Whether you’re a small business looking to take the first steps to grow or a more established brand looking for ways to expand your reach, email marketing has immense potential to help you make the most of your marketing dollars. Everyone can agree that there’s always a need to attract new customers while still retaining existing ones. In this article, we’ll be talking about some email marketing tips and tricks to keep in mind that’ll help you do just that!
Why Email Marketing is Worth the Investment
Before we begin, let’s discuss why email marketing is such a pivotal part of the marketing strategies of so many brands. With approximately 4 billion daily email users, most marketing teams are capitalizing on the fact that this number is steadily growing. Additionally, the average email generates $42 per $1 spent which is an amazing return on investment! Businesses are able to cultivate personalized content geared towards their target audiences and build stronger customer relationships in this process. Whether it’s to increase traffic to your website or to generate excitement about product releases or upcoming events, email marketing remains a great resource to take advantage of.
Our Top 7 Growth Hacks
1. Email Automation is Your Friend
Most businesses that are looking to scale up and grow typically don’t have an incredibly large team that is fully built out. It’s likely that quite a few people are going to need to be in charge of more than just one role! With this in mind, adding on the task of manually sending out emails to a growing subscriber base won’t be feasible in the long run. It’s much easier purchasing an email marketing software knowing that it would take the burden off of an employee while still generating enough revenue to make it worth the investment.
Email marketing automation can also help you with the personalization of your emails since you’ll be able to create specific flows and campaigns for your different target audiences. From welcome flows to scheduled campaigns, you’ll be able to nurture your customer relationships without an immense amount of time being invested in the process.
2. Clean Up Your Subscriber List
With the intention of building up your email list, it’s likely that removing anyone from this list seems counterintuitive and something you would be hesitant to do. However, engagement really matters, and in many instances, matters more than having a higher subscriber count. Think about having 1,000 subscribers but only 200 being engaged versus having 500 subscribers with nearly all of them being engaged. The second scenario is much better because you can be sure that these 500 people are likely to interact with your email since they likely want to receive your updates and promotions. Some ways that you could do this would be by implementing a sunset flow that phases out inactive subscribers or by providing users the option to unsubscribe themselves!
3. Collect Email Addresses Through Social Media
Simply having a sign-up form on your website simply won’t be enough if you’re looking to significantly increase the number of subscribers you have. By leveraging your social media following, some of these people might realize they aren’t subscribed to your emails and sign up wanting to learn more. You could also consider setting up a promotion or a freebie that would be exclusive to those on your email list and post about this on social media to encourage more of your audience to sign up. As a side note, this strategy could also be used the other way around where you leverage a larger email subscriber base and ask them to follow you on your social media platforms.
4. Experiment With Your Subject Lines
Subject lines are the first thing that people see when they notice your email in their inbox. This is why it’s crucial to have an eye-catching subject! Feel free to experiment and test out different tones, especially when you’re starting out, to get a feel for what your audience responds to best. Remember, the goal is to find a way to optimize your open rate. Some suggestions are to create a personalized subject line, consider including emojis, ask a question, or even crack a joke!
5. Give People a Reason to Share Your Email
Whether you’re doing a referral program or offering a promotion, getting people to share your emails with their friends is a great way to organically grow without investing any additional money. Offering something free, like an e-book, or at a discounted rate will help give your customers that much-needed push to sign up or even ultimately make a purchase from your site! By giving your customers something good that they perceive as valuable, it’s likely that they would provide you with a high engagement rate that would make up for the discounted price that you’re offering in the long run.
6. Use Social Proof
Another thing that would provide a boost to your email marketing campaign efforts is the implementation of social proof. People are more likely to go through with something if they know that others have also gone through the same experience, and by showcasing customer reviews, you’re able to give your potential customers a piece of what they’re looking for. Some ways that you can go about doing this is by encouraging your existing customers to write reviews, highlighting how many subscribers you already have, or by simply being transparent and as authentic as possible with your followers on your social media platforms to improve engagement.
7. Add CTA Buttons
Call-to-actions are one of the most important elements of your email. It’s a wonderful thing to grow your subscriber base and get people to open your emails but if there’s nothing present on the email to direct them, they likely won’t take any action to move forward along the funnel. Even if your goal in a particular email isn’t to make a sale, you can still include CTAs that collect feedback through surveys or even just lead them to a landing page where they can learn more about something on your site. It should also be noted that simply including a link won’t deliver as high of a click-through rate as actually including a button that they can click on since a visually appealing button typically leads to better conversion rates.
With the knowledge you’ve gathered from this article, you should feel more comfortable with developing your own email marketing strategy and more confident to test and perfect it along the way. It’s possible that it might take a bit of time to earn the trust of your target audience but by following these tips, the road to success will hopefully be a much smoother one!