Are you a business owner looking for ways to grow your network and increase sales of your products/services? Look no further, this blog has everything you need to embellish your marketing strategy using email marketing with the aim of promoting your business to a bigger and, most importantly, a targeted audience!
Implementing email marketing into your marketing strategy is an effective and worthwhile project to embark on. This blog will answer the following questions:
- What is email marketing?
- Why is email marketing beneficial for promoting my business?
- How do I use email marketing successfully to promote my business?
WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?
Before we dive into why email marketing is important, we need to know what email marketing actually is.
Email marketing is the process of marketing your business via email, with the aim of engaging with current and prospective customers through email campaigns to promote your business.
Email marketing can take many forms. The frequency and style of your email marketing strategy is completely unique to you and your business. Here are just some of the ways you can introduce email marketing to your content calendar:
- Welcome email sequence
- Onboarding email sequence
- Nurturing email sequence
- Focused emails with a promotional purpose
- Abandoned cart email sequence
- Repeat customer email sequence
- Re-engagement email sequence
- Email Newsletters
1. WELCOME EMAIL SEQUENCE
Ever subscribed to an email list and immediately received a warm welcome message in your inbox? This email isn’t sent manually, but is likely to be a sequence email that is triggered by an action made on your website (in this case, the trigger was signing up to an email list). We’ll talk more about email automation a little later on, and we’ve also curated everything you need to know about the benefits of automated emails here.
Automated welcome emails show your new subscribers that you are eager to engage with them and welcome their presence, which means they’re more likely to stick around for the long term and love your business even more than they do now! As well as reassuring them that they have successfully subscribed to your list, welcome emails are also an opportunity to set an expectation of how frequently they can expect emails from you and to offer any information you’d like them to know about your business. They’re also a great way to keep your subscriber engaged at a time when they’ve just expressed interest in your business.
The welcome sequence does not only have to include a single email, but can be a series of emails welcoming your new subscribers; yielding 51 percent more revenue than a single email, a welcome series will offer more opportunities for driving traffic to your website and boosting sales for your business. Why not invite them to check out your social media platforms, or let them know about any discounts they are eligible for as a subscriber to your email list?
2. ONBOARDING EMAIL SEQUENCE
You’ve welcomed your audience, but you don’t want to disappoint them! The onboarding sequence allows you to maintain audience engagement once you’ve successfully welcomed a new potential customer. This will encourage them to stick around and hopefully become a customer!
Onboarding emails are all about giving your customers an incentive. Types of onboarding emails include offering a free trial or offering a special discount for a product. This is an opportunity to engage your potential customers whilst they don’t have to make a full investment in your business through offering a discount or trial period. If they love it, they’ll become a loyal customer!
3. NURTURING EMAIL SEQUENCE
Add a touch of personality to your emails by telling your audience about your business’ journey. This may be a less frequent style of email, but it can provide a nice change of tone to remind your audience they are part of your community. You can make it business orientated – what inspired you to start? – or tell your audience more about yourself – what is your favourite thing about your business? The latter is a great way to segue into promoting your own products and services: people love a recommendation, so tell people what you love about a product you’re selling before encouraging them to check it out themselves.
4. FOCUSED EMAILS WITH A PROMOTIONAL PURPOSE
Is there a specific event, product, service or project you’d like to tell your audience about, but there isn’t much hype around it right now? Whilst the above two email examples will help maintain engagement, sending focused emails allow you to promote particular aspects of your business to drive attention and interest and create a buzz around your recent launch.
5. ABANDONED CART SEQUENCE
Remember when you leave something in your online cart and you receive an email reminding you to come back and finish the purchase soon after? This is an example of an automated abandoned cart email sequence, triggered when you added something to your cart but exited the webpage without purchasing.
Research shows that 45% of cart abandonment emails are opened; this means they’re effective for re-engaging customers after they leave their cart, and people might just need a little nudge from you to make the final purchase.
They allow you to remind and encourage your customers to return to their cart by showing them what they left in there and the products they were interested in buying, and they can be automated to ensure maximum efficiency for you without the need to manually send the emails yourself. Always end the email with a call to action, so your customers can return to their cart with a click of a button.
