Monday, June 29, 2020

Newbie feels lost with email marketing

I'm quickly trying to transition over from SEO to email marketing after suffering from the latest rounds of google algorithm updates that have destroyed my traffic and business.

The problem is I don't know what I am doing with my email marketing and I feel like a chicken running around with its head cut off.

Some background info:

My main niche is in the dating niche.

I am monetizing traffic mainly through 1 dating website offer and ads.

I don't currently have my own dating product yet but are planning to create an ebook to sell.

I currently have almost 300 email subs that I accumulated over a year (yeah really bad, I know :( )

I have a YT channel with over 5000 subs at the moment.

Here's what I have done so far:

I have a lead magnet on my website (cheatsheet of some sort) which isn't doing too well. According to the stats from my email provider, I'm only getting about a 0.45% conversion rate. I have placed the lead magnet on a sidebar and it also pops up when people visit the site. In addition, it is placed on my youtube channel description on a landing page which seems to be converting well (around 11-12%), however, I screwed up by not mentioning the lead magnet at all in my previous videos hence, very little people even know that it exists.

I've since also implemented another content upgrade lead magnet (half of the blog post formatted in an pdf ebook) on a new article that I wrote which seems to get a decent conversion rate, at least compared to my main pop up lead magnet (around 3% conversion), and I just created another ebook content upgrade lead magnet just 2 days ago at the end of one of my most popular blog post, yet it hasn't had a single opt-in yet :(. I'm considering moving the location to the top of the blog post or to leave two opt-in forms (one at the top and one at the bottom).

I have written out a 7 email welcome series to new opt-ins which lasts for about a month. I had no idea what to include in the welcome series except for the first email which I used example templates from my email provider + subbing to a tonne of people's newsletters to get ideas on what to write (welcome them to the newsletter, introducing myself, telling them to follow me on social media, and telling them what to expect with the emails ie. I will send you x amount of emails). I feel the welcome series is severely lacking especially with the follow-up emails after the first one. This is mainly due to the fact that I don't have my own digital product yet and I'm not exactly sure what to promote to them in the meantime. I did however include 2 affiliate offers (the dating website offer + a texting guide offer) on 2 separate emails later in that welcome series, however, I have had no sales so far.

In addition, I have spent close to a month writing out 8 months worth of emails that will be sent out on a weekly basis to my email subs automatically after they complete the welcome series. All of these emails are informational type of emails teaching them something, with zero products being promoted. I made the mistake of not sending out any emails to my previous subs for nearly a year and when I finally added them over to my automated newsletter from switching autoresponder email providers (I was using a free autoresponder with no automation previously), I got a bunch of unsubs immediately lol. Luckily the number has been low. Lesson learned: send out emails regularly.

So here is where I am stuck:

Organic traffic has continued to slide down. I know that I need to get as much of that organic traffic to my email list as possible, otherwise I am finished.

However, I am not sure where to focus first:

  • Should I revamp my main lead magnet to try and increase the conversion rate?
  • Should I create other lead magnets and sprinkle them into some of my other popular articles?
  • Should I create some new blog posts keeping in mind that some of them will have an accompanying lead magnet?
  • Should I focus on my YT channel and try to drive traffic to my landing page via creating some lead magnets that are related to my YT videos?
  • Then there is the issue of what type of lead magnet should I be using. I'm sure I will need to go through some trial and error through this before nailing down the right one.

Secondly: I know the emails that I sent out, especially the welcome series need to be revamped. However, I am not sure what to write for the welcome series since I don't have a product of my own yet. It seems kind of a waste to get all of these people onto my email list but then not being able to monetize that traffic. But I suppose once I have them on my email list I can always drive them back to my website to monetize through ads.

Then there is the issue of optimizing my emails to improve metrics like deliverability, open rate, click rate, etc, which I'm not even going to try and think about at the moment (too overwhelming with all of the other stuff that I need to worry about).

Lastly is my digital product:

Now regarding the ebook product that I intend to sell, I haven't tested it out to see whether there is demand for it or not, however I did have 1-2 people email me asking me to write an ebook so that they could purchase my products. I know in the dating niche, ebooks are very popular digital products that people sell.

I am actually not even sure how to validate the idea. I'm assuming that I need to do the following:

  1. add a link trigger somewhere in an email asking them whether or not they would be interested in learning more about my upcoming email? Not sure if this link trigger is supposed to take them to a landing page where they enter their email address again or if they just get tagged. I'm assuming I'm supposed to send them an email afterward that tells them that I will update them on the status of the ebook when it comes out?
  2. Create a landing page on my YT channel and mention in somewhere in the video to ask people to sub to the email list if they are interested in learning more about the ebook. Again, an email is sent out afterward telling them I will update them on the status of the book?

At the moment as you can tell, I'm quite overwhelmed and stressed out. I'm not sure where to start and if I am even taking the right steps. It seems like I need to do everything at once.

Sorry for the long post, but I thought I needed to give you guys a bit more info about my situation. Please help an email newbie out :(

submitted by /u/startupevolution
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/hhsc0e/newbie_feels_lost_with_email_marketing/

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