Email marketing is one of your most powerful digital advertising tools. However, using it effectively can be difficult, particularly if you’re new to the process. Below are seven steps to help you succeed.
1. Provide Value
First and foremost, it is vital to provide real value in your emails. You need to give your readers a reason to read the email—and to continue to read future emails from you. This might mean offering valuable tips, information, and advice. It may mean simply entertaining your audience. Or it may mean a promotion that is highly targeted to your audience so that even if they don’t buy, they still find it interesting.
2. If You Are Directly Selling a Product or Service, Highlight the Benefits
If you’re selling a product or service, make sure that your emails not only highlight what you have to offer, but how it fills a need in your customer’s life. Remember – your customers aren’t really interested in WHAT you have to offer, but instead in how it benefits them. The classic example is “don’t tell them about the shovel… tell them about the hole they’ll be able to dig with it!”
3. Use an Email Marketing Service
An email marketing campaign can be enormously time consuming, and chances are good that you don’t have the time for another full-time job. Services like iContact and Constant Contact make it easier by automating the process and taking the load off you.
4. Don’t Spam
Spam has become a hated word – and that emotion will transfer to you if you aren’t careful with your marketing practices. Never, ever send out unsolicited emails. Not only can spam result in unhappy readers, but if you do it enough, you may find your email server “blacklisted” by anti-spam authorities.
5. Check and Double-Check
If your messages are poorly written, use incorrect grammar, have typos throughout or are otherwise unreadable, you are off to a bad start. Why should a consumer put any trust in you or your products or services if they can’t even read your email message? Make sure you check and double-check for grammar errors and typos.
6. Repetition
One of the most common mistakes we see from business owners is the failure to use email marketing consistently. Sending a single email blast is rarely going to accomplish much. Just as viewers have to be exposed to commercials on TV many times before the message sinks in, email recipients must be consistently exposed to your brand and message. Note that this DOESN’T mean sending the same email over and over again. Change the content, tweak your offer, use different visuals… but keep at it!
7. Segment Your Email List
It is very rare for any business to have an email list consisting entirely of individuals all fitting the same profile. Yet, too many businesses take a “one size fits all” approach to their email marketing. To maximize effectiveness, it’s important to segment your list and reach out differently to different elements of your audience. For instance, if you sell both to businesses and to consumers (B2B and B2C), these audiences should be approached very differently. If some of these businesses are one-man-shops and others are corporations, they must be spoken to differently. This sounds obvious, but it’s often ignored. Email services such as we discussed above make this process very simple—so take advantage!
Email marketing can be a great source of new business and can help you sell more to existing customers… but only if you’re doing it right. To learn more, get in touch with us today!
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