It is said that the most important thing a business owns is its email list. Email marketing allows direct contact with new customers and repeat customers as well as the opportunity for brand ambassadors to share your business with other potential customers.
According to a recent study by Campaign Monitor, 64% of small businesses use email marketing and 4 out of 5 marketers would give up social media over email marketing (Litmus Resource Center).
With email still reigning king after all these years, how do businesses keep their lists growing and people engaged?
Keep It Fresh
What you put in your email counts. Make it fun, make it entertaining, make it colorful, make it relatable. You want to attract people to engage! Time and time again, studies about the sales process and the brain show that making decisions to buy are emotionally based.
Story-telling is a great way to not only get what is different about your business across but also connect with your audience on emotional level. This can be accomplished by using powerful images and landing pages that readers can interact with. "Storytelling is a fundamental human experience that unites people and enables you to create deeper and more personal relationships with your audience." (Sleeknote)
Make It Personal
Here are a few marketing tools of the trade to get the most out your emails:
Use audience "segments." Tailoring an email to different demographics of your audience or where a particular group is in your marketing funnel can resonate better with those specified people.
Personalize. From using greeting tags through personalized curiosity-driven subject lines.
Write a good email! It may seem like a no-brainer but, it's important to have the first sentence designed to draw in a reader and keep them reading and clicking by transitioning to a clear call to action.
With mobile devices being a go-to source for email inbox checkers, it's important to optimize email design for mobile responsiveness.
*Rule of thumb is not to send more than 5 emails per week.
Cross Promote & Grow
When you send out an email, post it to business social media accounts and encourage team members to share to their networks.
Engage your ideal prospects and be clear about the value subscribing to your email list can provide.
Use a CRM like Hubspot to track contacts, where they are in the sales process and the interests of those contacts.
At 4 billion users checking email daily (Statista), being in the email marketing game has great potential for any business.
With an average of about a 20% open rate across all industries, email campaigns continue to stay a part of most successful marketing plans and it doesn't look like that's going to change in the near future.
Trying to grow your email list? Find the right prospects first.
