Is email marketing still worth the time investment? When you think about how many emails you delete or ignore in a week, one might wonder if it’s an ingredient of digital marketing that could be postponed.
The truth is, skip email marketing, and you risk missing out on one of the best ways to generate significant revenue while getting your brand in front of consumers at the right time. In this article, we’re going to show you how to:
- Build an email marketing list with the addresses of people hungry for what you offer
- Create emails people open, read and respond to
- Time those emails to send when consumers are most likely to respond
- Find email marketing tools that make the process easier and more effective
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies that exist because of its simplicity and proven ability to deliver results. In its most simplistic form, it uses email to grow your business.
Email marketing might include newsletters, coupon codes, videos, information on new products, or anything else you want to send, but the goal is to build and nurture relationships continuously. Relevant content delivered to an inbox at precisely the right time is not an intrusion, it’s welcome communication that’s appreciated.
Before we start seeing email marketing benefits, it’s essential to understand first what doesn’t work. If you’re making a monthly flyer and blasting it out to a list of recipients you bought, you don’t have an actual email marketing strategy – you’re likely spamming. We’ll explain more about how to do email marketing in a way that gets results in a minute, first let’s look at what’s in it for you.
Why do Email Marketing?
A carefully crafted and implemented email marketing strategy is worthwhile for these reasons:
- It will make you money – Global tech company Campaign Monitor reports that, on average, for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses receive $44 in return.
- Email marketing has the most significant online reach – Currently, there are about 3.9 billion active email users, more than half the number of people on the planet.
- People buy when they receive email – 51% of U.S. users say they use email for online shopping.
- Email gets seen – According to the 2019 Adobe Email Usage Study, Americans spend an average of five hours a day checking email. At the very least, consumers see your brand and subject line in their inbox. In comparison, when you post to social media, only a small percentage of your followers might see your post.
- You keep the leads you gather – It takes work to grow your email subscription list, but once you do, algorithm updates and online changes don’t affect your ability to reach them.
How to Do Email Marketing
Campaigns fail when businesses don’t understand how to do email marketing the right way. To get started with email marketing, first, identify your goals – this is important. Is your objective to drive more traffic to your website, increase awareness of your new product line, let people know about events they can attend, increase the number of products consumers buy online, or some other goal?
Next, create an email list building strategy. Usually, it’s not enough to place a subscription sidebar on your website. Instead, what does work is offering consumers something in exchange for their email address. Your lead funnel might be a coupon, e-book download, access to subscriber-only content, or some other irresistible freebie. Offer a valuable incentive, make it easy to subscribe, and watch your list grow.
From there, set up email marketing triggers based on stages of the customer journey that’s tied to your goals. For new subscribers, you might offer welcome messages and a discount on their first purchase. Send loyal customers email marketing that includes coupon codes on their birthday or early access to new products. Develop your email marketing strategy based on your goals, but send content based on consumer behavior.
Email Marketing Examples
Find inspiration by looking at what brands like yours have already created. Resources like Really Good Emails let you browse email marketing examples by category and industry. For example, say you sell pet supplies, and your goal is to increase sales of your unique dog feeding bowl, and you want to do that by offering a coupon. Instead of having to start from scratch, look at successful email marketing examples from others to gather ideas for your email marketing campaign.
Email Marketing Benefits
Your customers are busy, and there’s a lot of competition for their attention. Email marketing done right isn’t an intrusion. Instead, it benefits consumers because it helps them make purchasing decisions, save money, remember items they might otherwise have forgotten, and stay connected. That’s good for them and good for your bottom line. Email marketing benefits business for these reasons:
- Consumers are more receptive to email marketing than other marketing types because they gave you their permission – When they see ads on social media, as a popup on their screen, as Google ads or on a billboard, it’s not because they asked to receive sales ads. When you build an email list the right way, everyone on it opted-in.
- Consumers prefer email when it comes to promotional content – A whopping 72% say they prefer to receive promotions via email compared to only 17% who like marketing via social media better.
