Advertising your website to the right audience is not easy, but email marketing remains one of the very best ways to do it. From a financial respective, your email marketing has the highest return on investment (ROI) than any other method with a whopping $40 dollars for each dollar spent.
However, many of the best marketing strategies are completely free, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of them.
Why Email Marketing is So Successful
I bet you are wondering how exactly email marketing manages to have such a high ROI?
For starters, people actually want to receive emails, at least the ones they sign up for. What this typically results in are customers who will actually read the message. Thus, they can actually have an impact.
Secondly, people keep their email address for a very long time. In fact, 51% of people have had the same email address for over 10 years. This means once someone takes the time to signup, you can market to them for a very long time…unless they opt-out.
Thirdly, and why email campaigns have remained so popular, is that they are extremely customizable and can be different for each customer. You can create an email template that will appear differently for multiple groups of people. This helps them feel more personal, which is a large part of their charm.
The last reason I will provide, trust me there’s a lot more, is that it goes well with every other type of marketing method. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to accomplish, you can create an email to help you achieve it.
When Should I Start Building a Subscriber List?
Whenever you look online about what you should do first, you discover one thing. There is a lot of things that should be done “first” and this is one that falls into that category.
Marketing is a huge part of every website, and the quicker you start, the quicker you will grow. And every website is completely unique. The answer is probably different if you have a blog versus an eCommerce website.
So the best answer I can give is once your website is fully operational, begin immediately.
8 of the Best Email Marketing Strategies to Follow
Email marketing has been around for decades, and as time passes, the techniques developers use have become standardized. Here are 8 proven ways to get the most out of email marketing:
1. Utilize Social Media
As I said above, email marketing compliments almost every other way to advertise your brand, and social media is no exception. In fact, social media is the next best way to advertise your website, which makes combining both methods a no brainer.
However, the question remains, how do I combine the two?
If you check almost any email you have received from a major corporation, at the bottom you should notice something similar. Almost all of them include social media share buttons.
To find the most success with this tactic is to place them under the call to action in your email. For example, if you are offering a 10% off promo code, placing these share buttons under it will have the most success.
This is because many customers will open an email and skim through it to find the coupon or promotion inside. If someone shares this on social media, you are going to have explosive results.
2. Take Advantage of The Subject Line
Do you know what Netflix, eBay, and many companies have in common when it comes to email?
They all use your first name in the subject line.
This method is known as personalized promotional mailing. To put it simply, it’s an email that appears more personally crafted to cater to the reader. And they are really effective.
In fact, personalized promotional mailing gets 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized emails.
Thus, it is definitely worth trying to put that small personal touch on the subject line, and adding a name does just that.
3. Don’t End Up In Gmails Promotions Tab
Gmail is the second most popular email platform in the world, only second to Apple iPhone. All the way back in 2013, Gmail added a new tab called promotions.
The idea was simple; it would help Gmail users sort their emails to improve the experience. And while that may have actually been the case for some, it wasn’t for businesses.
While the promotions tab is not the same as a spam folder, it is treated as one by most users. This means that when your email ends up in this tab, you are going to get fewer clicks. To fix this, you need to make sure your email does not end up here.
Gmail looks at certain factors that include the number of links, images, and certain keywords that are often found in these types of emails. Some of the words include free, urgent, low risk, and similar words.
You need to make the effort to ensure your marketing efforts are not undone by ending up in this tab.
4. Create Multiple Email Groups
Remember how personalizing your emails are far more successful than not doing it? A great way to do this is to gather information through a survey or based on other factors (purchase history, location, etc.) and separate your subscribers into multiple groups.
In fact, sending one email to a large group of subscribers is known as an email blast and is typically frowned upon in 2020.
This allows you to properly target certain groups with specific interests and make a more custom-tailored email for those subscribers. For example, sending a gaming ad to a non-gamer doesn’t do anything for you.
Properly targeting interest groups with your emails is a surefire way to boost click-throughs and make your subscribers more willing to check. Take a moment and think about it, would you continue to open emails that did not interest you?
Probably not, and that’s normal.
