Get your first 100 subscribers and excel in email marketing in Malaysia by 2021.

You may have heard that email marketing is dead. Let us debunk this myth.

The email marketing industry is growing bigger and bigger, especially as a personalized communication tool.

So, email marketing is not dead. In fact, marketing with email is stronger than ever and possibly the best way to gain the attention of your users.

Why is email marketing the best way

You may think email marketing is a desolate aspect of marketing, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. Let me tell you why.

First of all, every one of us uses emails. I bet you’ve already checked your email before coming across this article.

In the marketing arena, a lot of people have been talking about getting the attention of your users. The main goal here is to garner their attention to lead them into your sales funnel.

Email is probably one of the best ways to get your users attention other than overpopulated social media and other channels that you’re currently marketing on at the moment. This is because most customers are reachable via email.

I mean, if you think about it, you have a personal email address and a work email address. You use it to access your social media platforms as well as to log into work. You can’t avoid it even if you wanted to.

So, the fact stands, everyone is reachable via email. It’s comparable to one’s phone number at this point. You could assume a person’s email address is their “online phone number” as more often than not, people are most responsive and efficient there.

Even in this day and age where we’ve got an array of communication methods from Chatbots to Messenger. Email truly is well, alive, and thriving.

According to research carried out by Oberlo, in 2019 global email users amounted up to 3.9 billion. That number just keeps growing.

Email is not depleting in any form, rather it’s growing, day by day. The only difference is how it’s evolved over the years. One of the biggest things that are changing email marketing is the sophistication level of personalization.

If you are familiar with email marketing, I’m sure you know of the oldest trick in the book, addressing people by name. You could send the same email to a hundred people but personalize it by adding their name instead of saying something like, “Dear valued user.”

This is one of the simplest forms of personalization but let’s take it a step further.

As we move deeper into email marketing, you’ll find more ways and opportunities to personalize different sorts of things rather than just the name itself.

Think about personalizing things like your content, for example. You can change the content depending on the person who received it, their location, and more.

The future of email marketing is personalization.

People enjoy things that they think have been curated specially for them rather than content made for the general public.

To further illustrate my point that email marketing isn’t going anywhere and is, in fact, a hugely overlooked option, I’m going to introduce you to two companies. One is called Morning Brew and one is called The Hustle.

Morning Brew is a business that sends you an email every day. They send out emails with content based on topics such as international economics and international business. It’s safe to assume that their reader base is people in business or the startup scene.

By subscribing to Morning Brew you get a good, well-researched article or a business and industrial economic issue straight to your inbox every day. They have built a business out of just sending an email out to their subscribers.

The Hustle can be considered another email sending company. They are more like an email newsletter where they collect people who sign up for their newsletter.

A few days every week they send their readers some interesting content to read, either a case study, research on a business, or industry news that is well researched, well written, and, of course, very thorough as well.

Now, how does “an email sending company” work?

They send you an email for you to read at your own leisure which has ads. These ad spaces are bought by companies who want to advertise to their large list of email subscribers. For example, WeTransfer which is a platform for sending large files sponsors The Hustle.

Basically, what these companies do is by accumulating such a high subscriber count, they can make money from advertisements and sponsorships. The Hustle, according to old data posted online, had 1.5 million subscribers and have a high open-rate of 45%.

For email marketing, the industry standard is around 20%. The Hustle though, puts out effective content that they know their readers are interested in which has pushed their open rates.

The Hustle started as a simple email newsletter that people can subscribe to in order to receive news on business and startups. They currently makeover USD 300,000 a week. That’s more than a million a month.

So, if we reverse engineer and look at how much they make per email subscriber, that’s around $1 per subscriber. Now, in the email industry, $1 per subscriber profit is actually quite low. The company’s current goal, according to their website, is to make one hundred million in a year.

It’s hard to believe that they built such a successful business out of simply sending out emails but it’s true and you can too!

There are three things you need for a successful email list building activity for a business or for personal growth: an audience, an email software, and great content.

So, what is an audience list?

An audience list is basically just a group of people who have given you permission to email them, they do this by subscribing to your emails.

Now, one thing you have to understand is that when people do this, they are not yet your customers, and a lot of, in fact, could possibly never be.

They just want to hear from you, but they do not necessarily want to buy from you. Only a small portion of them would actually go ahead and move deeper into the sales funnel.

Define the value your email marketing brings

When it comes to building an email list there is a three-step list building plan. The first is to think about what you bring to the table.

What is the value you bring to the people who subscribe to you?

Find your angle

The second is to have a unique angle. An example of this is as follows. You are a tennis instructor and the value you bring to your customers is the lessons, but how do you make yourself different from other instructors? What is your unique angle?

