You may have heard of email marketing, but have you ever considered what it might mean for your business? If not, here’s a short guide on how to use Moosend’s free email marketing samples to grow your business using digital marketing tactics.
The Basics Of Email Marketing
To put it simply, email marketing is a form of marketing that’s as old as the internet itself but still as relevant today as it was 21st century before it. Simply put, email marketing allows businesses to send out frequent, untargeted emails to customers with the goal of promoting sales or generating leads.
What makes email marketing different from regular marketing is that all of the interactions happen online. This means that you can use various tools to track results and measure growth without ever having to worry about shipping a single product or serving a single meal to a single customer. Further, since email marketing is mostly automated, you won’t need to constantly be scanning social media for mentions of your brand. Instead, you can divert some of your managerial attention to increasing customer engagement via email marketing.
Why Should You Try Email Marketing?
First off, let’s talk about why you should try email marketing. Email marketing is a proven method of gaining exposure and connecting with customers. According to HubSpot Blogs research, 89% of consumers have received marketing emails from brands they interact with regularly, while 82% have opened a marketing email from a brand they know nothing about. This means that your best bet for driving traffic to your site or social media is via email marketing.
Further, 72% of consumers expect to receive emails from brands they buy products from and 55% would like to receive offers via email.
Now that you have hopefully persuaded the reader that email marketing is a good idea, let’s discuss how you can put it into practice. For our purposes, we’ll define email marketing as sending out untargeted, automated emails to a list of customers to encourage them to make a purchase. With that in mind, let’s dive into the juicy stuff.
Where Should You Start?
Depending on how much you’re willing to spend on marketing, you can start small then build up your list of subscribers over time or take the plunge right away and have a quick initial burst of growth.
If you’re new to email marketing, it’s a good idea to opt for the latter. With that said, you should always look for ways to improve your performance and make yourself more efficient. One way is to use a tool like MailChimp to segment your email list into smaller groups. This is more effective than sending out one big batch of emails and allows you to improve the customer experience by tailoring content to their interests. Additionally, using tools like Google Analytics will help you identify the demographics and interests of your audience so you can target your future emails accordingly.
How Much Should You Spend?
Now that you have a fairly large list of subscribers, it’s time to think money-wise. From an email marketing standpoint, it’s not always easy to determine how much you should spend. On the one hand, you don’t want to overspend on emails since you’re essentially just repeating what you’ve already said in other channels. On the other hand, you don’t want to underspend since you’ll lose credibility with your audience.
In most cases, the answer is somewhere in the middle. First off, you want to make sure that your emails are relevant and interesting. If you keep up with the trends, you’ll notice that marketers are constantly coming up with new ways to catch the attention of your audience. Additionally, you should look into what your competitors are doing and see if there’s anything you can implement to outshine them in the eyes of your customers.
To give you an idea of what it costs to field an email marketing campaign with a decent size audience, MailChimp has provided us with a Free 14 Day Trial so you can try out their completely free platform and send your first email without worry.
As a business owner, you’ll want to set a budget and stick to it. MailChimp lets you set monthly budgets so you can plan out how much you’re willing to spend on email marketing each month. Additionally, you can set email marketing goals such as getting a hundred new subscribers or increasing your average revenue by 10% within the next sixty days. With that data in hand, you can measure the success of your email marketing campaign and determine whether or not it was worth your time and effort.
How Often Should You Email Market?
Now that you have a healthy list of subscribers, you can think about how often you should email market to them. Generally speaking, this will depend on your target audience and what you hope to achieve by the campaign. If you’re looking to generate sales, you might want to shoot for three to four times a week. However, if you’re looking for brand awareness, you can space out your emails more frequently. If you need to drive traffic to a particular blog post or sales page, you can send out that message once or twice a week.
Again, the answer depends on you and what you hope to achieve by the campaign. Some marketers argue that sending out emails more frequently than once a week can hurt your businesses, as people get annoyed at receiving too many emails from brands. Additionally, you can always set up auto-responders so you’re sure to stay top of mind even when you’re not directly emailing them. For those looking to grow their business, frequent, automated emails are a great way to keep in touch with your audience and encourage them to buy your products or services. Additionally, you can use email marketing to introduce new products and services or to celebrate special occasions. Whatever your reasons may be for sending out emails, you’re sure to find a use for it.
Content Is Key
One of the most essential things to getting results from your email marketing campaign is to have relevant and interesting content. Since we just mentioned content, let’s discuss what it means for your email marketing strategy. Basically, you want to make sure that the content you’re sending out is something that will stick out and compel them to take action. To that end, you should look to create compelling, engaging content that will encourage your audience to buy your product or service. In a nutshell, you’re looking for the right mix of marketing techniques that will make people curious about your product or service and then compel them to take action.
While content is extremely important in getting results from your email marketing campaign, you don’t want to overdo it. You can always find a sweet spot where your content is interesting but not too much so. Additionally, keep in mind that everyone’s attention span is different. If you’re looking to attract new subscribers or increase engagement with your current audience, make sure that the content you’re sending out is of good quality.
To give you an idea of what content strategy might look like, here’s an example from MailChimp. Imagine that you’re an interior designer who often tweets about the latest styles and products to stay up to date with your audience. One day, you see that a popular blog discussed an interview with a designer who happens to be your competitor. Naturally, you’ll want to find out more about this designer and perhaps collaborate with them on a project or piece for your own blog. To get the information you need, you could write a short email to the blogger, inviting them to your website where you can interview them and get all the details you need about the designer. When designing this email, keep in mind that you want to maintain a friendly, authentic tone but also put in enough content for the person reading your email to feel like they’re getting value.
Hopefully, this article gave you a good idea of what email marketing means and why you should try it out. If you’re looking for a more detailed explanation, you can always check out MailChimp’s blog post that we referenced in this article. Additionally, if you want to dive deeper into the topic, you can also check out HubSpot Blogs, which is an affiliate marketing partner of MailChimp.