Email marketing is the most powerful piece in your business’s marketing toolkit. With a good email marketing list your business can build a relationship with your audience, establish your expertise by giving valuable information, and directly sell your products and services. All three things you need to be successful in business.
With all the power you have at your disposal with an email list, doesn’t it make sense to start using email marketing? But, how do you get started and avoid mistakes that others make? Surely you see people do it well and others fail. You’ve subscribed to other email lists and over time, unsubscribed because of one reason or another. In this post I’ll share with you four essential steps for email marketing success.
But before I get to the four steps, I want to lay out two reasons you want to build your email list. First, an email address gives you a direct way to talk to your audience or customers. Algorithms don’t have a chance against an email address. Second, with a robust list of your audience or customers, you have the ability to run ads to them on social media and to people who algorithms deem who are like them. An email address is an amazing piece of data that your business needs to leverage.
Now, to the four crucial steps to succeed in email marketing!
First, create an awesome email marketing incentive to subscribe
Your potential customer likely is very guarded when it comes to giving out his or her contact information because they don’t want to be inundated by spammy emails. However, if he or she sees something that is of value they may decide to sign up for your list. That’s where an email incentive comes in. Examples might be:
- A music sampler download that is only available for email subscribers
- An ebook or series of videos on starting a journey towards wine appreciation
- A short guide on how to protect a computer from viruses and failure
- A how-to on putting outfits together and accessorizing them with products you sell
The point is to create something of value that represents your company or brand well, is only available to email subscribers and that starts a great relationship between you and your subscriber.
Second, commit to a regular email schedule
In order to build that know, like, and trust factor you’ll need to commit to a regular email schedule. There’s nothing more frustrating to a person than signing up for an email list and not receiving anything until there is something to sell. Businesses who excel at email marketing don’t use the email marketing system to only sell, but work in sales pitches and offers in a good mix of content, help, and information.
Third, consider using a drip campaign
What’s a drip campaign? A drip campaign is a series of emails that are delivered automatically over a period of time. Most email providers like MailChimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact allow you the ability to create this kind of campaign if you pay for the service. You send a series of emails to new subscribers to get them used to receiving, opening, and reading your email.
You could augment your opt-in with additional content or help your audience to get to know you and your business. Perhaps feature your employees or your staple products in your business.
Fourth, create templates for your most sent emails
In order to provide your email subscribers the most value and content, you’ll eventually see trends of what you send and how you want it to look. So, to make it easy for you or your team to create emails you should creating templates that you can use and reuse over and over. Possible types could be:
- Blog Post Template
- Newsletter
- Featured Product
There are obviously other possible templates you can make, so start tracking what you send and what things can be made into a template.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these tips you’ll find useful when you start or improve your email program; that you should create an awesome incentive, commit to a regular email schedule, consider using a drip campaign, and create templates of commonly used emails. If you do this, you should see better returns on your email marketing investment.
Question
So, what about you, how do you make your email marketing program easier and what tips would you share to others who are using email marketing for their business? What do you think you could need help with? Leave a comment on the blog post below!