8 Email Marketing Strategies That Will Boost Sales
Email marketing is one of the most underrated, yet beneficial strategies ever invented to generate worthy leads. A 2015 study by the DMA found that for every $1 spent, email campaigns have an average of $38 return on investment (ROI). Email marketing is surprisingly cheap and effective enough in keeping in touch with your customers. As such, you need to come up with an effective strategy to achieve your set goals.
Your email marketing campaign strategy must answer these four Ws:
What is your message?
Why do you want to send it out?
When do you want to send it?
And who are the recipients of the email?
Email marketing is the key to establishing great relationships with both existing and potential clients. It works like a charm because by creating these relationships, you are creating a key to getting them buying from you over and over again!
Below are some proven tips and strategies that will elevate your email marketing from basic to platinum performance:
Build an audience
Before you embark on any email marketing activity, ensure that you have an email list comprising of people or organizations within your target market. The tactic of email marketing has evolved over the years, from the good old days of email blasting to the current market-specific, targeted emails. Nowadays, businesses no longer use email as a form of mass communication but instead study the needs of their markets and go after them strategically. Did you know that about 99% of website visitors don’t usually take any action on their first visit? So how do you capture this audience – most of which may never visit your website again?
Building an audience takes effort: you need to research and strategically build your email list with contacts relevant to your target demographics. A website opt-in makes a great place to capture your potential market. The other key strategy to build an email list is to deploy lead magnets. A lead magnet is something that a business gives in return for a potential client’s contact. It can be anything, from a contact form to enable your visitors to subscribe to your newsletters, or request for a quote, or get a coupon, anything!
Copy
Email marketing requires an engaging copy that will entice your customers. My best approach when copywriting is the AIDA model: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Ensure that your email content can do the four in the easiest way possible. So how do you do this? Use simple language and ensure that not only your persona, but your clients’ shines through words. Is the opening line ‘Dear Client’ or Dear (Name). Ensure that everything is relatable and finally and most importantly, never forget the call to action. Click here to order, read more, request a quote, and learn more are examples of calls-to-action.
Design
Now that you have your copy, it’s time to design your email. Think through your content before you design your email from the subject line to the images and even the links. Is your font consistent? What about the colors?
The best way of approaching this is to think like a customer – what would appeal to you? Usually, using more images and illustrations works better than just words. This is because people may not read marketing emails. However, if there is something attractive, it will capture their attention and they’ll consider looking at everything else more keenly. Moreover, ensure that every artwork or image that you use is properly named and linked as this is important for SEO. Finally, do not forget to put in social media icons like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to encourage sharing! The two work hand in hand and will get you results.
Device Optimization
Have you ever opened a website on your smartphone and received a popup saying ‘open this window on a desktop to view all details?’ That is an example of a website page that is not properly optimized. Sometimes you can design an email – and it looks good on your laptop – but then after you send it and view it from your mobile phone, it looks different. That sounds okay, till you hear that on average, a whopping 47 percent of all emails are opened on a mobile device. There is a big problem when nearly half of your targeted customers are unable to see your communication as you intended it to look. This will in turn reflect in the volume of business your email campaigns drive. In order to beat this, it is advisable to use a responsive email design. By so doing, you will ensure a seamless interaction with your content for everyone regardless of the device or browser.
Timing
Like every channel of communication, timing is key for email marketing. It is advisable to do extensive research on your audience list before you send a marketing email to them. The timing usually plays a significant part in the success of your email as it influences the open-rate and click-through-rate. To get the most out of your campaign, send your email when your audience is most likely to be online and to pay attention so they don’t open your email or send you to the spam list – but they also read the content and interact with it.
Frequency
What do you do on days that you wake up and have several unread emails? Skim through the lines, open those that look important and mark all the rest as read? Yes, me too. What we mark as spam are often promotions, and, well, marketing emails. There is a thin line between keeping in touch with your customers and spamming them. Once you have established the most ideal timing, it’s time to think about how frequently you want to send these emails. Email marketing send frequency influences not only the open rates and click-through rates but also the unsubscribes. Depending on your industry, it could be anything from an email after every few days, to once a week or biweekly, to once a month. Some email marketing platforms like Mailchimp give great insights into the level of email marketing performance within each specific industry. Remember that jamming your subscriber’s inbox will only earn you an unsubscriber. Therefore, protect your potential clients by emailing them important things.
Email Marketing Automation
Now that the basics have been taken care of and you understand why you need to implement your email marketing strategy, it’s time to consider the steps that will ease the process. This is done through email marketing automation. There is never a single model for all approaches in any type of marketing, therefore one thing that works for one entrepreneur may not necessarily be the answer to another. Therefore, start by analyzing your needs before you, move towards thinking about a solution. Above all, automation is not supposed to replace email marketing strategies but rather complement them with the bottom line being, if it’s predictable and repeatable –automate it. If otherwise, handle it yourself.
Automation is ideal for delivering messages to website visitors, lead generation, and prospect nurturing. The main benefits of email automation include: improved message targeting, improving engagement rates, and bringing in more qualified leads. Automation is a good fit for certain messages, such as reminders, post-purchase education, a “happy birthday” message. You could also send a “Welcome Email” that contains a special offer, a whitepaper, or a how-to guide that helped convince the contact to provide their email address. Automation can also assist in a customer loyalty program in which an automated email sends a reward is sent to the contact’s email address when a certain amount of points are earned.
Offer free, accurate information to build your credibility
Depending on your industry, there is always something that can be offered for free. It could be anything, ranging from free consultation, a software trial, an informative newsletter – anything! Sending such information can be easily automated. Showing them that you have real value is imperative. Before conversions can accelerate higher, automation can be used in a few ways to make potential leads or purchasers aware of who you are, what you’re offering, and why you’re better than the competition. Early on in the decision-making process, potential customers want to learn more about you. Similarly, you want to know more about them… and probably want to find some way to get their email addresses so you can effectively deploy a lead nurturing strategy by taking the conversation past your landing page or blog posts.
Highlight regular offers
Something about offers will always get to a consumer. Don’t we all aim to keep a coin after spending? Featuring offers, such as “buy one get one free today on all purchases made on the website” or “all visits between 11:00 am and 1:00 pm are discounted on Mondays for this month” or something like an electronic coupon that is redeemable with a physical visit to your store will transform your email marketing audience from not just viewers but to buyers of your products. Email marketing tools such as Mailchimp have tons of templates that are helpful in coming up with useful designs for your audience.
Always follow up
Communication is defined as the exchange of information. If you physically meet a prospect, such as at a networking event, make a point of getting their contact and sending a follow-up email. Email marketing doesn’t have to be to thousands of customers: it also makes a great platform to follow up with potential leads. By so doing, you will increase your conversion rate. You can also use automation to achieve this. Automation emails can be sent to potential leads or customers pre-conversion to make them aware of your products or service, convince them to follow you, and eventually convert. Automation emails can also be sent to leads and customers actively engaged in the decision-making process to convince them to finalize their conversion to a customer and also post-conversion to check in on the experience, offer guidance, provide links to information, or encourage repeat purchases.
Making your email marketing strategy work goes beyond just collecting email addresses and sending campaigns to subscribers. Create a deliberate plan to enhance your marketing efforts by helping your target market better identify with your brand. Get in touch with us today if you want help in executing an email marketing strategy that will achieve an exceptional return on investment.
