Email marketing is a form of marketing that uses one of the oldest social media – email. It is believed to be the most cost-effective and efficient form of marketing, but the big question is, are you taking advantage of it to grow your business?
You should know at least one of them – Ope from Cowrywise, Uche from Bolt, Kiki from Sterling, Aisha from Carbon. These are examples of big businesses that understand email marketing and have used it to grow their business. And you can too.
Justin Rondeau of Digital Marketer has this to say about Email Marketing:
Email marketing is the lifeblood of any business. If you don’t have a solid email marketing strategy, then you hate money. Email isn’t going anywhere and is still one of the best ways to move a lead to a prospect, a prospect to a buyer and a buyer to a consistent customer.
Justin Rondeau
That is the gospel truth. Perhaps you need more convincing; the stats below should help.
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10 Interesting Email Marketing Stats
These are exciting stats about email marketing that you need to check out. Some of them will resonate with you immediately, and others will only make more sense when you start harnessing the power of email marketing. Take a look.
- There are 3.9 billion daily email users, and the number is projected to reach 4.3 billion by 2023
- For every $1 spent on email marketing, it generates about $38 profit. That’s about 3,800% return on investment (ROI)
- 35% of business professionals check their emails on mobile devices
- 46% of all emails opened are on mobile devices
- 80% of business owners believe that email marketing boosts customer retention
- Marketers who segment their campaigns note about 760% increase in revenue.
- 78% of marketers have witnessed an increase in email engagement in the last 12 months
- 16% of all emails sent don’t make it into the inbox
- 59% of email respondents say marketing emails affect their choice of purchase
- The US spent more than $350 million on email advertising in 2019
These stats should give you an idea of the power of email marketing and how it can help your business grow.
Are you ready to join the 80% of business owners currently boosting their customer retention with email marketing? Below is the comprehensive guide you came for.
Grow your Business With Email Marketing: The Complete Guide
Let’s take a look at the complete guide on how you can grow your small business with email marketing, one step at a time
1. Set Your Email Campaign Goal
The success of any digital marketing campaign begins with setting a goal. As that’s the only way you can assess your effort at the end of the day.
Think of it as a journey. You know before you set out on a trip, you must first determine your destination. No one begins a journey first before deciding a destination.
So, what do you want to achieve with email marketing? Sure, you want to grow your business. But how do you intend to assess performance at the end of your campaign?
Who are your targets for the campaign, what do they do and what action do you want them to take after opening the mail? All of these and more you need to know before you set out.
Email marketing is goal-driven, so you must set your goals to get the best of it.
2. Choose Your Email Marketing Service Provider
The success of your email marketing campaign may depend on your email marketing service provider. Why you need to spend time to research on the right one to use for your business.
The most popular service provider in the industry at the moment is MailChimp. But popularity does not necessarily mean it’s the best for you.
Also, if you are entirely new to email marketing, you may have some difficulties navigating through some of those email marketing. Why you must do proper research and choose the one that works for you.
Other email marketing service providers are Zoho campaigns, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse and so on.
3. Create an Effective Optin
To send mails to your customers, you need their emails. And this is arguably the most challenging part of email marketing.
It would help if you devised an attractive way to get your customers to sign up to your email campaigns. How many times have you been on a website and just before you leave a message pops up asking to sign up to their newsletters? You must have seen that often.
Now, that’s one of the ways also to get your customers to sign up join your email list. But it’s not enough to just tell people to sign up to “receiving regular subtle adverts” from you. They won’t. So, you will have to make it as attractive as possible.
That brings us to the concept of lead magnet. What do your customers or target audience need and probably won’t mind paying for? How about you offer to give them free? This could be in the form of an ebook, a free course or an irresistible discount.
So, you provide this offer on your website or landing page (which your email service providers will give you) and tell your customers to enter their emails to have it delivered to them. And that’s it, free emails of your customers at your disposal.
4. Email Segmentation
Now, this is very important in the success of your email campaign. Email is a very personal means of communication, and you may not be able to personalize your message if you don’t break them into appropriate segments.
