigator guy with like a magnifying glass, and I was like unveiling my new podcast and we had huge open rates. And I can basically say this because I use that one emoji that nobody else uses, right? So think about how you can stand out and what emojis you can use in your subject line that nobody else is using that's gonna break up the feed of the inbox and make your email stand out.

Okay. Let's talk about content and what to put in your email with any marketing. Less is more. Less is always more in any marketing, whether that's a social post, whether that's a blog, whether that's a website.

People like to skimm. People are constantly skimming content. We've got lots of distractions. We don't have a lot of time. We need to make things skimmable. We need to make things easy to read. We make need to make things super concise, super clear. We need to have one or two priority objectives and that's it.

Too much is actually gonna do worse for you. Too much words, too many images, too many colors, too many links, all that is gonna actually hurt your performance. You always wanna think about like, what's the one thing I wanna get across with this email? What's the right audience to get this message across?

What is the one thing I want them to do when they open up this email? And just focus on that clarity. You can always send more emails, So you wanna keep your emails really concise. So number one, what are you offering? What is the main point? The first thing on your email, your first headline should be like the main point of the email.

You might have other things that are like backing that up, but the first couple words of your email should be exactly why the person opened the email. It should match the subject line, and it should help people understand what this email is for, what is the purpose of the email? the body of the email should basically align to whatever the headline was and the subject copy was.

Otherwise, people are gonna hit spam unsubscribe. This was clickbait, right? You wanna make sure you deliver on your subject line and your headline, and then your call to action. A big button with high contrast, right? That you've tracked so that you can understand how many people are clicking, who's clicking, and so on.

And so you wanna keep your emails as simple as possible, Call to actions are really important. So call to actions and marketing basically mean like the the action that you want your audience to take from your marketing material. So you wanna make sure that your CTAs are clear, you wanna make sure that they're super legible.

You wanna make sure that there's high contrast with your buttons, so that it's like easy to find. You don't wanna have too many calls to action in your emails. One is best, honestly, if you wanna have two or three, that's okay. But one call to action that is prioritized, that stands out, and you wanna make sure that you've tracked it and everything like that.

So you can collect the data and analytics in constant contact. They'll let you know what gets clicked. You don't have to do anything extra.

And in terms of designing your email, uh, mobile friendly design, whenever you're doing your email campaigns, you're always gonna wanna send out a test yourself, and you're gonna wanna check it on your mobile phone. You're gonna want people to check it. If you have a team, you're gonna want people to check it on Android, check it on iPhone, check it on an iPad, check it on a computer, and just make sure that it looks good.

You can also go as far as checking it on different platforms like Outlook versus Gmail and just make sure that everything looks okay consistently across devices and platforms. you also want to have consistent branding, so you wanna make sure your emails look the part, they match your brand and you don't want to go too crazy in terms of colors and fonts, right?

So typically two fonts max, one for your headline, one for your body copy. You don't wanna do more than that, otherwise it's gonna look messy and three to four colors max. Again, you don't want it to look messy, you want it to look branded. And less is more. When it comes to your marketing, pick engaging visual elements.

So typically stock photos and things like that perform really poorly. I. Even logos. Uh, it's important to brand, but using too many logos and like corporate looking things tends to do pretty poorly. So you wanna keep things simple, you know, solid colors, maybe gradients, uh, using authentic pictures of you and your team or your, your own customers.

That's gonna seem real. And not stock footage, high quality, you know, high resolution visuals that are super high quality, but you really wanna focus on those types of visuals. Like I mentioned before, avoid link overload. The more options you give people, the more likely they're gonna do nothing, right?

And so you wanna make their decision making process super easy. What is the main point of this email? What is the one call to action that I have? And you can have multiple buttons going to the same call to action. That'd be a better approach than putting too many links in your email. So you don't wanna overwhelm people by putting too many links in your email and then clean and clutter free.

A again, less is more. The more simple, the better. The less words, the better. The less colors, the better. The less fonts, the better simple wins in marketing. Okay? It also simple looks more professional typically. 

[00:22:44] Hala Taha: When it comes to the content of compelling emails, constant contact says you can keep your content on track by answering three questions. Number one, what are you offering? This is typically your headline. Number two, how will it help the reader? This is the copy that goes in the body of your message.

Number three, what should they do next? A k a. Your call to action. As for the design, optimize your design for mobile devices. Constant Contact has lots of mobile responsive templates that you can choose from. Use consistent brand colors and fonts, but don't go too crazy here. Two to four colors and two fonts max.

