The Basics of Email Marketing
Email marketing is how you connect your customers to your product, service, or craft.
Mastering the fundamentals is essential
With email marketing built on fundamentals, you can weather any change in the market and platforms.
The development of email brought all of us a little closer. At times, it brought us spam and other times it allowed us to communicate with our loved ones in the blink of an eye. Another great thing about email is how easy it is to now communicate with your customers directly.
Email changed marketing forever
Before, you had to rely on customers reaching out to you or hoping they don’t hang up on a cold call, with email marketing, you can reach out to them individually about new products and services, sales, and company information.
But how can you make your email marketing most effective?
There are plenty of pitfalls a company can fall into. Many of us have a separate email address we give to businesses just to avoid marketing emails. So how do you make the leap into the inbox they check 26 times a day?
Don’t forget the fundamentals!
First, you have to know the fundamentals. With a strong understanding of the fundamentals, you’ll have the foundation you need to build a better relationship with your customers through your email marketing. Strangely enough, the fundamentals can be where most of us wind up in another pitfall.
Why are fundamentals important?
Fundamentals aren’t flashy. Think of a time in your life you were involved with a sports team or were learning an instrument or a foreign language. You likely had to start by learning the fundamentals - those basics that kept you from failing and gave you the foundation you needed to learn and grow. Email marketing follows the same pattern. You need to know the fundamentals first because they work; it’s that simple.
Ready for the secret recipe?
Building websites
Blogging
Vlogging
Podcasting
Building products
Selling
Building relationships with customer
These are the fundamentals. We all know these methods work well to grow a business. But they work. They require planning and learning the technical side of things. They require time to prepare your content and mental energy.
Email marketing is what brings it all together.
One common error business owners make is jumping straight to email marketing. While this may help you in your short game, it can be a fatal flaw in the long run. The main reason is that the market will always be changing. It might be a new platform, a change in how a platform works with businesses, or simply a change in what the public wants.
Any one of these changes could mean your email marketing isn’t enough. And that can turn into a hit to your profits and traffic. But if you have the fundamentals under your belt coupled with your email marketing, you can work through any change to the game.
Email marketing is the glue
The reason email marketing is the thing that holds your fundamentals together is that it helps you control your audience. Email marketing is essential to growing and maintaining your business, especially if you are trying to make your living through your blog, vlog, or podcast.
At its core, email marketing is how you connect your customer base with your craft and products. You have a message to share and as important as it is to develop the fundamentals so you can share your work in as masterful a way as possible, no one will know about it without communication.
So, how can you take your email marketing to the next level
1. Develop a new strategy
If you don’t have a plan for where you’re going, you’ll likely get lost - and that’s true of email marketing. If you find yourself now realizing you don’t have a well-developed strategy, you are not alone. The Relevancy Group reports that about 60 percent of email marketers say they struggle to coordinate their marketing campaigns.
One way to easily develop a strategy is to identify why your brand or service or product is important to your target audience. You know it’s important and could benefit them; they don’t know that yet. Once you can summarize your value in one sentence, you can develop the rest of your strategy around that.
You should also be involving others in the planning discussions. The best way to avoid the pitfalls of poor communication is to be sure everyone is on the same page. If you know what the executives or designers or sales staff think about what you’re marketing, it can help you to round out your next campaign.
2. Data is your friend
Data and numbers get a bad reputation of being impersonal. They aren’t! Data is how you can personalize your marketing easily and effectively. The 2017 Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report showed an overwhelming majority of customers appreciating personalization in their marketing emails, with 79 percent of the customer surveyed saying it was of medium to high importance.
The data can come from several places, but it should be telling you where your customers are coming from, what they’re looking for, and how they move through the funnel of your marketing. If you know what your target audience does with your interactions, you’ll have a better chance of creating better interactions in the future.
So, picking the right analytics programs and data is vital to your future success. This can mean investing some of your resources into your marketing to get the right tools. By researching and spending the money on the right software, you’ll have a much higher return on investment.
3. Improve your content!
This seems like a no-brainer but it can be difficult for email marketers who might be stuck in a rut. Again, you need to know what the data shows about what kind of content your target audience enjoys. As you start to develop your next marketing campaign, identify and plan out the content that your audience will most likely open.
You should also stay aware of how your emails are opened. Think about your day. How many times do you open your email on your computer versus your phone? Email Marketing Daily reported that about 55 percent of emails opened are done so on a mobile device. That means you should be coding your emails to be friendly to a mobile open. If not, you could end up with 55 percent of your email marketing fall flat.
Don’t forget to also invest in creativity. Maybe you have a knack for it! But maybe you don’t and if that’s the case, just be honest with yourself. You may need to outsource your email marketing to someone with those skills. It’s worth it for better content that your target audience appreciates.
4. Be intentional
How does your email marketing fit into your overall marketing campaign? If you can’t answer that question, you need to sit down and map it out. Sending out your emails - even with the best content, formatting, and data - won’t be effective if it doesn’t efficiently work to convert your audience from reading an email to making a purchase.
One way to plan this out is by mapping out how you want your customers funneled through your content. Imagine that you’re the ideal customer or client. You receive the email, then what? Where are you directed to next? What incentive do you have to spend your money? Walk through the whole chain of events and identify holes where your customer can fall and not complete the desired action. With the right intentional planning, you can find your conversion rate improving.
IMPORTANT: This written material has been prepared based on sources which you
provided. Neither Flocksy or the creative who wrote the copy makes any claims whatsoever
as to the accuracy of the information contained within, and they are not responsible for any
legal or financial difficulty resulting from the use of this written material. We encourage you
to review it thoroughly before disseminating it or using it in trade.
SOURCES USED:
