customers, whether through social media, face-to-face, or other channels, it is easy to overlook email marketing. If your business is not actively building a database of customer emails, you
may be setting your business up for digital failure.
But what exactly is email marketing?
Email marketing is more than a regurgitation of your latest blog post(s). That is not email marketing. Proper email marketing delivers the right message at the right time to the right
audience.
What is Email Marketing?
Before we get into why email marketing is important for your business, let’s understand exactly what email marketing is. Email marketing is a way to reach your customers or prospective customers through email who have
given your business explicit permission to contact them.
As Spiderman’s uncle said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”
This definitely applies to email marketing. So many businesses (likely your competitors) do
not use email marketing responsibly. Just because you have permission to email someone doesn't mean you should constantly blast them with your latest blog posts or sales pitches.
Instead, you need to use email marketing responsibly since it is such a powerful channel.
Let’s take a look at why it is so important for your business.
Targeted Marketing Opportunities Unlike many other marketing opportunities, when properly implemented, email marketing can
provide your business with various ways to target specific customers. To do this, make sure that your email marketing software allows for
lead scoring. This will allow you to define various milestones or actions that a user exhibits through interactions within emails or your website. Once a user has met the criteria you have defined, you can then follow up with them with targeted messaging to further drive them down the funnel.
For example, let’s say that you send out an email that contains information on a sale you are having this month. You have also setup lead scoring to know who has bought something as a result of this email and someone who has not.
What you could do is find out if a user clicked a link in your email, viewed the product, but did not complete the checkout process. Your email marketing software could then follow up automatically with these users with an email (possibly a discount code) in order to entice them to purchase.
For those that did purchase, they could be placed into an email campaign that could provide tips and tricks on how to use the product they just purchased. Perhaps, if the product they purchased has a steep learning curve, you could offer a series of emails that are essentially on boarding process.
More Personal and Targeted than Social Media While there are many benefits of using social media for your business, there are many of your customers who might not use social media.
However, these people more than likely have an email address.
There are numerous ways to capture a
customer’s email address. A few ways are having a form on your website, asking them during the account creation or checkout process, or even asking them during a phone call. Pair their email address up with a first and
last name and you have the foundation set for sending personalized emails, meaning you could dynamically insert their information within emails or subject lines.
Once you have the basic contact information from a customer, you can implement progressive profiling to gather more information.
For example, let’s say that you are a realtor and
want to send an email out about an ebook
called “7 Tricks Your Realtor Doesn’t Know”.
However, to get this ebook, you need some additional information from the user. Perhaps, you are interested in knowing if the user is
interested in buying or selling in the next “X” months. Or maybe, you want to know what price range they are interested in buying or selling for? No matter what you ask, keep it short in
length and questions (probably no more than 3 or so). The user submits the form, they get the ebook they wanted, you get the info you needed.
Just think of the ways you can use this
additional info to provide targeted and
personalized messaging to your customer database. Once you have gained additional information, you could put certain users into
new nurturing campaigns to continue the email
marketing relationship. For example, you know
who the buyers are instead of the sellers and you could message each accordingly. Pretty cool, right?
While you can segment users manually in some
social networking sites like Google+, it is much
more laborious than with email marketing. On
top of that email marketing is very scalable in this respect.
Data Driven & Measurable
Knowing what works and what doesn’t is key to the success and improvement of a marketing
campaign. With email marketing, you get
insights into your initiatives.
Insight into a metric like open rates which is
what percent of users who were sent an email
actually opened the email you sent. One key
factor in improving open rates is having an
intriguing subject line. Whether it is having
personalization in the subject line, or text that
makes it impossible for them not to open,
having an eye catching subject line helps to
create higher open rates.
Another metric your business can track is click
through rate (CTR), which is essentially what
percent people clicked on a link within the
email. If you are really doing email marketing
right, you should split test different calls to
actions (CTA) within your email copy (and even subject lines). Knowing if one particular
phrasing works better than others in generating click throughs, can provide exponential results
to your campaign.
Having access to these and other metrics help
your business keep tabs on what is or is not
working in your email marketing initiatives.
Permission to Contact
Prospects & Clients
Let’s face it, it is much easier to see results by
contacting those who want to hear from you.
This is done very easily in email marketing by
having users confirm their email address after
they submit it to your business. This is called a
“double opt-in”, meaning that not only did the
user submit their email address, but they are
confirming they did so by logging into their
email and clicking on a verification link you send them.
By clicking this verification email, they are
granting you permission to contact them via
email.
Now that you have their permission, you must
be conscious of how often you email them as
you don’t want to flood their inbox with your
messages. Users will start to ignore your emails,
or worse unsubscribe completely from your
email list.
With the permission to email, your business can
do a number of things with email marketing.
You can create nurturing campaigns, send them
monthly newsletters, or use it for progressive
profiling.
Stay Top of Mind
Email marketing allows your business to email
the consumer whenever you want. While not
every email needs to be a sales pitch, your
contact with the customer should provide
something of value to them. Whether this is a
link to your latest blog post, an email asking
them questions relating to your industry, or even
an update on new products coming out in the
near future; using email to stay connected to
your customers keeps your brand in the
forefront of their minds.
With the personalization of email, you can tailor
your message to be warm and friendly and not
cold, stale, and corporate. The personal touch
will help them connect with your company on a
personal level and not think you are just
interested in having them buy something. This
ultimately builds relationships, loyalty, and trust
among your subscribers.
Generate Sales
At the end of the day, your business is about
making sales. You have probably heard the
phrase, “the money is in the list.” The list they
are referring to is your email list.
Email marketing can be a channel to help you
increase sales when implemented properly. I am
not talking about blasting your list with sales
pitch after sales pitch. That won’t work out too
well. Your business needs to use email
marketing the right way. The smart way. To do
this, I suggest pairing up your email marketing
with a marketing automation platform, allowing
you to put your email marketing initiatives on
overdrive.
Through lead scoring, progressive profiling, and
well defined email campaigns, your business
can know when a customer is primed for a
purchase. Knowing where your customer is in
the funnel through lead scoring will give you
insights on when to be more aggressive with
sales based messaging.
Being able to lead the customer further down
the funnel on their own terms is a powerful tool.
By allowing them exhibit certain actions before
hitting them up for a sale will not only make
your customer happy, but your bottom line as
well.
Cost Effective & Affordable
You might be thinking that email marketing
sounds great and all, but with all these features,
it is surely an expensive strategy? Sure there
will be some initial up front setup and
implementation costs, but once once the
foundation is set, the ongoing maintenance cost
is minimal compared to the return.
Still Have Questions About
Email Marketing?
No worries! Simply submit a comment below
with your questions, concerns, struggles, and
successes.
Do you know of a business owner that has
questions about email marketing? Send them
this link to help them out.
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