- Email stays until deleted – When consumers realize they need something and remember you emailed them a special offer, they can find it with a quick search. That 25% off coupon brings them back to your business website or retail location.
Email Marketing Strategy and Tips
Once you’ve identified your goals, gathered a list of subscribers, and created campaigns for each target, incorporate these email marketing tips into your strategy.
- Segment and personalize – Break consumers into sub-groups and tailor content based on their interests and needs. Use email marketing tools to insert the recipient’s name in the subject line for higher open rates. Send personalized messages on birthdays, anniversaries, or other special days.
- Send mobile-friendly emails – Multiple reports confirm over half of email opens occur on smartphones and other mobile devices. If consumers click on your email on their phone and it doesn’t display correctly, they’ll delete it and, you may not get a second chance.
- Make email short and to the point – Include a clear call to action and a button, so they don’t have to manage a hyperlink on a tiny screen.
- Talk with a reputable agency that offers email marketing services – At Stoodeo, our help can supercharge your email marketing strategy.
9 Best Email Marketing Tools for Small Business
Once you’ve created email marketing campaigns, tools help you do everything from automate sending to gathering and making sense of performance data. Here are the 9 best email marketing tools for small business.
1 Mailchimp
Built to help you grow your own way.
Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you personalize campaigns, understand your customers, and track your return on investment. Send to up to 2,000 contacts for free. Monthly plans start at under $30/month. Mailchimp has extremely comprehensive reporting tools and an easy-to-use template editor.
2 Constant Contact
Powerful email marketing made easy.
Constant Contact has been offering email marketing since 1995. They offer a drag and drop editor that allows you to view email on different device types. Marketing automation helps segment your audience and send email marketing based on where they are in their buyer journey and how they interact with your business online.
3 SendInBlue
Make your business take flight with a complete sales & marketing toolbox.
SendInBlue might be the best budget solution for businesses than need to send to a big list of subscribers. They offer reliable, easy to use options for email automation, an extensive library of email templates, and the ability to create landing pages for each email campaign.
4 GetResponse
Grow your audience, promote services, and sell products with marketing software that does the job for you.
GetResponse has intelligent list automation that lets you add multiple conditions to your lists for precise subscriber segmentation. Their spam checker helps you make sure your emails get where they’re supposed to go. It’s also packed with features that help drive more sales for ecommerce store owners.
5 ConvertKit
Connect with your audience. Make a living doing work you love.
This email marketing platform focuses on creatives like Vloggers, YouTubers, bloggers, and other online communicators. The service includes a landing page editor and email automation features. Their tagging system simplifies audience segmentation for extremely targeted campaigns.
6 Drip
An Ecommerce CRM to Make Your Online Store Stand Out.
Drip offers more than just email marketing –it’s an ecommerce CRM. It contains tools to learn more about your customers by seeing all the data you’ve collected on them from across channels. Send personalized, meaningful messages through email, Facebook, Instagram, even direct mail. Pinpoint what’s working with advanced analytics.
7 Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is an industry-leading email marketing platform for brands, or eCommerce.
Campaign Monitor allows businesses to design and personalize messages, automate campaigns, and track results in real-time. Their professionally-designed templates give you beautiful results. The service enables you to send abandoned cart messages, ask for reviews and feedback, and A/B test emails.
8 ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign gives you the email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools you need to create great customer experiences.
ActiveCampaign advertises their goal is to help you get better results from fewer emails. This email marketing automation software’s packed with automation tools, dynamic content, and comprehensive reporting tools.
9 AWeber
Powerfully-Simple Small Business Email Marketing Solutions.
AWeber has offered email marketing tools for more than two decades. The platform’s Smart Designer creates email template suggestions based on your website URL to simplify getting started. Users can also automatically generate an email from recent blog posts and use tagging to trigger automated email campaigns.
Grow Your Business With Email Marketing
Now it’s time to put email marketing to work for you and start experiencing its benefits. At Stoodeo, we can help develop an effective email marketing plan based on your customers and your business. Contact us online to get started today.