Effective Email Marketing
The internet was first used for sending out email, well short communication anyway. Electronic mail is a way of life. Although today, Whatsapp, Twitter and such message services have taken over, e-mail is still a valid communication and marketing tool.
We’ve all come across emails sitting in our inbox from websites we might have paid a visit to or purchased something from, websites promoting something, or a company launching a new product. As an entrepreneur, it is very important to know how to market your product online. Email marketing is one of the most important aspects of a business. Although it is done by everyone, most people do not understand the basics. So let’s get back to basics and understand some positive points on how you can use email marketing effectively.
1. Get users to sign up for your emails?
When you enter someone’s home, you are invited or get permission. Likewise, by making someone sign up for your emails, you are getting permission to enter their inbox. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think like they do. Their first question is “why do I want more emails?” or “whats in it for me?” Unless your website user sees receives a benefit, they won’t sign in! Provide a call to action (see our 47 point checklist for more website must haves) that gives your potential customer something of value. Do not call it your newsletter because to be honest no body really wants to read that. They want tips or tricks that they can implement immediately to improve their lives or business.
Use an Email Responder Service
Most reputed email service companies make sure that their emails aren’t blocked by ISPs, but they still can’t control whether it’s in the spam or the inbox. Getting white-listed is one of the most effective ways of ensuring that your email marketing reaches the client directly and is not ignored. There are a number of email responders like Mail chimp, Constant Contact, etc. We like Mailchimp, it is free up to a certain point and very effective for the minimal cost.
2. Making sure that your efforts bear fruits
With email marketing, follow-up is key. If you’ve promised a weekly email, but you are sending it out every day, customers will get irritated and unsubscribe. If you do the opposite, sending it out monthly, you will lag behind and not get the desired result. Stick to a schedule and be consistent. Most email responders have automated options to allow you write your emails in advance and schedule them to go out in the future on planned dates.
3. Email marketing at the right time
When you’ve set the expectations of a subscriber, your consistency with them really matters. Amazon is a great example for this. They send out offers only according to what the customer bought or is interested in. Offers which are not valuable or directed to the target audience are not likely to receive much response.
At this point we should mention that it is ok if people unsubscribe from your emails. Ultimately you want people receiving your valuable information who are going to eventually buy from you. If somebody unsubscribes it just means they were not going to buy anyway. In this way your email list becomes lean, mean and effective.
4. Segmentation
Segmenting a list is the practice of splitting your email list into segments. By doing this, you are able to send your automated email to the right target customers. For example, one user has signed up for a specific webinar topic about email marketing, so we put them in a segment called “called email marketing seminar”. Another user downloads a valuable pdf about building a better website and is added to a segment called “building a better website”. These users are all part of the same email list but when we automate our email marketing each segment gets sales info that is related to what they signed up for. In this way, you don’t overwhelm them as well be able to offer them some of your other free information at various times through the automated marketing plan.
Email marketing is an efficient and economical way to not only retain customers but to collect new ones too. When you measure the success rate of an email marketing campaign with a traditional one, you will realize that the return on investment in email marketing is much higher than in some marketing mediums.
Email remains one of the most successful tools used for marketing because it reaches people have invited you into their inbox, provides valuable and timely info and allows you to marketing directly to the right target market.
Give email marketing a try with Cowlick Studios. Give us a call at 226-783-0812 or email us at info@cowlickstudios.com.
