Email Marketing – What Does it Mean?
Despite the advent of social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, email remains a robust digital marketing strategy to generate leads and expand its customer base. Email marketing is a form of marketing that uses personalized and direct emails to reach and convert information into making a purchase.
Email marketing can turn prospects into loyal clients, which opens the door to gaining more clients through the power of referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. Despite being decades older than most social media channels today, email marketing has been ranked as the king of digital marketing. Wonder why?
Because more people still rely on email despite the other platforms. A survey shows that the number of email accounts being created increases exponentially every year. Don’t forget the algorithm, too.
Unlike social media platforms like Instagram, with algorithms that rapidly change and limit reach every day, there is no algorithm to worry about in email marketing.
The importance of a successful email marketing campaign in a business can not be overemphasized.
How Can Small Businesses Leverage on Email Marketing?
1. Be Sure to Keep Up Your Reports
How else can you see if your email marketing campaigns are making the desired effects if you don’t regularly check them out? Here’s where email reporting and using effective email report metrics come in.
Email metrics (or KPIs) are the tools of measurement to see how successful a campaign is. They include open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, total sent and unsubscribers rate.
To accurately understand the analytics of an email marketing campaign, there are three simple steps to take:
- Analyze the email you’re sending out and the idea you want your recipients to conceive when they read your mail. Suppose you want readers to click a link to your website using click-through rate and open rate metrics. If you’re organizing a survey, look out for response rate measurement.
- Compare how complementary your emails are to your business goals. Remember why you started the email marketing campaign in the first place – to drive traffic to your business. Whatever steps or content you send out to your audience, it must be riveted to converting leads to actual customers. Adjust if necessary.
Now that you’ve analyzed and compared, what are you doing right or wrong?
Are you veering off course, sending emails to the wrong demographic, are people responding to you, or did more people subscribe or opt-out? Drawing up your answers will tell you the next step to take.
2. Pay Attention to Cart Abandonment
Some prospective clients add products to their carts but drop them off halfway. While some forget all about it, others might lose interest in patronizing anymore.
Data shows that 80% of online shopping carts are abandoned before purchases. Here’s where cart abandonment emails come in.
These emails are follow-ups sent to these people to remind them about the abandoned carts. While it is impossible to persuade all cart-abandoners to go through with the purchase, it is worth the effort to reach out to them just in case some of them still have the intention to buy from you.
Using catchy headlines and warm headings piques their interest and eventually draws them to purchase.
3. Make The Signing Up Process Easy for New Subscribers
You finally get people interested enough to subscribe. Still, do they have to click through half a dozen websites and multiple ads instead of a simple sign-in sheet?
Most people give up if they go through a long process of clicking through ads and being redirected to new websites. The best way to encourage prospective customers is to make the signup process seamless. Nobody wants to spend hours clicking through unnecessary pages.
To encourage more people to subscribe, ensure that the process is straightforward. A complicated or unnecessarily long sign-ups form could be a red flag to prospectives and scare them away. The easier it is to sign up, the higher your chances of getting and keeping subscribers.
4. Offer Incentives
Incentives draw customers like bees to a honeycomb. It works like magic if the goal is to raise engagement in your email marketing campaign.
By offering incentives like free shipping, discounts during a limited time space, and a special sale, you will get visitors to respond to your website and increase patronage.
Summary
A prevalent marketing quote says, “The money’s on the list.” Having an email list or a current email address for your business isn’t enough. How active is it?
When it comes to email marketing, that means that the profitability of your business depends on how extensive and active your email list is. You can generate sales from a thorough email marketing campaign, even as a small business owner.
It all comes down to your approach. The primary purpose of building an email list in the first place is to source and increase the number of your potential clients. With the proper engagement like the ones listed above, they can be converted into loyal shoppers at some point.