Go for a clean and uncluttered layout. Like most marketing efforts, less is always more. Try to avoid too many images, too many words or unnecessary elements that can just distract from your main message. And speaking of main message, you really should only have one c t a. You wanna avoid link overload.

Try to just have one c t a one main message for your email and you'll drive better results. Now let's move on to step four, automating your emails.

 Let's move on to automation. So this is like, Really where it's at. In email marketing, if you wanna take your email marketing to the next level, this is uh, most likely if you guys like rate yourself at a four, outta a five. If you wanna get to a nine and a 10, you need to think about automating your emails.

This is the advanced stuff that really makes the difference. This is what like big brands do, and anybody who's sort of winning in email marketing is really leveraging automation. So essentially with email automation, you communicate relevant information to subscribers at the right time based on their different actions and interests.

So you choose the order, the frequency, and the targeted content of the automated email, and then once it's set up, it's on autopilot. So we're gonna talk about the triggers or specific events or actions that initiate the sending of an automated email campaign. 

So there's lots of different triggers that you can use to automate your emails. So for example, a really popular one is a new subscriber, somebody who newly signed up to your email list. Those types of people you typically are gonna wanna send on an onboarding journey or a welcome series, right?

So you welcome them. Thank you for joining the email list. You might send them a series of educational emails. You might send them a promotional offer. and then you're gonna try to drive them to some sort of sale. Now if you make these evergreen, you never have to change this. So you set up a welcome series and as soon as somebody signs up, whether it's now or in three months, everybody gets the same welcome series and you do things like, wait two days and send this email.

You know, if it didn't open, send this email. If they opened, send this email. Right? And you can set up all these different sequences based on their actions. Okay? Another popular one is Abandoned cart. So Constant contact integrates with lots of different websites like Shopify and WooCommerce. So you can see who abandoned their cart.

They, they were about to check out, but for some reason they didn't. And so you can set up a campaign that automatically says, you know, six hours after somebody abandons their cart, send this email. 12 hours after somebody abandons this cart, send a follow up email. 24 hours, send an email with a promotional discount to try to get those people to convert because they didn't finish converting right.

You can also do something like abandoned browsing. So somebody logged on your website and then left. How can you reengage those people so you can automatically get that data? And anybody who came on your website and abandoned looking at something, you can then send them a sequence of emails. Uh, you can also send automated emails based on past items ordered based on products used, based on whether they clicked a link in a certain email or clicked an image in a certain email.

And also date, date-based triggers. This is especially important, like let's say you have a salon or something on their birthday, you can send 'em a notification to get a certain amount off or an anniversary or if there's a subscription renewal. So these are all the different ways that you can automate your emails.

We're gonna talk about Welcome series and Abandoned Cart, which are like more of the more popular ones, right? So welcome series. Like I said, this is one of the most important ones that you guys should set up. And essentially when somebody signs up to your email list, you're gonna wanna come up with a series of email sequences.

They're gonna get people introduced to your products, give them a warm welcome and hopefully get them to buy or convert with whatever you want them to do. So you might wanna first send them like an introduction and thank you email. You then may wanna have a series of emails where you're sharing your brand story, your values, your mission.

You might want some educational emails. Uh, highlight benefits, give them, uh, exclusive content discounts, resources. And then after you are done with the email sequence, you can then put them in another campaign, like your weekly newsletter. So they go through this onboarding sequence. Anybody in this onboarding welcome sequence doesn't get any other emails because you don't wanna overload them.

Once they're done with the email sequence, then they can get your ongoing weekly newsletter and be incorporated in that campaign. So then you're just like continually engaging people and putting them in the right list. Now, abandoned cart sequences, like I mentioned, are really important. So the average abandoned cart emails have a 43.76 open rate and 8.76 click through rate and a 10.7 conversion rate.

So this is extremely high. So average open rates are like 20 to 30% and that's good, right? Good. Open rates are 20 to 30% click-through rates. Good ones are like one to 3%. So these are really, really high. So you can have reminder emails. So gentle reminders about their abandoned cart. Again, you can put rules in like six hours after they abandon the cart, send this 12 hours after send this, right?

You can put product benefits and social proof. You can know exactly what items they clicked on. you can give them a specific discount on a specific item. You can send customer views or testimonials to try to convert them. And then again, you can offer incentives. So discounts, free shipping, you wanna just try to get them to finalize their purchase.

So like as they continue to not buy, you want it to, the offer to get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So then they end up buying.

