Do you know that there are 4.3 billion e-mail users worldwide? This means you have a billion chances of getting new customers today. So, are you going to pretend that you shouldn’t be using e-mail marketing as your chief lead generation channel?
This literally suggests that more than half of the global population has an e-mail. This includes your potential customers worldwide. If you tap into this massive market with the right strategies, you can take your business to a whole other level.
Imagine, people, reading advice and case studies by you right inside their inbox. They know that you work well and you drive results. How? You told them yourself via an e-mail.
Ask yourself this — why did they subscribe to your newsletter in the first place? Because they trust your work. They’re already led deep into the sales funnel. All you need is valuable content to help them make a decision.
This is how e-mail marketing works:
- You get people to sign up for your newsletter
- You drop valuable information inside their inbox
- You build trust
- Make sale
It’s as simple as that.
Why choose e-mail marketing?
There are a number of reasons why you should choose e-mail marketing but let’s understand this with a scenario.
After studying the dentistry field, you opened a clinic in a decent town in America. And, another dentist has his clinic right in your lane. In this case, you both are bound to compete for customers.
But you, having a smart marketing mind, have invested in an e-mail marketing strategy. You regularly share oral hygiene tips with your subscribers which has increased your subscriber base over time. People know you and your work. You also share experiences of your customers and testimonials which prove your expertise.
All this is right inside their inbox, personalized for their liking. Can you imagine the power of this strategy? If someone has a toothache in that area, whom do you think he’ll choose.
The answer is pretty simple — you.
So, let’s summarize how e-mail marketing benefited you:
- It helped you create a strong customer base in the form of loyal subscribers.
- You could drop offers and advice right inside their inbox
- E-mails don’t favor one form of content over the other, like most social media channels.
- You don’t need to worry about hashtags, likes, and comments. Your subscribers are there for information and that’s what they’re going to get.
- You build trust which is hard to remove.
How to set up an email marketing strategy?
There are three steps to building a successful e-mail marketing strategy.
- Build a list
- Maintain List Health
- Send Valuable E-mails
Let’s understand how these steps work.
- Building a list: To build an e-mail list, you need to have a free product. A valuable freebie can get users to sign up with an e-mail. In exchange for a freebie, you get access to their personal e-mail where you can drop value bombs every week.
Note: Never buy an e-mail list. It’s the same as buying followers, there are just numbers and no results.
Your freebies can include free e-books on topics that people are searching for or webinars. You can also give a free trial for your service for which the user needs to sign up with an e-mail.
- Maintaining list’s health: You can’t just gather a bunch of e-mails, hire a freelance writer and leave it. You need to keep your e-mail list in a tip-top shape. This includes skimming your list for e-mails that don’t respond to your content.
E-mail marketing calls for a high engagement ratio. If more and more people don’t respond to your e-mails, it will send them straight to the spam folder. You don’t want to land there.
To tempt users to open your e-mails, you can segment your e-mails for location, age, and company size. The most important thing to focus on while conducting an e-mail marketing campaign is to personalize e-mails for your subscribers.
- Sending Valuable E-mails: It all comes down to this — value is what gets your campaign going. To achieve this, you do behavioral segmentation of your emails. This means you can personalize your e-mails based on users’ behavior.
The target is to tailor-make your e-mails based on your users’ interests. Take Spotify for example — they send new music recommendations by various artists. That’s how you keep the interest up.
These three steps are pretty basic but you need to put in effort in doing them well. Remember that competition is everywhere. Most companies today send out newsletters because they know the potential. That’s why you need to do a regular quality check. Keep your e-mails in good shape and reek the benefits.
