How Can Email Marketing Help My Business?
There’s a lot of jargon surrounding digital marketing, but the term ‘email marketing’ is pretty much self-explanatory – it’s using email to get your company’s message in front of potential customers. But how email marketing can help your business is not so straightforwardly explained. Follow our email marketing tips and techniques, and you’ll soon learn the essentials.
Physical post is in decline – in the UK, addressed mail was down 8 percent in 2018. Use of email, on the other hand, is increasing at an almost unmeasurable rate – in 2018 a survey by the Radicati Group estimated the number of consumer and business emails sent per day at more than 281 billion, and it projects the figure to grow to more than 333 billion by 2022. It’s said that 86 percent of professionals name email as their favourite mode of communication.
Compared to post, email is a big money-saver. You don’t have the costs of printing, packing, handling, and posting letters or leaflets, and once you have a template for a newsletter designed, you can use it again and again at no extra cost.
But why is email advertising particularly suitable for promoting SMEs? An email marketing agency will tell you that it’s an essential tool to grow your business in the fast-paced world of the internet, as it offers open, conversational, and interactive communications.
But aren’t people’s in-boxes already crammed with email? Isn’t a lot of it consigned straight to the junk folder? An email marketing company will help you to avoid these traps, and to tailor a campaign which will pay off handsomely in terms of customer engagement.
What Is Email Marketing?
There are many different forms of permission-based email marketing, including newsletters or ezines, special email promotions, daily deal emails, solo blasts, follow-up sequences, auto responders, and email courses.
All of these are popular because they are relatively inexpensive, quick to start and easy to keep going. The main essential, of course, is an email list of valid clients, potential customers, and subscribers who want to hear about your products and services. Once you have that, you can email them regularly to keep your company’s name in their minds and boost your sales.
Email marketing keeps you in touch with your target audience and builds your credibility and brand awareness. Keep your email marketing consistent, relevant and valuable, and it will help you to promote your brands and services.
To find out how email marketing can help your business, ask an email marketing agency for advice on presentation and content of your material. By sharing your company activities with your customers – perhaps you are planning to display your products at an exhibition, or have a new range being launched – you can educate your current clients and attract new ones.
A well-designed email newsletter can attract new opportunities such as media appearances, conference participation, and strategic partnerships.
You can even turn your email marketing into a source of revenue. Ask an email marketing digital agency about the possibilities of inserting referrals, on which you could earn commission on sales, or even about selling advertising space in your newsletters – once your mailing list is big enough, it will become attractive to other businesses too.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
According to email marketing company MarketingSherpa, 91 percent of US adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with, and McKinsey says that email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers.
McKinsey suggests these email marketing tips and techniques:
- There’s more to it than the first click. Opening the email should be the first of a series of interactions with your brand.
- Click through to a customised landing-page on your website – this can increase conversion rates by more than 25 percent. Remember to optimise that landing page for mobile devices – more than 45 percent of all marketing emails are opened on a mobile device.
- Learn and share. Any email marketing company will tell you that an email is a chance to learn more about your consumer, and to share that data with your team. Define a clear objective for each campaign, capture data, and share it within the marketing group.
- Use past user click-throughs, browsing history and purchase history to personalise your emails for each user. Building these sorts of targeting abilities requires specific capabilities and supporting infrastructure which may require the help of an email marketing digital agency.
How To Use Email Marketing For Business
One of the best email marketing tips is that the first essential for any email marketing campaign is to establish your goals, whether it is to generate leads, drive conversions, build brand loyalty or increase donations. An email marketing company may give you advice on the type of campaign you need, who to target, how to put together content and how to measure success.
You may wish to send links to stories on your website, promote new products to drive customers to online or physical stores, or highlight a particular event or campaign.
You then need to build your email list by importing a list of known contacts (checking that you have adequate permissions to email them), or by building a list from scratch using a sign-up box on your website. Offer an incentive, such as sending blog content, or offering discounts or free or discounted product shipping.
An email marketing agency can advise you on how to make the sign-up process easy; on your website, a header bar with an entry form and a highly visible call to action is a simple option.
Next, you need to decide what type of campaign to send. A newsletter, for instance, is good for covering one subject, and ideal for keeping in touch with existing customers, while to drive direct sales, you may prefer a marketing offer email with a prominent BUY NOW button.
