“If Social Media is the cocktail party, then email marketing is the ‘meet up for coffee’.” – Erik Harbison
Running a business is one thing, figuring out how to market that business in a way that works is a whole other ball game. As a small business owner, I’m sure you understand pouring your whole heart and soul into building your company. This is your dream coming alive and you’re determined to see it through, whether easy or hard. You know that marketing is crucial. But amid our internet-driven world that feels overcrowded and noisy, it’s hard to know how to market yourself (and your business).
Trust me—I get it.
Every marketing expert on the internet is telling you that communicating with your audience and ‘hopefully’ turning them into customers who keep coming back for more is the way to go. But how can you do that? At the end of this post, we’ll unlock the most powerful method that you’ve got at your fingertips. That’s right, I’m talking about email.
Many people make it look like it’s a headache to communicate with your audience using email, especially in the Nigerian market. But that’s not entirely true and I’ll share all about my love for this marketing strategy in a second, but first let’s get into the importance of email marketing and how to make it as effective as possible.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing, as its name indicates, is a content marketing strategy that capitalises on using emails to reach your prospects. It refers to sending emails that market your product, service, and/or brand, either to people who subscribe to your mailing list or people you are cold emailing. It is a low-cost and high-impact marketing tool that is able to accelerate brand awareness, increase customer engagement and drive sales.
Why Email Is Important For Businesses
Short answer, it’s the most definite way to reach and build connections with your audience. With social media, we’re all stuck with whatever the algorithm gives us—which right now is that a good portion of your followers may never see what you post. Some research suggests that less than 7.5% of your followers consistently see your posts. But when you send an email, you’re getting up to 5x the reach just by using a reliable tool for your messaging!
The world runs on email, and almost everyone has an inbox they’re willing to share with businesses that matter to them. A portion of that number don’t have a social media presence so there goes one point. About 60% of all email subscribers say that marketing emails influence their buying choices, and email marketing has led to 40x more customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
Email marketing is also the cheapest marketing strategy as the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent. This means that for every dollar invested in email marketing, businesses can expect to see an average return of $42. If like me, you run social media ads for yourself and/or clients, you know that these costs add up. So, the return on investment when it comes to email marketing is impactful!
Types Of Email Marketing Campaigns
There are several types of email marketing campaigns that you might consider incorporating in your email strategy. Some common types of email campaigns include:
- Welcome emails,
- Email newsletters,
- Promotional emails,
- Lead nurturing emails or re-engagement emails,
- Transactional emails, like confirmation emails,
- Feedback or survey emails, and
- Milestone emails, such as for customer birthdays.
Benefits Of Email In Marketing
Creating Personalised Content:
With email marketing, you can customise your campaigns and create targeted content. With personalisation like including a contact’s name in the email or creating a segmented campaign for a segmented audience group, you can send the right emails to the right customers. If you want to send an email marketing campaign to returning customers and different one-to-one-time customers, personalised content is an opportunity to do this. Actually, emails that include the first name of the recipient in their subject line have a higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t.
Improving Sales:
While email marketing is an excellent marketing tool, it can improve your sales as well. 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI and marketers who used segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue. Email marketing campaigns can feature products or services, deliver special offers to your customers, or encourage customers to purchase after abandoning their cart.
Communicating With Your Audience:
In today’s world, it’s important to continuously improve communication with your audience. Because they’re more likely to become loyal to you when they feel like they can talk to you. When you send them good emails that communicate exciting information about you and your brand, they’ll probably enjoy the experience and keep in touch with you.
Driving Traffic To Your Website:
When you produce great content, how do you disseminate it to your audience? Most likely, you send them an email. With email marketing campaigns, you’ll send traffic to your website and improve your SEO. Plus, you’ll keep your audience engaged with your brand and your website. When creating an email that links to your content, remember that each email should contain a call to action (CTA) so that your readers can click through to your website.
