Email Marketing: What You Need to Know to Be Successful
When people think about email marketing, the first thing that often comes to mind is spam.
And for those who think that email marketing is a waste of time, it’s worth mentioning that it has a return on investment of $36 for every one dollar spent.
If you run a small business, you can benefit from email marketing just as much as anyone else.
Now let’s dive a bit more into setting up email marketing with a few tips and tricks!
Setting Up a Mailing List
Email marketing requires you to have email contacts of potential leads. But how do you create a mailing list?
One way is you can create a form and place it on your social media and your website.
One thing to note is that you should always ensure that customers know what they are signing up for. Provide an incentive for them to provide their email, which could be anything from “download this ebook” to “join our newsletter.”
Deciding on the Type of Email
Depending on your type of business, and the type of product or service, you will need to decide on the kind of emails you will be sending. Some of the types of emails include:
Newsletters
You can choose to create a newsletter that tells all about the company: their blog content, upcoming events, and any updates. It gives your customers the information they need and keeps you on their minds.
Lead nurturing
These emails are built to lead your potential customers to a sale. You want to guide them through your sales funnel and get them to make a conversion.
Lead nurturing builds trust so that when a customer is ready to buy, they’ll already know about your business
Since this type tends to take more than one email to make a conversion, you may have to spend some time figuring out what works best for your company.
Promotions
These are extremely common in email marketing, so you need to make sure you’re standing out from the crowd with your emails.
Instead of focusing on its promotion, try focusing on the product or service itself and add that it happens to be on sale. Let the product or service stand out and draw in your customers.
Milestones
Milestone emails are emails sent during a particular time in your customer’s life, like their birthday or anniversary.
These emails celebrate a special time for them and show that you care about your customers.
When Should You Send Them?
You will also need to decide on how frequently you will be sending the emails.
Will you be sending a monthly newsletter or promotional messages weekly?
Also, keep in mind what days and times your target customers are most likely to check their email and pay attention to what they’re reading.
For example, if you send out a bunch of emails on Monday, they might get missed because everyone’s still recovering from the weekend.
The times that work best can be different for every business, so keep up with analytics and make any necessary changes.
Designing the Email
It’s now time to design your email. Don’t forget to keep the customer in mind when creating them.
The goal is to create a message that resonates with the reader and makes them want to engage with it.
This means you have to understand what your readers and customers are searching for before creating your copy.
Of course, this also goes for choosing the ideal images. Make sure they’re high quality and that they make sense with your content.
Analyze Your Performance
Your email campaigns don’t end when you hit the send button. So you need to keep track of their performance and see if it’s working for your business.
After the first send, you have an excellent opportunity to get feedback from your customers.
Through analyzing, you will evaluate the different email marketing campaigns to determine which works and which doesn’t. Of course, each business is unique, and your marketing campaign will be too, so just keep trying until you find what clicks.
Tips to Make Your Email Marketing a Success
Use these great tips to take your email marketing to the next level:
1. Provide quality
You’ll know this from your personal experience—people do not want to go through hundreds of emails.
That’s why you should focus more on quality and less on quantity. Send emails that add value to your readers’ lives and create copy that people want to read. Your customers are coming to you for a specific reason. Posting about things away from your industry could cause them to leave.
Look at your customers and learn from them. Get feedback on what they like and don’t like and on how you can improve.
2. Entice customers to sign up
The signup form should not just be on your website’s homepage. You should include this in the blog, as well as in other pages of your site.
You can:
Add it to your blog with a “learn more” section about whatever topic the post is about
Add it to a “contact us” page for potential customers to get more information about working with you
Add it to an eBook download where the reader has to enter their email to get the book
The goal here is to entice readers on different web pages to provide their contact email. The more the readers see the signup form, the more likely they are to sign up.
3. Mobile-friendly emails
Making sure your emails are mobile-friendly is one of the most critical actions you can do when it comes to email marketing.
People use their phones to read their emails and shop most of the time, so optimizing your emails for mobile phones can keep your viewers reading.
Customers have a short attention span and will quickly move to the following email if yours isn’t mobile optimized.
One Final Word
Email marketing is alive and well even in 2021. With a high ROI, it makes sense to include email marketing in your arsenal of marketing strategies.
So, we’d advise you to get started today and learn more about how you can apply this type of marketing, regardless of the size of your business.
