How to Grow Your Business with Email Marketing
In the business world, email marketing is an effective strategy for growing and developing your business. In order to have a successful business you need to be able to connect effectively with potential customers in order to persuade them to purchase your product or service from you and not from a competitor on the market. Email marketing can help you to achieve this by building up relationships, allowing you to stay in contact with the potential buyer and allowing them to come to you as soon as they are ready to purchase a product.
Benefits of Email Marketing
There are huge benefits of email marketing and they largely speak for themselves. A massive 66% of consumers will end up purchasing a product or service purely from reading an email from a brand, this shows how influential email marketing can be and how many sales it has the potential to generate. Not only that, but almost one third of customers favor receiving emails from brands rather than staying in contact through other avenues such as telephone or physical mail.
Related: Tie the Knot – Business Partnership
Increase Traffic
By creating the perfect email marketing campaign, you have the ability and power to turn those emails into views and traffic to your website. One of the best ways to increase your traffic directly from your email marketing strategy is to try to include at least one link to your website in every email that you are sending out to your customers. By including these links you are increasing the likelihood of them clicking to see what it is all about – after all, simply clicking a link is much less effort than searching for the information yourself so it is much more likely for them to view your website that way.
Seeing as they have already signed up to receive emails from you, you already know that these customers are interested in your business, and may be interested in purchasing your product or service in the future. So, all you have to do now is keep on sending them relevant links that they may be interested in reading about and clicking on, and keep driving them to your website. The more they view your website and receive emails from you, the more you are on their mind when they finally come to deciding whether to buy from you or a competitor.
As long as you are constantly giving them relevant links that are of interest to them, they will keep on being subscribed to your mail list and clicking on those links which ultimately results in an increase of traffic to your website and has potential for new sales. Focus on increasing traffic and the sales will almost sort themselves out.
Test Out Your Emails
Before you go out and send any emails to your customers you should test them out first to make sure that they are being displayed correctly and that all of the links work. Having broken links or text and images not being shown correctly may result in the reader just deleting the email without bothering to try and read through it, straight away you have lost a lot of potential views and sales. If your emails have any problems loading or any images or text are not showing up properly, by testing them out you are able to identify and fix these issues before making the mistake of sending them out.
In the event that emails that do not work properly get sent out by mistake, you may wish to follow these up with an email that does work correctly so that your readers remain interested and up to date with everything that is going on. By sending out emails full of errors you are losing out on potential traffic to your site which can lead to sales.
According to Blue Hornet, a massive 71.2% of people who receive emails that do not display or load correctly will simply delete it straight away – this is what you will be avoiding by testing out all of your emails first. While testing out emails can take a little bit of time, it is worth doing the job properly for correct execution.
Perfect the Design and Content
While email marketing has a lot of power when it comes to turning visitors into sales, it is definitely not as simple as throwing a bunch of words together. You need to carefully create your emails by perfecting the overall design of the email template. Things to take into consideration are any colour themes that are on your website, logos, relevant images and incorporate all of these into your emails.
If design is not something you are great at, then there are many design services like JV Media Design who are able to help you out with some amazing design work. It is much better to hire someone out who knows how to complete the job perfectly than try to do it yourself as the image of your brand has to be consistent.
Once the receiver opens up your email you have just a few short seconds to make an impression on them and make sure that they keep reading. If they are not pleased with the design, a lot of readers will just shut off and delete the email. A lot of readers will scroll through and skim read while taking in the overall design, it may be surprising but a lot of people will judge your email by how it looks and comes across to them. You need to make sure that the email gets across your message within a few short seconds. If they are not interested in what they are seeing, they will move on and delete the email. Make sure that you know your customers and what they like reading, this will help you to create a design that you know they are going to like and is relevant to them.
If you ever need help in creating the perfect marketing email, then there are plenty of writing services out there such as the Australian Reviewer who will be able to help you out by creating some excellent content for you. Just like the design, the content within the email is also vital. You need attention grabbing headlines and short and sharp pieces of information that make them read on.
Increase Sales
One of the best things to use within your marketing emails is the promotion of any discounts, promotional offers or any new release products that you are offering to your customers. With a huge 98% of people logging into their emails every single day, you would be only mad to miss out on the opportunity that this brings to you for grabbing some extra traffic and sales.
If your new products, sales offers or discount codes are for a limited time only, then you would want them to see it sooner than later. Make sure that you get the urgency in the deal across to them and that they know it will not be lasting for long, this may tempt them into making a quicker decision which ultimately drives more traffic and ups the potential sales.
It Isn’t Spam
Absolutely no one likes to receive spam emails of any nature, but email marketing certainly is not the same as spam, in fact it is a whole world away. For one thing, your readers have chosen to sign up to receive these emails and they will understand that they can unsubscribe at any time if they wish to do so. If they have not decided to do this then you know that they are interested in hearing more from you, therefore you are very unlikely to annoy them by sending them emails, unless of course you bombard them with too many. People do not like to wake up in the morning or come home from work to find a ton of emails from the same person or company, trying to get them to buy something, so limit your emails to relevant information that they will actually want to read about.
If you find yourself a bit lost for what are definite ‘no-nos’ when it comes to email marketing, then this particular post from Ninja Outreach may be great for you to have a look over. It contains information on some of the things you should do, and most definitely not do, if you are interested in keeping hold of your subscribers and increasing your traffic and sales.
If you ever worry about your emails being considered as spam, just remember that your readers have subscribed for a reason and that they fully understand they can stop being on your mailing list. It may be helpful to you to include an easy unsubscribe link or information on how to at the end of each email.
All you need to do is be careful with how many emails you are sending out and make sure that they are all relevant and have valuable pieces of information throughout, if they are not then you will lose subscribers which means loss of potential customers and revenue. Typically, try to limit yourself to something like a monthly newsletter or a weekly update – depending on what is relevant for your business and what your audience seem to prefer and what they have been reacting to best.
To stay up to date with all of the latest news in business, sites such as Media Times are great. They even publish regular articles offering advice to businesses.