Email marketing has become a lost art. Marketers and Business Owners simply don't know what to do, so they become completely paralyzed. They dwell on the following questions rather than taking action with the questions in mind.

• How often does your business send out email marketing messages?
• Have you figured out the right cadence?
• Are you worried about "bothering" your audience with too many messages?
• Who is on your list(s)?

Instead of analysis paralysis, just start going, and see what the response is. Chances are, the response will be more positive than negative, especially if married with best practices and lead nurturing tips from top email marketing experts.

Let's start with this one:

Making sales today isn’t about the hard sell. Instead, you need to create content that provides real value to your prospects. From tutorials on commonly Googled product questions to top ten favorites lists curated by employees or influencers, the pieces you create should help ensure that your prospects have the information they need to make an informed buying decision.

One of the most useful ways we’ve seen to move people through the sales funnel is to present them with meaningful content that they want to look at. It keeps them interested, engaged, and can help them understand the value of the product or service without tuning out like they might with a pitch.

There’s none better at doing this than men’s clothing and lifestyle curator, Huckberry. Each Sunday, they issue a “Rundown” email in addition to their product-centric email. These emails veer off the path of product-promotion and instead look into the lives of Huckberry employees, partners, and influencers. They talk about things that Huckberry customers will be interested in, such as reading lists, favorite gear, favorite Huckberry products, family stories, and epic adventures. The stories are interesting and relatable. Sometimes they feature some of Huckberry’s products, but never in a sales-focused way, and only as a simple link. Each story is followed by a couple of product features and a link to the blog, but these CTAs are presented very casually.

I think Huckberry wants to make sure they are providing legitimate value to their subscribers and this creates a loyal, engaged customer base that will almost always open and read through every email that makes it into their inbox.

Hit me up with any questions on email marketing or digital strategy any time at paul@datadriven.design.

Thanks for reading, watching and listening, and have a great day!

KEEP MARKETING!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.