Email marketing can be a powerful tool in your business to cultivate relationships with your community of followers. It is a way that your business/brand can interact with clients or potential clients about things happening in your company, a way for you to share your personal story, offer special promotions, and show tips & tricks. There are many possibilities with how you can connect with your followers through email marketing because the beauty behind it is that you have full control over what you want to say, when you want to say it, and the topics you want to cover. It's unlike social media platforms that have restrictions and you don't have full control over who you are going to reach.
With an email list, you can reach 100% of the people that have signed up for your emails by landing in their inboxes. While you may not have control over who is going to click and open the message, businesses have a higher chance of this occurring because the individual subscribed to be part of your list to hear from YOU!
Email marketing helps build trust and authority with subscribers and is a great way to generate revenue for your business. Because people trust what you have to say and what you have to offer this gives them a reason to purchase from you. Email marketing can take a lot of thoughtful planning and content to engage properly with your followers, but it can help serve your business in many ways that other social media platforms or advertising efforts cannot. An email list can generate more return on your investment, is an inexpensive advertising method, and can help you reach the right people for your business.
Why having an email list is important?
Think about if you put all your energy into building your Instagram and Facebook followers and one day those social media platforms no longer existed. What would you do? How would you feel? And most importantly how would you reach your followers and clients?
While social media offers many amazing benefits, it is a platform that is not controlled by you. Social media accounts can get deactivated, content can get pulled down, and information is only shown to a small percentage of people. If this happens, what would you do and how would you reach the people that you want to engage and interact with for your business? Putting all your eggs in one basket allows you to be up a creek without a paddle with the possibility of losing your content, your following, etc. This is why email lists are so important to your business.
Email lists allow you to collect the email address of clients or potential clients and land right into their inboxes. It's not as easy to give out your email address as it is to click a follow button, but people who sign up for your email list choose to give you their information and want to hear from you. This allows for a personalized experience right in someone's inbox.
An email program allows a company to:
Define what their content looks like
Who they are going to send messages to
Decide how often they are going to send messages
Create dynamic personalization - addressing a subscriber by their name, showing content to a subscriber based on their search history or viewing activity.
Engage with their audience so that your company/brand won't fall top of mind when a customer needs something.
These are just a few ways in which email provides a unique marketing approach allowing companies freedom and control while bringing a more authentic and personal experience to the email subscriber.
Is email marketing effective?
Email is an extremely effective tool to reach customers while also bringing in revenue for a business. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email is 40
times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. According to Constant Contact, every $1 spent on email marketing can generate a return of $36 - which is a higher return for marketing than you will see with other advertising efforts like social media. Email marketing works and it can make you money if you do it properly. It can help you acquire new leads and customers and can help retain those customers when a need arises if you offer the particular services they are looking for.
Social media marketing has its own reasonings for how it should be used in your business and is another way to grow your following, however, it doesn't generate nearly the same number of returns for your business' sales as email does. With email marketing, companies are able to reach every customer on their email list (if they wanted to) whereas when companies post on social media platforms, like Instagram, only 10% of their audience actually sees their post. This means that most of a company's social media audience doesn't even see what they are posting a majority of the time. In addition, getting more visibility for a social media post requires a significant amount of money behind it. With email, you have control over 100% of your email base from who receives your emails and you control what you think particular audiences would like to see.
Email Automation
Today, automation is key when running a business and certainly when it comes to email marketing. As a business owner or someone running a business you want to spend your time focused on growing sales and growing your business, not writing emails every day to send to your audience. Your time is valuable and time is money. Therefore, incorporating automation into your email marketing program is critical to saving time as you continue to reach your audience and increase sales.
Automation allows you to prepare your content ahead of time, schedule it, and send it to your email audience when an action is taken. Emails can be sent to your entire list or to a portion of your list based on segments of customers.