The announcement campaign, in which the aim is to publicise a new product, feature or service, is another type of email advertising, ideal if you have an engaged audience and want to keep them up to date and drive them back to your website to make a purchase.
How To Do Email Marketing Yourself
It is possible to use online tools to set up your own email marketing, but to find out how email marketing can help your business, you may need the help of an email marketing agency.
When you are planning your first email marketing campaign, it can be tempting to simply sign up for an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor, and start sending your first messages. These drag-and-drop tools can be easy to use, but an email marketing agency will be able to give you some email marketing tips and techniques which might not be immediately obvious.
Structure your emails so the reader is guided towards the call to action. Use the ‘inverted pyramid model’, with a catchy headline conveying your key message, followed by supporting information and visuals, leading to a prominent call to action button.
One of the best email marketing tips and techniques is to use visuals when directing your readers to take a desired action – according to marketer Jesse Mawhinney of Kulapartners, 80 percent of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing.
Ask any email marketing digital agency and you will be told that improving email personalisation is a number one goal, but can also be the greatest challenge. An email marketing company will be able to help you in areas such as marketing automation, segmented lists, and third-party integrations which can make email personalisation easier and more effective.
Email marketing tips and techniques for personalisation include starting by adding the name in the subject line, then customising campaign content based on list segments to improve engagement. List segmentation, which categorises your subscribers according to their interests, will make it easier for you to choose what content to send them, and will improve response rates.
Think about the frequency of your email advertising; too often could be unwelcome, too rarely risks your subscribers forgetting who you are or why they subscribed. Try giving them options as to how often they hear from you.
Keep your content to the famous Pareto Principle ratio of 80 percent information to 20 percent promotion. If the balance goes too far the other way, you risk alienating your readership.
Then measure your results. If you are using an email marketing tool, it will generate reports on how people interacted with your email campaign, such as recording opens, bounces, click-throughs, shares, spam complaints and unsubscribes. Otherwise, you can use Google Analytics to measure the impact on your website in terms of page visits, time spend on the site, which campaigns were effective and so on.
A standard approach to testing how your list segments respond to personalization is to test a subject line that includes the subscriber’s first name against one that doesn’t. Campaign Monitor reported that this comparison suggests a 26 percent increase in open rates using personalised subject lines.
Try to avoid words in your subject line which might trigger spam filters. An email marketing agency will advise you on the key words to avoid.
What Are Some Email Marketing Tips and Tricks?
To finish off, let’s consider a few email marketing tips and tricks which should serve you well as you plan your first campaign.
- Make sure your email marketing campaign increase your brand recognition by incorporating your logos, company colours and taglines into your emails. Just because they’re digital doesn’t mean your emails should have any less design value.
- Remember to promote your email newsletter via social media, on your website, when speaking, in products, and even in your email signature.
- Re-use your email material. Once you have sent out newsletters on a series of topics, compile them into an ebook, guide, or white paper. An email marketing company can help you to turn them into audio material.
- Drive traffic back to your website by using your email to promote the latest posts.
- Use your email newsletter to test content topics, subject lines and headlines, then turn the most popular content into a free information product or an opt-in gift.
- Share your ezine articles on article sharing sites like Outbrain, Taboola, and Quora to gain exposure and visibility for your brand.
- Send your marketing emails on a Tuesday – more email is opened on Tuesday than on any other day.
- Try and try again. If subjects don’t open an email the first time, target them again with a specific list segment. If they still don’t respond, don’t be afraid to remove them from your list – this will increase the overall open rate of the remaining names.
A powerful driver of sales and revenue for your business, email marketing has a greater reach and better ROI than any other channel available to marketers, so try it today and see the unrivalled results it can deliver.
TRON Media can help with all your email marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in email marketing, content marketing, web design, SEO, PPC, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build an email marketing strategy perfect for your business.
TRON Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to help you reach your audience. Get in touch today to find out about our latest email marketing and web design services, and what a creative digital agency can do for your business.
Contact us using our Contact Form, call Lasharie in London on: 020 7870 9041 or Simon on: 020 3006 6889 or by emailing us at: [email protected].
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