How to Use Email Marketing to Grow a Business
What is email marketing?
When you want to grow your brand or sell your stuff, email marketing is one of the most popular—and effective—tools around. In this article, we’ll discuss how email marketing can benefit your business, and we’ll give you a few tips to help you get started.
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of direct communication between businesses and customers. While it has been used in numerous ways throughout history, the modern form of email marketing began in the early 1980s with the introduction of electronic mail.
Email marketing is now widely accepted as a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. This article explains why email marketing works so well and gives you several ideas on how to use it successfully.
You may not be sure where to start when it comes to email marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing — especially if you’re already getting some results from your current strategy. Here are seven lessons you can learn from other successful marketers:
The most important thing to know about email marketing is that it’s not just one thing: it’s many things. It’s a combination of several components including:
• Content
• Landing pages
• Automation
• List segmentation
• Personalization
• Social media integration
• Analytics
• Reporting
How Does Email Marketing Work?
A well-designed email campaign will include all the elements listed above. But don’t worry if you’re missing some – we’ve got you covered! Our email marketing guides include everything you need to know, from setting up your first campaigns to optimizing them for success.
1. The Basics
First things first: You must send emails. This means that they’re sent regularly, usually at least once per day. There are two main types of transactional emails, which are also known as “bulk” emails:
Coupon codes: These are emails that offer discount coupons for products and services. They’re typically triggered by an action such as purchasing a product or subscribing to a newsletter.
Promotional emails: These are emails that bring new subscribers into your lists or help exist ones. Subscribers stay subscribed. Promotional emails often contain offers like free samples, competitions, or exceptional discounts.
These bulk emails are also called “newsletters” because their content focuses exclusively on news relevant to your business.
2. The Benefits of Email Marketing
There are lots of benefits to email marketing. A few of these include:
More Sales: Email marketing allows you to reach more people than any other type of digital advertising. That means more potential sales. And remember, the average person spends only four hours each week online. So, even if five percent of those people click through your emails and buy something, you’ll still see an increase in revenue.
Better Quality Leads: People who receive promotional emails are much more likely to want to work with you. What this means is that qualified leads become less expensive to acquire. For example, if you sell plumbing supplies, sending out a promotional email about a great deal on the copper pipe could lead to a lot of purchases in the following weeks.
Higher Customer Satisfaction: Most people would rather hear from companies directly than read about them on social media. When customers receive promotional emails, they feel valued and appreciated. This creates a positive experience and makes them more likely to share recommendations with friends and family.
3. How Do I Start Sending Emails?
If you’re ready to get started, here are three different options for doing so:
Manual: If you know what you’re doing, a manual approach is a way to go. However, this method requires a fair amount of technical knowledge and a good understanding of how email software works.
It can be intimidating for beginners, but it may also result in higher-quality results.
Automatic/Scheduled: Automatic email programs let you set up your schedule based on triggers you choose. While many people use this option to make sure they never miss important emails, this feature can cause issues when it comes to email deliverability. We recommend using it sparingly until you learn more about scheduling and automating.
Prospecting: Prospecting is the process of finding people interested in buying from you. Many businesses do not consider prospecting part of their normal marketing strategy. But most businesses should be actively looking for prospective customers. Prospecting is the best way to find people interested in working with you.
4. Why Should I Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing has been around since the early 1990s. As a result, it’s proven itself over time as one of the most powerful tools for reaching and engaging audiences. Here are just a few reasons why we think it’s worth trying out:
Email is Easy: It takes extraordinarily little effort to create a promotional email and send it out. The only thing to keep in mind is making sure you have enough space to fit all the information you need to convey to your audience. There are plenty of free services available that help with that.
Free Promotion: Yes, we said “free” promotion. Promotional emails provide you with the chance to test drive new products or services without paying anything upfront. Plus, you may end up saving money by being able to offer discounts to customers who sign up after receiving your message.
Reach More Customers: With millions of subscribers across multiple platforms, email marketing gives you access to a wide range of audiences. Plus, because it’s such a low-cost form of communication, you won’t have to spend tons of money to build brand awareness.
5. Is My Business Ready for Email Marketing?
The answer to this question depends on what kind of business you run and how large an impact email marketing has had on your bottom line.
Email Marketing Strategy and Tips for Successful Campaigns
The best way to find out what works is by testing different approaches. So why not try one of our free email marketing templates? They’re designed to get results without any extra effort on your part. We’ve tested hundreds of variations of each template to ensure they perform well across every device and browser.
Businesses that have seen success with email marketing include those selling physical goods, digital content, membership sites, subscription services, and even dating websites. If you’re starting a business yourself, you might want to focus on offering physical products that sell quickly. Or, if you’re already operating a brick-and-mortar store, you could start offering online sales.