Examples of ways in which email automation can be incorporated into your business are:
Welcome Series Emails - These are a series of emails sent to people who subscribe to be a part of your email list. These emails welcome subscribers to your community and tell them about what you have to offer. Typically, the first email is sent immediately once the person subscribes to your list and then the next set of emails gets sent a series of emails days later about different topics you'd like to introduce them to.
Customer Inquiries - Email automation can be built in when a customer reaches out with an inquiry. If a visitor or customer is looking for specific information about a topic, a rule can be set up to trigger an email with the information that the customer may need. This can save time responding to customer inquiries, but also get the customer the information they are looking for immediately.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails - These emails can be set up to be sent when someone leaves a product in their shopping cart on your website. An email can be triggered several days later to remind the customer that they have that product in their cart with the hopes they return to make their purchase.
Post-Purchase Emails - These types of emails can be sent to a customer after they have made a purchase. It can be a series of emails that thanks the customer and connects the customer to a product giving them a discount code for their next purchase. A follow-up email can be sent later with general questions or FAQs to help a customer with their purchase or ask them if they need support. A third email can be sent asking for a review or rating on the product or services offered. Ask customers what they liked, didn't like, how this product was able to help them, and what results they saw from the purchase. This can help businesses make improvements or they can use shining reviews as part of their marketing programs with the customer's permission.
Automated email triggers can easily be set up through rules in the email platform of your choice. Rules defined by actions that trigger an email response can save companies time and stress later on. Businesses that plan upfront, create meaningful messages to their audience, and build out action-based rules will help reach the right people at the right time and get the right message in front of them, ultimately growing sales and engagement.
How to grow your email list?
Gaining followers and growing your email list is an important strategy for any business. It's something that if you are not currently doing today is something you will want to start working towards and developing. Businesses that are consistently adding fresh contacts to their list are generating growth in their business by reaching people that want to hear from your business and eventually turning them into clients.
So how is this possible and what are the strategies to do this?
Create engaging content - high-quality engaging content is key to growing your email list. Be your authentic self when you write your emails. You have control over the content you put out so you can be funny, entertaining, and informative all in one. When you create engaging content that your users like to read they are more likely to continue opening up your emails and wanting to see what you have to say.
Segment your email list - if you have buyers that have particular interests or products they want to hear about more often than others, segmentation is a great tool to use. This splits your lists up by groupings allowing you to send specific messages to each grouping of subscribers that have similar interests or things they want to hear about happening in your company. They are more likely to open emails when they are tailored to specific interests.
3. Create a freebie or lead-generating offers - people aren't just going to give away their email addresses. They don't want a ton of emails flowing into their inboxes with irrelevant information that they are just going to delete anyways. You need to be able to show that something offers value to the individual in exchange for their email address. One great way to do this is through a freebie or offer. This can be a free guide, an ebook, Canva posts, or flyers. coupon, etc. It can be almost anything you want but it MUST add value and should match similar products or offerings your business has to offer. This should be a complementary product that allows someone to see what you have to offer before even making a purchase. Make sure that your freebie requires the individual to receive the product or coupon in exchange for their email address.
4. Create bonus content -Give your subscribers extra information and content they can benefit from because they are email subscribers. This can be something that you only offer to these individuals making it more enticing for them to be a part of your list.
5. Call to action links - Add call-to-actions on your Facebook page or Instagram bio leading users to your email sign-up link.
6. Headers and Lightboxes - Use headers on your website or lightboxes to capture emails - drive visitors to a place where they can sign up for your emails. Make sure this is noticeable on your site from a lightbox that pops up when someone lands on a specific page, a form at the bottom of each page of your site, or a link to your email signup page in the header of your website. Wherever you choose to put this information, make sure it is noticeable to visitors and that it is an easy process for them to become a part of your list.
7. Post about your email newsletter - create snips of your content to engage users on why they should sign up for your email list. You can incorporate information that subscribers could see from your newsletter and use that in your Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest marketing efforts.
Analyzing your emails
While sending emails to your subscriber list is a great start to engaging and retaining them it's important to understand the metrics behind each email sent. An engaged list is a good list. You want your contacts to open and engage with the emails that you send out. If no one is opening your emails, there is also no one reading the emails either. Information like open rates, click rates, revenue, shares, etc. can give you valuable insights.
