
The importance of email marketing to business can not be overemphasized. Since its invention, email marketing has immensely aided the growth of many businesses substantially with little effort. This is why all form of business needs to embrace email marketing. Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy for sending emails to prospects and customers. Effective marketing emails convert prospects into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal fans. An email has a tremendous conversion rate, so investing in it is a wise decision. Email marketing has an ROI of 4400%. The average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media. According to research, email communication is projected to grow to 4.3 billion in 2023.
If you are looking to get started with email marketing, here are the steps to follow:
1. Choose An Email Provider
The first thing to do when starting email marketing is to choose an email provider best suited for your business. The email provider you need to choose should be flexible and cost-effective. Top email providers with various features are MailChimp, Hubspot, and Constant Contact. A clear idea of your email marketing goals, the marquee features you need, the size of your contact list, and the overall budget for your marketing program will help you determine the best email provider for your business.
2. Set Your Goals
What are the overall goals of your email marketing and digital marketing efforts? An accurate answer to this question will help you run an effective email campaign. You need to establish clear goals about your business customer acquisition, open rates, and how email marketing will build into your overall strategy. Don’t just send random messages or daily inefficient emails to your contacts. Establish some goals that will guide your marketing activities.
3. Build You, Contact List
Emails are meant to be sent to a contact. To have an excellent email marketing campaign, you need to build a solid contact list for your business. The list must keep expanding. Some of the ways to augment your contact list include featuring an email newsletter sign-up section on your website, adding an opt-in form as part of your website’s e-commerce section, and adding opt-in forms on order confirmations and other customer surveys. Avoid letting your email end up in spam!
4. Create An Email Template
Email providers offer you hundreds of timely templates to choose from. Be sure to select a layout that is clean, attractive, and quickly gets your message across. This is because people scroll through their inbox quickly. Also, choose a mobile-responsive email template that looks good on any device.
Then, customize your template with your brand logo at the top of your email and linking the image back to your website’s homepage. Add in your business’s signature colors and create an email footer with your business name, contact information, and links to your active social media channels. It is essential to make a copy of your email and save a version as a master template.
5. Practice writing persuasive mails
Writer’s block makes this aspect of the email campaign a scary one steps for business owners.
You can overcome this by assuming you’re having a face-to-face conversation with someone and writing down precisely what you would like to say to them.
Also, you could follow the process of structuring your message in line with an answer from these three questions: What are you offering? (Headline) ; How will it help the reader? ( Message body), and What should they do next? ( Call to action).
6. Edit, preview, and test before you send
You might be at risk of making mistakes when you send your first mail. But to avoid this as a beginner, you need to take your time to edit, preview and test your message before sending it.
This is a crucial step to take because, sadly, there’s no back button with email, so you can always send yourself or a staff member a test email before sending it out to your entire list.
