There are many reasons why, as a digital business, you might want to offer an email series to your customers. We’ll start by looking at the why, and then take you to the how. 

Why Plan an Email Series?

1. Added value to your customers

If you have a great idea of who your target user is and what their problems are, then an email series catered to solving those problems will be incredibly valuable to your subscribers. Even if it is not exactly a problem that you are targeting, even if the series relates to something your target user is incredibly passionate about, then their hunger to know more about the topic can also be satiated by a well-crafted email sequence.

2. Build trust and brand loyalty

We tend to trust what we are familiar with. This is definitely the case for online shoppers. They are more likely to purchase from a company they know and have interacted with in the past over a completely new option. An email series is a great way to establish consistent interaction between you and your user. Seeing your branding, messaging, and useful content catering to their needs and interests on a regular basis is sure to lead to a connection being built between you and your readers.

3. Grow mailing list

Having an email service offered as a product is a fantastic way to capture emails and build your email list. It makes sense to any subscriber that in order to sign up for the email series that has caught their attention, they must provide their email address. Having an email list filled with the addresses of so many of your target users is a great asset to have for future promotions and series. Make sure to get consent from your email subscribers before sending them other promotional material.

4. Showcase brand voice

Any content you share with your prospects or users along the user journey is an opportunity to showcase your brand voice. A consistent brand voice will allow your readers to build a connection with you as they will start to know what to expect from you, this can be comforting to a lot of people. Due to the consistent nature of an email series, and because of the added value you will be offering to your user, an affinity with your specific brand voice will start to form.

5. Build Suspense for a Holiday Season

There is great opportunity for e-commerce businesses to boost their conversion in the holiday season. One way they can ensure this is by building anticipation for the celebrations and sales. A holiday email series could be a great way to do this. 

How do you plan an email series that converts?

1. Define conversion

What is the purpose of this email series? What counts as a conversion? Is it how many users sign up to the next series or buy a related product, or is it how many users click on any given link? It is important to define your key performance indicators before starting your email series, so you can continually assess the performance and make adjustments where necessary.

2. Choose a subject that will excite your audience

I am not sure how interested pen buyers would be in a calligraphy course, but the chances are that the number is higher than that of a digital ad agency.

Just as you do when you consider any type of content you put out on your website or social media, you must think about what your reader might want. Better yet, what they might need.

Have a look at the content that does well on your site. Is there a topic that continuously attracts higher visitors and more engagement? It is likely that a deeper dive into that topic would do well in an email series.

Simply offer your readers either something they don’t know or something they might care about and you are already doing well!

3. View the Series as a Product

Your email series is a unique product offering and should be treated as such. Your users will gain a lot of insight and value from this package you have put together just for them. Make it visible. Set up landing pages to register for your email course. These landing pages will be where your paid and sponsored ads will lead to. Leave CTAs on related blog posts and share them in your weekly or monthly newsletter. 

You have created this enriched content for your target audience, so it is important to spread awareness of it as much as possible.

4. Nail the Content

So you’ve got the marketing of your email series down, you’ve picked a topic that you’re sure your readers will love, and you have identified your KPIs. Now you need to make sure you nail the content!

There are three parts of the content you need to consider:

1. The copy

Your readers might like long-form or short-form copy, just make sure it is consistent with your brand voice. It’s also crucial to avoid grammar mistakes and poor syntax, as this will erode your brand’s credibility. 

2. The visuals

Use visuals to display data or emotions where possible. Consider including pictures of your team or yourself to add to the personification of your brand. Make sure the images you use are high quality and relevant to the copy.

3. The design

The overall design of the email series is very important and doing it well can lead to a great lot more conversions than something amateurishly put together. Do some research on email series by companies you love and search for inspiration in their style.

5. Final value offering

The end of your email series is an opportunity to re-engage with your audience. Make sure you know what you want your audience to do by the end of the email series.

Options include: 

• Further product offering
• Download white paper
• Sign up for a community
• Buy  a subscription 
• Sign up for the next part of the series

Final Thoughts

This has great potential to bring you and your users together, showcase your brand, and to bring users further along your own defined conversion funnel.

So, you really have no reason not to put together a winning email series after this guide! Or maybe I have missed something, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below.

The post How to Plan A Winning Email Series? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

What counts as a “bounce”? 

Google Analytics classifies a single-page session as a “bounce”. So if a user clicks on a blog or other piece of content, consumes it in its entirety and leaves, this also counts as a bounce. I would advise looking at the session durations instead of bounce rates, but according to Google Analytics, the session duration for a “bounce” is recorded as zero seconds, because the user doesn’t interact with the site again, signaling no marker of an end time. 

High bounce rates can also be a sign that something is going array along the user journey. If you would like to lower your bounce rates and keep users on your site for longer, and interacting with it more, you can follow the following steps.

4 Steps to Lower Bounce Rates 

Step 1: Check your page speed 

The longer the load-time, the higher the bounce rate. People are not likely to wait for longer than a few seconds for any site to load.

If you want to check the time it takes for your site to load on Google Chrome, you can press ctrl + shift + i (on Windows) or Cmd + shift + i (on macOS). Once the Inspect Element is open, click “Network”.

If you “hard refresh” by pressing CTRL and “Refresh” at the same time, you can get a clean look at how long it takes your page to load. See the screenshot below. This was taken of Amazon’s homepage load time.7

Studies have shown that if your page load-time increases from 1 second to 5 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 90%. With these statistics, it is really worth reducing your page speeds.

Step 2: Build trust with the visitor

Another reason for high bounce rates could be a feeling of insecurity when visiting your page. Especially, if a user comes to your WordPress site to buy something, not trusting the site will send them away sharpish.

Check the following trust signals to see if this is why your bounce rates are high:

Do you have an SSL certificate?
Are your images of high quality?
Do you have trust badges?
Is there social proof on your website?
Are your content titles misleading?

Step 3: Improve your UX

It can be tempting for some marketers to bombard users with popups and countless CTAs, but this can be enough to make users roll their eyes and then run for the hills. Keep popups to a minimum and make your site easy to navigate. It also helps to have a visible search bar for the explorer, and perhaps an intuitive drop-down menu for the skimmers.

If you want to test how easy or difficult your site is to navigate, have a friend use it for the first time, and watch how they interact with it. It is always good to see your work through a fresh pair of eyes. 

People are going to be happy to visit more pages on your site if it is an easy and natural thing to do. 

Step 4: Make it mobile

There is no way around it, every site needs to be mobile optimized, if not mobile-first. This does not mean squeezing the same content onto a smaller screen. 

Simplify your mobile version and keep step 3 in mind! To check how your site looks on mobile view, you can go back to the Inspect Elements from step 1 and click on the devices on the top left corner.

Conclusion 

Hopefully, this article gives you some ideas on how to lower your bounce rates and get the interaction from your users you want.

Good luck!

The post 4 Steps to Lower Bounce Rates of your Websites appeared first on Tricky Enough.