A common misconception when it comes to email marketing is that it just annoys your clients, or that they will feel spammed by your frequent emails. However, in reality, if you are providing value to your clients through your email campaigns, they are going to enjoy and look forward to getting your emails!
In fact, email marketing works! It is one of the best ways to reach your target audience while building relationships and brand recognition with them. Also, it has one of the highest Returns on Investment (ROI), with the average return being $42 on every $1 you spend. Their likelihood of purchasing from you is increased, as they have already entrusted you with their email and are familiar with your brand.
In this post, we will inform you on the benefits of email marketing, the basics needed to start, tips on how to turn it into a highly converting marketing method, and tips on growing your email list.
Benefits to Email Marketing
- Affordable – It ranges from free to a few dollars a month.
- Measurable – It’s easy to keep track of who is engaging with it and who they are.
- Easy to Use and Create – Drag and drop templates are available.
- Effective and Profitable – It has amazing Returns On Investment, like mentioned above.
Basics to Start
- Define Your Audience – Who are you speaking to? Who is your ideal client?
- Create and Send Valuable Content – What would your ideal client find value in? What do they need to make their lives easier?
- Create a Marketing Plan – Schedule email campaigns within your content marketing plan. Think of promotions that would suit different holidays or seasons. Try starting at a frequency of once a month and work your way up to once a week, while maintaining consistency.
Steps to Become Highly Converting
Once you have the basics down, you will want to make sure you consider the following to grow your success!
Keep Readers Engaged
- When speaking to your audience, use the right tone of voice to suit them. Additionally, be creative with storytelling and be authentic.
- Visually, it is important to have a balance of text, images, and other media (videos etc.). You want to avoid having big chunks of text, try to break it down to bullet points or small sentences.
Know Your Goal
- Create content that supports your goal. Draw your audience in to complete this action by using call to actions.
- For example, “book an appointment”, “subscribe”, “register today” or “purchase now”. Highlight this in your calls to action within your email!
Test What Works Well
- Tues, Wed, Thurs are the days of the week that have the highest read rate. However, use your analytics to see when and what improves your read rate among your audience.
- Watch out for spam triggers (Save, Help, $$, % off), as well as using some less reputable platforms. This may lead your client’s inboxes to send your emails to spam. Play around with it to see what triggers it and what doesn’t.
- A/B testing can be useful to trial run the effectiveness of your email campaign. Send your email campaign out as a test run to a small segment of your list, and then see how people are reacting and engaging with it. If it didn’t get the results you wanted, then you can make some tweaks before sending it out to the rest of your list.
- Segmentation of your list can also result in more engagement. According to Mail Chimp,“Segmented email marketing campaigns get 14.64% more email opens and 100.95% more clicks compared to non-segmented campaigns”. This is when you send different email campaigns out to different clients to meet their needs more specifically. Such as, sending your workshop clients a different email from your consultation clients.
Create a Valuable Opt-In or Lead Magnet
- A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or contact information. Whatever you create, make sure it is something that your ideal client would like and fits their needs. Examples of this are special deals, a free e-book, a PDF checklist, video etc.
Tips to Grow Your Email List
- Use social media to share your lead magnet with your audience. Let them know about your offer, then link it to a separate page where they can exchange their email address for your offer.
- Organizing a referral program or a loyalty program. For example, offering a promotion or discount for those that forward your email to 5-10 others.
- Network with others, both online and offline. Let others know about your offer and the value of signing up for your email campaigns. This can be as simple as having a sign-up sheet in your store and asking customers if they would be interested in joining. This can also be done at larger events like festivals or events, of course, when restrictions let up!
With these changes, your email campaigns will soon be highly converting marketing method. If you have any questions on managing your business’s marketing campaigns, contact me!