How to Use Email Marketing For Business ?
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This post is aimed at providing an easy-to-follow, proven-to-work strategy for using email marketing for business. Right before we dive into the core aspects, what is email marketing?
Email marketing definition
Email means electronic mail. It refers to a set of messages sent through an automated virtual pathway.
Marketing refers to the process undertaken to promote a product to convert and make sales. It involves the bits of strategies and routes you employ to deliver your products to your ideal customer.
So what does email marketing mean? You said it right.
It is the combination of these two terms. That is, email marketing is the series of processes you undertake to promote your products or services to your ideal customer through email.
That’s done, email marketing at a glance. You are about to take a sip of the juice as the next paragraph explains the reasons why you need email marketing.
Why do you need email marketing for business?
1. Easy access to an interested audience and ideal customer
Email is an ever-ready marketing tool. It gives you access to an interested audience, a targeted base of your ideal customers. For a prospect to give you his email address, he is ready to listen to whatever you have to say. That’s a win. You decide whether or not you want to make such a converted prospect an active customer.
2. Cut on a budget used for promotion and the highest ROI return
According to VentureBeat, email is the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers. It has been estimated that for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you get in return at least $38 to $40.
You don’t have to spend as much as you do on other marketing strategies before you get your desired results.
3. A personalized engagement with clients
Email marketing provides an avenue to create personalized messages for your subscribers. Even though not all email marketers use personalized texting, Experian noted that personalization increases open rates by 26%.
When reading a personalized mail, you notice that your name gets mentioned mostly at the beginning of the post and the middle.
This is to get back your attention after you might have lost it or you’re starting to lose interest.
See this sequence, you have a message delivered directly to your personal mail where only you can see it. And while you read, you have your name mentioned in-between the message.
Even though the same message was sent to several others, you get the feeling that the message is exclusively for you.
This trick works on everyone. Just as you prefer to be treated specially on a personal level, so do your clients, email gives you that opportunity to stay personal with your client and win them into loyal and returning clients. You’re giving them the credibility vibe. The vibe that you personally know them and that they can trust you.
4. Unrestricted access to communicating with our audience
Recently, about two weeks ago to be precise, I got a text from a colleague at work asking me if I know any email copywriter. At that time, I knew only one so I directed her to her.
Three days later, I got a call from an old friend asking me to create content for an email marketing campaign. He told me, I’m into email marketing and automation and I would like you to create four email copies for me to promote a female product.
I was scrolling through my WhatsApp status and most business owners had their posts designed with the beauty of this strategy; Email Marketing.
At the time this post was created, I’ve filled my details into two websites asking me for my email address and the day isn’t even over yet.
Are you confused? I am too. What is the sudden interest in email marketing that people found?
Email marketing used to be the most neglected marketing strategy. What’s up with everyone?
After these email marketing requests that I got, I was left with only a question in my mind.
Is email marketing the hottest marketing strategy right now?
You don’t have to rack your brain to answer the question. Let the statistics below give you the answers!
According to OptinMonster, 92% of online adults use email. 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email. 99% of email users check their email every day, some as much as 20 times a day. And 58% of users check their email before they check out social media or the news.
In a statistics report by Statista, the global email marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. Not only that, there are 4 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.
Why you should consider email marketing for your business
Simple, email marketing remains one of the most effective, go-to strategies that will continue to grow in the business space.
Now, you may be wondering, should you consider email marketing for business? How can you get into it? Why should you even do it in the first place? Will it help you to convert more and make more sales?
On October 4, 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down globally for six hours. These few hours of temporary shutdown stipulated a certain period of loss for most businesses. Even Facebook shares fell by 4.9%.
Now, imagine you own an active email list at that time. Does it stop your business? No!
Unlike other marketing strategies, you own your list and so you decide what to do with it. Even in cases of temporary shutdown as in the above, you can continue your marketing.
If you are a Nigerian marketer whose business relies mostly on the Twitter platform, your business may have gotten a scratch due to the June 5, 2021 ban on Twitter by the Nigerian government.
There are several other reasons why you need email marketing but there you have it; the four major reasons you need to check. It’s time to gulp down the juice, a sip isn’t enough. The next few paragraphs explain how to use email for business marketing. The strategies you have to employ to set up your email for marketing.
How to use email marketing for business
Using email marketing for business can be quite complex, especially for beginners. However, it can be simplified. In this post, you will learn how to do email marketing in 3 steps.
1. Build your mail list
This is the first step in successfully using email marketing for business. You need to build a list of the audience that you intend to market to.
To build your email list, you need to define your customer’s avatar i.e. your ideal client buying persona. Identify what exactly they expect from you, what they need to know, and what exactly they’re looking for.
This will help you come up with a lead magnet that they will be willing to exchange their email addresses for.
This lead magnet can be in form of a free eBook, audio, video, a guide, or a cheat sheet.
2. Send emails
After collecting their emails, choose an auto-delivery platform to deliver the freebie i.e. your lead magnet.
There’s a variety of email service providers that you can use. They will be mentioned in the bonus section later on in this post.
Right before you send emails to your list, you need to go through these four stages;
a. Segmentation
Each person joined your email list for a particular reason. Say, for instance, you run a copywriting business. Your target audience is copywriters as well business owners. The copywriters look forward to creating copies to make money, the business owners look forward to learning how to make more sales using words.
To be able to know which message you have to send to any of the parties, you have to segment, so that you will be able to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
b. Send educational mails.
The next on the list is to send them emails. But this shouldn’t be a promotional email, you shouldn’t sell to your mailing list immediately after they join. You have to make them familiar with you, build trust in them and make them look forward to your mail and whatever you have to give.
Using the copywriting business as an example again.
You can send them a 5 day completely free email course on copywriting. Or you can send them reports on copywriting cases, giving them a real-life case of your successful jobs. It could also be how you created highly converting copies for a particular person and the amount in the business earned in return. Or the number of students who have successfully taken your copywriting course and now run their own businesses.
You have to be consistent in giving them the value they signed in for, Most time, in the early days, for free.
c. Engagement
Engaging your client is the most important stage in using email marketing for business. You have to make sure your customer is actively involved in your mail. Ask for their feedback on the emails you’ve sent, if they find it useful and if they would like more of such content or things they would like you to talk about.
d. Promotion
After winning your subscribers completely, you can then sell to them. They already know you for the value you give and hence are rest assured that buying from you is a great decision
At this stage, you’ve completely won your subscribers over and they can trust you enough to purchase from you.
3. Analyze
A lot is going on in that email list. Some people joined because of the freebie you offered, not because they intend to buy. Some are unable to finish their verification and others wanted to purchase but the credit card didn’t go through. And you may need to get prospects back into the system.
This is where analysis comes in. You need to keep a clean sheet of the active subscribers from the inactive ones. So in the end, you may decide to remove them from the list or create a sequence of emails to turn them into customers.
Before conclusion, you will be learning about email marketing tools for business campaigns.
Email marketing tools for business campaign optimization
To carry out a successful email marketing campaign, you need to choose the best marketing tools available. Here are some of them: Mailchimp, Sendinblue, GetResponse, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, Aweber, Convertkit, MailerLite, Campaign Monitor, Omnisend, Drip, Mailjet, Benchmark Email, SendPulse, SendGrid, Email Octopus, etc.