Email marketing is the use of emails to connect with your customers and prospects for commercial purposes. Emails are personalized and are as such, a direct mode of communication between you and your customers. It is also a great avenue to educate your customers about how to use your products. If you are not doing email marketing yet, you should. This blog post will give you some insights on why you need to get started and how to get started but first, let us show you how valuable it is.

How valuable is email marketing?

• It is inexpensive and easy to set up.
• You can track – click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, and more.
• With email marketing, you can target a specific group of customers.
• Email marketing increases sales and customer loyalty.
• Helps you promote your products/services.
• Build a relationship with your customers and prospects.
• Your customers will surely remember you. This directly translates to brand recognition and customer retention.
• Emails are a great way to make your customers feel like they are part of your company. You can share company updates such as events, offers, news and special observances that matter to your customers via email.
• It can be automated. This way, you can set up your email marketing campaign such that when a customer takes a certain action on your site, they can get an email you have already set up solely for this purpose. You can take a look at some email marketing services and their features here to figure out which of them can best help you solve your needs.

3 Reasons Why Email Marketing Should Be Part Of Your Marketing Strategy

 You may think that email marketing is a waste of time, especially because your customers can visit your website and get any information they need, right? That notion is so wrong🙄. Your website may have all the features of your products or services but there is only so much you can explain about each product or service on your website.

• You Can Help Your Clients Better Understand Your Products And Services 

With a thoroughly planned out email marketing campaign, you can explain the features of each product or service in a way that you cannot on your website. Say you run an event planning company and you have various event packages whose features you have listed on your website. The customer or new visitor who just visited your event planning landing page may not understand what the feature “Shell Scheme” means but with email marketing, you can fully explain what this and many more features that come with each package mean. This way, they learn from you and fully understand the benefits they will be getting from choosing any of your event planning packages.

• It Is Better Than Social Media

Social media is a great way to advertise and sell your products but emails have a stronger impact than social media posts. This is mostly because your prospects and customers are more likely to see an email than a social media post. Your social media posts might not show up in your target audiences’ newsfeed but an email will sit in the person’s inbox until the person reads it or deletes it.

• It Converts

Believe it or not, email marketing converts. Most people may never place an order on your online store or use a service you render because they simply do not understand why they need it. They may have visited that landing page and placed an order but forgot to pay because they got distracted. You can target these different group of people with emails.  A few emails explaining the benefits of using a product or reminding the person who forgot to make payment to do so can go a long way to persuade your prospects to make a purchase or more.

Now that you understand why you should be doing email marketing, are you ready to learn how to get started? If you are, keep reading 👍.

How To Get Started With Email Marketing

Getting started with email marketing is quite easy. Before you get started, you will need to get a few things. You will also need to know some very important things to easily help you get started. Keep reading to find out.

Get a professional email address

To get started with email marketing, you need a professional email address. Trust me, you do not want to send promotional emails to your customers or prospects using a free email service. They will very likely mark your mail as spam without even opening it.

Why? The answer is quite simple.

If you have ever gotten a fraudulent email, you will understand why no one wants to open promotional emails from free email accounts like Yahoo or Gmail. You are in business now so, everything has to have a professional touch.

Get yourself an email address that has yourbusinessname@yourdomainname to build customer trust and loyalty. You can get a business email account here at only N500.

Want to know the great things professional email addresses can do for your business? Read more here.

Subscribe to an email marketing service

Now that you have your professional email address, you will need to subscribe to an email marketing service. Whatever you do, make sure that the email marketing service you choose is permission-based and optimized for mobile. Emails that do not give the prospects you are targetting the option to unsubscribe is not an email marketing service you should be using.

Most people check their emails using their mobile phones more than ever before, so, ensure that your emails can be viewed properly on a mobile phone else more than half of the people you are targeting will not get to read your email.

Curate email addresses and Build Your Email List

If you own a website, you should add an Opt-in form to your home page, products page or landing page(s). According to Bigcommerce, “An opt-in is a form of consent given by web users, acknowledging interest in a product or service and authorizing a third party to contact them with further information“.

For best results, your opt-in form should not be heavy. The design should be simple yet appealing. Your copy or write up on the design should be catchy and enticing.

Whoever reads it should feel like they will be missing out on something great if they do not subscribe to get your email newsletters. To further entice them into opting in to receive your emails, offer them something.

It does not have to be monetary neither does it have to be a discount. It could be a free pdf download of an educating topic in your niche. They will gladly opt-in to get that free information that they need.

Write your Compelling emails

An email has four parts. The subject, the salutation, the body, and the complimentary close.  The subject of your email is very very important. It is the first thing that catches the attention of the recipient and it is what determines if the recipient will open the email or simply scroll past it. This is why it is very important to ensure that the subject of your email make people want to learn more.

Your salutation should be professional and personalized. The body of your email should not sound bland or generic. Write like you are having a conversation and try not to sound too serious.

Remember that you are not the only marketer targeting your prospects or customers so try to ensure that your emails are as brief, interesting and educative as possible. If the content is boring, your customers or prospects will likely not finish reading it before exiting the email. The content you provide should be valuable.

Remember, Time Is Money

People do not like it when you waste their time. Telling them what is not relevant to them professionally or otherwise will definitely make them ignore your next email or prompt them to unsubscribe from your email list. This is why you need to make sure the emails you are sending out are targeted at people who are interested in what you are selling.

If your email is a sale, mix it up with educative content.  This way, it is not too obvious that you are trying to get them to purchase a product or service. The educative content could be a blog post that educates them on the benefits of that product you want them to purchase.

Make sure that you send fresh content. Do not send the same content repeatedly else people will either unsubscribe or mark your email address as spam.

Add social media follow buttons

Link your social media pages to the social media buttons available in the email marketing service. This can help people who read your emails, connect with your business on social media. If you are interested in growing your social media following or improve engagement on your social media channels, you shouldn’t leave this out when customizing your email marketing account.

You Need To Test and Tweak

To determine what your customers or prospects respond to more, you should test different headlines, copies, and writing styles. To measure properly, ensure you check your statistics till you discover which combinations convert prospects into customers and customers into repeat customers. When you find out what works, tweak it every once a while to avoid your emails sounding redundant and boring.

Please Follow the rules

There are certain rules that guide email marketing. These rules are necessary so that marketers will not bombard users with too many marketing emails. Some of these rules include having a non-deceptive subject line, a method of unsubscribing, and your name and address at the end of the emails. According to The Nigerian Cybercrime act 2015, individuals or organizations that send spam email will be sentenced to 3 years in prison and/ N1 million fine. 

Please make sure that you follow the rules 🙂.

Finally,

If you do email marketing properly, you will not just boost your sales, you will get your subscribers to fall in love with you. So much so that they become evangelists of your brand for free. Love is like a drug, it makes you do things you naturally would not do. Get started with email marketing today, make people love your brand and reap the rewards in your favourite currency 😉. Do not forget to get your business a professional email address.

Kindly share this post if you learned something and share with your friends too 💕.