Why is email marketing important? Email marketing allows you to promote products and services to your target audience in their inbox. Additionally, you have your subscriber's permission to send promotional material to their inbox. It is always important to send emails for follow-up from the people interested in your products or services. And email marketing is one of the best ways to do that. I recommend you make email marketing that focuses on your business to build trust with your audience.
You have to write the emails once, and you can repeatedly use these emails in the email automation process. By building your email list, you will start to grow your audience and redirect them to your funnels, Facebook groups, or wherever you want. Email marketing is one of the best traffic sources you can rely on as it also provides you access to control the number of traffic you receive. It will be much better than any paid social media campaign to grow your list with potential buyers.
How many platforms allow you to send promotional material directly to a client's inbox? Email marketing isn't dead. There are over 4.1 billion email users, and over 2 billion emails are sent in a day. Most smartphone users access their emails on their mobile devices, so odds are your target audience will see your email a short while after it is sent.
Email marketing should be part of your marketing campaign because it outperforms all the other digital marketing platforms. By the end of this blog, you should be ready to increase your budget for email marketing and increase your email list efforts.
Why Should You Use Email Marketing?
There are many reasons why small businesses should use email marketing campaigns. Many business owners and marketers think that email marketing is obsolete because of the emergence of social media platforms. Overall, email marketing gives you a direct communication line with potential customers. All you need to do is offer valuable content and earn the trust of your subscribers.
• Constant Contact with Your Audience
Email marketing allows you to have direct contact with your audience. You can tell readers firsthand about the benefits of your products and even offer discounts. You can tell your audience about your brand and what you want to achieve.
Also, your audience will get to know you as the person behind the brand, product, or service. Email marketing establishes a personal connection with potential leads. Some of your email audience can begin to look forward to reading your emails because of the value they get. You also will be able to learn from your email statistics what interests your audience.
• Real-Time Communication
Email marketing is an excellent substitute for postal services, and you can be sure that your emails will be read within a few minutes to a few hours after you send them. Anything that hasn't been read in that time frame should be considered as ignored emails. Therefore, you can check your email campaign results the same day and see how many subscribers you could reach.
You can be sure that people who check their emails regularly will see your email soon, take the necessary action, or ignore it. Overall, emails are a convenient way to communicate with your potential or existing customers.
• High Engagement Rates
Emails have the highest engagement levels across all digital marketing platforms. You can expect a high open-rate when using email marketing. Also, subscribers who read an email tend to click on the CTA button and take the necessary action.
Email marketing is essentially an excellent way for client acquisition and retention. You can acquire new clients 80% of the time using email marketing and retain the clients as repeat customers.
Repeat customers are the best because they will spend on your products and services several times a year. You don't have to look for new traffic before reminding repeat customers to make their monthly purchases.
• Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is an essential step in setting up a business. Customers cannot buy a product they haven't heard about and don't understand the benefits. Email campaigns are excellent for introducing new brands to subscribers. You can create informative emails that showcase the best features of a product or service.
Meanwhile, you will be able to build trust with potential buyers. You have to be patient when doing email campaigns with brand awareness as the objective. Businesses shouldn't sound pushy when telling subscribers about their products or services. It would be best to choose “learn more” or “go to website” as your CTA actions during brand awareness. Using a “Buy Now” CTA button before establishing trust with subscribers will trigger them to unsubscribe from your listing.
Why is Email Marketing Important for Small Business
Email marketing is a vital marketing strategy for small businesses because they have a small marketing budget. Small businesses can make high-volume sales through email marketing with a small budget. Therefore, small businesses can get exceptional results from email marketing compared to other digital marketing channels.
• Cost-Effective
Did you know that email marketing has the highest ROI than all other online marketing platforms? Affordable marketing costs are one of the advantages of email marketing, and that is an excellent factor why small businesses should adopt email marketing. Currently, email marketing has an ROI of $40 or more for every $1 spent.
Such high returns on investment make it easy to reach more people and increase sales without a significant marketing budget. Therefore, an email listing of 100,000 subscribers can bring in many sales with each email campaign. Overall, the size of your email list will determine your sales per campaign. You have to grow your email list to enjoy more profits through email marketing campaigns.
• High Customer Acquisition Rate
Acquiring new customers is as crucial as retaining existing customers. Email marketing has a high conversion rate because your subscribers are welcoming to your promotional content. It is why email marketing is effective in acquiring new clients. People give their emails to a website they believe they will get value from their promotional material.
Your subscribers will be willing to follow your CTAs once you establish trust. Others will subscribe to your email blasts because of the deals and discounts you offer. Overall, identify what different subscribers expect and give them what they want. You can use email marketing to reach a new audience and market them your products or services. New markets that perform well during email marketing will reward you with high sales volumes.
• Targeted Personalization
Email marketing tools have evolved, and you can now use a subscriber's name when sending emails. You need to collect the information when you provide a subscription form to your audience. Personalizing emails will get you more engagement and clicks on your CTA buttons because you establish a connection with your audience. It is another reason why email marketing is effective in bringing in high returns.
