How to make Email Marketing work for your Business
Introduction
Email marketing often gets a bad rap for being unsexy, difficult to understand and complicated to set up. So, many business owners tell me they don’t see the point of marketing their business via email – or that they just use it to send the occasional email. In this blog post, I share some of the ways you can develop an email strategy to grow your business.
However, email marketing is the most cost-effective digital marketing channel of all. Mailchimp estimates that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the ROI is around $42. This is a global average based on a whole host of different businesses, but it’s fair to say email marketing will be profitable for you if used strategically.
It is about more than sending out the occasional newsletter, though. You’ll need to have something in place to get people excited enough to give you their email addresses and then nurture them once they’ve signed up to help them get to the point where they want to buy from you and continue to do so.
Email Marketing: what’s the benefit?
Data Capture
To be GDPR compliant, people must agree to receive marketing updates from you. They have given their consent, which means they are interested in the services you offer, enabling you to build a database of interested people you can market to accordingly. You’ll also have their names and contact details, which will help inform your sales efforts.
Moreover, that database is yours – you can download it and keep it somewhere safe, so no more worrying about your favourite social media platform disappearing overnight and taking all your precious followers with you.
The Analytics
You can monitor open rates, click-through rates, purchases and link clicks and see which individuals responded well to which messages. This makes the upsell easier, enables you to run more targeted campaigns and gives you content you can repurpose elsewhere.
Email marketing also enables people to quickly and easily click directly through to a link or a website – making the user experience more seamless.
Brand Awareness
Whether people have bought from you or are considering doing so, you’ll need to remind them of your existence. Regular emails will help keep you front of mind and increase traffic to your website. Even if people don’t open every email, your name will be in their inbox – a subtle reminder.
Increased engagement and loyalty
It’s estimated that people need between 5-50 interactions with a business before they buy from you; that’s a lot. The right email content at the right time – will increase engagement with potential customers. It feels more personal, can be personalised and is helpful to them.
Automation
The power of automation can not be underestimated; I don’t mean going all AI and becoming robotic. It’s about creating emails and email sequences that reach people when you can’t be online.
It might be a sequence of emails to welcome people and build a rapport with them after they sign up. Or, it could be a friendly email to remind someone who got distracted and wandered off to come back and complete that purchase.
Segmentation
You can automatically segment people in your email based on things like engagement, services and products they are interested in, events or training they have attended and purchases they’ve made. This makes it easy to run targeted campaigns, send relevant messages, and run outreach campaigns.
People can read them in their own time.
Social media is brilliant and super important, but it’s designed to be scrolled through, accessed and then get buried away. How often have you seen a brilliant post while cooking dinner? Only to go back later and be unable to locate it. That information is in their inbox, making it easy to search for and refer back to.
It’ll give the rest of your marketing a boost.
Regularly sending out emails and giving people a compelling reason to sign up for something will increase traffic to your website – great for Search Engine Optimisation. You’ll also be able to drive people to sign up for your social media and repurpose content for that. If you plan on running paid advertising campaigns, you can use the data in your email database to build relevant audiences, which will make your campaigns much more effective.
Getting started with your email marketing
It can be tempting to jump straight in and start emailing your entire list. But, in order for your emails to work for you, you will need to develop a strategy that works for your business and creates conversations.
1.Review your current content and efforts.
If you are producing content, whether it’s blogs, vlogs, training decks, emails or social media posts, make sure you conduct a full review! Those successful content and offers will work well and can be repurposed for email.
I recommend looking at what your competitors offer and are doing – so you can learn from them and identify what you need to do differently.
2.Understand your audience
Similarly to an overall marketing or social media strategy, you will need to understand who you are marketing to and what they need to see from you; think about your audiences:
- Habits
- Interests
- Challenges
- Online habits
- What they need to know about you and your products and services
- What they will buy.
Combining this with understanding the type of content already working for you will help you in the planning stages.
3.Set Goals: What do you want to achieve from your email marketing?
You might want to use it to create awareness of your business, encourage upsells, or simply educate people. Or you may want a shorter term strategy to sell a particular course or product. Identifying what you need it to do for your business will help you identify the type of email marketing software package you might need and the level of support required.
Think about how much time, money, and resources you have to dedicate to it – this will help you stay on track.
Some goals might be:
Growing your list: Perhaps you have just started, or you need to grow.
Engagement: Encouraging people to engage with a specific tool, product or page on your website or sign up for something such as a free webinar or training.
Revenue: This is for a more developed list and will probably go out to a smaller number of people – those who are warmer and more likely to buy.
Fewer cart abandonments: Most useful for e-commerce, but can also work well for subscription services or if you have another service that can be instantly purchased on your website.
Brand Awareness: You may use your email marketing to increase awareness about your brand.
Customer research: You can use your email marketing to research your customers using quizzes or surveys, collect reviews or monitor their interests.
Post-purchase upsell: Once people have purchased from you, you will want to encourage them to repurchase or buy another service.
You may have more than one goal for different audiences.
4.What email software will you use?
