Are you interested in using emails to grow your business? Have you ever wondered or asked the question “How does email marketing work?” There are millions of other business owners like you who are also curious about email marketing. So, if you want to find out how exactly email marketing works, you are in the right place, stay tuned.
There are more businesses today than ever before, and every single minute, numbers of new businesses get launched. However, according to statistics, not more than one in every ten new businesses will survive up to 10 years. And even fewer of those survivors will make it in the longer run.
Does it make you concerned? It shouldn’t if you know what you’re doing. American business magnate Warren Buffet said “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. So, if you know how to get leads and convert them, you’d be head and shoulders above your competition”.
Now, when business owners hear about others winning leads and conversions, they are eager to learn how to it themselves – that’s very good. But that’s not enough.
What do you do with the leads you’re generating? How effective are your tactics? These are the most important questions you should be raising.
The difference in the result you’re getting and what you want to get is not only in the effort you put in, but also (and mostly) in the knowledge you have.
Of course, you have worked hard. You have developed great content on your blog, and you’re even making wonderful videos. But the result won’t come as expected if you do not know how to convert your visitors into leads, and then into buying customers.
The purpose of this article is to show you how to convert your visitors into clients that will pay you.
Today, an email list has big potentials. In fact, one email address on your email list is worth $1 per month. This means, at the very least, you should be earning $10k from a list of 10,000 subscribers –monthly. This is the power of email marketing and this is what you are going to learn in this post.
How does email marketing work?
First off, email marketing is the use of emails to reach out to potential customers (or leads) in order to generate sales and increase revenue. There are three things that a business can promote in emails – products, goods, or services. This has to be done over or after a period where the marketer has developed a relationship with his email list.
The modus operandi of email marketing is simple:
- Get as many email addresses as possible (of people interested in your kind of business or niche)
- Send them helpful emails regularly (or depending on their preference)
- Promote or recommend your products or services to them, in a way that is not spammy.
According to statistics, more than 50% of USA email recipients check their emails more than 10 days a day! Such stats indicate that email is a highly valuable communication channel. Because the conversation occurs in the customers’ mailbox, email marketing is also personal, yet very effective between the marketer and the customer.
Pros of email marketing
Sending emails is not just a way of reaching out to your customers. We won’t be telling you to do it if it doesn’t work, or if the return is not worth it.
There are numerous benefits of email marketing and reasons why you should be using emails to reach out to your potential customers. So what are the pros of email marketing?
1. Your customers want to hear from you
One of the pros of email marketing is that your customers love it.
Indeed, people don’t appreciate promotional emails from brands they’ve never heard of –we don’t either. But your customers are waiting to get a promotional email from you because you took the time to introduce yourself so they know you and are ready for offers.
Customers have repeatedly said it that they love to get emails from the brands they know and love, especially when the emails are about tips, coupons, hacks, daily digests, discounts, etc.
2. It helps your branding strategy
Every business owner wants to build a brand for their business. But the news feed on Facebook and Twitter is saturated. The Search engine result page is extremely competitive. And it is not that you can’t win the competition, but you want to take your branding strategy to a more personal level.
There is no better way to strike the heart of your customers and become a friendly brand than knowing them as their friends do.
Sending them the content they love, and sharing things that matters most to them is the best way to do this. This is possible when you connect with your audience through email marketing (especially when you segment your list properly).
3. It is a great way to build a relationship with your customers
People do not buy from marketers anymore, they rather buy from businesses they trust and have a relationship with. Email marketing is one of the best ways to build this relationship and sustain it for log-term. Email marketing is not only effective, but it is also personal and private.
When you properly use the power of email marketing, you:
- Collect leads from your potential customers
- Nurture the leads you collect.
- Connect with your potential customers on a personal level
- Show your contacts your expertise in your niche and that you are an authority (which is what they want you to be)
4. Email marketing is effective
One of the pros of email marketing is that when it is done correctly, it can be very effective. This is best if the audience on your list is targeted. This means that they are highly interested in the content you’re sharing.
This gets even more productive when your list is segmented. Segmentation could come in various forms, and it includes but is not limited to the following; Age, gender, location/country, time zone, buying behavior, previous purchase or not, email opening rate (or habit).
This will help you know what to send and what not to. If for instance, you want to send a message to the group of those who have not bought any of your products, you can reach them if your list is segmented, and you’d know how to craft the mail to appeal to them.
If on the other hand, you want to send a message to those who usually buy your products or those who reply your mail, you’d know how to craft your message for better conversion.
