5 Ways to Use Email Marketing

How many of you hate spam? I know I do. Now another question, does email marketing even work anymore? With an ROI of 4400%, I’d say the answer is yes. And it’s expected to grow within the coming years.

Now the most crucial question I are you effectively using email marketing. To be quite frank, most businesses aren’t. If you don’t want your messages to end up in the folder marked spam, you need to keep reading and be ready to make some changes.

What is email marketing?

All email marketing is a way to send promotional messages to prospective clients to generate sales or leads. 

Why should I use email marketing?

If the 4400% ROI isn’t answer enough, I’m not sure how else to convenience you.

Different email marketing types

There are many different types of email marketing. If you type how many types of email marketing are right now in a search engine, you’ll likely come up with thousands of results, all gibing you different answers. Here are a few of the ones most frequently used.

• Transactional or thank you emails.

These are the emails you send once a transaction has been completed. This is just a way to say thank you, you appreciated their business and give them a receipt. Customers interact with this type of email more than others because it contains valuable information, such as receipts, tracking information, and order confirmations.

• Newsletters

This is one of the most common and popular types of email marketing. Generally, on your website, it gives you the option to sign up for newsletters. If your customer does, it means they are interested in learning more about your company and your products. When creating newsletters, you want to make sure that your topics are relevant, engaging, and informative.

• Promotional emails

This is an excellent way to entice past customers and drive sales up. Promotional emails are used to reward past customers with exclusive offers, introduce new products, and inform them about other money-saving opportunities. 

• Re-engagement emails

This is for past inactive customers. It’s a way to remind them of your business and re-establish a connection. It’s much easier to turn a past customer into an active customer than find a new customer—one thing to remember is do not send too many emails that will cause them to unsubscribe.

1. Get an email list

Email marketing only works if you have people who are interested in your product or services. There are so many ways you can get email lists that we could write a book, so we’re going to briefly touch on a couple of proven ways you can do this.

• Create an email signup form on your website – When people visit your website and are interested in your products and want to know more about your products or services.
• If you have a brick-and-mortar store, have an email signup sheet or ask them for it when they’re checking out.
• If you have a large following on social media, add email signup to your page and on your blogs.
• Use a lead magnet – This is basically a bribe. You give away something for free in exchange for their email address. These things are either free or cost very little. Focus on things you can create yourself, such as.
  • eBooks
  • A webinar
  • Free trials or samples
  • Free quotes or consultations
  • Quizzes or self-assessment
  • Coupons

2. Create your marketing plan

Now that you know what email marketing is, the different email types, and how to get your email list, it’s time to create a marketing plan. Below you will find the steps on how to do this below.

• Find your target audience – you do this by asking yourself who would want to buy your product or services. This is important because you can send them targeted emails to build a relationship.
• What are your goals – when writing an email, you need to have a specific purpose.  A few of these are listed below.
  • Increase sales
  • Brand awareness
  • Customer engagement
  • Promoting a new product
  • Offering discounts
  • Weed out people who are no longer interested in receiving emails

•  Determine what you’ll write – determine what you want to say and how you want to say it. The main thing to remember is that people are busy and don’t want to read paragraph after paragraph. They want to skim the email and see if anything appeals to them. There are a few ways to ensure your emails capture the readers’ attention. 
  • Create attention-grabbing subjects
  • Use short sentences and paragraphs – avoid wordiness and fluff
  • Use bullet points
  • Use psychological triggers such as
    • Fear of missing out
    • Colors that invoke emotion
    • Social proof

• Determine how often you’ll send emails – this can be tricky. You want to send them often enough to keep readers informed but not so frequently that people ignore them or unsubscribe. The easiest way to determine this is to have frequency choices on your signup page. If you don’t have this option, choose your frequency and check the unsubscribe rate until you find the sweet spot. 
• Create your schedule – This is the best way to ensure that you’re meeting your frequency target. You can use a calendar to do this or use an automated program that does it for you.

3.  Design your emails

When designing your emails, you want to keep it simple start with the most critical information first. Make sure it’s well structured, with a font that’s not too big or small, keep it clean, only use images if it serves a purpose, and only add three at the most. 

4. Test your emails

People use their phones to look at emails more often than any other device. So you’re going to want to make sure that your email is smartphone-friendly. Send out test emails to friends or coworkers before sending them to the people on your email list.

5. Determine the best day to send your email

Depending on what area your client base lives in, this will vary depending on your list. The one day you want to avoid is Friday. Most of the time, people are getting ready for the weekend and will likely ignore your email, and then by Monday, it’ll be buried under a ton of other emails. Avoid end-of-day emails because, like Friday emails, they probably won’t get read until the following business day, which they will be buried under a ton of email. Otherwise, it’s trial and error. Find what works best and stick to it.

6.  Measure and optimize your email campaign

Your email marketing strategies should be easy to determine so you know if it’s giving you a good ROI and which marketing campaign is working the best. This is why tracking your conversion rates and user behavior is so important. Your email service provider should have various reporting tools such as.

• How many people are opening your emails?
• The number of people who are clicking on the links
• Number of people subscribing from your list
• Revenue generated from the emails

Summary:

There are a few main things that are essential when starting an email marketing campaign. The first is to get the right subscribers. Without them, your entire campaign will be useless and end up with wasted time and money. Once you have the right audience, it’s time to create a marketing plan that will grab your reader’s interest so that they are more likely to purchase from you instead of another company.

Essential tip: always add a call of action at the end of every email.