This will be down to what you want to achieve, how sophisticated you want your email segmentation(s) and journeys to be (more on that later) and what budget you must allocate towards it. There are a lot of different systems to choose from, so make sure you do your research. This article will help you to get started.
5.What mechanic will you use to encourage people to sign up?
Today’s consumers are super busy and pretty savvy to marketing tactics – so you’ll need to give people a compelling reason to sign up to your newsletter. If you are a product-based business, a discount usually works well (make sure you have a plan for follow-up – so they don’t just buy an unsubscribe).
If you provide a service, a discount might not work so well; you’ll need to think of something your audience will want from you. This may take some testing, but it could be:
- An interactive quiz
- A PDF checklist
- A training video
- A competition to win something relevant to their business (make sure it showcases your services)
- Access to a live event or webinar
- A survey – good for gathering information
- An e-book or white paper
These don’t all need to be free, and some may be limited-time offers, but make sure your offer is right for you and your audience – do your research.
6.What does your customer journey look like?
This sounds daunting, but understanding the process your customers go through before they buy from you and how to get them to buy more – will have a huge impact on your business. To start, you will need to think about:
- How do people first become aware of you? Can you entice them to sign up to receive something from you that might take them closer to making a purchase?
- The touchpoints you have with that customer could be social media, paid advertising, signing up to a lead magnet, attending an event or free training, meeting them at networking or making a purchase.
- The length of time that passes between people becoming aware of your products and services and getting to the point where they will make a purchase.
- You’ll also need to look at the time between people buying one product or service from you to repeating their purchase or buying a different service.
Once you have this in place, you can map out the journey (s) you want your emails to take people on.
How to start implementing email marketing
When I set out to write this blog, I had planned on sharing a step-by-step guide to creating an email marketing strategy. However, I realised there is no blueprint for this – it’s all down to what you want and need to achieve. As well as the touchpoints you have in your business and the length of your sales cycle.
So, here are some ways you can utilise email marketing to your advantage:
Organise, segment and tag people
You can set up auto-tagging so you know which products and services people have used or bought, how engaged they are and what they originally signed up for. Over time, this will help you send more tailored messages super useful for sales outreach.
Make that sign-up button work from the outset
People enter their details because they are excited about what you have to offer. If they don’t hear anything from you for weeks or months, they’ll have forgotten why they signed up or that they did. You’ll see less engagement and will have missed the chance to engage with them straight away.
This might be one email or a series of automated emails to go out at a set time. This helps build interest and trust with people and speeds up the buying process.
Design your emails
Interactivity and accessibility are becoming more and more important. You need to ensure your emails are consistently branded, include some images (but not too many – email servers don’t like it), have clear calls to action and are easy to read.
Email Campaigns
These are one-off emails that you send to most of your list or a specific segment. They might be one-off, but they are usually sent regularly (monthly, fortnightly or quarterly).
They might be to promote a particular product or service, but they are often more general -usually referred to as a newsletter. Don’t call it a Newsletter – it’s about what you can do for them.
Make sure you use a compelling headline that the email educates and entertains. How often you send these types of emails will be dependent:
- On the time and money you have available.
- The size of your list and what your audience requires.
- What are your objectives?
Email Automation(s)
Automating your emails will be a game-changer for your business as people will receive the messages you want them to, and at times, they need to see them. No more remembering to send out certain messages on certain days to some people.
Many people worry that automated emails aren’t personal enough but with the correct branding, tone of voice and use of personalisation tools, that can be overcome, with the bonus being that you will be able to see who opened them and clicked on the links.
Some types of automation are:
Welcome Sequences
These are set up when a new subscriber signs up to your email list (you may have different sequences in place for different ways of signing up). They are a series of emails that goes out to a new sign up to welcome them, educate them and tell them more about your products and services prior to them receiving an email campaign.
Engagement Sequences
These are more commonly used when people sign up for a free or low-cost event or training. Free events tend to generate a high volume of signups. Those events are valuable to you as they are an opportunity to share your knowledge, grow your list, and sell – but free events are easily purchased out of people’s diaries. An engagement sequence between the signup and event – will help to keep people engaged, make them excited about what they will learn and plant the seed of a sale.
Abandon Cart/ Checkout Sequences
These are more common in the e-commerce world, serving as a handy reminder for someone to go back and complete their purchase – when they’ve been interrupted by the dog barking or gone off to check the price on another website.
They are most commonly used in e-commerce but can also be attached to membership, course or subscription pages.
Post Purchase Sequences
You can resell or upsell your services. They are designed to collect feedback in the first instance and then can be used over time to keep people informed, remind them of what you can do for their business and send them relevant information between purchases.
These things will help you build customer loyalty and remain at the forefront of their mind – they can also create a talking point.
How many emails you have in each sequence and how long it will take to send each one will depend on your objectives and the length of your sales cycle.
Monitor, Test and Measure
Of course, email success won’t happen instantly overnight, so you’ll need to monitor, test, and measure.
If you would like to learn more about developing an email marketing strategy to grow your business, you can email me here at melanie@thesussexsocial.co.uk or visit the email marketing strategy page to find out more here.
