You wouldn’t expect to get ripped biceps doing one dinky little workout every quarter. You’ve got to get in the gym and do the reps!
Too many email marketers are emailing once a month or less to everybody on their list, never bothering to look at the metrics, and then being shocked at their flabby arms. I mean, flabby performance.
Today we’re sharing a few specific ways you can get more reps to increase your email marketing prowess, so that you too can be swole.
Let us set the record straight right now: we are not saying you need to send more emails. Although not sending enough can hurt your results, if you’re sending at least once every month, we’re not going to bug you on this particular topic. That’s literally just the table stakes. If that’s astounding to you, up your frequency a little and then come back to the rest of this content.
Okay, back to the gym.
In the gym, you get more muscle definition by increasing your reps, but you can also increase your weight. You can try different moves. Don’t skip leg day, right? You can mix up your modalities: work out in the sun, on a machine, go to a group class. And one of the best ways to get more definition is by working with a trainer.
We promise you, we have an email marketing point to make here. Stick with us.
1. Increase Your Weight
Ask a smaller sample size of your email list to do more of the ecommerce heavy lifting.
Get super targeted with your email campaigns. Don’t send your last-call email about your Viognier to everybody; send it only to people who purchased this vintage of your Viognier, letting them know the final cases are flying and if they need more, they’ve got to act.
Don’t invite everybody on your list to your wine club before the next allocation; only invite people who have spent at least $400 in the last 6 months and aren’t members yet.
The beauty of this strategy: you can always open the campaign up to a bigger audience if the targeted offer doesn’t get the numbers you need. (This is segmentation doing its best work.)
Increase your weight by sending to smaller, targeted audiences.
2. Try Different Moves
If you want sweet biceps, you’ve got to do bicep curls, but you could also do hammer curls, reciprocating curls, or a little Arnold press. It keeps things fresh in the gym and adds more definition.
In email marketing, this equates to trying different moves strategically.
Stop only sending sales emails. Mix in lifestyle events, recipes, quizzes, surveys.
Mix up your email creative from time to time by sending a plain text letter instead of another flashy marketing campaign. (One of the best-performing emails we’ve ever sent for a client was 176 words of plain text.)
This keeps things fresh in your customers’ inbox and feeds insight back to you on what your customers enjoy most. Then test what you learn instead of guessing.
3. Work with a Trainer
You can try both of the previous strategies and get great results. But if you want better results faster, work with a trainer.
A story from Erica:
My son plays baseball, and this year he finally made the all-star team. He went from being one of the best kids on a decent team to being among the best 10-year-old baseball players in the whole city, and the level of competition definitely helped. He was surrounded by other great players, which helped him get more useful reps, but he also had a different caliber of coach. No offense to his amazing dad who coached him during the regular season, but these guys had different drills and standards. They would catch poor form and help the kids correct it. They inspired them to work on things they really enjoyed, and gave them tools to get better at the stuff they didn’t love as much.
My son came home one day after a scrimmage where he had played shortstop, and the ground balls were just eating him up. He didn’t hang his head or complain or say baseball wasn’t a sport anymore. Instead, he said, “Hey Dad, can you come outside after dinner and help me practice fielding ground balls? I really want to get better.”
That is what a coach can do for you. In the gym, you discover what you didn’t know before, and then you want to push yourself to become better.
Take Action
Now that you know better, you know what we’re going to say: you’ve got to do better.
Go put on more weight by sending more targeted emails, mix up your modalities, and incorporate a mix of campaign themes and formats into your calendar. And if you want to go further faster, get yourself an email marketing coach.
✨ Ready for a trainer in your corner?
If you want coaches catching your form every week, that’s Mavens On Demand: weekly group coaching, feedback before you press send, and personalized recommendations for your unique winery. It’s the trainer relationship from the story, for your inbox.
And if you want the full playbook first, the drills and the system behind the coaching, that’s our course, PRESS SEND. We teach you everything you need to send marketing emails that sell, that don’t suck.
Either way, you can always tune in here for inspiration, strategies, and reps to try. Try something new, get some feedback, try something else, iterate, and there is no limit to what you can accomplish.
At Email Mavens, we believe that every winery can sell more wine online by sending better marketing emails. So go put in some reps, and keep pressing send on your next best email.