When readers see “Dear Raya” or Hello Jasper,” they feel recognized by you. It is better than using a generic greeting like “Dear Valued Customer” at the beginning of your email content. Generic greetings tell a client that you couldn't be bothered to tailor your content. The best part about email customization is that you do it in a matter of minutes. Again, everything about email customization begins with the subscription form. It helps you decide how to customize content for your target segments.
• Quantifiable Results
Email marketing services provide information on various email marketing metrics that you can use to benchmark your performance. Email marketing metrics are essential in measuring the performance of multiple campaigns. You can see what is working and what's not when you do split testing to see the change in performance for specific metrics.
Some of the popular metrics include:
- Open rate
- Mobile open rate
- Opening time
- Bounce rate
- Link clicks
- Click-through rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Conversions
- ROI
- Spam score
Some metrics like the open rate and the bounce rate can tell you how well your subscribers received an email. Also, the action taken by the subscriber can tell you the success of an email campaign. Some campaigns will see many subscribers click on links, while others can cause some readers to unsubscribe from your list.
Overall, it would help determine the metrics that show success or failure in your industry. Also, compare your results with the performance reports that your email service provider posts. It would be best if you always aimed to be better than the average email campaign performance.
What is the Most Important Aspect of Email Marketing
There are several essential aspects of email marketing that can make or break your campaign. There is an art to emails that have high conversion and click-through rates. You need to understand the factors that make an engaging email. Here are some of the aspects to pay attention to when creating an email campaign.
• Email Automation
Email automation is creating emails that are sent when a trigger action happens. For example, you can create a welcome email sent to anyone who subscribes to your website. You can also send emails to remind your readers about an offer that is about to expire. Also, you can create an email that prompts a customer to complete the checkout process when they abandon their cart.
Email automation is an excellent solution for busy business owners as it helps small businesses provide personalized emails on time to subscribers. You can use automation to increase sales when the correct trigger events happen. Overall, you get more work done with less input.
• Timing and Frequency
Email marketing should never be an excuse to bombard your subscribers with promotional emails. Remember that your readers are giving you access to their inboxes because of the value you provide. Abusing that access can land you in the spam folder, which is terrible for your business.
Do a couple of test emails to get an idea of the time most subscribers check their emails. The right time to send promotional emails is the window when most subscribers check their emails. It may be early mornings during weekdays or in the afternoon on weekends.
Overall, don't send more than three promotional emails per week. It would be best if you sent 1-2 emails per week to your subscribers. Use the opportunity to reach your subscribers carefully, so you don't prompt them to unsubscribe from your email list.
• Call-to-Action Buttons
Never send an email without a CTA button to a subscriber. Each email should have a desired action that a reader should take. You can choose to use emails to drive traffic to your website for brand awareness or sales. Choose CTA buttons that are relevant to the email copy you just sent to your email list.
• Be Respectful and Friendly
Use kind and friendly words when creating an email copy because your subscribers give you a precious opportunity. Overall, use the best email practices starting with warm greetings and a thank you line at the end of your email.
Readers can unsubscribe because you write rude, insensitive, or use formal business language. Keep your audience interested without using callous language or unorthodox methods. Always keep up with the best email copy practices when creating an email campaign.
What is the Most Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing can't work well without a strategy. An email strategy helps marketers deliver the right content to different users to reap the best results from their listings. What a 20-year-old considers trendy isn't what a 35-year-old does. You need to cater to different needs using different strategies if you want your email campaigns to be successful. Here are the best email marketing strategies.
• Segmentation
Email segmentation is the process of creating smaller email lists from your subscribers according to shared interests. You can segment emails according to geographic locations and automatically send emails at the best time for each location. You can also segment email lists according to age, gender, work, or other interests. Therefore, you can send content about parenting tips to subscribers within a particular age group or who have children. Segmentation increases the odds of readers taking a specific action because the email copy resonates with them.
Segmentation is a simple way to boost the performance of your campaigns on all relevant metrics. Readers are more likely to open an email, interact with it, click several links, and even look forward to your emails when you target them with personalized content.
• Mobile-Friendly Emails
Most email users view their emails on mobile devices more than they use emails to read emails. You need to ensure everything about your email copy looks fantastic from a mobile device. Email marketing services offer the option to preview emails across several devices before sending them out.
Images, CTA buttons, and your paragraphs should have a professional outlook. Never use images that don't adjust well to mobile devices. Some huge images don't compress well when a viewer uses a phone or tablet to view them. Change anything that looks out of place from a mobile perspective and replace it with an interesting alternative.
• Split Testing
You will never know what works best without carrying out split testing on your email campaigns. Some of the things to test are the heading, subheadings, CTA buttons, links, images, and anything in the email copy that can sway the decision of a reader to take action. You have to conduct split testing (A/B testing) on one component at a time to be sure what works. For example, if you change the heading, image, and copy of the email to test the results, you won't know which metric is responsible for improving or lowering your metrics.