Cons of email marketing
Unfortunately, there are cons of email marketing too, however, with a strong strategy, you can turn them all in your favor. Here are the few cons to email marketing.
1. Users are conscious of spam
One of the unfortunate cons of email marketing is the level of spams generated by tricky marketers.
Of course, because of the efficacy of email marketing, you would expect some unscrupulous marketers to take advantage of it.
People buy emails lists and send emails those on the list they have bought. This is an unethical and unacceptable way to do email marketing.
People appearing on the list which is sold, won’t trust emails from such marketers and mark those emails as spam. Because of the unsolicited emails, they’ve received in the past, they may even think every email marketer is a fraud.
Even if you are providing relevant quality emails to the email list you’ve actually built yourself and getting spam reports – don’t get d3, some people just don’t trust emails.
2. Know-how
You need to have a level of understanding along with the knowledge of how email marketing works to get the best of email marketing. This includes – how to segment, ensuring your emails don’t land in the promotion or spam folders, etc.
Also, every audience is different and every audience may require different email marketing strategies. It will deficiently take time to test and find what works best for you and your audience. The technical aspect (albeit easy) is one of the cons of email marketing, but in a short time, you can get a hang of it.
3. Ineffective email service providers
You may purchase an email service from an autoresponder who isn’t good enough. Buying the service of any of these providers will make your email marketing campaign ineffective. A bad email service provider can include design issues, undelivered emails, resource and etc.
How you do email marketing?
The following are simple steps you need to take to ensure your email marketing program turns out into the success. These are the crucial points that every business owner who wants to integrate into email marketing must follow:
1. Choose the right email marketing service
There are hundreds of autoresponders out there. So much that choosing one of them can be hectic. To get the best result, you may have to use the trial period of a couple of email marketing services in the market.
There are lots of them, including Aweber, Drip, MailChimp, SendPulse, InstantContact, ConvertKit, etc. Most of them have a free trial period and you should take advantage of it before committing your money to them.
2. Get a good lead magnet
Your lead magnet somewhat determines the success of your conversion rate. If your lead magnet is not compelling enough, then no one will be joining your list. As you may have known, no one gives their email away for nothing.
So your lead magnet is what attracts your audience. It is what gets them interested, and makes them give you an email address for an exchange to what you are offering. Your lead magnet could be anything, and it could include;
- PDF or ebook
- A cheat sheet
- Access to a resource library
- A video
- An infographic
- An explainer video, or whatever your audience will be interested in.
If you can figure something what about your audience will go “crazy” about, you’ve found a goldmine.
3. Get a good signup form
A quality sign-up form is one of the reasons why you should choose the right email marketing provider. Depending on the signup form you’re using, you may be able to split test. This will enable you to know the best spots to place the signup form for the best conversion.
You may place your form on the header, after your post, on the sidebar, as a popup, or at the footer of the page where you wish to display it. The choice is yours but the position goes a long way in determining the volume of opt-ins you get.
It is also possible that you place more than one signup forms on your website at the same time, but ensure they do not affect user experience.
4. Grow your signup list
Focusing on constant email list growth is a crucial part of successful email marketing. First off you need traffic on the pages where your signup forms are.
You can get free or paid traffic from many traffic sources, that could be: search engine (like Google, Bing, etc), or social media platforms (like Youtube, Facebook, Pinterest and many more) There is no shortage of options for you.
5. Send regular emails
You need to constantly keep in touch with your audience or those on your list. This means you must regularly send them emails (if you use a good email service provider, your audience may have the option of choosing the frequency at which they would receive messages from your business).
But then, you must ensure your messages are in line with what you promised. Your messages must be helpful, entertaining, expository, etc. they definitely don’t have to be mainly promotional, otherwise you may be dealing with a high unsubscribing rate.
Related: The Best Email Copywriting Services
6. Subtly integrate your offers
The goal is to make sales, so you must find ways to integrate your offers in a manner that is not so much of an ‘in your face’ advertising. You should, however, find ways to recommend your products or offers.
Your promotions should come as recommendations that will help the reader improve in one way or the other. It could also be you leading them to your site where your offers are.
In the end, the result of email marketing is better when you have lots of subscribers. However, you don’t need just subscribers, you need targeted subscribers.
So whatever your building process is, you should ensure it is targeted at those people in your list are actually interested in your kind of business.
It is not nice to send too many emails, so you may confirm from your subscribers how often they want your messages.
Email marketing is powerful but must be done correctly for the best return on your investment (both financial investments, time and effort).