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Is email marketing important to boost sales?
You may be noticing that this question arises every now and then.
The answer is 'yes'.
Do you know that there are three times more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter accounts combined? And you are six times more likely to get a click-through from email than on Twitter.
You may get surprised to know that email is one of the most successful marketing mediums on the web.
You will be even more surprised to learn that email marketing helps generate much more sales than social media giants Facebook and Twitter.
A strong email marketing strategy will help you to reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales easily.
Email marketing is a form of marketing where you make use of emails to promote products or services and also develop relationships with potential customers or clients.
Email marketing has the highest ROI, but you must take steps to ensure that your email campaigns become a success.
You should remember that your prospects and customers will be receiving a huge number of emails every day so make sure that your email marketing campaign is unique and stands out from the rest
Here is a step by step guide to help you create a compelling email marketing campaign.
You should be clear about what you want to accomplish with your email marketing campaign.
You may want to promote your services to new customers or inform existing customers about new services or products. You may want to drive traffic to a new page on your website or you may need customers to sign up for your newsletter.
Sometimes you will want to offer additional discounts and offers to your long-term customers. Doing all these things will help you to connect with people, entice them to become your loyal customers, and increase sales.
Once you understand what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign you can decide who you want to target, what type of content you should have in your email and how you can measure success.
No matter what your goal is, ensure that it is clear, simple, and measurable.
Once you are clear about your goal you should prepare an email list to start your campaign. If you are planning to offer new services to existing customers then you may already have their emails and you can create a list easily.
But when you are looking out for new customers you must build your email list from scratch. So how do you attract new customers?
You should create a personalized call to action on your website or blog. You can attract people visiting your website or blog to join your email list by offering them incentives, free gifts, and bonuses like gift coupons, ebooks, and free downloads.
Once you have enough people on your email list you can segregate them according to their age, location, gender, and interest and then send appropriate emails to each group.
You may wonder how you can gather information about your prospects and customers. You can do it by asking them to take a survey or complete a quiz on your website.
Alternatively, you can provide an online form on your website and ask your visitors to fill it. With the data you have collected you can understand your audience's preferences.
You can segregate your audience into groups according to their geographic location, demographics, past activity, and preferences. And it will help you greatly to draft the contents of your emails accordingly.
You can't send the same type of email to everyone on your email list. By segmenting customers you will be able to send more relevant and targeted emails which will help you develop a better and stronger relationship with them.
After you have grouped your customers, using a single design/format of email may not be appropriate for all.
You may be planning to have different types of campaigns to attract customers. And for each campaign, you may need a different email format.
If you just want to keep in touch with a list of people who are already your customers then you may send a newsletter.
You can offer a bonus or discount to your new customers who joined your email list through your website.
When you are introducing new services you can make announcements about it to your existing customers and new customers.
If you are organizing an event to promote your services you can send email invitations to all customers.
You can even give additional offers to your loyal customers who have been with you for a long time.
You must draft emails in such a way that it will attract people's attention, make them read the entire content, and guide them towards the call to action in your email.
Your subject line should be very attractive as it will be the first thing your subscribers will notice when they see your email. The subject line decides the open rate of your email and if people don't open your mail then they will never read the content no matter how well you have written it.
You should write personalized emails and address the subscribers by their names. Your message should be informal with a friendly tone.
You must keep your paragraphs short and use bullet points and images wherever applicable.
Your call to action should be easy to find and stand out from the rest of the email. You should use bright colors, bold text, and large buttons to make it look prominent.
You should have minimal text with lots of white space and make sure that your email content captures your customer's attention when they show interest in reading your mail.
If your email doesn't add value then it will be ignored by the customer.
One important thing you should do in email marketing is to do split testing. So you should draft two emails with slightly different content for the same purpose.
You must send one version of the email to one segment of people in your email list and the second version to another. At the end of the email marketing campaign, you can check which type of email content gave a better result.
When your subscriber is convinced and shows an interest in visiting your website you should give importance to the page where you will be sending them from your email. So you must have a dedicated landing page and drive your email traffic to it.
Your landing page must have a strong, relevant headline that will make the subscriber read further, a supporting image or video, and a call to action which will convert your subscriber into a customer.
Now that you have created your email and landing page you can try the split testing or A/B testing which is very important for email marketing.
You can split-test almost any aspect of your email which includes the subject line, length of the email, the content of the email, tone of your email, images, and videos embedded in the email, and the call to action.
You should change only one aspect at a time when you do split testing in an email marketing campaign. This will help you to easily pinpoint the perfect email option for a specific segment of customers.
At the end of the campaign, you will know which version of the email gave you a better result.
Once you have sent your emails you would like to know how many people opened your emails and how many clicked on the call to action.
Your campaign will be a success only when the open rate and click-through rates are high. Open rate is the percentage of subscribers who opened your email and click-through rate is the percentage of people who opened your email and then clicked on the call to action
You can track the success of your campaign by using email marketing tools or website analytics tools. These tools will also help you to see how many people unsubscribed from your email list and how many shared your email with others.
By using these tools you will get an overview of how your subscribers are responding to your email campaigns and also compare the success of one campaign to another.
If you have a Google Analytics tool you can even find out what your subscribers did after they clicked through to your website. By viewing all the data you can make changes to your email marketing campaign to improve open rate and click-through rate.
You must remember that your subscribers will be getting a huge number of emails every day and you should not bombard their inbox by sending too many emails just because they have signed up for your email list.
You should avoid spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in your emails and also you must proofread every email before you send it.
You must provide a proper business address that your subscribers can use if they want to reply to your email.
You should provide the subscribers a way to unsubscribe from your email list at any time if they are not satisfied.
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is it is cheap compared to mainstream marketing.
You should remember to make your emails mobile-friendly because most of your subscribers will be viewing their emails on mobile devices.
You must carefully analyze every component of your email before sending it and your email marketing campaign will become more powerful when you use the right email marketing tools.
You can fine-tune your email marketing campaigns and achieve better results with each campaign. By planning carefully and crafting an effective email marketing campaign you will see an increase in your sales.
We make every part of the contact management process easier. Getting started with building relationships has never been easier.