Start by testing a heading, and you will be surprised how a magnetic heading can boost your email open rate. You will need to use email copies that are the same except for the metric you are testing. Once you get the results, maintain the changes that provide the best performance. The final product is an email that people want to read to the end and take the required actions.
Why are Email Lists Important?
An email list is a gateway to reaching potential customers directly through their emails. You can notify subscribers about discounts, new products, or offers that you have on your website. A list is an excellent way to acquire new repeat customers that will transact with your company for years.
Most importantly, an email list allows you to significantly increase your business's bottom line for a small cost. Who wouldn't want to increase profits by spending a little money? Emails have a broad reach as more people globally use emails as a form of business communication. You can create a massive email list and make significant conversions from that list after earning your readers' trust.
Small businesses need an email list because it gives them a competitive edge against big companies with significant marketing budgets. The cost of an email subscription list is low, and the returns are high when done right.
FAQ
1. Is Email Marketing Alive?
Yes. Email marketing is alive and thriving. Many businesses have abandoned email marketing for other digital marketing platforms like paid ads. However, email marketing still has the highest performance because the audience is interested in your products. Moreover, you can make higher returns per $1 spent on email marketing campaigns. For the last ten years, the ROI for email marketing has been $39-$51 for every $1. You won't find those kinds of returns on other email marketing channels.
2. Who Should Use Email Marketing
Every business should exploit the numbers available on email marketing. Email campaigns can rake in more customers than other digital marketing campaigns. Forget about what gurus' say about the latest marketing trends. The performance metrics for email marketing show that you will get better engagement, click-through rate, and conversions from email campaigns. Small businesses with small marketing budgets can benefit from using email marketing to generate traffic to their websites. Overall, it is simple to attain several objectives from email marketing campaigns without a hassle.
3. What's the Email Marketing Cycle?
There are four stages that marketers should take to retain them as repeat customers. The cycle starts with engagements, the discovery of products, conversion, and retention. You need to get the attention of potential customers with a value-packed offer. It may be a simple eBook or report. After that, send engaging, relevant content to your customer until you earn their trust.
The discovery stage allows you to introduce your products or services to the relevant audience via email. You can state the benefits or provide a detailed review of a product. Some readers will take action and purchase. Once a customer buys from you, keep them engaged and remind them to repeat business with you. Retaining as many customers as possible should be the objective of email campaigns. A high retention rate gives you a warm audience to send automated messages for repeat sales for months or years.
4. How Long Should I Wait to See Campaign Results?
It will depend on the target of the campaign. An awareness campaign will only take a few hours to see how many emails were read, how many readers clicked on links, and how many clicked on the CTA. However, a campaign to make conversions may take a few days before you see the whole picture of the campaign results. Some users may read the email and opt to buy a product a few days later. The other will remember to place an order on payday.
5. How Can I Write A Good Email Copy?
An excellent email copy will get you more conversions than an average one. A good email copy should start with a catchy title. Titles determine whether or not a reader will open your email, so spend some time crafting an attention-grabbing title. Include subheadings in the email copy to split the content into bite-size sections. Use a friendly tone and show appreciation for the time given. Get to the point immediately after the greeting. Tell your reader about your proposition and the benefits they stand to gain from using your services.
Finally, offer something for free as a show of goodwill. Everyone expects an email to ask for something. Few people get something valuable from email campaigns and offering something useful sets you apart from the rest. Ensure that your grammar is on point before you send the final copy to your subscribers.
6. How Much Do Email Services Platforms Charge?
The charges you pay to email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact will depend on the size of your email lists. Some platforms offer free services, but it doesn't have comprehensive features like paid services. Most basic paid services charge according to the 500-10,000 email lists per month. You can expect to pay anywhere from $10-$25 for an introductory email service plan.
7. Is Email Marketing Warm or Cold Audience?
Email marketing deals with a warm audience since your subscribers know you when looking for relevant information. Therefore, your subscribers expect to receive promotional emails from you, hoping to learn something valuable in the future. It is easy to earn the trust of a warm audience by providing value with each email. Also, you can sell your products directly to a friendly audience once you earn their trust. Overall, you won't be dealing with a cold audience when doing email campaigns.
Conclusion
There are several advantages of email marketing for small businesses, and they can apply to affiliate marketing. Email campaigns are an essential part of all kinds of marketing, including digital and affiliate marketing. Statistics from various email service platforms show that email marketing has high returns on investments. Overall, email marketing is affordable for affiliate marketers, and it keeps a steady flow of traffic to their affiliate link. You can make a lot of money in a short duration through email marketing without breaking your bank account.
Suppose you are a beginner who wants to learn more about affiliate marketing. Would you please read my other blog about “How to make money with Affiliate Marketing.” If you are ready to start your online business with Affiliate Marketing or are already in the business and still figuring it out, you can join the One Funnel Away Challenge. You can learn how to use the different types of affiliate marketing appropriately to get outstanding results. Most importantly, it will help you to build an online business that generates income through affiliate marketing.
“If you don’t have big dreams and goals, you’ll end up working for someone that does.”