The key things to understand before deciding whether email marketing will work for you are:
What type of business are you running?
Do you sell services or physical items?
Are you targeting B2C or B2B?
6. How Do I Choose Good Marketing Emails?
So, you know that email marketing is an effective tool for growing your business. But there are so many options to choose from. Which ones should you use?
The Advantages and Disadvantages
Email Marketing has become the most effective tool for reaching customers. It’s inexpensive, easy to set up, and it allows us to communicate directly with our audience. But email campaigns aren’t cheap to run either. If you want to see real ROI from your emails, you need to test them thoroughly before sending them out. Here are some tips on how to make sure that your email marketing is a success:
Many companies have discovered the benefits of email marketing as part of their lead generation strategies. When done correctly, this type of advertising can be enormously powerful. However, if not planned properly or executed well, it can also be ineffective at best and even detrimental depending on what you use it for.
We all know people who think they’re awesome marketers because they send regular blasts full of spam mail to every single person on their contact list…but do we really want to end up in that group?
The good news is that you can get an email marketing program set up in just a few minutes and start sending messages out today. The shocking news is that your first try will be terrible because, even if you have an excellent product or service, nobody knows about it yet. And that’s because there are more than thirty million emails being sent every day! That doesn’t leave much room for mistakes, so we’re going to look at some of the things you need to do right when setting up your initial campaign. Your second run won’t have quite as many problems – it might take only five or ten days before enough people see your message that they know about you. By then, you may already have a solid mailing list, which will mean less work for you and more success.
In addition, when sending emails, you must ensure your messages are not considered spam and that they do not contain viruses or phishing fraud. You also must be aware of the diverse types of emails people can receive and how each type needs to be addressed differently. This guide will help you understand all aspects of email marketing so that you can build a successful campaign for yourself.
- Advantages – As the number one communication channel in today’s digital world, no other marketing method is more cost-effective than email marketing.
- Disadvantages – Sending an email can take time and effort, especially if you’re looking to gain new leads. If someone gets spammed by you, they may feel like you’re being pushy and/or just trying to steal their personal data for profit.
It can cost you a lot of money if you don’t have an efficient way of tracking your prospects’ clicks on links in your emails. You may also find that some people don’t like getting too much information on their inboxes or are just not interested in what you’re promoting.
Some marketers tend to send out sales pitches every time they want to reach customers. This is a common mistake. Instead, you should try to stick to a regular marketing routine. So, what do you get from an expensive marketing campaign? There are two ways in which your business can benefit from this form of communication:
- You build trust in your brand. If a customer is receiving marketing material directly from your company, they know that your product or service is trustworthy. This increases conversion rates because people have less of a fear of giving out their personal details online.
- You increase engagement levels. When someone receives correspondence from YOU rather than another individual, they tend to stay on your website longer because they feel more connected.
- You retain customers by communicating information about your products or services. As soon as someone knows how to contact you, they will use this method instead of going through a salesperson. By sending regular emails, you make yourself accessible to them when they need you.
- You provide real-time feedback so that you can see if your messages are getting through. This allows you to gauge whether your target market likes your style, style, message, and tone. The more open you are with feedback, the better your chances of improving the success of future campaigns.
- While you can manage a free account on services like Constant Contact and AWeber, you’ll be facing stiff competition from larger companies that are willing to spend more money advertising their messages through emails. If you want to be successful in business, you need to develop an email marketing strategy and stay within your budget. Your first step is selecting the right platform to host your campaign. We have selected one of the best free email platforms: Mailchimp. Once you’ve chosen your provider, there are still things you should consider before starting your campaign.
Growing Your Email List
The first thing we recommend is testing different subject lines and content types. This will give you insight into which messages perform best and what people respond to. Once you know this information, you can start building your list by segmenting your subscribers based on interest.
It’s important that you don’t just send email blasts to your entire subscriber base. Instead, target them with specific emails containing relevant content and offers that are of interest to your subscribers. You should also make sure they’re not too spammy, so be sure to build a relationship with your audience while still delivering excellent quality content. It’s all about finding the right balance between these two things that will keep you connected with your customers without annoying them!
The second step in growing your email list is segmentation. If you haven’t done it yet, now is the time to start segmenting your subscribers. There are many ways you could do this, but you want to break up their lists to allow you to better target your communications at the individual level. For example, maybe if you sell shoes, you might split up your consumers into various categories, such as men or women, urban or suburban, etc. By doing this, you’ll increase the likelihood that your emails get delivered faster because only those who fit the characteristics of your segmented groups will receive them. And speaking of getting emails delivered faster, that’s why you need an autoresponder.
