Email marketing refers to the act of sending your message through email with the purpose of building a relationship with customers. It’s anything that’s meant to build your business, increase brand awareness, and build customer loyalty and trust. The emails are sent as either direct email or as a transactional email.
Why you should use email marketing?
Email is still the number 1 communication channel. More than 85% of adults and 78% of teenagers use email, with 99% checking it every day- and usually multiple times per day. That’s a staggering number of potential users that are waiting for your email.
Email has a high conversion rate. People that buy products through email marketing spend up to 138% more than buyers who didn’t receive the email. Email marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to other marketing efforts. It’s much cheaper than regular mail because you don’t have to print physical materials and pay to ship them. The ROI (Return on Investment) for email marketing can be as high as 3800%.
The average email marketing sale outperforms social media marketing by at least 3x.
44% of consumers search through email before making a purchase, while only 4% check social platforms such as Facebook.Email belongs to the consumer and they will have the email until they delete it. They won’t lose it if they scroll past it.
Email is searchable and sortable. It’s difficult to search social media and even more difficult to sort it. Email allows you to create your own folders, flag emails, search them, etc. Email is a better choice for a consumer that wants to search for an ad from a specific brand to find information about a sale or a coupon code.
Sending the email is handled by an email service, so all you need to do is create the email and send it once and it can be received by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of readers.
Email analytics
Email services include analytics, so you can know how many readers open the email. This helps you understand consumer behavior for your market. You can even perform a/b testing so you can improve your marketing efforts.
It provides an excellent marketing opportunity because they’re expecting to see emails from you. You’ll have a list of emails you can send to that you already know are interested in your products or services. It can turn prospects into customers, and it can turn casual buyers into devoted fans.
You own the list and you can interact with the list any time you want. Rather than a social network that owns the space and has full control over who sees your marketing efforts, and even charges for your marketing efforts, everyone on your list can see your marketing campaigns without restrictions.
Measure your goals
Before you start developing and implementing marketing emails, you’ll want to start with some measurable goals. What do you hope to achieve from your email marketing campaigns? Based on your answer to this question, you can start to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you track and measure goal progress along the way.
- Improve Sales Conversions – Every business wants to improve their conversions. But how can you measure if your email marketing is helping? There are a few different metrics that you can track to determine how effective your email marketing lead nurturing is. That includes engagement, lead acceleration and impact on revenue.
- Increase Website Traffic – This is another common goal for small business email marketing. If you want to get visitors to your site to improve awareness, you need to grow your brand. That way they can see what your company has to offer. The best way to track this metric is by looking at click-through rates.
- Increase Revenue – This is a goal for most businesses. But how does this pertain to your email marketing strategy? Well, once a person becomes a customer, you will be able to see how email marketing may have contributed to their conversion. For instance, if they clicked on a link to make a purchase, then you will be able to see just how much revenue increased due to your marketing emails.
You should know your audience!
If you are doing email marketing for a while, you’ll likely know who your audience is. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to make some educated guesses so you can target your content. Don’t worry, you’ll start collecting subscriber info the minute you send your first campaign. So, next time round, you’ll have real data to work with.
In the meantime, gather data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles, like the Facebook Insights data shown below:
