Have you ever thought if it is worth to start an email campaign? Well, in the very beginning of running your business, you probably don’t think about it, but as your client base starts growing, it gets harder and harder, so you need automation of your process. Maybe it would be difficult to get used to it at first and you probably think to yourself “How am I going to do this? What tools do I need? Is there a company that can help me with this?” Yes, there is a lot of questions, so you delay the decision forever, however, you don’t have to anymore. Email campaign can start anytime and the sooner, the better.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Although a lot of people are hard to convince, this strategy definitely still works and has a lot of benefits.
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You can gain consumer loyalty and build relationship with your audience.
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Your clients can be directly informed about your products or services.
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You can reach an unlimited number of people with your message
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Your sales increases.
Moreover, it is one of the most effective strategies of direct marketing. It is important to have a precise plan before starting an email marketing campaign. This should be about valuable content, and not about sending trash to people’s inboxes. Set your goals. Chances for your clients to receive your emails are high. Especially when they agreed to receiving those emails.
Yeah, but how to put it into practice?
Email marketing is not the easiest thing to do. You can think about the catchy topic, and prepare a great email, but that could be a waste of time, if nobody opens or reads it. That’s why it’s important to clearly establish your subscriber base. You can’t send messages to random groups of addressees. Otherwise, your actions may bring the opposite results to what you had expected. Above all, before taking any steps to start your marketing campaign, you should think about the cost and prices. We can say it upfront: it is one of the least expensive forms of marketing, if you will make a strategy for sending emails yourself. You just need certain tools, and you’ll read about it later in this article.
Let’s start from choosing your target group
Who are your clients and what do they expect? If they ended up on your list, they must have taken a certain action. They are already interested in your product, or service, and you can send them a sales offer. The rule of finding a target group is really simple – the more detailed and narrow your group is, the more effective your campaign will be.
Where to find subscribers and how to build a database?
If you think about email marketing seriously, you have to focus on building a mailing list. It’s worth to mention that sending emails is not always about selling stuff, but also about building a relationship with your audience. You’ve just started a website or opened up an online store? You think it’s too soon to start an email campaign? Well, we believe that this way of thinking is wrong, because it’s never too early to start building an email list.
In the beginning, you can put a newsletter sign-up button on your website. You just have to offer your audience something in exchange for their contact information. This is a simple transaction: you get the email address, and the client receives something valuable.
Newsletter
Newsletter is just a tool to communicate with your clients on a regular basis. This way you can inform your clients about the offer of your online store.
The best thing you can do is to draw the customer’s attention during their first visit on your site. When they try to leave, they can be convinced to sign up to a newsletter with a pop-up window. You have just a few seconds to interest them and therefore everything has to be perfect, including graphics and copywriting. Try to make it simple, yet attention grabbing.
When you create a sign-up form, remember to keep it minimal and clear. Name and email address should be enough. Don’t forget to include the sign-up consent form.
The person who joins your list can receive a discount for the next shopping (on the whole shopping basket or on certain items). If you don’t run an online store, you can send them an article about certain topic that may interest them. The thing you offer depends on your business or activity. This way you gain a new subscriber to your email list.
Remember to stay in touch with your subscribers. Every now and then send them valuable content, inform them about important events, changes, tell stories, encourage them to action. If the emails are prepared well and they are attractive to the audience, you can be sure that they will work.
Signing-off from the email list
Don’t forget to give your subscribers a way to sign-off from your email list.
You already have subscribers and you’ve accumulated a great deal of email addresses. What to do with them?
Choose a good system for email marketing. Now imagine that you have a couple thousand of email addresses and you have to manually send an email to each individual address. You can only imagine, but it’s practically impossible, so it’s worth to use systems that automate the process. Imagine that you sleep and somebody has just purchased your product or downloaded your e-book. One or even more. Besides particular knowledge on how to build a base of subscribers and how to segment it, you need tools which would send emails to your customers even if you’re asleep.
Tools
This is the tool, which allows you to automate your business and your sales. Moreover, all emails are under control and you can plan them in advance. Additionally, you have an access to all the statistics about how many people the message reached, who opened it, and who has made a further action (for example clicked the link you put in the email). You can build a list of subscribers and then segment it. Segmentation is really important, as your subscribers are different, take different actions and they have different expectations. You should prepare more personalized messages that will go to the narrow subgroup that is interested in a certain kind of products of services. Only then you can expect certain results.
These tools allow a faster and more effective action, as they send emails to a certain group of people. This way you save time and money, as you set up the system once, and specific content goes directly to a chosen list, and not to the whole contact database. Furthermore, the system is very intuitive. You just need to spend a little bit of time on get to know it and then you can quickly put the emails in the queue, so they can be sent: on the day of signing up, one day after, three days after etc.
Start working step by step.
Step 1. Build an email list.
Step 2. Add subscribers to the list.
Step 3. Add system messages.
Step 4. Set up an email queue.
You can find out more from the following entries:
1. 5 most important elements of email marketing.
2. The potential of email marketing.
Let’s think about how you can apply email marketing to your business.
Below we present the list of examples of what you can use email marketing for in your business.
Use “call to action”
Always put “call to action” in your emails. It can be a link to your new blog post, or a button that goes directly to your e-store product. If you use expressions like “only today” or “till tomorrow,” it will show that the offer is limited and if the client wanted this product in the first place, they are more likely to purchase it now. Let’s give them a little nudge.
Example subject lines:
– Only today: mega offer for real cinema lovers.
– [ATTENTION] Our newest solution 90% cheaper. Only till tomorrow.
Don’t let them forget you!