6. REPEAT CUSTOMER SEQUENCE
Consider this: repeat customers make up around 11% of your customer base, but they are responsible for almost a quarter of your revenue. This is sure to convince you of the importance of repeat customer email sequences, as they are the perfect way to nurture your repeat customers and show them that you care about and value them.
Repeat customer emails include asking for a review or feedback on the product/service they have purchased, which is a great way to keep your customer engaged and gain direct customer insights at the same time!.
Another option is sharing similar products/services they may be interested in based on what they have recently purchased. Show that you know what the customer likes and wants by targeting them with bespoke email campaigns tailored to their individual needs.
Overall, touching base with your customers will show that you are thinking about them and value not only their loyalty but their feedback.
7. RE-ENGAGEMENT EMAIL SEQUENCE
Whilst selling to a new customer achieves only 5-20% conversion success, selling to an existing customer achieves 60-70% more conversion success. This shows how valuable it can be to nurture your current customers, even if they’ve lost interest in your business.
You can win customers back with a re-engagement email sequence – tell customers what they’re missing out on or what other people are saying about your products/services typ incentivise them, before giving them a call to action to head back to your site and reignite their love for your business.
8. EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
A great way to engage your subscribers is by touching base with an email newsletter. How you structure your newsletter is up to you. You may want to tell your audience about any updates and what they can expect from you in the coming weeks, or perhaps a wrap up of the things you’ve launched during the last month. When developing your newsletter strategy, create a schedule and stick to it, so people know when they can expect emails from you. Whether this be twice a week or once a month, show you are committed to your subscribers and your emails are worth reading every time you send them out. Being consistent with your newsletter output will mean your audience remains consistent in their commitment to your business, whilst dropping off the grid for a while could lead to them forgetting you (we don’t want that, do we?).
Ensuring the design, tone and overall impression of your newsletter remains consistent will allow you to establish a strong brand identity and make your brand more recognizable – this will contribute to ensuring people remember you. Rather than allowing lots of information to overwhelm your newsletter, using visuals will help maintain your reader’s attention and add a touch of fun to your newsletter whilst making it easier and enjoyable to read.
If you fancy starting an email newsletter or want to revamp your current one, our blog post about writing engaging newsletters will be sure to help you out.
HOW CAN EMAIL MARKETING HELP MY BUSINESS?
Let’s look at why email marketing is effective when promoting your business. As an estimated 91 percent of consumers check their inboxes at least once a day and 89 percent of marketers say email acts as the primary channel for lead generation, email marketing is still worth your energy despite the rise of social media in recent years as an effective marketing tool.
Here are some of the ways your business can benefit from investing in email marketing, which highlight why email marketing is so important for businesses:
- Build a strong relationship with your consumers.
- Develop your brand whilst growing your network.
- No competition means higher engagement.
- Nurture your audience.
- A time efficient method with a big impact.
1. BUILD A STRONG RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS
Having direct contact with your audience via email is so important for establishing and maintaining a connection between your brand and your consumers. Sending emails straight to their inboxes will remind them you value their presence within your community whilst also showcasing anything new your business is working on in order to increase interest.
2. DEVELOP YOUR BRAND WHILE GROWING YOUR NETWORK
Just as you want to get to know your target demographic, your consumers want to get to know you. Email marketing allows you to establish credibility for your brand and your ethos through reminding people you are there and you exist to produce a quality product/service for them, which in turn gives consumers a reason to trust and connect with you.
3. NO COMPETITION MEANS HIGHER ENGAGEMENT
You may have 10,000+ followers on Instagram, but unfortunately you are not the only one competing for your followers’ attention, as their home feed is likely to be cluttered with lots of other accounts. Combine this with the platform’s algorithm (which is in control of who sees your posts depending on how your followers engage with your content), and your beautiful graphics and eye-catching photos are never guaranteed to reach your intended audience each time you post.
This is where email marketing comes in. Whilst a meagre 6 percent of people see your posts on their Facebook newsfeed, open rates for email marketing messages are within the range of 20-30 percent; this means the information you send via email is 5x more likely to be seen than putting the information on your Facebook page. It’s worth noting also that email content is six times more likely to be clicked than tweeted content – this highlights how worthwhile investment in email marketing can be when trying to promote your business.
Because you have full control of your email list, the information you send out via email will receive much more attention – people are going to receive and see your email, and therefore there’s a higher chance they’ll give it a read. Achieving higher engagement will contribute to a greater awareness of the things you are promoting, and thus increase interest in your business.
