Email has been my most powerful sales channel since before I started a business so it blows my mind when I hear readers say "I've never sold anything from email."
How can that be?! This channel that's such a goldmine for many of us simply doesn't work at all for others???
But marketing channels are not created equal. Each one demands a specific skillset to master, which is why some business owners flock to TikTok and others thrive in private communities or local networking. I cannot TikTok to save my life but I've long loved the email game and to this day, it's the main way I make money. I don't necessarily believe that everyone has to be good at email or even that everyone has to use email, but it is one of the easier channels to master.
Emails sell for enough of us that I believe they can sell for you too. I wanted to get to the bottom of what might be happening for service providers who say their emails don't convert so I turned to five email marketing experts for advice. We talked about what makes someone buy from email, common problems getting in the way of sales and real examples that worked for them and their clients. From don't use "book a call" to share weirdly specific details about yourself, their answers will give you a ton of fresh fodder to try with your emails.
Who's on your list
Conversion rates have poisoned our brains so deeply that people seem to forget what they learned in high school math. If you have 100 people in a room, but all of those people are professional mimes and you sell microphones, how many potential buyers do you have in that room?
None! No percentage of that room will ever convert because they are not the buyers for the thing you sell. Who is on your list is the most important thing to get right in email marketing. It's WAY more important than how many people are on it. The advent of recommendations widgets and the proliferation of summits have flooded lists with people who barely even open or who shared a fake email address.
"Your email list should be full of your ideal clients. That sounds obvious, but for a lot of service providers the real problem is that they're talking to the wrong people. Some don't have the budget. Some aren't looking to hire or outsource at all. Some are nowhere near ready to buy. So you need to be attracting your ideal clients onto your list in the first place," Eman Ismail wrote me. Eman's an email marketing strategist and copywriter who helps her clients improve their list performance and write higher converting emails.
One way to rebuild your list with interested clients is to look at your sources for booked projects. If you can reuse some of those channels where clients found you — maybe it's networking groups, LinkedIn DMs, or guest speaking gigs — as email list growth channels, you'll see an improvement in how your emails convert because you'll be attracting potential buyers to your list.
Email marketing and automation strategist Bev Feldman said you might find your current list is more set up for referrals than selling. She said about half her own list is other marketers and the other half is past clients and referral partners. Past clients might come back and buy again, but if your list is mostly colleagues, your messages should be more about staying top of mind, rather than selling directly to them. You'd have to change how you grow the list in order to sell more from email.
For me, as a paid subscription operator, I don't bother with newsletter growth sources that don't also grow my paid subscription. I look at the most successful paid subscriber sources and I look to grow my newsletter from those places instead. I recently bought a classified ad that brought in 200+ new subscribers, none of whom joined the paid subscription. I'll never use that channel again. Instead, I'll revisit buying classifieds from existing paid subscribers because those usually bring in not just newsletter readers, but new paid subscribers.
What makes someone buy from an email
If you do have the right people on your list, but they're still not smashing those buttons you want them to smash, where should you look to make a fix?