With so many ways to reach your customers, many businesses wonder whether email marketing should be a part of their overall marketing strategy. Is it really worth it? The short answer: yes.
There are plenty of statistics out there to support the value of email marketing. For one, 99% of consumers check their email every day.
Email marketing is powerful, persuasive, and cost-effective. A study by Emarsys found that email beats organic search, paid search, and social media when it comes to customer acquisition & retention.
If you worry that you’re bugging people – you’re not. Email gives customers the freedom to read your email when and where they want. And besides, if you’re adding value (or especially if you’re providing an offer for a discount or free stuff), customers actually like hearing from you.
Here are 4 ways you can use email marketing to increase sales and save money:
Build Relationships
For sure, email is great for promoting products or services. But you can also use your email marketing strategy to develop relationships with current customers, and/or reach out to new prospects. Lead them down the path of know-like-trust by providing useful information that’s relevant to their needs and interests.
One of the best relationship-building tools is a simple “welcome email”. The average open rate for a welcome email is much higher than your average email, at around 82%! So, it’s a golden opportunity to slip in some useful information or something else you’d like your audience to know about.
Follow Up
Every good salesperson knows follow up is the key to sales success. And any email marketing platform worth using will have automation tools that make following up a cinch.
One of the most effective follow ups used in email marketing is the “abandoned cart” email. Automatically send a follow-up email to anyone who has added items to their online shopping cart but failed to complete the purchase. Ecommerce businesses swear by this as a surefire way to boost revenue.
Or, go the route of Amazon and send a “you might also like” email, suggesting products based on past purchases. It works!
Automate
Speaking of automation, you should definitely be using it! Doing so will save you tons of time and score more sales.
Pretty much the best thing to ever happen to email marketing, automation tools let you create emails ahead of time and set them to send automatically based on a lead’s actions. For example, when a user downloads a pricing chart, it triggers an email targeted at interested customers.
Email automation as part of your overall email marketing strategy has the power to bring in a big ROI for relatively little money. To set up an automated email workflow (such as an email drip or email nurture campaign), you’ll need to create a series of emails that guide your reader through your sales funnel.
Personalize and Segment
Let me tell it to you straight – the more targeted your email, the better your chances of it getting opened. These days, you have access to all kinds of information that can be used to personalize emails to every member of your target audience.
Customizing your greeting to include the person’s name is square one of personalization (and it’s very easy to do)! But to really wow your readers and increase your open/click-through rates, you should customize both the subject line and email body based on the user’s interests, location, and activity.
Segmentation tools included in your email marketing service provider can help with this. And by doing so, you could see as much as 760% higher revenue (Hub Spot).
Remember, at least half of the new leads you generate are probably not ready to buy from you. Well-timed emails help you stay connected until they are. We can help you set up an automated email marketing campaign to increase sales, nurture leads, or both.
Still have questions about email marketing? Want to set up a campaign?
