A Guide to Growing Your Business With Email Marketing

How do you reach your customers? When it comes to marketing, there are many platforms and diverse strategies you can use to accomplish your goals. More often than not, this leaves us confused as to what strategies we should follow. In face of the lively social media marketing and efficient SEO, how much would email marketing really benefit your business? 

If you still think email marketing is only limited to selling goods and promoting deals, then you’ve been missing out gravely. Email marketing is one of the most practical and efficient tools when it comes to connecting with new prospects, retaining old customers, and deepening the relationship with current ones. Here’s what you need to do to make the most out of this remarkable marketing tool. 

Understand Your Customers

Just as is the case with every marketing strategy, it always starts with understanding your customers. Despite its efficacy, email marketing is most certainly not for every customer segment; you can’t expect teens to be keen on checking their email regularly. Make sure to study the customers you want to craft the emails for, taking into consideration their behavior, interests, and needs. 

Set Down Email Marketing Goals

There’s another step that goes into all marketing strategies, which is modifying the tool to fit the main marketing and sales goals you’ve established in your plan. Merely deciding to use a new tool for its so-called efficacy won’t automatically help you grow your business. You’ll need to use the tool, which in this case is email marketing, strategically specifying the goals and KPIs you’re supposed to accomplish with this plan. For email marketing, you’ll focus on the conversion rate, customer retention rate, and the leads you generate. 

Generate Leads

Have you thought of how you are going to reach your customers through email marketing? Clearly, you’ll need to generate leads first. Lead generation is most commonly accomplished through creating sign-up forms on the landing page, but you can create forms for different kinds of customers to guide them through their journey across your platforms. 

Create the Email Template

Depending on the customer segment and the purpose of the emails you’re sending out, you’ll probably need to create different email templates. For instance, you’ll want to create a welcome-on-board email to new subscribers, which may or may not include any promotional content. However, you may want to steer clear of direct advertising in the first email, unless you’re offering them some kind of discount or a welcome offer. Other email templates can include confirmation messages, newsletters, and follow-up emails to explain certain procedures or products in more detail. 

Choose an Email Marketing Service Provider

Your email marketing experience may either be a breath of fresh air or a daunting endeavor; it all depends on the email marketing service you use. According to Matthew Woodward’s review on https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/reviews/aweber/, you should look for an affordable, flexible, simple, and easy-to-use tool. Such a tool should provide you with superb and easy-to-create sign-up forms, while it should also help you build the landing page, make your experience fun, simple and practical, and give you the tools you need to test and measure your performance. 

Test Your Emails

Before you send out your emails in bulk, make sure to test the whole process first. This starts with behind-the-scenes efforts by using the email marketing service and getting familiar with its features. Once you get the hang of it, make sure to test the emails you’ve created by sending them to your own team members or acquaintances to spot and fix any unforeseen issues. More often than not, you’ll come up with a design and misalignment issues that are easily fixable.

Segment Your List

To further maximize the benefits you get from email marketing, make sure to segment your customers according to their criteria. You’ll want to analyze your customers by looking through the demographics and then use the information you find to customize your emails. You may even send the same message crafted differently based on this segmentation, or change the time of sending the emails to fit different time zones and lifestyles. 

Automate Email Marketing

No one likes the idea of having to do everything manually. If anything, the whole purpose of using marketing tools is to make the process more efficient to save on time and energy. This is another way in which the right email marketing service will help you expand your business – by providing you with a set of automated tools that fit your convenience. Automating your emails will help you schedule emails and send them at different times and to multiple lists. This feature will also welcome new subscribers automatically as soon as they submit their forms. 

Measure Performance

We’ve already established the importance of setting your email marketing tools, but how will you make sure you’re progressing in the right direction, or at the desired pace, unless you keep an eye on the numbers? There are multiple ways in which you can measure your performance, the simplest of which is looking at your conversion rate and increase in sales. However, a more accurate analysis would be to look at the recipients’ interaction with your emails and then break it down. By doing so, you’ll identify the main source of the problem and tweak your process accordingly. 

Get More Subscribers

Now that you have the process ready to be scaled up, you can start getting creative with your email marketing campaigns to grow your subscribers’ list. Technically speaking, you’ll have to focus on other marketing strategies in order to achieve that. Think about starting contests, promoting offers via social media channels, or asking people to subscribe to offline events. 

Long gone are the days when email marketing was limited to promoting products and services. Nowadays, email marketing is one of the best tools you can use to build an authentic and interactive form of communication with your ever-growing customer list. With the right strategy in hand, you’ll witness an unparalleled increase in both marketing KPIs and sales numbers.