No competition, no wasted graphics – only more engagement and more sales!
4. NURTURE YOUR AUDIENCE
Imagine you’re messaging a friend: if you only call on that friend when you want something from them, rather than messaging them just for a chat or to see how they are in general, your friendship becomes merely transactional.
Nurturing a friendship is just like nurturing your email audience. Don’t make it about the sales alone: striking a balance between promotional emails and personalised, thoughtful emails (such as sharing your business ventures or sending a ‘check-in’ style email) will reduce the transactional quality of your emails and ensure your subscribers feel as though you value them as individuals rather than as vehicles for promoting and boosting sales. This will have an overall positive impact on audience engagement, which will hopefully lead to increasing attention and sales in the long run.
Your emails are also the place where your subscribers are guaranteed to find accurate and valuable information about your business, so maintaining a positive relationship through email sequences will show you’re a business with integrity and one they can trust.
Another aspect of nurturing your audience is through personalising the emails you send; this does not only mean putting their name in the subject, but involves sending them the emails that matter most to them. Keep reading for more info on creating an individual-specific email sequence…
5. A TIME EFFICIENT WITH A BIG IMPACT
One of the great things about sending emails is that it doesn’t require you to monitor your analytics 24/7 and manually send emails yourself. Rather, you can construct and schedule your welcome email in advance so it automatically arrives in your subscriber’s inbox as soon as they subscribe without you having to worry about it.
Once you have created a schedule and your emails are ready to go, email marketing becomes a time-efficient way of promoting your business that isn’t labour-intensive for you. This makes email marketing a hassle-free way to connect with your audience – time efficient with a big impact!
As well as automating your emails, they can be ‘segmented’ for maximum efficiency. Segmentation involves tracking your audience’s demographic profile, what they have taken an interest in and what they have purchased in the past. You can then use your findings to categorize your audience in terms of what they are interested in the most, which allows you to send customized and relevant emails.
Rather than sending an email with your latest shampoo launch to a customer who has only ever expressed interest in purchasing your perfume (which could result in them losing interest or becoming frustrated at your flow of irrelevant emails), you can send the relevant information to the relevant people at the relevant time to show you mean business. Sending targeted, bespoke emails based on people’s past behaviours will optimize your conversion rate as people are more likely to respond to emails that provide individualised and personal information. What does this mean? More sales for your business!
Overall, email automation allows you to work smarter, not more. We’ll touch on exactly how you can segment your content later on.
HOW CAN I PROMOTE MY BUSINESS EFFICIENTLY VIA EMAIL MARKETING?
So now you know the what and the why. But what about the how? How can you create a successful email marketing strategy that will promote your business in the most effective way?
Below are our top tips for growing and promoting your business with email marketing:
1. GROW YOUR EMAIL LIST
Successful email marketing is impossible without people to send emails to. A great way to kickstart your email list is creating an opt-in form on your website; people can enter their emails and sign up to receive the latest info straight into their inbox. This will give you an audience to communicate with via email so you have a place to start when promoting to your network through the beautiful emails you’ve created.
Growing your email list can be achieved through using lead magnets, which help you obtain email addresses. “Enter your email to stay up to date!” is one you may recognise. There are plenty of other lead magnets you can use to guarantee people are going to give you their email address, such as offering discounts or pointing them to a resource they can take advantage of.
Think of it as a ‘give and take’ sort of system: offering your potential subscriber an offer they can’t resist – ‘sign up and get 20% off your first order’ – will encourage them to offer you their email address. Once you have their email address, you’ve got a one-way ticket into their inbox, which offers the opportunity to show them how awesome your business is through segmented emails.
To learn more about growing your email list with lead magnets, download our Free eGuide, 5 Lead Magnets to Grow Your Email List FAST for ideas that are proven to be successful!
2. AUTOMATE YOUR EMAIL SEQUENCE
Don’t miss an opportunity to turn a subscriber into a customer! Remember, you can schedule your emails so that they are triggered by actions your audience takes on your website – you won’t be wasting any time and those precious emails are guaranteed to land in their inbox at the time you want and need for maximum impact.
