Whether you are a team lead for the marketing department of a SME/Start-up business or a team member in a marketing agency for a large company, one of your Top-on-the-List goals is to generate leads and increase conversion rate in order to meet your business' sales target for a scheduled period of time through a cost-effective means.
What better way is there to achieve this goal efficiently than through Email marketing?
It is an affordable and proven marketing strategy that is used by diverse businesses globally, irrespective of their size, to achieve their company's ultimate marketing goals such as attracting new customers, increasing sales, announcing the release of new products to their brand ambassadors, keeping in touch with existing clients and so much more.
In this article, we will consider the top 3 benefits of Email Marketing which include:
Have you been thinking of doing a marketing campaign that has a global reach for your line(s) of products? Or have you been thinking of what strategy you require to increase your brand awareness at an affordable cost? Email marketing is one of the best ways to achieve these goals.
Brand promotion gets easier when you have an email list of all your prospects and existing customers which you use to constantly keep in touch with them. Email is one the most common means of communication used every day by billions of people all over the world.
Hence, your business brand becomes top of the mind when you use email marketing to drive your business values to your customers. It can also be used to drive traffic to your website and your social media pages when you include your web and social links in your emails.
Email marketing is an inexpensive way to announce the launch of your brand's new products or services. It is cost-effective; you don't have to spend so much money on ads which is one major advantage it has over other media ad campaigns such as TV/Radio jingles, social media ad campaigns or even the expensive, branded T-shirts and photoshoot requiring street campaigns which you do in-person with your team to promote your products.
Furthermore, email marketing tools gives you the leverage to control your own campaign activities. You can choose when to send your emails by scheduling them to be sent when your customers are more active to open and read them.
It also has important features that allows you to keep track of the performance of your email campaigns such as A/B testing, your Click through Rate (CTR), Click-to-Open-Rate (CTOR), Bounce rate, Conversion rate and a lot more email metrics.
One of the key goals of starting a business is to make profit through the sales of your products or increasing your customer base patronizing your services. If you aren't selling, you'd soon be out of business. So, how can email marketing help you increase your sales?
Email marketing tools have an interesting feature that allows you to create personalized contents for your customers. They give you the opportunity to segment your customers into various categories such as 'Existing customers', 'Returning Customers', 'New Customers' or 'Prospects'.
Therefore, your email content to your prospects should sound convincing enough to make them purchase your products. On the other hand, your emails to new customers should be aimed at encouraging them to purchase more of your products in order to make them your loyal customers while the personalized contents you send to your loyal customers should be aimed at encouraging them to become your brand ambassadors who refer other people to buy your products or patronize your services.
Furthermore, email marketing is a great way to generate leads. You can send automated emails about your business to people who sign up for your newsletter or for your other opt-in forms such as e-books, how-to-guides, publications etc.
You can also do an online market research to find out who your target customers are, where they are located, and then create a sponsored email ad to raise awareness about your brand or products.
Besides that, nurturing prospects is very vital to lead conversion. You need to optimize your landing page to ensure your leads can easily navigate through your website to find valuable information related to their needs which will enable them to respond to your Call-to-Action (CTA).
Moreover, email marketing can be used to drive the right messages to the right people at the right time; thereby, saving time and efforts. For instance, if you run an online store that deals with the sales of different brand of products, you can do an email campaign to promote products based on their seasonal use such as summer clothes, or a campaign to promote products that are trendy at a particular time such as newly launched but competing brands of phones.
To make this effective, you need to keep track of your customer interactions. For example, if a customer frequently checks your website for different brands of sneakers, that should give you a hint that s/he will be more interested in receiving promotional emails about sneakers.
In addition, email marketing gives you the opportunity to up-sell other products which go hand-in-hand with the one your customer is currently interested in e.g., encouraging them to purchase an iPhone with its associated accessories such as a fashionable pouch or an iWatch.
You can also decide to send promotional emails that allows you to cross-sell between brands. For instance, if your customer is interested in an Adidas brand of T-shirt, you can let them know through a follow up email that you have other brands of T-shirts such as: Nike, Puma or Versace branded.
Email marketing is a great way to conduct customer satisfaction survey. Getting feedback from your customers is important because it helps you discover what they think about your products or brand. It also gives you an insight into your buyers' behavior i.e. it helps you discover what makes them interested in your products or what they don't like about your products.
Since your customers are the ones purchasing and using your products or services, you can gather feedback from them to know how to improve your service rendition and to increase their satisfaction.
You know that customers always want to be treated right, whether they are buying online or on-site, so emailing them a post-purchase survey is an interesting way to find out if your customer had a 'kingly user experience' while purchasing from your online store without experiencing any form of technical hassle.
Furthermore, email survey can be used to gather ideas for updating your product(s) or website. For instance, if your product is an app such as a fintech app that provides valuable insight into your customers' financial management or investment, you can conduct a survey to know what updates or features your users are interested in having on your app to make it more interesting for them to use.
Moreover, emails can be used to conduct a post-update survey to find out if the issues popularly complained about your products have been fixed.
In summary, email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies which helps you run your product campaign at an affordable cost and gives control over the process. It has the advantage of connecting you directly with your leads and customers, thus, giving you the opportunity to send personalized emails pitching your products or services to them in order to get them responding to Call-to-Action.
Finally, it is makes getting customer feedback easier and can be used to obtain reviews about your products from the user's perspective. Thus, in contrast to making cold calls to pitch your products to leads or organizing street campaigns for brand awareness, using email marketing tools saves you time, money and efforts; and gives you value for every dollar spent on your email marketing campaign.
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Do you need help getting started with email marketing? Or do you need help improving your current email campaign strategy or achieving your campaign goals?
Contact us at Lizop Writes, we will help you set up an email marketing strategy that works and that increases your Return on Investment (ROI).
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