When it comes to email marketing for small businesses, the most important thing is sending emails that get opened and clicked. As a result of these factors, an email’s success depends on its subject line and overall design. We’ve compiled a checklist of tips to follow when creating successful emails.
What Is an Opt-In?
Opt-in means that someone explicitly agreed to receive e-mails from us. They have signed up or subscribed to our newsletter. With opt-ins, you don’t need to worry about people unsubscribing from your campaigns either. For example, if you send them an exclusive offer, they might sign up for your newsletter automatically but then later unsubscribe.
However, with opt-outs, people’s permission isn’t required before you send them something – in other words, they could be happy to hear from you, even though they haven’t given you their explicit approval. Its good practice to make sure you’re getting enough information about who your audience is, so you can target your emails appropriately. Depending on the type of product or service that you sell, there are several ways to go about doing so:
Subject Line Segmentation – Create a rule to send emails based on certain triggers. For example, if someone signs up for an online course you offer, you can email them with a link to view their course material.
Content-Type Segmentation – If you have an e-book, blog series, or other digital product, it’s possible to segment your list based on the kind of content you read in the past. You could create a new campaign for each content type.
For example, let’s say you want to build an email list of entrepreneurs to help increase traffic to your website. First, you would find out who these individuals are using a lead generation software tool like LeadPages, Infusionsoft, etc.. Then, based on those interests, you might create separate campaigns to send emails containing links to videos, podcasts, e-books, blogs, and more to grow your business.
Subject lines
are the most important part of any email marketing campaign. You need a catchy subject line that captures attention and gets click-through rates. It should be short enough, so it doesn’t come across as spammy, but long enough to get people interested in clicking through.
What email metrics should I track?
Email marketing analytics tools like Mailchimp allow you to see exactly how many people opened your emails, clicked through links, and engaged with your message. These numbers tell you whether your campaign was successful or not.
Tracking the results of your campaigns is critical in determining if it’s worth continuing to send them out, as well as gauging their effectiveness. Tracking these metrics will also help you determine which techniques performed best for different audiences, so you can continue to refine your strategies accordingly. For example, sending more text-only messages that don’t contain any images may work better than image-heavy emails containing lots of graphics. You can try this by simply changing a few variables in one of your campaigns.
Track individual open rates and click-through rates. You can use the same tool that allows you to view statistics on each of your subscribers to create an email funnel to analyze results over time. See what works, what doesn’t, and why certain campaigns result in lower engagement. This will help you hone your strategy.
The content of your emails isn’t just something you add at the end; make sure it’s part of every single email you’re writing.
But what if the reason for low response rates isn’t that a few people didn’t open your email but that everyone who opens it doesn’t click on anything in your email? You may get an inaccurate impression of reader interest, which could lead you to make poor decisions about future content and campaigns.
I use and recommend several free services to help measure the success of your campaigns and optimize them based on feedback from real users:
To gather this information, we need to know when each user opens our email and then track their interactions within the email. This is done by integrating third-party tracking and measurement cookies into your site.
The most common type of third-party cookie used for this purpose provides us with a unique identifier called a “tracking ID.” The tracking ID allows us to link one set of actions performed by a user to another activity that happens after the action takes place. For example, if someone clicks a link to view a page on our website, we can count that as one action taken per person in our database. However, there are other ways to measure the performance of an email that go beyond basic stats. The following tips will provide insight into what to focus on when measuring the success of your email campaigns:
• Measure open rates – You can easily set up a landing page where your subscribers can click through if they want to sign up for a free trial or download eBook. Set this page as one of your CTAs in your autoresponder. Then, include this link within your subject line and main body text. To calculate the effectiveness of your subject lines, test them out by using different variations until you find something that works best.
• Monitor unsubscribes – Make sure to review your list regularly, so you know who is leaving, why, when, and which segment of your audience is most likely to be unsubscribed from future emails. This way, you can learn more about their needs and continue to improve your product or service.
• Track response times – Email has become increasingly interactive. If someone clicks a link or opens an image in your email, do something with it! They provide a good first step in tracking the success of your campaigns, but more information is needed.
How did my open rate compare to other campaigns on this website? Did anybody opt out of receiving future emails from me? Did anybody unsubscribe after opening an email from me? Why didn’t more people click through when they received the email?
If you can answer these questions, then you have some valuable insights into what content works best for your audience.
Once you know why certain emails are getting opened and clicked, you might want to change those messages so that they work better. If people aren’t clicking through to read your blog post because it doesn’t have any value to them, you need to spend time creating high-value blog posts. You could also add a call to action at the end of your email that will encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter or take another action within your business.