You’ve prepared an online course and time for signing up ends in a couple of days? Plan the emails that will inform your subscribers that it is the last chance to take part. If you run an online store, and the sale is coming to an end, let your clients know that this is a limited time offer for certain products.
Example subject lines:
– [LAST MINUTE] Your special offer will end in a moment.
– This is the last reminder about our promotion. The end in 3… 2… 1…
– [URGENT] You have only one more day to view the offer!
What to do when the customer abandons their shopping cart in your online store?
A client visits your store, views products, and yes! They’ve found what they were looking for, added the product to their cart, now the payment and… Wait, they abandoned the cart and left the site. Unfortunately, it happens often. How to make them change their mind and finalize the payment? Send the email and encourage them to come back to the site.
Example subject lines:
– Hey, do you need a ride to your shopping cart? The ticket isn’t required.
– [name], you seem to forget something?
– Pssst… the prices in your car have just dropped!
Encourage people to download your guide!
You’ve prepared a new entry on your blog? So don’t wait for it to advertise itself, just send your clients an email and encourage them to read the article. You can put a fragment of your entry in the email, or send them a couple of the best ones. This way you can increase reach on your blog. If you have just released a new guide, do exactly the same.
Example subject lines:
– 200 ideas on blog posts that work.
– Download a guide on how to create Facebook ads [STEP BY STEP]
– Write emails that sell [COMPLETE GUIDE]
Inform your clients about the new product, or a new solution
A Client has found a product in your online store, but it is sold out? Inform them that as soon as the product is available, they will be notified. Send them an email with an information about the restock, so they can purchase the product. Don’t forget to include a button that will take them to that specific product in the store.
Example subject lines:
– It’s here! We did it! We’ve finally succeeded.
– [name of the product] is restocked
– [product] is available in our store! Buy, before other people do!
Don’t forget about sales, promotions, and unique discounts!
Email marketing will also be a useful tool, when you want to inform your clients about the prices of the products. Mailing is a wonderful way to inform about the ongoing promotion and make people take certain actions. Just lowering the price on the store is not enough for the client to find out about it. Sending a direct email gives better results.
Example subject lines:
– What you’re looking at? Your discounts are running away!
– 50$ today, 250$ tomorrow. What are you waiting for?
– New products you can keep only to yourself
Use cross selling and up selling strategies in email marketing!
Introducing a sales strategy to email marketing can give a really interesting results and generate high number of sales. However, you have to do it in a well-thought way and gradually “attack” a customer with your offer.
Let’s say you have an online boutique and Mrs. Smith has just bought a warm winter coat, for instance. In this case you can send her an email, recommending winter accessories that could go with the coat. Or a different scenario: she bought a guide on how to write sales emails, so you can offer her a course, where she can learn how to put this knowledge into practice. This strategy is called cross selling, which means recommending another, complementary product to the customer who has already bought something.
The other strategy you may use in email marketing is up selling. Let’s go back to the example of the abandoned basket. If the client does that, you can send them an email with a reminder, which encouraged them to finish the shopping. If you see that they have a coat in their cart, offer them a more expensive model. Moreover, tell them about the product In as much details as possible, especially about the quality. This is what up selling is all about: the client chooses a basic version, and you offer them a more expensive, higher quality version of a product. Offering a product after product after product will be a good strategy for building sales funnel, but you will find about that in a moment.
Building an advanced sales funnel
Building sales funnels is not as complicated as it may look at first. You can definitely learn that skill. You just need to spend some time to get to know what actions you should take in order to make successful funnels. Show your subscribers what your product is and try to convince them to buy it. It works a little bit like you guide the client through the free product, which you offer in the first step, and next you make them open their wallets. The second step is to offer a small, cheap product, which leads to more and more value and money.
In the first step the client receives the free product that has value in exchange for their email address (so it is not exactly free). The email address provides value to you, because when the client doesn’t buy the first product, you can sent them the queue of emails in order to convince them to use your offer. I know, I know. If you’re just starting your adventure with internet marketing, then building sales funnels can sound a little bit foreign to you. However, they bring the most income and are most effective. Maybe in some time you will start implementing them to your business?
Building a brand name through email marketing
If you really send your emails systematically, and not just on holidays, when you have discounts, the audience will remember you for sure. Try to come up with a good and catchy subject line. If it’s interesting, the subscriber will be more likely to read it. If you care about building long term relationships, you need to approach this in a personal way. The best way to do it is to address the person by their name.
Example subject lines:
– Karol, remember me?
– Rafał, here is your new favorite marketing tool [FREE]
– Rough day, Alicja?
The subject of the email is a little bit tricky. If you liked the lines we presented above, see our entry about how to choose a subject. We gathered over 60 examples, which you can use when you prepare your emails. They are divided into categories depending on the goal you want to achieve and the occasion.
Is it worth to send emails?
In the end of this article, we will focus on analyzing statistics concerning email marketing. Without these information, it is hard to come to a measurable conclusion. The average opening rate in Poland is 29,60%, while the world’s average is 22,15%. It’s one of the best results. It can be caused by the lack of oversaturation of the Polish email market and high quality emails, sent to subscribers.
Email marketing is an effective way of promoting brands and you can’t argue with that. Not only do the companies put a great deal of effort to build a relationship with existing customers, but also they try to attract new customers. Building a brand’s image is a key to success, so we cannot imagine running an online store or a website without consistent contact with the client. Without any doubt, email marketing is one of the best ways to keep in touch with your audience. It is a direct form of marketing, where email is your main source of communication.
Go to the entry to find out more: How to start mailing campaign >>
