How Can Email Marketing Help My Business?
As a human with an email address, you are probably bombarded every single day with dozens - maybe hundreds of emails. Some of these are probably things you don’t care about, others you may look forward to. But no matter how you feel about your overflowing inbox, you likely acknowledge that email marketing is an important part of an effective marketing strategy .A 2018 study by the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) found that for every $1 spent, email has an average $40 return on investment (ROI). That is no small return. Done correctly, email marketing can result in more dedicated customers, more accurate customer data, and higher profits for your business.
Stay Top-Of-Mind
Email Marketing allows you to send personalized messages directly to your clients. Which allows you to stay on the radar of your target audience. Unlike other marketing platforms like ads or social media, you know exactly who your emails are going to. Allowing you to make sure that the people you want to be aware of you, are aware of you.
Two Types of Email Messages
There are 2 basic types of emails you can send. Campaign Emails and Behavioral Emails.
Campaign emails are emails that go alongside your normal marketing strategy. You probably sit down (or know you should be sitting down) once a month or so to craft these emails.
Behavioral emails are often forgotten about by small businesses, but here’s where you can save time. If you have a good Email Service (we like MailChimp for its ease of set up and use, as well as it’s very robust and scalable capabilities), you should be able to send emails based on actions (or inactions) your contacts take.
Here are some example actions:
- Buying something
- Adding something to their cart
- Opening an email
- Not opening any emails for some period of time
- Downloading something from your website
- Filling out a form
You can create emails that go out automatically when someone behaves in a certain way. This means you only need to create this email one time, and it will be sent out whenever someone performs that action...for as long as that action is active.
So instead of sitting down periodically to think of content to email your contacts, you can sit down one time, determine a goal, and craft an email based on some action that is aimed at achieving that goal.
For example:
If you own an online store that sells athletic apparel and you just launched a new line of running insoles. You could build an email that is set to send out whenever someone buys a pair of running shoes. The email could tell them that the best way to ensure their run is perfect is by adding a pair of these insoles to their order. You could even include a discount code. Now, instead of writing an email that goes out to your whole list - even the people who only ever buy tops - you’re spending your time making sure your new products are only advertised to the people who are interested in your products. This ensures that your email-writing time is well spent.
Send Personalized Information
We touched on this personalized information in the example above, but now take it a little bit further. Let's say that every time someone purchases a product from your athletic apparel store, they are tagged with the type of product they purchased: Tops, Bottoms, Shoes, Bags, etc.. They are also tagged with the sport associated with the items they purchased: Soccer, Basketball, Running, etc.
Now you can create a Campaign that targets only the people who have recently purchased Soccer cleats and let them know about other soccer accessories you might be offering. This email wouldn’t be interesting to someone who has only purchased Basketball shorts, but will probably be very interesting to the people targeted by your campaign.
If you don’t have an ecommerce business, you can still collect personalized information based on how people interact with your website and emails. You can send out campaigns to people who regularly open your emails and thank those people for being loyal readers.
You can send emails to people on their birthdays, and you can even customize the subject line to include their name and other relevant information. Did you know that personalized subject lines are the single factor that leads to the highest open rates?
Testing
If you make all sorts of changes to your email strategy, but don’t test to see what changes are effective - there is little point in changing anything. All the email marketing advice in the world could mean nothing to your specific audience. You can be told that one thing or another will help your emails, but that might not hold true for you and your audience.
The only way to be sure that what you're doing is working is to test! Test frequently and test everything. E-commerce customers who use A/B testing with revenue as their test metric typically earn 20% more revenue than they would from a standard campaign.
Moreover, incorporating an email verifier into your testing process is crucial to ensure that the outcomes are based on accurate and reliable data. Testing frequently and with precision, including the accuracy of contact information, not only validates the effectiveness of your email strategy but also enhances the overall reliability of the insights gained from the testing process.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is an incredibly powerful tool. With A/B testing, you send out one version to a percentage of your list, and a second version to another percentage. The Test determines which version is “winning” based on a criteria of your choosing. When the winner is determined, the rest of your list is sent the version that won.
Outside of A/B testing, you also need to look at your sent emails to see how they performed. How many people opened, what was the click-through rate? Did people open the email? If you’re seeing a decrease in metrics, you probably want to review your strategy.
ProFusion Web Solutions is a MailChimp Certified Agency, and we are happy to talk to you about your email marketing strategy. We offer packages that will meet your budget and help you grow in the ways that mean the most to your business.