Unleash the power of email marketing: a guide to driving traffic and boosting sales
By Rob Redding
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Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to drive traffic, increase sales, and build relationships with customers. It offers a cost-effective way to reach a targeted group of people who have already expressed an interest in your products or services.
With its high level of measurement and analytics, email marketing provides a clear picture of the return on investment (ROI) you are getting from your campaigns. Whether you are a small business looking to build brand awareness and increase visibility, or a larger enterprise looking to improve customer engagement and drive sales, email marketing can help you achieve your goals.
In this article, we will provide a comprehensive guide to unleashing the power of email marketing. We explain the major benefits of email marketing and then show you how to use it to drive traffic and boost sales. From building your email list to creating engaging content and automating your campaigns, this guide will provide actionable tips and strategies to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.
Six big benefits of email marketing
Here are six big benefits that make email marketing a powerful marketing asset for any business.
1. It's cost effective
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach customers and promote your products or services. Compared to other forms of marketing such as television or print advertising, email marketing is relatively inexpensive to set up and maintain.
The cost of setting up and maintaining an email marketing campaign is relatively low compared to these other forms of marketing. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact.
Unlike direct mail campaigns that require printing and shipping costs, email marketing is purely digital and does not incur any physical costs. This means you can reach a large number of people for a fraction of the cost.
With email marketing, you also eliminate the need for buying media placement or advertising space. You own your email list and can use it as often as you like without any additional costs.
2. It's targeted
Email marketing allows you to reach a targeted group of people who have already expressed an interest in your products or services. By segmenting your email list, you can tailor your messages to specific groups of people based on their demographics, behavior, and interests. Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria such as demographics, behaviour, and interests.
Demographic segmentation involves dividing your email list based on demographic information such as age, gender, location, or job title. For example, you can send a targeted email to women aged 25-35 who live in a specific city.
Behavioural segmentation involves dividing your email list based on customer behaviour such as purchase history, website activity, or email engagement. For example, you can send a targeted email to customers who have purchased a specific product in the past or who have clicked on a particular link in a previous email.
Interest segmentation involves dividing your email list based on customer interests, such as hobbies, product preferences, or interests in specific topics. For example, you can send a targeted email to customers who have shown an interest in cooking by purchasing cooking-related products or clicking on cooking-related links in previous emails.
Email list segmentation increases the chances of your emails being opened, read, and acted upon, leading to increased conversions and sales.
3. It's measurable
Email marketing provides a high level of measurement and analytics. This information can help you optimize your email campaigns and improve results.
Some of the key metrics you can track and measure include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Open rates measure the number of people who have opened your email. Open rates give you an indication of how effective your subject line and sender name are at capturing people's attention.
The click-through rate (CTR) measures the number of people who have clicked on a link in your email. CTR gives you an indication of how relevant and interesting your email content is to your audience.
Conversion rates measure the number of people who have taken a desired action such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter. Conversion rates give you an indication of how effective your email campaign is at achieving its goals.
Bounce rates measure the number of emails that were undeliverable and returned to the sender. Bounce rates give you an indication of the quality of your email list and the accuracy of your email addresses.
Unsubscribe rates measure the number of people who have opted out of receiving future emails from you. Unsubscribe rates give you an indication of the relevance and value of your email content.
By tracking and measuring these key metrics, you can optimize your email campaigns and improve results. For example, if you see that your open rates are low, you can experiment with different subject lines or sender names. If you see that your CTR is low, you can improve the relevance and interest of your email content.
4. It helps build relationships
Email marketing can help you build and strengthen relationships with your customers. By providing valuable content, information, and promotions, you can create a loyal customer base that is more likely to make repeat purchases. Here are some of the ways in which it can help you achieve this:
Personalization - Email marketing allows you to personalize your messages and create a more intimate connection with your customers. By using the customer's name, preferences, and purchase history, you can create emails that are tailored to their interests and needs.
Relevance - By sending targeted and relevant emails, you can keep your customers informed and engaged with your brand. This helps to build trust and loyalty, which are essential components of a strong customer relationship.
Consistency - Consistently sending relevant and engaging emails can also help to build a strong relationship with your customers. It helps to keep your brand top of mind and ensures that your customers remember you when they are ready to make a purchase.
Customer service - Email marketing can also be used as a customer service tool, allowing you to respond to customer inquiries and provide support. This helps to build trust and strengthen your connection with your customers.
Two-way communication - By including calls to action in your emails, you can encourage your customers to interact with your brand and provide feedback. This two-way communication can help to not only build a stronger relationship, but also to provide valuable insights into their needs and preferences.
5. It builds brand awareness
Email marketing can help you build brand awareness and increase the visibility of your business. By consistently sending relevant and valuable emails, you can increase the chances of your recipients remembering your brand and sharing it with their friends and colleagues.
By segmenting your email list (as outlined earlier), and sending targeted messages to specific groups, you can ensure that your emails reach the right audience and increase brand visibility. This allows you to tailor your messages to the interests and needs of your target audience, making your brand more visible and appealing.
By building a strong email marketing strategy, you can create a consistent brand message and reach a wider audience. This helps to establish your brand as a trusted and reliable source, making it more likely that customers will return to your business and recommend it to others.
6. It saves time
Automated email campaigns can save you a lot of time and effort. You can set up automated campaigns to be sent at specific times or when certain actions are taken on your website, such as abandoning a shopping cart.
This automation will eliminate the need for manual tasks, such as creating and sending routine emails, tracking responses, and analyzing results. This can save you a significant amount of time and allow you to focus on other important tasks.
