Email marketing can help your business connect to your audience, establish trust, and increase sales. It’s also inexpensive and easy to do. However, many businesses lack consistency in their email marketing efforts. If that sounds like your business, we have a few strategies that can help you get back on track.
First, let’s define what email marketing is exactly. Email marketing involves sending emails directly to potential customers in your target audience. How do you get email addresses for your target audience? You can capture contact information during sales or entice customers to sign up for emails by offering a discount for new subscribers. You may also get leads from other businesses or organizations you partner with as long as their contact list shares similar characteristics with your ideal customer. Email marketing can refer to newsletters where you share general updates about your business or promotional emails offering special discounts.
Unlike social media ads or paid search ads, email ads are sent directly to the customer. This makes it feel more personal to the customer. On Facebook or Instagram, they are just one of the thousands or even millions of people scrolling past your ad. It is more likely that your message will get lost in a crowded timeline. However, their email inbox is for their eyes only.
Since most people check their email several times a day for work, school, and even personal reasons, they are sure to see it. Also, almost everyone has an email address, while some customers may make a conscious decision not to have social media. Email allows you to reach customers who might not otherwise interact with your brand.
Email marketing consistently delivers results. On average, email marketing offers a 122% return on investment. This is because it is relatively inexpensive for companies to run email marketing campaigns, but they bring in a lot of sales. You can even schedule emails ahead of time and send them automatically. This allows you to set aside one chunk of time at the beginning of the week or month for content creation and let your marketing take care of itself.
It is easy to divide your mailing list into different segments based on income, gender, age, location, and more. Targeting highly specific populations with deals designed to appeal just to them is a great way to ensure that you are bringing in sales.
If email marketing is so easy to do and offers so many benefits for businesses? Why do some companies struggle to take full advantage of it? To be effective, you have to be consistent with your email efforts. You should be sending out one weekly email at a minimum, but most successful companies email customers almost daily. This means you must constantly think about new content to send, create it, and remember to send it. If you’re a small business, this may get overwhelming. Fortunately, we have a few tips to streamline the process so you can boost your sales with a successful email strategy.
Getting started is often the hardest part of any task. It’s very easy to say every week that you’ll start focusing on improving your email marketing efforts…next week. If that sounds like you, try putting your commitment into writing and preferably share it with someone else who can hold you accountable. Decide what measurable goals you have for your email marketing—for example, a certain increase in sales or web traffic. Make a plan for how you are going to use email marketing to achieve those goals. Finally, select a date for sending the first email.
Email marketing is a way to establish a relationship with your customers through consistent communication. However, this only works if your customers are actually reading your emails and not marking them as read or deleting them without ever opening them. Remember that your customers may get hundreds of emails each day from work, school, personal contacts, and other businesses trying to market to them. You need to get their attention by sending them emails that add value to their lives. This could be a “quick win” in the form of a coupon they can redeem immediately. Educational or inspirational content also works well. This can include a DIY that involves your product, interviews with leaders of your organization, or testimonials from satisfied customers.
Sending out emails on a consistent schedule helps both you and your customers. When you’re starting out, send a weekly email on the same day each week, as close to the same time as you can. Choose the day and time when you commit to email marketing, and set a weekly reminder for yourself. Having a set day and time makes it more likely that sending your weekly email will become a habit or routine, and you will be less likely to forget. Consistent communication helps you stay at the front of your customers’ minds.
Batching emails can help you stay on schedule because it lets you create emails ahead of time and set them up to send automatically at a predetermined time and date. It can also help you save time. Set aside one day each month or week to create all your emails for that time period. Creating a template that you use for all external communications can make this process even simpler. Once you are done, you can schedule each email to send on the correct date and time. This minimizes the risk of human error and frees up more of your time for other tasks. Most email platforms come with a feature that allows you to create and schedule multiple emails at the same time.
The majority of email automation will also track key performance metrics for you, including bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates, and more. Ideally, you want high open and click-through rates; these show that people are opening your emails, reading their content, and then visiting your site. As you consistently track email performance, you’ll start to learn which kind of content gets the most opens and clicks. This streamlines content creation because it tells you how to focus your efforts to get the best return on your investment.
Email marketing is just one component of a successful online strategy. It’s not enough to run killer advertising campaigns; your website needs to look great, run smoothly, and be easy for interested customers to navigate. At BHirst Media, we’re experts at building and maintaining top-quality websites. Contact Us to learn more about our Comprehensive Website Care Plans and Web Design services.
