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With over 4.3 billion people utilizing email accounts and many users opening their accounts daily, the odds of finding a customer or two on this particular channel are pretty good.
Advertising is all about reaching people to buy your services or wares. What better way to do that than through email marketing?
What Is It Exactly?
Email marketing is direct marketing. It’s fast and immediate and allows a business to use a line of communication that sends personalized, mass emails to potential customers.
And what do we gain by contacting them? Well, if you’re skilled enough, you can convince the recipient of your email–a subscriber or lead–to follow a specific course of action, such as purchasing.
Businesses can connect directly with an audience and convert these subscribers to purchasing customers. Consumers that come from email are already likely to buy and are often familiar with the brand. It’s a high-intent marketing strategy.
EMAIL MARKETING REMAINS THE MOST PROFITABLE MARKETING CAMPAIGN TO THIS DAY.
What Are The Benefits?
The benefits of email marketing are numerous, not to mention profitable Our number one benefit for this strategy is cost efficiency. An overwhelming reason for using email marketing is its low cost per conversion. It generates $42 for every $1 spent says the email marketing stats of 2024. Marketers know that this strategy works. Why else would 89% of them use it as their primary channel for generating leads?
Direct contact opens up a window of opportunity to boost brand awareness. It’s an amazing way to keep your products and services in full view of the recipients. You’re building trust between your company and those you’re interacting with.
Another major benefit of email marketing is the ability to target key audience groups throughout the sales funnel. It helps increase the speed with which people move through that sales funnel. New contacts go to the top-of-funnel and the top-of-funnel audience goes to the middle-of-funnel, and so on.
Email marketing gives you more control over who you’re reaching out to. The power is in your hands. When successful, email marketing can drive traffic down the sales funnel. It finds the ideal audience that is looking for that precise product or service at that exact moment.
Every interaction with the receiver of your email Increases customer engagement and loyalty. If they see you are on the other end of an email reply, you’ve opened up a line of communication that feels safe and useful. Small business owners show their customers they can count on them to be consistent.
The Value of Tracking and Measuring Results
Now these next two benefits are essential in making your campaign efficient and profitable. Easily tracking and measuring results have a couple of advantages.
First and foremost, it helps you keep your emails–and as a consequence, your business–relevant. You don’t want your emails to end up in spam. A low email engagement rate is something you want to avoid. A low delivery rate is a spam trigger that puts your email messages into the trash.
Most email software allows you to set up goals you can track. You’ll see how many people open up your emails or ignore them, subscribe and unsubscribe, click the links in your email, and convert from them. That’s important data right there.
Email marketers will have a better chance of tracking their marketing return on investment because they can be sure that email subscribers are being added to the list and in some cases, new customers are being added.
Measuring results is just as significant as tracking. It shows you what’s working and what is not and you see where and how your audience responds. That allows the marketer to optimize the campaigns.
If you’ve grown up with the internet, there may be a tendency to overlook email marketing. It is often underrated, especially by newer digital marketers. For many businesses, it is the only way to advertise. 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.
How To Build A Solid Email Marketing Strategy
Ideally, we want a list of email addresses from all potential customers so you can send emails to them. Now don’t make the rookie mistake of thinking you’ll be sending individual emails from your Gmail account. Or worse still, sending one giant CC’d email to all of them.
Getting a mailing list up and running is fairly straightforward. What’s more, the customer list you create is yours, and yours only. It’s built on a stable foundation (your business) and is not dependent on social media. Whether you are B2B or B2C, it is a great way to diversify your marketing strategy.
You can build a reliable list by using a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an offer you make to a potential customer in exchange for their name and email address. For this to work, your offer must be of value: a free guide, a cheat sheet, product demos, checklists, or anything that can better the life of a person. Free offers of value should be sent in your first emails, generally before any sales content.
Advertising this lead magnet on Social Media through a lead generation campaign or on Google with PPC marketing is a formidable way to hit a solid target audience. Your audience is opting in and giving you permission to send them emails. You’re clarifying that these people are interested in what you have to offer.
Email Dos And Don’ts
- Don’t buy email lists. Avoid the mistake of buying email lists at all costs. There are no results to be gained and you could find yourself in the spam folder more often than not. Email providers do not take kindly to this and you could be forbidden from sending emails altogether.
- Avoid spam triggers. While on the subject of spam, there are some spam triggers that we should avoid. Doing research can help you understand which words signal red flags and consequently put you in the unsolicited bulk communications folder.
- Write a good email. The use of effective subject lines will improve your chances of catching the eye of the recipient which means they will (hopefully) open your email. Vital information should not be included in images since some images do not always pop up in your inbox. Emails should be easy to read and short, sweet, and simple. Get the job done, so to speak.
