When you want to grow your brand or sell your product, email marketing is a great avenue to take. It’s effective, wildly popular and can help you create ongoing brand awareness. Email marketing is great for showcasing or promoting your products or services and can be effective for incentivising customer loyalty. Below is a definition of what email marketing is along with a few tips to help you get started with your very own email marketing campaign.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful form of direct marketing that can be used to promote your business’s products or services. It’s effective in making subscribers aware of your lastest items and offers and can assist with lead generation and building relationships. It can also be used as a softer sell with the purpose of educating your audience on the value of your brand and keeping their attention between purchases. This approach is particularly useful for B2B brands.
Why you should use email marketing
Email marketing is such a powerful tool for businesses because it grabs the recipient’s attention and compels them to take some kind of action. This could be reading it, deleting it or archiving it. It’s also one of the most cost-effective tools out there and is inexpensive compared to print media and social media. Especially since social media is becoming pay-to-play for businesses. All email marketing requires is a small investment of time and resources to create compelling content.
Email marketing is the second most influential source of information for B2B audiences behind word of mouth according to Digital Strike. Customers who make purchases through email offers spend 138% more when compared to those who don’t receive an email. On top of that, 73% of millennials say that email is their preferred method of business communication. This is good news for businesses since millennials currently hold the most buying power.
Email marketing is useful for building meaningful relationships with your audience and driving traffic to your website, blog, social media pages or where ever you want your subscribers to go. You can segment your audience emails by demographics to be more effective by narrowing your focus and sending messages to targeted email lists. Segmenting will ensure that your campaigns are more relevant to your audience and you’ll get better results.
How to build an email marketing list
To build a successful email audience, it’s worth considering the below email marketing best practices.
- Treat them like VIPs. Send exclusive content to your email subscribers and notify them of new products and services. People generally expect this type of content when they sign up for email marketing as part of joining a loyalty program and it’s an excellent way to reward them and make signing up feel exclusive.
- Once they have signed up, regularly send your recipients high quality and relevant content. This will keep subscribers engaged and maintain a relationship with them. New subscribers, more often than not, are curious about your brand, want to learn more about it and how you will add value to their lives.
- Time-sensitive giveaways are great for gaining new subscribers and growing your audience quickly. Just remember to be respectful and add a disclaimer that notifies them of what it means for them if they choose to subscribe. You should also provide an option for them to only sign up for the giveaway, if that is all they are interested in.
- Marketing is all about starting conversations and building lasting relationships. A great way to do this is by acknowledging your subscriber’s birthdays or other important dates to make them feel special. Bonuses, discounts or gift cards are an excellent way to show them that they are valued. Special dates can be captured via a signup form or automatically as a part of your campaign.
- Offering discounts on goods or services every once in a while is a great way to encourage more subscribers.
- Divert every now and then from your regular marketing content to send out surveys, show your customers some appreciation or to follow up on an abandoned online shopping cart. This will give your audience a chance to provide you with valuable feedback and may give them some insight into the person behind the business.
- Don’t flood people’s inboxes with too many emails. No one appreciates that, especially when they have trusted you with their email address. Only send them relevant messages about topics that interest them.
Follow these guidelines and you are guaranteed to have a loyal subscriber base for a long time.