Next is a reengagement series. So this is trying to reengage people who haven't engaged with your brand in a while. Sometimes people we're big fans of you, they wanna buy from you, but they just forgot about you, and you need to figure out how to reengage those people. So you may send out an email to all users who haven't logged on your site in three months with an exclusive offer incentive, or all people who haven't bought in in three months with an exclusive offer, offer and incentive.

And this can be automatic, like I said. Where maybe you're changing the offer, but the audience list automatically populates based on the actions that they take. So let's say like every month, you might change the email, but the audience list automatically populates based on the criteria that you set.

They haven't logged on your, your website in three months. For example, winback series. So this is re-engaging customers who have not purchased in a while. So similar to what I just said, they haven't bought in three months. And here's, here's a really interesting one. Let's say you're finding that your open rates are going down, that you're starting to hit the spam.

You, you might want to like, especially if you've been growing your email list for a while, send people a notification and give them an opportunity to opt out so that you can actually have a clean, engaged email list, which ultimately is gonna be better for you long term. So you may see people sending emails that are like I.

We haven't heard from you in a while. do you wanna still be on this email list? And that's the actual purpose of the email is to get people to unsubscribe so you can clean out your list and get people who really want your emails. And then another one is birthday message. You know, if you're able to get their birthday or some sort of important date, you can send out special offers about their birthday and that can just be automatic.

Uh, you have one email message that you create and then anybody's birthday just automatically send. So you see how this can like work for you while you're sleeping, basically. it's this upfront work that you do that enables you to continue to sell and convert automatically. So Constant Contact has great automation features.

They've got different automated templates that you can leverage. They even can automate SS m s messages. So you can create a series of automated emails and text messages that gradually nurture leads over time, increasing the chances of conversion. They also have lead capture forms. So like I was mentioning, when you have this gated asset with your lead magnet, there's a form that goes along with it.

And this is really important to, to capture lead information and then segment people in your different lists. And so with Constant Contact, you can easily design and embed forms on your website, and it'll all be integrated seamlessly into constant Contact. This is one of my favorite features. Uh, also event registration.

So you can automate the registration process for webinars, workshops, or events, capturing lead information and sending event details. 

And lastly, like I mentioned, Integration with Shopify WooCommerce.

They've got lots of different integrations to support you with your automation. And here's a stat, 30% of professional surveyed say the biggest benefit of marketing automation was that it saved them time. Again, you're not reinventing the wheel every time. You can do it once, update the emails, but it just like runs like clockwork.

So really, really great feature. Again, if you are rating yourself at a four and a five, chances are you're not doing email automation and that will really level up your game.

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[00:32:38] Hala Taha: We all know how time consuming and tedious it can be to manually send out emails to our subscribers. By leveraging automation tools, you can save valuable time and streamline your marketing efforts. For example, when a user signs up for your newsletter, you can set up an automated welcome email that is sent immediately after they sign up to your list.

This not only saves you time, but also ensures consistent and timely communication with your subscribers. Because of new advancements in ai, we can take automation to a whole new level, which brings me to the fifth step using AI in your email campaigns.

 So AI has been taken a world worldwide. Storm AI is being used everywhere. It looks like one of the first places that AI is really disrupting is copywriting, and it's really helping people level up their copywriting. And the way that I think about AI is, I think about it as an advanced intern.

It's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna have all the knowledge that you have as a real human. It's not gonna have all the experience that you have as a real human, but you can give it direction, you can give it prompts, and then you know you can keep working with it until it spits out something that's really helpful and it'll help you move faster.

Ai. I use it all the time and it just helps me move faster. I'll never take anything from an AI platform like Chat, G B T and use it verbatim, but it does give me a lot of ideas. Again, it's like having a really good intern that can just help me move faster. So that's how I think about ai. 79% of sales and marketing leaders say AI has helped their companies increase their revenue.

AI power tools can generate engaging and personalized email content at scale. It can save you time, it can save you resources, and so in constant contact, for example, you can use AI to create subject lines, pre headers, email, body comment, calls to actions. It will tell you the words that are actually gonna resonate most with your audience and drive the most click through and it will help you get like 90% there.

95% of marketers who use generative AI for email creation rate it effective and 54% rate it very effective. in terms of AI generated contents, like I mentioned before, AI generated content has immense potential. But you're gonna have to make sure that you're using it carefully. You're gonna wanna review it.

