What is Email Marketing? A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a digital marketing strategy where you send emails to your existing customers or prospects in order to promote your business. This is one of the most effective ways of promotion as it has other benefits to it.
Through email marketing, you get to build a relationship with your customers or prospects and it has been found out that a lot of online buyers get motivated to make a purchase by an email. So it’s a great opportunity for you to boost your business.
But remember, it might not be as simple as it appears. Just having access to people’s inboxes doesn’t mark the accomplishment of the job. If your emails are not attractively written, then they might not care to give it a read.
So make sure to write catchy emails. Besides, if you get a response from their side, be respectful enough during your turn as that sketches the first impression about your business in their minds. The next thing to do is to learn the importance of email marketing.
Why is Email Marketing important for any business?
Email marketing serves as a constant connection between you and your customers. The impact is so much so that even a random buyer can become one of your loyal customers. To know why it is such an important aspect of every business, read a little further.
Spread Awareness:
Email marketing is a wonderful way of telling more and more people about you. Through web forms and landing pages you can connect with your audience and make an appeal to them for subscribing to your email list. Drip campaigns can be created to represent your brand better.
Get Noticed and Remembered:
With the right use of email marketing strategies you can become your audience’s go-to brand. Sending inviting mails regularly will help you get noticed and considered by people. Every time they are in need of the service your industry provides, they will get back to your brand for it.
Stimulate Interest:
Through frequent emails let your customers know in detail about your services and convince them that you have an edge over your customers. Be confident enough to win the trust of your customers. If you are on the right track then they might end up believing that you are what they need.
Motivate Towards Sales:
After you open yourself up completely to your customers and have confidently convinced them that you are the best they can get the industry, cleverly nudge them towards making their first purchase. With emails which can overwhelm them, you can achieve this too.
Stay Connected:
Even after the purchase, you need to show your concern towards your customers. Ensure whether they are happy with your services or not. Ask them to leave a review. If they are satisfied they will recommend your brand to others and will certainly make another purchase.
Types Of Email Marketing
Having known how important email marketing is for your business, it is necessary to get a bit deeper into it and understand what are the different ways in which you can reach out to your audience. Emails are classified into 4 types
Marketing Offers:
It appears almost self-explanatory. In these kinds of emails you provide details about your products and aim at making your audience impulsive to buy your products. Introduce an order button or announce special offers for a limited time to generate fast action.
Announcements:
When you come up with new products or add a service which you were not providing earlier, send these kinds of mails so that your customers stay updated. They might find you responsible, prompt and even take a step more to try out your products.
Event Invitations:
Whenever you come up with a new event, be it online or offline , you can update customers on that by sending an email and requesting them to join you. This will help in increasing your brand awareness.
Newsletters:
You can ask customers to subscribe to your newsletters. These mails are sent regularly and strengthen the relationship with your customers so that you remain at the top of their list. They focus on elevating your open rates and CTRs.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing?
When you switch to email marketing, you have to take care of certain things. You need to find out who all are actually interested in your brand and contact them only. Those who do not show interest in your products, sending emails to their inboxes will be considered as mere spamming.
Therefore build an email list first. An “optin form” and “ email marketing service” are required for you to get started. With the help of Optin Monster you can produce a very targeted and personalized optin form and analyze your performance without having to hire a developer.
How to Grow Your Email List?
This is indeed a tricky thing. Understand the fact that just waiting for people to fill up the optin form will not turn out effective for you. You need to create that urge in them to try you out. Compel them to give their email addresses in exchange of overwhelming offers which will help you build an email list. To make it easy, ask for their email addresses in exchange for a free trial, coupon, newsletter, free webinar, basically something that they cannot deny. These things in exchange of which you get access to their inbox are known as lead magnets.
Tips to Build a Perfect Optin Form
The next major step is to learn the secrets of developing an optin form that can guarantee you an increase in the conversion rate. To know them, read the points mentioned below.
Give a Captivating Heading:
The headline should be attractive and must give a brief idea about your brand.
Give a Proper Description:
Keep the description short and valuable . Long texts will bore people.
Keep the Form Simple:
Don’t load questions on your audience. That is annoying. Restrict it to name and email address only.
Design a Snappy Form:
Make your form simple yet elegant. Introduce bigger sized images and make your visuals enchanting.
Add a Subscription Button:
Introduce a prominent subscription button that shows up randomly while they are on your page.
Create a successful Email campaign:
After gaining enough subscribers you must make the following move. It’s time to get a step closer to them. That means, let’s create an email that will compel them to read.
Craft an Eye-Catching Subject Line:
This the first thing your audience notices. If it is not compelling enough, they might just skip it. But I’ll tell you how to do that.
Personalize it:
With a lot of email providers you can add the name of the subscriber in the subject line. This adds a personal touch and somehow compels people to click on it.
Keep it Precise:
Say the crux in less than 50 words. Since most people read emails on phones the small screen can’t show more text. Avoid using words like urgent, increase, free, make money. People have become smarter. They will push your mails into the trash.
Create a Sense Of Urgency:
This might not be possible for all the emails you send out. But for some you can make it appear urgent by giving amazing offers or discounts for a certain period of time.
Be a Storyteller:
Don’t reflect on your mails that all you want is business growth. Though that is what you want! People will be piqued if you only ask them to buy your products. So open up. Tell them how you got inspired to start your business, your struggles, how you overcame them.
You can also give them a sneak peek into your internal business circuit and share some funny or emotional incidents with employees or customers. This will give them an idea that you want to be genuinely in touch with them.
Make it Easily Readable:
Do not stuff a lot of content into your email written in tiny letters. Surely you never read those kinds of mails. Keep it short and use clear fonts and large sized ones. Use simple words. Bold or italicized the words or phrases you want them to notice. Avoid using commas. List the required things using bullet points or numbers.
Note: Keep a track of who all are actually engaging with you. Some subscribers might not be actually interested or have their email addresses changed. If they haven’t responded for a long time, try to re-engage for a couple of times. If things do not change , remove them from your list. This will keep your list up-to-date.
Conclusion:
We have discussed all the important aspects of email marketing. With these basics you can easily start your email campaign. If you have started out with your business, then don’t delay , start laying out your email marketing strategies. And if you are running a business for years and are not involved in email marketing, then this article might be the game changer. Start with email marketing now and you will thank me.