You’re about to find out why email marketing is important to the success of your business. I’ve built a 6,000 subscriber email list and used it to sell products. If you want to grow your email list with less marketing effort, you’ve come to the right place.
Why Email Marketing Is Important: It’s All About ROI
Whether you run a small business or a significant corporation, email marketing consistently delivers robust results. Why is that the case? Effective email marketing is based on trust. A potential customer permits you to send them an email message whenever you want. Assuming your email list is well aligned with your target customer profile, you have a list of people who are ready and willing to hear from you regularly. The fact that people have given permission for you to contact them makes email different from every other digital marketing channel.
In terms of numbers and studies, the following studies and research show why email marketing is so crucial to the success of your business.
Social Media vs. Email Marketing: Why You Should Put More Effort Into Email Marketing
Social media platforms are appealing in many ways. They already have a large number of users. The digital advertising options offered by LinkedIn and Facebook are exciting. So, why not put all of your efforts there? There are a few reasons why email marketing should be your top priority in your marketing plan.
Avoid Digital Sharecropping In Your Digital Marketing
Imagine you are a farmer. Would you rather buy your own land and farm it or rent somebody else’s land to farm? Everything being equal, it is always preferable to have your land. By building up a list of followers on social media platforms, you are renting land in somebody else’s fields. With email marketing, you are much closer to owning a relationship with a customer. That means you don’t have to struggle to keep up with changing rules.
Higher ROI: Email Marketing Is The Number One Marketing Channel
When you compare email marketing and social media from a return on investment perspective, email marketing tends to win. Take note of the following findings to see the difference:
“ROI from email marketing now stands at just over £42 for every pound spent; a rise of almost £10 since the previous study. B2B organisations collectively report just under £36 ROI, but a lower proportion are measuring, compared to B2C organisations we surveyed — which score an average return of nearly £48.” – Marketer email tracker 2019, The Direct Marketing Association (UK)
“Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.” – McKinsey research cited by Campaign Monitor.
If your small business is ever struggling on where to invest your next marketing dollar, choose email. It remains the fastest path to increased revenue.
Reduce Dependence on The Digital Marketing Giants (Facebook and Google)
Social media companies like Facebook have come under fire over the past several years. For example, there is a sad reality that these platforms have had a negative effect on political discourse. Further, these platforms have also had a negative effect on
Email Marketing: Four Metrics To Track To Improve Your Mailing List Conversion Rate
Whether you are sending email newsletters or promotional emails, you need a few key metrics to track your results. First off, start with the bottom line. Did your email generate sales? If not, did it move the needle in another metric linked to sales (e.g., engagement with our sales cycle)? If nothing is happening in terms of revenue, it is time to look at a different email measure. In case you’re unclear, we’re focused on sending promotional email from a service like Mailchimp or ConstantContact rather than using your personal inbox to send messages.
1) Response Rate Per Email Campaign
If your business relies on sales calls (or demo sessions to showcase enterprise software), tracking response rate or reply rate is the right email marketing metric to track. Email tools like Mailchimp can track replies automatically. If you have a small list of 100 email subscribes, counting replies manually works as well. As a benchmark, aim for a 3-5% response rate. That figure should be much higher if you are sending a promotional email to repeat customers.
2) Open Rate Across Marketing Campaigns
By aiming to achieve a higher open rate on the email you send, you stand a greater chance of achieving increased revenue. Let’s illustrate this metric with two examples:
Email 1 has a 10% open rate to 100 email subscribers. That means only ten people in your email database saw the marketing message. This is a terrible open rate, likely caused by a boring subject line.
Email 2 has a 25% open rate to 100 email subscribers, so 25 people in your email database saw your promotional email. You have a much greater chance of achieving increased revenue.
If your open rate is falling over time, there are two fixes to consider. First, look at the subject line that you use in your email newsletters. If they are boring and fail to offer a clear benefit, you will need to do better. If you need inspiration for email subject lines, check out this analysis, I wrote: Marketing For A 8 Million Member Loyalty Program: Shoppers Drug Mart Email Marketing Case Study.
3) Your Email Campaign Unsubscribe Rates
You should expect an unsubscribe rate above zero from your email users. After all, most subscribers are window shoppers rather than potential customers. Some people may join your list and decide that they don’t like your content or even your email template. It happens! The key to this measure is to track the trend. If unsubscribe rates were historically around 1-5% and they suddenly spike, then you have a problem on your hands.
4) Mobile Device Performance
According to a 2015 TechCrunch article, 75% of Gmail users access email on mobile. Since then, the mobile usage number has probably increased.