Generating Leads:
In the same vein as improving sales, you can also increase your leads with email marketing. Actually, with the inbound method, email marketing can be used to nurture leads and improve conversions. Email marketing campaigns can further qualify leads so your sales team isn’t wasting time on bad leads who don’t open your emails or engage by clicking the links in your email.
Owning Your Audience’s Contact:
With social media platforms, you don’t own your contact list or even the information that you post. In fact your content and your follower list are all owned by the social media platforms. If the social media platforms disappear tomorrow, you will probably lose all your followers and customers won’t you? That’s why building an email list is important. You will build a contact list that you own and you can interact with them whenever you want by just signing up with an email provider.
Promoting Yourself:
Email marketing allows you to establish a more personal connection with your audience as a way to promote yourself. Sending out regular updates and information directly to your audience’s inbox creates a direct line of communication between you and your potential customers. This opens the door to increasing a better understanding and knowledge of your brand and the particular products and services you offer without having to implement all of those ‘salesy’ strategies that have flooded our screens in recent years.
Email Marketing Tips
A successful email marketing campaign can engage previous customers, attract new ones, and help you meet your marketing goals. To pull this off, you need to create a thoughtful email campaign that strategically engages customers with relevant and well-timed messages.
As you are working on creating your email marketing campaign, keep the following tips in mind:
- Use eye-catching email subject lines.
- Structure your message in a manner that will captivate your audience to read to the end.
- Simplify your email’s design and layout.
- Only email people who opted into your list.
- Strategically time the delivery dates and times of your emails.
- Keep tabs on all metrics and run necessary A/B tests.
Best Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing tools and platforms help to maximise marketing efficiency. As you implement your marketing strategy, these platforms offer advanced features that can help you design personalised emails, manage your contact list, send automated emails, and monitor your email marketing efforts. Some common email marketing platforms include:
- Sendinblue,
- Mailchimp,
- Convertkit,
- Omnisend,
- Get Response,
- FloDesk,
- Constant Contact,
- Sender, and
- Active Campaign.
Whatever your marketing goals, you can use these platforms to execute your email marketing strategy seamlessly.
Why Email Marketing Works
Unlike some other marketing channels, email marketing allows you to own the entire process of keeping in touch with your audience and customers consistently. From a simple welcome email, or a “Thank you for subscribing” email, to a sincere congratulatory message like a “Happy Birthday” email, it can be an effective way to let your customers know you value them.
Essentially, customers love it when they are treated like individuals and not just like everyone else by the businesses they patronise. Personally, I love to receive emails from some of my favourite businesses and people whose newsletters make me feel like I’m a part of their growth. I feel like there’s some intrinsic value that I add to those brands and they notice this value that I bring. How do I feel this?
They show that value in the emails they send. You should aim to achieve this. And the more value you provide to your target audience, the more they’ll look forward to hearing from you. Just like me.
That’s a benefit of email marketing that affects both you and your customers.
The Future Of Email Marketing
No matter who you ask in the marketing industry, there is a general consensus that email marketing is relevant and has a long, bright future. It will probably become even more important as time goes on, especially with the changes in algorithms of social media platforms & since it’s both easy to use and cost-effective.
More brands now see the potential to improve their profitability by generating real leads and sales using email marketing. So there is no better time to begin focusing your attention on the rising trend of email marketing because as this upward trend continues, you will want to be sure that your brand is ahead of the game.
Take Advantage Of Email Marketing For Your Brand!
The bottom line is that you should be communicating with your customers and prospects consistently. This is the bare minimum of what is expected of businesses today. With email marketing, you can meet (and exceed) those expectations and more by creating a mutually beneficial relationship between you or your business and your email subscribers. The benefits of email marketing are that it can help you build your brand, exceed your marketing goals, set yourself up as an expert, and grow your business revenue, all without breaking your budget or taking up all your time.
So, stop thinking about it and get started on your small business email marketing today. You’ll be glad you did!
Do you have any questions for me about creating and executing an email marketing campaign? Leave a comment below or DM me on Instagram.