- Sign up to your own list. Another fantastic bit of advice is to sign up for your email list to see what your company is sending out to subscribers. While you’re at it, sign up for your competitors’ emailing lists, too. What better way to keep abreast of successful competitor campaigns? And if they’re doing it wrong, make sure you are avoiding that same approach!
- Keep your customer list in order. With good leads now guaranteed, a competent email provider will house your contacts’ information and group them by demographics and behaviors. Use an Excel spreadsheet to keep everything in order. This is where the importance of segmentation steps in.
- Segmentation is key. Marketers know that good segmentation can bring as much as a 760% increase in revenue. Not too shabby! Behavioral segmentation is especially effective. It looks at previous purchases, lifecycle stages, and customer loyalty. Create those emails with your specific audience in mind.
- Get segmentation targeting right. The conditions you set up in automation will help you understand which email should be sent to the desired recipient and when. Did the user fill in the contact form? Send them a thank you email. Did the user purchase one of your products? Send a purchase confirmation along with a tracking number. A lead magnet will have another email reply.
- Reap the rewards of brand interaction. Different actions help a potential customer feel cared for and personally accompanied at each step. Positive brand interaction will be appreciated, which gets you trust, followed by valuable customer loyalty.
- Furthermore, the best results are reached when you get high open and click-through rates. You are aiming to improve your customer engagement and increase repeat purchases.
- Know when to use CTAs. CTAs are powerful but remember that they are best used on warmer leads. A unique CTA can be lost on a customer who has simply decided to receive free information. Building brand awareness for small businesses should be a slow and steady process. Understand where your customer is on the journey to buying.
- Quality, not quantity. It would be advantageous to clean up your subscriber list. Emails that aren’t delivered or have poor open rates can signal red flags and put you in the spam folder. We want a list of potential customers NOT a list of rejections. The savings are better, too.
Marketing emails are usually more effective than promotional phone calls and big savings are to be had here because there are no overhead costs in your sales force.
How Email Fits Into Your Overall Marketing Campaign
Email marketing is the item that creates a feedback loop from the bottom-of-funnel back to the top.
While marketers often get lost in the sea of new customer acquisition, it’s easy to forget about the cheapest customers, which are your current customers. New offers, add-ons, and even offers for those yet to become customers are a valid part of the process.
Email is the final piece of the marketing funnel because it allows your paid platforms to focus on acquisition. Email will nurture your most valuable customers.
Should You DIY Or Partner With An Expert?
We thought it might be helpful to let you know you CAN do it alone. With so much online information and numerous resources at your fingertips, there are simple rules to follow that have been outlined above.
You can master email marketing for your small business. You’re aiming to grow a contact list that is quality, not quantity. Engaging subscribers and building relationships step-by-step are a big part of that process. Existing customers should not be neglected.
A tailored approach to email marketing will see maximum results in conversions and leveraging this approach to boost sales is a giant part of this objective. Timing plays a crucial role in the seamless journey toward your landing page but please remember that an impactful landing page with a clear call to action is the key.
And lastly, don’t be afraid of the free trials on offer for email marketing platforms. An intuitive tool is best when starting your email marketing strategy.
Email Marketing Platforms
There is no one fit for all. Different platforms suit different businesses at different budgets. Whatever platform you choose, it should give you a high ROI, and help you with opens, clicks, and sales.
A great platform will also build up other strategies so it all comes together for the good of your business. Top email marketing tools should have drag & drop, A/B testing, reporting, customizable templates, and custom automated workflows.
Pricing can vary but essentially you’re searching for the chance to send out a sizeable email list at the best price.
You want great features from your platforms. These can include segmentation, landing page creation, subscription forms, full CRM, high deliverability rates, unlimited emails, automation, email AI, marketing tools, SMTP servers, and transactional emails.
Solutions 8 Email Marketing Services
Solutions 8 has a user-friendly service that can help you manage and optimize your email campaigns in one place. Deliver the right message, at the right moment, to the right audience, and make it easy for them to convert every time.
Take away the stress of your email campaigns by putting your business in expert hands. Without a comprehensive email marketing strategy in place, you could be leaving the door open for your competitors to better connect with your target audiences and hijack your growth potential.
Let’s generate more high-quality leads and boost your revenue today!
“Glad to have met the team at Solutions 8. Their creative minds have really given our business the competitive edge we needed through digital marketing. I highly recommend Solutions 8 for their creativity and personal attention, I can’t say enough about how EXCELLENT Soultions 8 is!”
Tim Lyons
Founder || ProFit Marketing Solutions
Two-time “Two Comma Club Award” Recipient
Interested to work with us?
No cost. No obligation. No high-pressure salesmanship. The action plan is yours to keep regardless of whether or not you choose to move forward with us. What do you have to lose?