3. SEGMENT YOUR EMAIL LIST
Remember when we talked about segmentation (sending the right email to the right person for maximum interest)? Let’s imagine you’ve gathered the information you need from your demographic, and you’re ready to send segmented emails. What now?
Personalise your emails – what is it that this specific category of subscribers is interested in the most? Use this as your starting point. A publisher, for example, might send emails based on purchase history. If a customer has recently purchased a book by a specific author, send them an email with other books by the same author they may be interested in to encourage them to return to your business when they’re looking for a new book (they might not even need another book, but sending them an email with other options will be too tempting for them to ignore!). This is where segmentation and automation interlink: sending this email at the prime time – maybe one or two weeks after they’ve purchased a book – strikes the balance between having enough time to read their recent purchase and thinking about buying another,
You can also send emails that give valuable information to your customers. If a customer has repeatedly visited a specific page on your website, a targeted email with more information on why it’s worth investing in that resource they’ve taken interest in might nudge them into feeling confident enough to make the plunge. Instances like this are informed by behavior-specific email segmentation (understanding what kind of buyer you’re dealing with); if the individual is a lingerer, an email telling them why they need to invest in you might just seal the deal.
This all helps with nurturing your audience. Segmenting your email sequence shows that you value consumers as individuals and you’re attuned to their specific needs. Showing you care contributes to building integrity as a brand and will turn valued customers into repeat customers.
4. PROMOTE NEW PRODUCTS/ SERVICES THAT HAVE JUST LAUNCHED ON YOUR WEBSITE
Sometimes people might not head to your website on a regular enough basis to notice when you’ve launched a new product/service. Giving them an email with all the info they need will not only promote your new product/service but also remind people you’re there and there are plenty of new things they can enjoy since they last visited your site. Doing this via email means people don’t need to go onto your website to find it for themselves, as you’ve done the work for them!
5. SPECIAL OFFERS
Make your audience feel extra special by offering a reward for being loyal subscribers. Giving them a taste of your business with a discount will encourage them to try your products/services out and will generate excitement around your business whilst generating sales. In the long run, this will hopefully contribute to repeat purchases without the need for offers/discounts etc. as they love you enough without an incentive! Promoting a discount/offer can be complemented with a call to action such as ‘Don’t miss out on our limited offer – head to our website now!’, so you create maximum interest around your promotion. It can also be handy to summarise your offer – i.e. ‘Save £30? Yes please!’ – in the subject line of your email so it’s the first thing the audience sees and they know this is a special email they need to read.
6. GRAB READERS ATTENTION BY KEEPING IT TO THE POINT
When you have the space, it can be easy to fill your email with remes of information. Only give your audience the most important info they need to hear without turning to using extended paragraphs and large chunks of text so your readers stay concentrated throughout the whole of the email. Another way you can maintain reader attention is by using visual material: 65% of users prefer emails to contain mostly images, so keep your emails vibrant and exciting to look at by adding a touch of colour or a cool graphic that links to the context of your email.
7. GET CREATIVE WITH YOUR CONTENT – OFFER INSIGHTS AND UNIQUE INFORMATION
Giving your email audience something unique and new will inspire intrigue and interest in your emails. One idea is offering an insight into your business or giving information people can’t find anywhere else. Let’s say you’re a sustainable clothing brand: how are your products made so that they remain sustainable? Whilst also reminding them that you’re there, emails like this will hopefully make your audience more likely to purchase from you as they are hearing personal, unique info that will encourage them to invest time and interest in your business. You could also share client testimonials within your emails and use them as a platform to show the impact your business is having before encouraging your readers to join in the fun. The opportunities to tailor your content are endless, so get creative!
8. GET TO KNOW WHAT’S WORKING AND WHAT NEEDS WORK
A blog talking about the best email marketing tips can’t ignore the benefit of being able to monitor their success, and why it is vital to do so. Keeping an eye on email analytics will allow you to see where your audience is engaging the most, as analytic tools can locate where website clicks are coming from most frequently (i.e. – emails, Instagram, Facebook etc). This will allow you to gauge how successful your email marketing is, or whether you need to change things up in order to ensure it is as successful as it can be.
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There are endless benefits to using email marketing to promote your business, and we’d love to hear how you’ve been getting on; follow us on social media @WeAreCandescent and share your experiences of using email marketing when promoting your own businesses!
Image Credits: © Brooke Cagle / © Campaign Creators