As well, automating your email campaigns ensures that your emails are sent consistently and on schedule. This helps to establish a consistent brand message and ensures that your customers receive your emails at the right time.
Strategies for success
As you can see from the list above, there are lots of benefits to using email marketing for your business. However, in order to be effective, it's important to have a strategy in place. Here are a few strategies to help ensure the success of your campaigns. These strategies required a bit of “leg work” but the results will make it well worth the effort.
Create engaging content
This one is probably the most important key to success: Create emails that provide value to your subscribers and entice them to open, read, and click what you send. The subject line is the first thing people see when they receive your email, so it's important to make it interesting and attention-grabbing.
Inside the email, it’s important to provide your subscribers with information that they will find useful and relevant. This might include tips, advice, exclusive offers, promotions, news, educational content, or any other content that is relevant to your audience. People are busy and don't have time to read long, drawn-out emails. So, keep your content concise and focused on the most important information.
Finally, make sure the content is visually appealing as well. Use images, videos, and other multimedia to make your emails more interesting and engaging.
Segment your email list
Segmenting your email list is also very important. This means dividing your list into smaller groups based on factors such as demographics, behaviour, and interests. We covered this in detail above, so we'll keep it brief in this section. But, this is an important strategy that you shouldn’t step over. By segmenting your list, you can tailor your email campaigns to specific groups of people, which can lead to higher conversion rates.
Get permission
Getting permission from people before adding them to your email list is crucial for several reasons:
Legal compliance - Most countries have laws that regulate the sending of commercial emails, such as the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) in Canada, the CAN-SPAM Act in the US and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU. By obtaining permission from people before adding them to your email list, you are complying with these laws and avoiding the risk of legal action.
Building trust - When people give you permission to add them to your email list, they are showing trust in your brand. By respecting this trust, you are building a stronger relationship with your subscribers and increasing the likelihood of them engaging with your emails and visiting your website.
Improved deliverability - When people opt-in to your email list, they are more likely to engage with your emails and less likely to mark them as spam. This can improve your email deliverability, meaning more of your emails will reach your subscribers’ inboxes and fewer will be filtered into spam folders.
Better engagement - People who opt-in to your email list are more likely to be interested in your products or services, which can result in higher engagement and a higher return on investment.
Personalize your emails
When people sign up for your email list, ask for information such as their name, location, and interests. This information can be used to personalize your emails and make them more relevant to each subscriber.
This kind of personalization can help to substantially increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns. By including a recipient's name in the subject line or body of the email, you can make the message feel more personal and increase the likelihood that they will open and read it. Additionally, you can use data from previous interactions to personalize the content and offers that you send.
Create email templates
Creating templates for your email campaigns is a great way to ensure a consistent look and feel for your emails, helping to build brand recognition and trust with your subscribers. But, there are other benefits as well.
One of the biggest benefits is that templates save a ton of time later. They allow you to quickly create new emails using pre-existing designs, layouts, and content blocks. This saves you from having to start from scratch each time you want to send an email. Your template can be easily modified and adapted to fit the needs of each email campaign, making it easy to change the layout, style, or content as needed.
Templates can be created and stored in your email marketing platform, making it easy to access and use them again and again. This speeds up the process of creating new emails and helps you to stay on schedule.
Your templates can also include dynamic fields, such as the subscriber’s name or location. These fields can be automatically populated with information from your subscriber list, making it easy to personalize your emails.
Use A/B testing
Once your audience is large enough, A/B testing can be a great way to compare different versions of an email to see which one performs better. This can help you optimize your email campaigns and improve conversion rates.
For example, you can test different subject lines, headlines, or calls-to-action to see which one leads to the highest open rates or click-through rates.
Automate your email campaigns
As explained earlier, automation can help you save time and increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns. You can set up automated email campaigns to be sent at specific times or when certain actions are taken on your website, such as abandoning a shopping cart.
Using a good email marketing platform such as MailChimp will make this kind of automation easier. And, it will also allow you to store and manage subscriber information, segment your list, personalize your emails, and automatically manage subscribes, unsubscribes, and legal compliance.
Drive traffic to your website
Email marketing can be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Links in your emails can direct people to your website, where they can learn more about your products or services and take action.
For example, they can click through to a landing page about a specific product or service you are promoting, sign up for a newsletter, or download a free resource. By directing people to relevant pages on your website, you can increase the chances of them making a purchase or getting in touch with you.
Including links also allows you to track and measure the success of your email campaigns by seeing how many people are clicking through to your website.
Track and analyze your results
Lastly, it's important to track and analyze the results of your email campaigns. By using automated reporting and analysis tools, you can find out how many people open your emails, click on links, and convert. This will give you valuable insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns and help you make data-driven decisions to improve them.
Those details can be automatically tracked and reported for every email you send. It’s important to regularly review the results so you know what’s working well - and what’s not.
Start building your list!
Today’s email marketing platforms make it easier than ever to create high-quality emails that drive results and help you achieve your marketing goals. By reaching a large and targeted audience, building relationships with customers, increasing brand awareness and visibility, automating campaigns, and providing a high return on investment, email marketing can have a significant impact on the success of your business.
We hope the benefits and strategies outlined in this guide can help you to unleash the full power of email marketing. Whether you are just starting out or looking to take your email marketing efforts to the next level, the benefits of email marketing make it an essential part of any marketing strategy. So, start building your email list, create engaging campaigns, and watch your traffic and sales soar.
Rob Redding is the President of Redding Designs Inc. (reddingdesigns.com), a full-service digital marketing agency for the construction industry, offering web design, social media marketing, and SEO services.