Do you have a business? Are you interested in growing your customer base and brand awareness? Email marketing is one of the best ways to do this. An email marketing campaign can be so effective that only 13% of businesses currently use it to market their company. With so many businesses still on the fence about email marketing.
Here are 7 things that you need to think about before you start.
Create An Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing strategy is one thing that must come first. You can’t just start sending out emails without knowing where you’re headed with your campaign. This is especially true if you’re just starting. Your email strategy will determine how your emails are written, who the emails are sent to, when the emails are sent, how you track results, and how you measure success. While there are a few strategies that will work for almost any email marketing campaign, most campaigns can be broken down into specific objectives. To drive results, you’ll want to make sure that you’re approaching these objectives in the right way. If not, you could end up with subpar email results.
Decide What You’ll Offer In Your Emails
Knowing what you’ll put in your emails will help you decide what information to collect and when. It will also help you decide what to track from a data point of view.
Possible ways you can use your emails for marketing are:
- Prospecting – Prospective customers are the people that you want to be your customers. When sending out emails, you want to collect data about your audience and let them know what products you sell and what you can do for them.
- Customer Support – Even if you don’t have any sales, you can still use email marketing to help support your customers. This can be done through training, troubleshooting, or providing reference guides.
- Community Building – Email marketing can also be used for community building. You can build a relationship with your audience by creating email campaigns to discuss common topics and interests.
Set Up Automatic Emails
Email autoresponders are another great tool for email marketing. There are different reasons people are turning to email autoresponders. Perhaps your product or service is subscription-based. Or, perhaps there is only a few days between your initial sale and a deadline for the customer to take action. In these situations, email autoresponders can be a great way to catch your customer’s attention and give them a prompt to act. If you are only interested in being alerted to customers when there is action to take, you can set your autoresponder to “reply all” and use email blasting to send it out to all your customers. This is a great way to catch your customers off guard and remind them of their due dates.
Test, Test, And Yet Test Some More
While it’s important to keep your eyes on the whole marketing ballpark and make sure you’re hitting all of your key objectives, it’s also important to know when it’s time to move on to the next level. As more and more companies start to turn to email marketing, industry standards are starting to rise. As a result, we’re seeing more and more data being reported. This is also leading to more and more research being done on email marketing. As a result, there is a lot of data out there on what works and what doesn’t. By testing, testing, and yet testing some more, you’re taking advantage of what is out there in terms of data and terms of research. You’re applying those learning to your email marketing campaigns.
Bottom Line
Email marketing has grown tremendously as a marketing tool over the last few decades. It is also a cost-effective and highly impactful channel. It is important to keep these things in mind while developing an email marketing strategy. As you meet these objectives, it is important to measure your campaign’s success. Create an email marketing strategy that includes who you will market your products to and what you will offer in your emails. Decide what you will offer in your emails and set up automatic emails for your customers. Test, test, and yet test some more to measure the effectiveness of your emails. Set up an email autoresponder to catch customers when they need to take action. With all of these things in mind, email marketing can be a powerful way to grow your business.