Some insights you can gather from email metrics are:
What emails does your audience interact with the most?
What topics do your subscribers find the most interesting?
What products are converting?
What subject lines lead to more opens?
What devices are your subscribers using?
What times are your emails being opened?
Insights gathered from the above information can help businesses refine their email marketing strategies and workflows to boost engagement and appeal to more subscribers. These metrics can help businesses determine follow-up content and emails to create to continue engaging with their audience about a specific topic or what they like to see the most. Understanding what your audience wants can help to create loyalty amongst your subscribers and provide them with high-quality content that will continue to bring them back over and over again.
Ideas for how you can serve your email list
Maybe you have already started your email list by collecting emails (you are ahead of the game) but then have the thought "Ok I'm collecting emails but now I actually need to send emails". Or maybe this type of feeling resonates with you- "How the heck can I create emails on top of EVERYTHING else I have going on?"
The good thing is if you have continued reading this far you are invested and you want to find ways to connect with your audience authentically and find ways to not spam them. Who wants a whole bunch of emails in their inbox that are unreliable or offer no value to read through?
Here are 8 ideas for emails that you can send to reach out to your email community.
Welcome series - this is an email program with several rounds of emails that are sent to individuals who have signed up to be part of your email list.
Tips and Tricks - share insights into your process and procedures that you have used and developed for your business. Offer tips to those who are looking to you for advice and how to avoid the mistakes that you have already learned from. This can offer a huge value to your followers. Your email audience is most likely following you because they want insights. Something you might find is an easy process might come as a challenge to someone else. This could be a game changer for someone else so don't be shy in offering tips and tricks from those who want to learn from you.
Special Promotions, Discounts, Giveaways - offer special discounts, offers, and giveaways to your email list first. Treat those individuals on your list as VIPs and give them access to things first before you roll them out to everyone. This can entice people that there is a special value in being part of your email list. Giveaways are a great way to help grow your list of subscribers
Recap of content posted - People may not be coming to your site every day to see all the new and amazing content you have put up on your site or even the new blog posts that have come out. Do a recap of all your weekly or monthly content depending on how often you turn around content. This allows your subscribers to see what they may have missed. You can also share some of the content that you are working on for your audience to keep an eye out for what is to come.
Offer a training or class - Use your email list to offer lessons, guides, and challenges that can help people on their journey to reach their dreams and grow their businesses successfully. When doing this make sure the content you provide can offer value. Sometimes when people try and offer webinars or classes they only try and sell you something else without really getting to the point that brought you to the class in the first place. Make sure you serve your audience first! The rest will come as you build trust and authority with them.
Behind the scenes - show a sneak peek at a special process or how you create something in your business. Because you do something all the time and it seems like a menial part of your process doesn't mean that someone else might not find this interesting and helpful. Find creative ways to show an inside look into your business from how you make something from start to end.
7. Repurpose your existing content - Not everyone sees all the content that has been created on your social media platforms. When you have spent a ton of time creating great content you want to be able to use that again and share it with others that may have missed it. Repurposing the information in the form of a blog post, email, Pinterest posts, or other methods will help to reach new people and you don't have to create brand new content. Create something once and find different ways to utilize it.
8. Life experiences/About you - tell your audience about you. what is going on in your life, and the experiences you are having. People who signed up for your emails are interested in what you have to say and what makes you. They WANT to hear about you and things happening in your life. Change things up from the informative, educational, or promotional route with your emails, and let your audience hear YOU!
Now that we have discussed some of the points for why you should start collecting emails in your business, the importance of emails, and how emails can grow your business take some of these topics and insights back to start incorporating them. Don't worry about having everything together in a few short days. Take the time to plan, think about what you want to say, and be consistent in showing up for your subscribers. If you have a plan, serve others, and show how you can bring value into their lives or businesses the other things will fall into place with time. You've got this!
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