Let Me Explain The Email Marketing Sandwich

What does a Cubano sandwich have in common with email marketing?

Nothing.

But it makes for a great analogy when I’m trying to explain what an “email marketing sandwich” is.

Here’s the gist of it.

Making the sandwich

The base layer bun

Every sandwich has the base layer bun on which everything else is piled. For the sake of this amazing analogy, I need you to imagine the base layer bun is your email list sign up form or pop-up.

Your sign up for or pop-up should be converting between 5-10% of all visitors into subscribers.

If you’re batting the league average, your conversion rate should be no less than 3.09%. If you’re in the top 10% of hitters in the league, your form should be converting at 9.3% or higher.

If you have no idea what your form conversion rate is, you need to find out. You can’t optimise content you don’t know needs to be optimised, so make sure you don’t overlook this step.

The meat

A Cubano sandwich has roasted pork, glazed ham, and salami along with Swiss cheese, thinly sliced pickles, and mustard. This is what makes the Cubano a perfect sandwich.

In this analogy, your meat is the emails you send to your list. Without quality ingredients, the buns provide zero value.

Quality ingredients in this context include:

• Subject line

• Preview text

• Header(s)

• Body text

• Images/video

• Call(s) to action

I’m not going to go too much more into the this part of the sandwich because I write extensively about these topics every week. If you’re using email marketing, you should know to be sending regular content as well as setting up all your necessary automations.

The top layer bun

Before you can bite into this meaty sandwich of perfection, you need to add the top bun. Get out that olive oil or butter and lather it up…don’t skimp out.

Once again, this (somewhat tedious) analogy continues with the top bun being your website landing page.

What I mean by that is that most email marketing conversions will not happen in the email. It’s rare that you’re going to convert by someone replying to your email (unless you’re sending cold emails, of course).

Most conversions happen on a landing page for a product, service, PDF, event, and so on. In other words, when someone clicks the button in your email, they’re going to get sent to a page on your website that requires them to fill out a form or add a product to their cart. These pages need to be optimised to make that conversion as easy as possible.

The average landing page conversion rate is 4.02%, but you’re not average, amigo. You’re exceptional and so is your product or service. Aim for a conversion rate North of 7%.

Bon appetite

Congratulations, you’ve successfully sandwiched your email marketing efforts between optimised contact generation and conversion strategies.

The point of all this was to illustrate how email marketing doesn’t happen in a silo. As marketers and business owners, we need to consider how people enter your list, how they interact with your emails, and how they convert on your off-email pages.

Because there’s a front and back end to email marketing, it’s imperative that you don’t just focus on sending emails.

Recently, a client asked me to help improve her email marketing campaigns.

Before even touching her emails and automations, I told her that a newsletter sign-up in the website footer wasn’t good enough.

We needed a pop-up on her website that encouraged people to sign-up for 10% off their first order.

This small change resulted in the business email list going from 125 to 1002 subscribers in 8 months — a 702% increase.

If your business doesn’t sell physical products, consider giving away a free PDF, a link to an exclusive video, or a private blog post about something that’d interest your audience.

What I’m trying to say is that you need to give someone a reason to sign up.

Your marketing efforts can be better than 95% of your competitors if you just do the simple things correctly.

Enjoy your sandwich,Andrew