You’ve probably heard that email marketing is a great way to reach your audience and grow your business. But, why is that? What is special about email marketing? How can you use it to grow your business?
Let’s take a look.
Why Email Marketing?
You may be wondering why you should bother with email marketing when you can simply use social media to reach your audience and gain more customers.
The truth is, although social media is a great tool for marketing, some businesses benefit more from email marketing than others. Here’s why.
It Has Depth
When someone opens their inbox and sees a message from a well-known brand, they probably expect to receive great content, right? Wrong!
Social media gives you instant gratification. When someone clicks on a like button or shares your content, you see immediate results. But, with email marketing, you have to wait until your email hit’s the inbox before you see the results.
The good news is you have something unique and powerful called permission marketing. When you use this method, you can take advantage of the curiosity of your audience, and get them to interact with your email by giving them valuable information or offering them a reward.
It’s Personal
Thanks to the internet, you can now target specific audiences based on interests, hobbies, and demographics. With email marketing, you can use this targeting to speak to your audience in a way that is personal and relatable.
When someone receives an email from a brand they know and trust, they are more likely to open it, reply to it, and begin a conversation with the brand. This type of marketing is often referred to as ‘cohesive’ or ‘one-to-one’ marketing, because, instead of spamming your audience with countless messages, you are engaging with them and keeping track of their interests, hobbies, and opinions.
One of the best things about email marketing is that, once you have a list of interested parties, you can continue to engage with them, and use that list as a goldmine for future marketing efforts. You can retrain your audience to get them to trust you and, in turn, buy your products or services without having to market to them repeatedly.
Pro-Focused
If you’re looking to grow your business, you need to have a clear vision of how you are going to do it. One of the best things about email marketing is that, when someone subscribes to your list (opt-in), you know that they are looking for your product or service, and, therefore, are more likely to sell it to them.
On the other hand, if you are just sending out generic messages, you may reach a lot of people, but you’ll have no idea as to whether or not they are interested in your product, and you won’t stand a chance of making them buy it. Since you know exactly what your subscribers are looking for, you can craft an effective marketing plan to get them interested in your product or service.
Where to Begin?
If you’re looking to use email marketing to grow your business, you must have a clear idea of where you’re starting from. What is your email marketing strategy? What are you going to do to get the most out of your list of subscribers?
Use this checklist to help you get started:
- Creating a solid email marketing strategy (30+ days)
- Curate a buyer persona and target audience
- Develop marketing material (optin forms, white papers, webinars)
- Determining the right pricing structure (free, subscription, etc.)
- Establishing performance metrics and measuring success
- Determining how to handle unsubscribe requests (no hard feelings, the list is life)
- Prospecting for valuable insights (lead magnet)
- Tying the entire campaign together with a call-to-action
- Continuing education
If you can answer yes to all of these questions, then you can move forward with confidence, knowing that you’re taking the correct steps to grow your business through email marketing.