The third aspect is to define a quantifiable goal. This quantifiable goal should sound like, “I want to have at least one hundred subscribers by the end of this month.” By making your goal quantifiable, you are more likely to be able to achieve it.

Here’s an example. Say I’m a home chef who’s decided to start a business during MCO. I’ve decided that I’m going to sell easy home-cook recipes for people to cook at home during CMCO and MCO.

Now, what is my unique angle when it comes to my home-cook recipes? How do I differentiate myself from the hundreds and thousands of people in the market?

I’ve decided to make my unique angle the fact that all these dishes can be made within 10 mins. That would definitely set me apart from the rest.

Now, what’s my quantifiable goal?

What is something that I want to achieve in a week, two weeks, or maybe one month? I want to have at least a hundred subscribers within the next month.

Build a capture page

One of your first goals should be to build a capture page. To start any sort of email marketing one has to build an email list.

A capture page is the landing page on which people can submit their email addresses to you in order to subscribe to your service.

There are some rules to creating one though.

First, it should have a simple, benefit-oriented headline.

The second is that you shouldn’t have a navigation page.

Navigation means distraction which means fewer subscribers. Your capture page automatically becomes more effective.

And this is also one of the reasons why landing pages and also squeeze pages look so much better than trying to get people to opt-in on social media when there are so many distractions around.

Third, you should have a hero shot. This is something that shows your subscribers the value of the act of subscribing to emails.

Another important factor is having less urgency. While urgency works, it tends to put off the younger generation (millennials, gen X) quickly due to their tech literacy. They are able to easily see through your strategy and end up ignoring it instead.

Email Marketing Platforms

There are an array of email marketing platforms to choose from especially in this day and age. From Mailchimp, GetResponse, Klaviyo, AWeber, etc.

Email marketing tools in Malaysia

Here’s a quick list of email marketing tools made for and by the Malaysian market.

• https://www.exabytes.my/online-marketing-1/email-marketing
• https://www.justsimple.com.my/managed-email-marketing/
• https://www.operion.com.my/email-marketing.html
• https://www.webserver.com.my/malaysia-email-marketing-digital-solution/
• http://www.picocentury.com/
• https://www.callbox.com.my/email-marketing-campaign/
• https://www.gctech.my/email-marketing/
• https://www.blastmy.com/

There’s no one perfect marketing software or email marketing software to use, but there are few things that you want to look at.

1. Integration

How does it integrate with other platforms for advertising? When you use an email marketing platform, you want it to be flexible in the sense that you can connect it with your CRM as well as your website so that the operations around email become much, much simpler.

2. Mobile responsiveness

Another point to consider is the fact that a lot of people read their emails via their smartphones. So, if you are writing your emails within one of these email marketing platforms some things to consider are: do the email marketing platform produce a visual?

Is their email easy to read on different types of screens? If people read on the desktop, laptop, versus mobile phone, how does your platform handle screen optimization?

3. Deliverability

If you write an email and you send it out to thousands of people, those emails may end up in the spam box.

Some email marketing platforms have reputable deliverability, and some do not, which is an important factor to consider.

Finally, personalization is the biggest thing in email marketing.

What you want to find out are other ways to creatively personalize emails for different segments of your list. This is because people who subscribe to you would have different worldviews than others and should be segmented as such.

If you’re just starting out, we recommend starting with something simple and intuitive like sendfox.com. This wouldn’t be comparable to the ones mentioned previously but is a great place to start.

Watch our video for a tutorial on how to use it efficiently: How to get your first 100 email subscribers!

Market and promote your capture page

Once you’ve set it all up the next big question is how to market your capture page?

What we suggest is to send your new subscriber something of value. Here at LEAD, our landing page promotes a free video training for data science so when someone new subscribes to us, we immediately send them one!

Depending on your business niche, you should offer your clients a freebie, something you know they find value in. The next step is to simply go where your users are. There are a multitude of ways to do this.

Here’s one: promote it in your email signature. Think about it, we send emails every single day to people, to our customers, to our clients, to our friends.

What you can do with our emails is we can put in a link to our capture page on our email signatures, it’s an opportunity to promote that you shouldn’t miss.

The second way to do it is to put these links in your bio, whether that’s Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. The point is to basically put this link where people might find it in order to turn them into a subscriber rather than just a visitor to your website.

Another aspect to cover is networking. Look for people interested in your product already and offer them a free sign up with your freebie.

The quickest way to do this is through paid ads. The turnover time is much faster, and it directly leads people to your capture page.

A quick recap of our guide to getting your first hundred email subscribers:

• Define the value you bring
• Find your angle
• Build a capture page
• Market and promote your capture page

Best of luck and as always, feel free to shoot us a message or comment below with any questions or feedback, we love hearing from you!

By Masumi Atul Parmar