You're not gonna wanna use it verbatim, but it's a good starting point.  And when it comes to AI's, constant Contact Tools, very innovative. I haven't heard of any other email service provider that offers this. And essentially you can help, uh, create the content of your email with their features.

So basically you plug in a few keywords about what your email to be about, and then they'll do things like create your subject line, create your body copy, create your CTAs, and then you can refine it and finalize it. So again, it's like having an intern write you a draft that you then finalize and send out.

So how the AI content creator works on constant context. So  you can pick the type of campaign it is. So is it announcement, is it a newsletter? You can pick the tone of voice, then you can enter a few keywords and then it will generate your emails. So like super cool and really advanced and like I said, can get you 85% of the way there with very little effort.

[00:35:55] Hala Taha: Personalization is crucial in today's marketing landscape. Ensure that AI generated content aligns with your brand voice and resonates with your audience. Use AI algorithms to analyze customer data and behavior to deliver hyper-personalized email content. The sixth essential step for boosting your email results is to analyze and optimize your performance.

 So one of the ways that marketers like to test is using AB testing so you can enjoy up to a 28% higher return when you test your email program. And so AB testing is also known as split testing, and it's essentially creating two versions of your emails, an A and a B option, and you send them to two similar audiences.

And this is usually a test sample. So maybe you're sending it to, maybe your list is 20,000 people or less. Let's say your list is 20,000 people, and then you send option A to a hundred people, option B to a hundred people. You see what the open rates are, what the click-through rates are in each email, and then you send the highest performing email to everyone.

So basically you're sending a subset of your users, a version A, a subset of your users A, version B, and whichever one has better performance, you then send to everyone. This really maximizes and optimizes your email campaigns. And again, if you are rating yourself at a five or six, maybe you're not doing AB testing, and that's something that you can leverage to make sure that your email campaigns actually convert.

So you can test things like your subject lines, your colors, the colors of the C T A, the images that you use, and so on.

Like I've mentioned throughout the presentation, you're definitely gonna want to scrub your email list. So you wanna remove emails that are bouncing. You wanna remove people who haven't maybe engaged in your emails in three months. You wanna remove people who may not fit your audience criteria anymore.

Let's say you're like a location based company and somebody's out of your state or city, and so you always wanna set, set different criteria. In terms of inactivity or like no opens or no clicks for a certain duration. And then you can basically remove those inactive subscribers based on that criteria.

And a lot of email service providers give you the, uh, option to automate this process. So you can automatically remove people, for example, who have not opened your email in one year. So again, this is really important so that you actually hit the inbox and not the spam folder, and so that you have good open rates and you're more likely to be seen by your potential customers.

[00:38:40] Hala Taha: 

Email marketing is still a powerful tool for marketers and entrepreneurs. As the c e o of Yeah, media email marketing remains one of the most effective and direct ways that I can connect with my audience, build relationships, and drive my business growth. Ultimately, r o i, you can use the six steps that I went over today to unlock the true potential of your email marketing strategy.

And when it comes to powering your email marketing efforts, one platform that stands out as a trusted and comprehensive solution is constant contact. Constant Contact provides you with the tools, features, and support you need to take your email marketing to New Heights. I've been using Constant Contact for several years from both my internal client newsletters as well as my external industry newsletters, as well as sales campaigns for my masterclass.

I absolutely love this tool from powerful automation capabilities to AI driven personalization and robust analytics. Constant contact really has it all. The Empower marketers and entrepreneurs to create engaging, targeted campaigns that deliver real impact. You can go to constant contact.com/profiting for a free trial today.

That's all lowercase constant contact.com/profiting. For a no risk, no credit card required free trial, you can sign up for a free trial at Constant Contact and send up to a hundred [email protected] slash profiting. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting podcast. If you listen, learned and profited from this episode, be sure to share it with your friends and family and drop us a five star review on Apple.

And if you want more free trainings like this, be sure to sign up for that. No risk, no credit card required, free [email protected] slash profiting. I wanna shout out my amazing and hardworking yap team. Thank you for all you do behind the scenes. And if you guys like watching your podcast, you can find all of our episodes on YouTube.

Including the replay of the Constant Contact webinar that I put on a couple weeks ago. It was an hour long webinar. It had slides and visuals and more examples than what we went over in this audio podcast. So if you want the full webinar, you can also check out the replay on YouTube and we'll stick that link in the show notes to make it super easy for you guys.

Big shout out to my amazing and hardworking yap team. Thank you for all you do behind the scenes. This is your host, Hala Taha, a k a, the podcast princess signing off.