Email marketing is a highly effective strategy and is a great way to connect with your leads, convert prospects into customers and nurture your professional relationships with your users. In this guide, you will learn the benefits of this form of marketing, how to establish a successful strategy, and tactics on how to manage your campaign effectively.
There are a variety of reasons why you should consider implementing email marketing into your business’s marketing strategy. It allows you to:
Strengthen customer relationships: establish and build connections with your customer base through emails with engaging and personalised content.
Keep everyone up-to-date: keep customers informed of what exciting new feats your business is taking on.
Promote yourself: share new content, products and services.
Boost brand awareness: keep your company on customers' screens and minds as often as possible.
Generate leads: attract prospective customers to your business by offering them assets in exchange for their information.
Along with these opportunities, email marketing presents many benefits. Some include:
Improving sales.
Generating traffic to your website.
Increasing leads.
Allowing for self-promotion.
Providing a means to collect feedback and survey data.
There are approximately 4.2 billion email users worldwide and on average the return on investment (ROI) for this form of marketing is $36 for every $1 spent. While this number certainly varies from business to business, this average ROI is higher than any other channel.
Now that you know why you should use email marketing, it’s time to get started. Creating a marketing campaign can be a daunting task, but with We Think Digital’s assistance, your customers will be receiving intriguing, personalised emails straight to their inboxes in no time. We’ve broken the process down into some integral steps so you can begin thinking about how you want to utilise this marketing opportunity.
Define your audience: Email marketing needs to be tailored to your customers. It’s always a good idea to formulate a user/buyer persona so you are certain of what your email recipients will positively respond to.
Establish your goals: What you want to achieve can vary greatly depending on your business. Knowing what you want from your email marketing campaign is a great way to ensure you make the right choices going forward.
Build an email list: An email list consists of a group of recipients that have provided permission for you to send them content. Effective ways to formulate an email list include lead magnets and opt-in forms. People are generally very careful with their personal information, so it’s important that you take every opportunity to make prospects feel comfortable and secure interacting with your business.
Decide on a campaign: This is where establishing goals for your email marketing comes in particularly handy. There are various sorts of marketing emails you can send out such as newsletters, lead nurturing emails, post sharing emails or revenue generating emails. All the different kinds of emails have their own functions, so deciding which method suits your goals best is key.
Create a schedule: Stay organised by knowing when your next email is going to be sent out. This way you can make sure their content is up to high standards and your recipients know they can rely on your consistency.
Collect and analyse your results: Small changes yield better results, so it’s important that you analyse the performance of your emails extremely carefully. You don’t want your customers uninterested or your funds wasted.
A fantastic first step in the process of sending marketing emails is to choose an email provider that’s right for you. An email service provider (ESP) is a helpful resource that assists in fine tuning your email marketing. ESPs have a variety of useful services, such as email list management, tracking and analytics and campaign creation tools. While utilising an ESP is a good idea if you’re looking to begin email marketing, you need to ensure you choose the correct provider and are well versed in how it functions. We Think Digital ensures every email that you send is eye-catching and highly professional.
There are many elements that should be present within every email, no matter the campaign you're running. These are things such as copy, images, calls to action, a subject line and personalisation. There is a lot to think about when filling out an email with content and the layout of the content is oftentimes just as important. Generating more leads is your primary goal and you can make this a reality by keeping all of this at the forefront of your mind.
Segmentation and personalisation are two methods that will help you present your audience with content that they are genuinely interested in and most likely to respond to in some way. You can segment or break up your list by the following categories:
Geographical location.
Lifecycle stage.
Awareness, consideration and decision stage.
Industry.
Previous engagement with your brand.
Language.
Job title.
A 2021 report by Litmus revealed that 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalised experiences. Making your customers feel special and valued will benefit everyone involved, so putting in that bit of extra effort is always worthwhile.
Marketing is an ever-evolving, always changing task and that is reflected in campaigns of any size. What worked for you yesterday may not work today, and keeping track of these changes and user preferences is integral to ensuring success. Taking a peak behind the lens and understanding your email analytics will allow you to make informed decisions going forward to improve your marketing tactics. Below are a few ways to analyse the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Test your emails: Every customer is different and has different preferences regarding what they want to be seeing. You want your emails to appeal to the majority of your listings and one way to ensure they do is to a/b test. This is a testing process in which you select one variable at a time, for example, a different subject line and generate two different options for this variable. Send out 50% of your emails with the first option and the other 50% with the second and see which option creates better results.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): While your campaign is new, set a group of KPIs that you will use to measure the success of your emails. These can be different for everyone depending on what your goals are, but we recommend you look at deliverability, open rate, click-through rate and unsubscribes.
Reports: Generate a report about your analytical findings as a way to better visualise where the strengths and weaknesses of your email marketing lie. Reports like these can be very helpful in creating and implementing new strategies that better your business’s marketing.
Email marketing is an effective way to engage your customers, generate new leads and increase overall conversions. However, it is potentially an involved process and there is a lot to juggle if you want your campaign to be successful. While the points we’ve discussed in this article are a great way to begin, if you want your emails to stand out from the rest of the crowd, you need a professional touch that our skilled team is eager to provide.
To get started on your email marketing or to transform your campaign’s effectiveness, get in touch by visiting our website today.