That is critical to know because the mobile device screen is small. Further, mobile device bandwidth is typically more limited than a full computer. Therefore, you should track performance (e.g., open rate and clicks) on mobile devices vs. computers. Your marketing tool should make it easy to preview your marketing email on a mobile device. If not, send a test message to yourself and open it on your mobile device.
Email Marketing Is One Of The Best Ways To Execute Tour Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy covers big picture questions like pricing, target customer profile, and positioning. You can use email marketing to execute your marketing strategy and to refine your marketing strategy over time. Here are some ideas to get started
Fine Tune Your Marketing Strategy With Market Research
In the digital marketing world, we have so many tools that it is easy to imagine that we know what potential customers will buy. With email marketing, we can ground that confidence in real data from your email users. For example, run one or two marketing campaigns by email to test which price point has the best conversion rate. Based on that information, you can verify which price converts best.
Go Deeper Than Brand Awareness
In your marketing strategy, you may make some assumptions about brand awareness, such as “3,000 people know about our brand.” Or perhaps something more refined like “our customers value our marketing automation app because it integrates with HubSpot. By running some marketing campaigns via email with a survey, you can see what your current and potential customers think. Based on that insight, you can update your email template, digital marketing messages, and spend your marketing budget more effectively.
Optimize Your Customer Acquisition Process
In digital marketing, there are many paths to a sale. You might be used to selling a SaaS product by offering a demo on a sales call. What if your small business customers prefer a free trial instead? Rather than changing your website copy, send an email message to your list and offer them a free trial (or a low priced free trial like the $7 trial used by marketing tool Ahrefs). You may find that this is a more cost-effective way to improve your customer acquisition instead of using sales calls.
Promotional Offers In Email Marketing: The Key To Increased Revenue
Yes, you can sell products and services directly through email. The key is to strike the right balance between sharing relevant content and sending offers regularly. As a general rule, at least 20-25% of your email messages should contain a clear call to action to buy something. The rest of the time, you can focus on sharing valuable content like links to new blog posts, podcast interviews, and tip sheets.
What About Email Automation For Customer Acquisition?
Once your email list is up and running, you may be wondering about email automation. Instead of doing everything manually, email automation rules can help you to sell more. Here are some of the ways that you can use email automation to get better results from your customer base.
1) Onboarding: Guide your customers through a welcome marketing campaign
Your past content marketing effort probably contains a wealth of resources. You might have published a great interview in the past like my interview with David Woodward at ClickFunnels (From $0 to $70 Million: Inside The ClickFunnels Marketing Machine). At the bare minimum, each subscriber should receive a welcome email. Your welcome email will usually give people access to a lead magnet and tell them what to expect. For example, will you send a weekly email newsletter? If so, set those expectations early so that your target audience knows what to expect from your email content.
2) Use Marketing Automation To Send Different Types of Email Content
As your email list grows, you can start to use marketing automation to improve your email marketing results. For example, set your marketing automation to tag email users that open five or more promotional emails. That level of engagement with email content signals that the user may be ready to buy. Consider direct response marketing tactics like sending a coupon code to get them to subscribe.
3) Use personalized marketing in your email content
While GDPR has made personalized marketing more challenging in some ways, personalization is one of the best ways to improve your email marketing results. At its most basic, collect the customer’s first name so that you can address them by name in the email. In B2B email marketing, experiment with gathering more data over time, such as company name, job function, and company size. Based on this information, you can segment different groups of potential customers. Whether you are the business owner or a marketing automation specialist, personalized marketing is one of the best ways to improve your results.
Improve your digital marketing in the next two hours
If you already have website visitors and a growing mailing list, there are a few ways you can get better results like a better click-through rate and increased revenue without increasing your marketing budget. Set aside your brand awareness goal for a while and get faster results for the business owner with these tactics.
1 Write a follow up email – a simple tactic for more profitable email marketing
A single email message does not make an email campaign! You need multiple messages to test different marketing ideas. When you send an offer, a coupon, or another call to action in your email marketing, write a follow up message. In many cases, adding a follow up email to your marketing campaigns will improve your results more than anything else.
What if your digital marketing efforts are aimed at multiple types of potential customers or buyer personas? In that case, pick the top three types of customers you want to focus on. Then, write a follow up email that suits each of them. Save these emails into your preferred email service provider so that you can easily use it to improve your results daily.
2 Send a referral request email to your repeat customers
As a business owner, referrals are probably your favorite way to get more customers. However, there is usually no referral strategy or process. We’re about to change that! Take some time today to write an email to a repeat customer (e.g., a SaaS customer who has been a paying subscriber for at least two months) and ask for a referral.