Using groups can help you significantly, but it is worth noting that this does involve making a separate email template for each of those groups, which can take up a lot of time.
5. Frequency Matters
Frequency is one of the most important aspects of any email marketing plan. If you send too many emails, users will get annoyed and you will end up in their spam folder very quickly.
However, if you don’t send enough, you are not engaging your subscribers.
Luckily, there is a really easy fix. It is possible to add a small section in the footer of an email asking your subscribers exactly how often they want to receive emails (a great grouping factor to consider).
Do they want it daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly? You can have them select it and make it changeable.
However, there is one small issue. They need to actually select it, which isn’t easy. One of the best strategies for this is to make it a big section within a welcome email.
For example, something along the lines of “We’re glad you have subscribed to our services! Help us give you the best experience by selecting how often you would like to receive emails.”
Just avoid spamming emails as it does not help you.
6. Add Social Proof To Emails
Social proof has become a staple of online interactions and has a place within emails. In fact, a majority of people look up reviews and testimonials from other customers because it is believed to be the most trustworthy.
This type of content is referred to as social proof. The point is for someone who has used the product and is not being paid to give a review. Thus, there is no reason to not give an honest review, at least in the eyes of most shoppers.
Adding this type of content into your email can give you a huge advantage.
However, reviews and testimonials are a form of user-generated content and it is worth exploring other avenues. Consider using social media posts and video reviews from customers as well.
Any type of user-generated content can be a huge asset to your email campaign. And the best part is the customer makes it for free.
7. Don’t Just Sell Products
The biggest problem with email campaigns from businesses is that it is really obvious you are trying to sell a product. Now, there isn’t anything wrong with this per se, it really is just the name of the game.
However, you can sell a product without pushing for a sale.
One of the most popular methods is to add a story or a blog snippet that links to your other pages. This helps bring in traffic and that makes the emails you do send more effective that are for sales and new products.
In fact, just adding a blog is a benefit of its own. If you don’t have one, you should consider starting one.
Getting people interested in your emails is very important, so creating some that are not actually salesy at all is an important part of ensuring subscribers keep engaging with you.
If they keep visiting your website, they are more likely to make a purchase than those who do not.
8. Add Videos To Your Emails
70% of people check their emails from a mobile device. And mobile users love video content. In fact, 75% of videos are viewed from a mobile device. Starting to see a connection here?
Thanks to the popularity of HTML5, you can now seamlessly view videos from an email on a mobile device. And doing so could help you out significantly. This is a great way to help your emails stand out.
Many subscribers do not read the entire email, They skim it and look for the best parts. A promo code, deal of the week, etc. and adding a video is a great way to stop a skimmer in their tracks.
Especially when it’s quality video content.
This is more popular when your subscribers are millennials and younger generations. Thus, experimenting with adding videos in your emails is key. Based on the results, you can decide if it works for your user base.
Consider Paid Methods
With such a high ROI, email marketing is really worth every dollar you throw at it. While it is understandable when starting out to pinch pennies, this is one area you really want to make sure you nail.
The most common thing that website owners spend their marketing budget on are email marketing services. These are other businesses that help you manage your email subscribers and are what allow you to send out thousands of emails at once.
Of course, when you are starting out, you won’t have anywhere close to a thousand subscribers. In fact, you may be lucky to have 50. But as you grow and expand, it is necessary to keep up with your email subscription.
Thus, if you are serious about your marketing efforts, you will end up spending money eventually in one form or another, so don’t hesitate.
However, with such a huge ROI (4000%), I assure you it is money well spent. Before you know it, you will be making a profit in a shorter amount of time.
Never Just Use One Marketing Method
While email marketing is definitely the best way to reach out to customers in 2020, it is not the only method out there. You should make use of other platforms.
One such platform is social media. In the next decade, it is very likely that the tables could turn and social media will become the ultimate marketing tool. And building that presence is not easy and takes time, but it’s free to do.
Another rapidly growing marketing tool is video content. Videos are already dominating social media sites and are the most viewed pieces of content on them. Creating videos on YouTube and including them on social media or within emails is a great way of combining the methods.