Is Email Marketing Right For My Business?

Creating an email marketing campaign is a very practical strategy for many businesses – it’s simple, inexpensive and effective. Email marketing is 40% more effective than Facebook or Twitter at acquiring new customers and leads. To get the best results, there are a number of components to consider.

Here are five important components to think about before launching your email marketing campaign.

If you are considering email marketing as a strategy to reach your audience, be sure you are capturing a relevant audience, so it isn’t a wasted effort. Email marketing delivers the highest ROI, even in comparison to social media, paid searches and affiliates, mainly because of the direct communication that is possible to reach your target audience.

Reach your most valuable audience by communicating to past and prospecting customers.

Use relevant photos, images, colours and wording in your campaigns in a way that speaks to your targeted audience.

Make sure your email list is not only within your targeted demographic, but that it also is a group of people that are likely to have and use the Internet and email.

Statistics show that for every $1 spent on email marketing, there is $38 generated.  To get these kinds of results, you have to first build up your email list.

Getting your target market to your website or into your store is half the battle, now all you have to do is have them sign up for your newsletter.

You can curate your email list in a number of different ways:

• Invite your customers and potential customers to opt-in to your mailing list.
• Include a pop-up window on your website inviting visitors of your website to sign up for the newsletter.
• If you have a storefront, ask your customers for their email address at the checkout.
• For a better chance of your customer leaving their email address, offer them something special for leaving their email address! This could include a discount for their current purchase, free shipping or a small, free product.
• Enable online contact or enrolment forms in order to collect email addresses from web based browsers.

Purchasing or renting an email list is typically a bad idea. The contacts on these lists will not be expecting your emails and will less likely be interested in hearing from you, and may potentially even go out of their way to tarnish your brand. In a case like email marketing, the element of surprise is not a valuable thing.

Once you have your email list curated, it’s important that you can provide this list with content.

Email marketing is for you if you have enough content to make each newsletter different and exciting. There are several characteristics that make content valuable:

Your newsletters are a great way to promote special offers, coupons or deals that your customers or potential customers should know about.

It is not enough to pump out purely transactional sales messages. You’ll want your newsletters to inform your readers, make them feel valued and to create a respectable relationship with them. A good way to avoid this is to also include some “on brand” material that is in no way promotional, but is helpful to your reader. For example, a real estate agent might include content that informs their readers with tips on how to spruce up their kitchen with hottest trends for the season.

It’s important to maintain a consistent schedule – one that your readers will be able to expect, count on and look forward to receiving.

Once your readers sign up for your newsletter, it’s likely because they want to learn more about what you have to offer. Don’t disappoint! Give them consistent enough content to be able to grasp the offers, voice and values of your business.

• By having consistent emails sent out to your subscribers, you will be able to accurately gauge what is working and what isn’t.
• By being able to analyze the results of your campaign (by number of opens, click through rates and engagement), we will be able to adjust certain elements to improve the engagement of the emails.

• There’s a happy medium! It is important to not bombard your mailing list with too frequent of emails, as it is likely that your readers will eventually treat your emails as spam and throw them right in the trash without opening them.
• If you don’t put out enough, your subscriber may forget who you are and why they signed up for your newsletter and choose to unsubscribe.

Use *|MERGETAGS|* to personalize your emails

• Newsletters can be easily personalized with merge tags, so your emails are specifically addressed to each subscriber. Seeing “Hi [First Name]”, will give your reader the impression that you are speaking directly to them.
• This makes it personal, and will reassure them that you aren’t spam email in their inbox.

• Newsletters are a great way to ask for feedback and engage by responding to your customer base.
• This will allow you to better serve them (and others) in the future.

Don’t send an email to your list with a wrong name or incorrect the merge tag code visible. To avoid this from happening, send yourself a test email first!

If you can envision all of these things with your business, then an email marketing campaign is likely a very good move for your business. Let us show you how we can help you gain subscribers, while increasing your customer reach, engagement and satisfaction through email marketing . Contact us here .