The power of email marketing is something that amazed me when I first started out. Compared to other strategies like SEO, social media and content marketing, building a solid email marketing strategy is at least as effective. As your list grows over time, it becomes more even more powerful. The mindset that sending bulk emails is considered spam, was quickly wiped out
Creating solid email marketing strategy is worth it
Email marketing is the most effective form of interacting with your target audience online. This strategy has proven itself, which is why all big companies use it. Besides generating traffic, list building is the first thing you should focus your marketing activities on.
Creating a solid email marketing strategy can generate a lot of business, without any significant investment. For every $1 spent on email marketing, you get a return of $44. With these figures, it’s no surprise why this is many organizations favourite marketing tool.
Looking at cost, it doesn’t matter if you are sending the email to 10 or 10.000 people. Cost is unchanged. This is why you should grow your email list as big as possible, to generate this leverage.
On average, email open rates is a given statistic. You know what you can expect when sending an email to your list. On average, 40% of your list opens the email, and 10% of them, click through to your website.
The beauty of email is that once you have their email, you don’t have to pay again to reach out to them. Once they are on your list, you can start to approach without making any additional charges. Unlike Google AdWords, where you have to start the campaign over and over again to keep visitors coming back.
Email on mobile and desktop
When designing your emails, put the emphasis on mobile users. The majority of the emails get opened on mobile first, followed by a second look on a desktop when considered interesting enough. Emails that do not look good on mobile, often get deleted within 3 seconds.
Email marketing platforms all offer a design mode, where you can see what you created, and what it will look like on all the devices.
Email Opening Mobile VS Desktop
Email platforms often include many fancy templates you can choose from. My advice would be to make your email look as basic as possible. This doesn’t mean it will not look professional. It will just look very clear and clean. This way, you avoid that your email will look like a big commercial, and people will just think you are spamming.
Establish the relationship through email
Email marketing is perfect for building a relationship with your audience. Educate, inform and entertain are foundations of generating trust that turns a lead into a customer. Therefore, the goal of email marketing, is hardly ever to sell, it is to establish a relationship.
Roughly there are three types of emails:
- The informative email. Here it is all about giving value. There is no sale intention in this email at all. Just educate and building the relationship. These are emails you should send out most frequent.
- The hybrid email. As the name says, this is a crossover email. Here you give value, but also sneak in some products that you want to sell. I would say for every 3 informative emails you send, you can send one hybrid email.
- The sell email. This email is purely to sell your products. You can still add value here, you just need to make the offer as attractive as possible as you can, for them to see this value. These emails I would only recommend sending after you have sent 5 informative and 2 hybrid emails.
Building the list
A good way to get people to sign up for your newsletter, is to work with lead magnets. A lead magnet is something you give away for free, in return for their email, I am sure you have seen this somewhere before. This giveaway needs to be something of value. I always say it needs to hurt a little bit to give it away.
Examples of lead magnets are, eBooks and pdf’s, or a coupon someone can enter in the checkout of your webstore. See, it’s all real value. If you fail to deliver value here, you are getting of to a false start, and you won’t build up credit so easily, and it will take longer before cold leads turn into converting customers.
You can also do it the classic way. Although not as effective as lead magnets and depending on how you set it up, the good old pop still works. You should also have a fixed location on your site, that allows people to sign up.
You can start collecting emails from your visitors today. Even if you are not planning on sending out any emails soon, it doesn’t hurt to start collecting them.
Lead Magnet
Sing Up Form
Getting started
Popular email vendors, such as Getresponse and Mailchimp all have free plans available, which you can integrate into your site and start collecting emails. I personally like GetResponse, because with them it is very easy to setup a funnel and make the whole process very visual.
There are plenty of email strategies you can implement which suit the style of your business. Email is one of the few activities that will work for almost any branche. Popular email vendors, such as Getresponse and Mailchimp all have free plans available, which you can integrate into your site and start collecting emails.
