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Jeremy McGilvrey Gives Tips for How Small Business Owners Can Grow Their Customer Base with Email Marketin
If you’re among those who think that email marketing is past its prime, then think again. Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is still one of the most successful digital marketing strategies used by companies such as Amazon and HubSpot.
Statistics have revealed email marketing is a lot more successful than SEO, paid search (PPC), social media marketing, and affiliate marketing.
Many successful small business owners use email marketing to grow their customer base. You can either choose to outsource your email marketing or select a staff member to execute it for you.
With the right techniques and the correct use of the data, you can achieve success with email marketing. Let’s dive into some tried and tested email marketing strategies.
I’ll also discuss how these methods can drive leads to your small business.
3 Email Marketing Strategies:
Some businesses are unable to succeed with email marketing because of their lack of segmentation. Segmentation allows businesses to put different customers and prospects into different categories and send email messages that are tailored to their subscribers. When you segment your email list you exponentially increase your odds at succeeding with email marketing.
Segmentation can provide benefits of email marketing as it allows you to create more targeted campaigns for audiences in different phases of their consumer cycle.
According to HubSpot, segmentation works wonders as email marketing KPIs work better when segmented.
Let’s look at an example to understand this better. An email with the same subject line and the same content sent to two different groups (different consumer cycle phases) will result in different outcomes. That is why it is important to segment your mailing list and then create email marketing campaigns that target each list individually to get better results.
- Personalized Messages
For a consumer named Tom, an email starting with Hey customer and an email with Hey Tom is going to resonate differently. A carefully curated email will give the consumer the right impression. Make them feel that you care about them and that they aren’t receiving randomly generated emails.
Amazon uses this strategy, and the success of the company is in itself is evidence of the success of personalized messaging.
According to Experian marketing services, personalized emails have a 6X higher transaction rate, but 70% of brands fail to use them. This is where many businesses don’t properly gauge the importance of personalized email and gain a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Additional research I discovered stated personalized emails can result in a higher ROI, up to $20 for every $1 invested. As I’ve mentioned above, the most basic yet easy route to email personalization is to address the reader by their given name. You can request the first name in your opt-ins to gain this information and start doing something that 70% of the brands aren’t – using personalized emails.
- Automated Email Campaigns
With a high number of subscribers to your mailing list, automation becomes a necessity. Knowing when to automate your email campaigns is going to give you an edge over others. The most basic form of automated emails are confirmation emails or welcome or thank you emails.
These are also more commonly known as trigger emails. Interestingly, research shows that trigger emails perform much better than traditional emails. These emails have higher open-rates when compared with conventional emails. Forrester reports that trigger emails-based email marketing strategies can generate 4 times more revenue and 18 times more profit.
I’ve shared some strategies that can be useful for creating effective email marketing campaigns. Now, let’s further solidify those strategies by stating the benefits of email marketing.
Email is still one of the most commonly used platforms of communication. Did you know that during the year 2020 alone, 306.4 billion emails were sent and received each day?
Add in the fact that there will be 4.3 billion email users in 2023. This staggering growth can be communicated as a growing benefit of email marketing as well.
Low Costs
One of the benefits of email marketing is its low costs. You don’t have to pay a premium to have your message appear on a billboard or in a magazine.
All you have to do is invest in software that will automate your emails and track and analyze the data gathered. However, the cost would be significantly less when compared with traditional marketing.
Effective and Easy Communication
Email marketing is your self-curated platform to communicate with your audience and engage with them.
This communication can also result in your targeted audience getting closer to your brand and becoming more loyal. It’s an easy way for your audience to keep in touch with you and stay updated with your latest updates and offers.
Targeted Messaging To the Right Audience
A good email marketing solution is a timely one. And with email marketing, not only can you reach your targeted audience with a personalized message but also target them at the right time.
Segmentation, as mentioned above, can prove to be beneficial in targeting the right audience. Add in the right timing, and your email marketing strategy is fool-proof.
Revenue Generation
The bottom-line of all marketing campaigns is to generate revenue for your company. Email marketing does that, and with lower costs. Add an excellent copywriter to your team and see your call to action resulting in significant revenue for your brand.
According to marketing week – for Virgin Airlines – email marketing was the second largest revenue driver for them after PPC.
Self-Promotion
Promotion is not an easy feat to achieve. That is why brands have to come with unique and new ways to keep promoting themselves. But self-promotion can easily be a part of an email marketing strategy.
It is undoubtedly a tried and tested method of reminding consumers of your presence. And with email marketing, you have a low-cost platform to do so.