As the industry evolves, so must our strategies, tools, and mindsets.

Lorraine Ball's guide to marketing efficiency is not just about following processes but also about recognizing the importance of flexibility and continuous learning in the fast-paced world of email marketing.

Ready to use email marketing to grow? Let's go!

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Read the Blog Post: How Can Your Email Marketing Thrive?

Is Email Marketing Dying?

Email marketing has been "dying" here for the last 15 years.

Every time you turn around they tell you, "Oh, it's dying. Students aren't getting email addresses. Nobody wants to read email."

Here's the thing: it's a part of how we communicate and people have their phones and their email with them everywhere they go, and people check their email.

They may grumble about it, but they check their email every day. 90% of people check it every single day, and so it is not the Wild West anymore. There are lots more hoops that you have to jump through.

Your open rates and your click-through rates may be lower, but email, if it's done well, still works and it's still one of the most effective tools out there.

When you open your email and it may not be for very long, but in that moment, when you open up an email from me I have your undivided attention and there's power in that.

Strengthen Your List by Asking Permission

I think the single biggest thing is building a permission-based list.

It is so tempting to scrape email addresses just so you have a lot of people on your list but they don't care. You are way better having a smaller list of people who are really interested, because that's a much better gauge of the receptiveness of your audience.

I started my email program in December of 2002. Okay, there are people who are on my email list today who have been getting emails from me since December of 2002, March and April of 2003.

Not a lot, but the people who are interested have stayed with me.

long the way that list grew and shrank and I think one of the things that you have to be comfortable with is letting people go.

I had 8,000 people and I went through it and pulled anybody who hadn't opened an email from me in six months and said, "hey, do you even still want this?"

Yeah, today my list has about 2,500 people, but my email campaigns have a 30 to 40% open rate. That's great.

So it's a smaller list, but it's people who actually are interested in what I have to say, so I'd much rather be talking to them than shouting into the ocean.

So I think that's the first thing is don't be afraid to cut people. Don't run to shove everybody on your list and instead figure out what they really want to hear from you.

Grow Your Audience by Niching Your Emails

The hard thing is that to do email right, it takes more time.

To subdivide your list, and I say there are 2,500 people on my list but I have five or six different lists and sometimes everybody gets the same email, but sometimes I just want to send an email to the 200 people who are the podcasters that I know, because I have something I'm working on that's really just relevant for them, and I want to be able to carve them out.

I don't want to send that email to everyone, and there are also different kinds of emails.

There are the email newsletter updates, and then there are the auto response campaigns, and when someone downloads something from your website, takes advantage of your lead magnet, the worst thing you can do is dump them into a generic email newsletter list.

Evergreen Content is a Time Saver

Now I'm going to tell you one of my favorite tricks, and this is with blogging, with podcasts, with email newsletters.

You spend a lot of time creating your content and then it's gone. The email is sent, and now it's next week and you have to create another one.

Well, if you've done this for any length of time, nobody remembers your content and you can reuse, repurpose.

When it comes to articles on your website, updating them will add way more value from an SEO perspective than creating a new article and taking your email newsletter with a different introduction and covering the same topics again.

People won't remember and with a little help from ChatGPT to rewrite some of your titles, it's a brand new email.

I don't do that very often but I do reuse my newsletters and when I worked with a heating and air conditioning company for three years, by year number three I was resending the emails we sent in July of year number one.

Absolutely nobody would remember that and it was good content and I have the data. I can look at all of the emails we sent and go, "you know what? That's the one we need to resend, because that one knocked it out of the park."

About Lorraine Ball

Lorraine Ball is a successful entrepreneur, author and professional speaker. She enjoys sharing what she knows about marketing and gives presentations to groups in college classrooms around her county and in her weekly podcast, More Than a Few Words.

• Visit Lorraine Ball's Website: More Than a Few Words

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