2:44 pm admin

Here are 5 ways to use micro-commitments in your email campaigns:

1) Relevant Subject Lines: Your subject line has one job and that is to get your email opened. By opening your message, your subscriber is making a micro-commitment. They’re committing to see what you have to say. And you’ve got about 5 seconds once your email is opened to capture their attention.

Therefore, your email should have a single focus. It should have a single idea that you are trying to communicate. That could be that you have a time limited special on a product. It could be that you have a webinar coming up that you want subscribers to register for. And your big idea could be to raise your subscriber’s attention to a problem that you have a solution for.

If you have a new gluten free cook book to promote, your subject line doesn’t have to sell the book, it just has to get the email opened. Your subject line could be “Is gluten causing your migraines?” By framing the subject line that way, if your subscriber has migraines, they’ll likely open the email to find out.

2) Tight Email Body Copy: To continue the gluten free cook book example, now that your subscriber has opened your email, the only thing the first sentence needs to do is get them to read the second sentence, and so on. Your opening line could say, “If you suffer from migraines then you need to know about a controversial new study that suggests that eating gluten can trigger migraines .”

Again, at this point you’ve not mentioned that you are selling a book, you’ve just asked a migraine sufferer to learn more about a hidden link to the cause of their debilitating migraines.

3) Get the Click: If your body copy is focused on explaining briefly that there is a problem that your subscriber needs to know about, then the call to action is to learn more about the solution. One way to do this is to offer compelling proof of the big idea that your subject line and email body copy revealed. To continue the gluten free recipe book example, the copy could explain that “The Harvard Study followed 457 adult migraine sufferers s and found that even small amounts of gluten could trigger debilitating headaches.”

4) Micro-Conversion Sale Funnel: At the end of your brief video about the 5 ways to stop migraines, you could make an offer to your subscriber download a free chapter of your new recipe book with a few gluten free recipes in exchange for their email address.

At this point your subscriber has indicated they are interested and they’ve claimed their free chapter. Even if they don’t buy the book today, you can follow up with them again or even make other related offers.

5) Offer More: If your subscriber liked the gluten free recipe they just got for opting in, they may well like it enough that they want the whole book. To go from having a chapter to having the whole book is a safe, incremental decision. After they buy your book, it will be a relatively smaller decision to buy from you again in the future. If you have a higher priced offer you can use this same principle to upsell your visitor if they buy the recipe book.

By making every step from the subject line to the upsell a series of small decisions, you can potentially convert a much higher number of buyers than if you had tried to sell the book or the upsell directly in the email campaign.

If building a whole new funnel sounds daunting, don’t worry. You can start with writing a subject line and take baby steps and before you know it you’ll be done and you’ll have a funnel that can convert open rates into sales.

 

For over a decade Heather Seitz used email marketing to build successful companies and had to solve the biggest barrier to consistent profitability: deliverability. Today she is the Co-Founder and CEO of Email Delivered.

To discover how to use micro-commitments in your email campaign, visit http://www.emaildelivered.com/micro-commitments-in-your-email-campaigns/ Remember to sign up for the FREE Email Delivered Pulse newsletter for articles, tips, and recommended resources for email marketers.

August 10, 2015