For instance, you run an online store that sells men, women and children clothes. You do realize that the contents that will appeal to men may not move women.
Another example is, say you run an international brand that sells to customers in different parts of the world. You want to break your audience into segments for several reasons.
One, customers in Africa don’t use the same time zone as those in America. So you want to ensure that each customer receives at the best time appropriate for such in their countries.
Also, the choice of words or lingua and specific needs come into play when writing for people from different parts of the world.
The long and short of this is that email marketing is data-driven. It begins and ends with data, so pay close attention to data and let influence your decisions.
Don’t let the word ‘data’ scare you. Basically, get all necessary information about your audience (age, location, gender etc.) and let it all influence how you sort them into categories so your mails can be personalized to your audience.
Don’t forget – “Marketers who segment their campaigns note about 760% increase in revenue”.
5. Writing Your Mail
You remember the examples we gave at the beginning? – Ope from Cowrywise, Uche from Bolt and the rest. You know you don’t see them coming to your mails every time to sell to you. Most times, they come like a friend trying to advise you.
In the same manner, don’t come to your audience advertising every time. They will get tired of your mails and stop opening them.
Instead, come with tips, advice, information and other things that will help them. You can do this and still subtly promote your business, and they will gladly click that link.
Here are a few tips to help you write a good mail that will keep your readers opening your emails and taking the actions you want them to take
- Make sure your headline is irresistible
Your customer receives tons of emails every day, and you can bet they won’t open them all (do you open all your mails?) Statistics show that an average user only opens about 17.8% of their correspondences. And your mail can make it to that small percentage if you can pay close attention to your headline.
You can make it informative, thought-provoking, answer-seeking, engaging or simply combine all. Don’t forget to keep it short too so the whole text can appear on your readers’ screens (usually mobile devices).
- Make it Personal
How does it feel seeing a brand mentioning your name in the emails they sent to you. Cool right? Now, go and do likewise.
Call your customers by their names and not the generic tag ‘customer’.
“But what if I have over 1,000 customers, how am I supposed to type their names one by one?” Even if you have two customers, you don’t need to type your customer’s name when you’re sending mails provided you have their names in the email list you’re using. There is a simple tag you will insert in the mail that will automatically the customer’s name in the mail they receive. Yeah, power of technology.
- Keep your goal in mind
Remember it all begins with a goal? Make sure you keep that goal in mind as you write. Don’t deviate from it.
For instance, if you want your customers to click a link after opening the mail, you have to ensure you add such link in your mail with a clear call to action.
- Don’t send yet, run a test
Before hitting the send button to all your subscribers, you need to run a test first and measure reception.
Most of the times, you will have more than one idea for your campaign, especially for the headline. So, run what is called A/B testing of the two ideas and assess how your audience responds to them. The result would then determine what you would use for the actual campaign.
6. Measure your Campaign
This is where you examine how well your campaign has performed. And how you assess the campaign will depend on your set goals.
Here are the significant metrics with which you can measure your email marketing campaign
- Open Rate
The percentage of your subscribers that opened the mail.
- Click-through rate
The percentage of subscribers that clicked a link in your mail.
- Conversion rate
The percentage of subscribers that completed the required action after clicking the link in your mail.
- Bounce rate
The percentage of subscribers that, for some reasons, did not receive your mail.
- Opt-out
The number of customers who chose to unsubscribe from your email list after your last mail.
- Email sharing or forwarding rate
The percentage of customers who shared your mail on social media or forwarded it other mails.
- Overall ROI
The percentage of profit made from an email campaign as against the amount spent on the campaign.
- Mobile Open rate
The percentage of subscribers who open your mail on their mobile devices
Conclusion
Remember, every email campaign is not an opportunity to sell. Resist the urge to sell all the times. Like Justin Rondeau said, email remains “one of the best ways to move a lead to a prospect, a prospect to a buyer and a buyer to a consistent customer”.
So, don’t rush the process. Gradually take your prospects journey with you from their current state (prospect) to the destination (consistent customer).
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