Email marketing for business is and essential part of the inbound marketing funnel. It is a form of direct marketing. As the name suggests it used email as the main communication channel to reach an audience.
Broadly speaking, any email that is sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
The most common definition, however, is using email to reach a group of people to achieve a specific goal. This goal could be increasing leads, sales, retention, or engagement.
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate directly with potential and current customers. You can personalize your message and talk directly to your audience.
Also, email marketing is affordable and scalable. Usually, there is an initial investment in email marketing software. After that initial investment, you can send as many emails as you want (within reason, of course).
How to Do Email Marketing
Email marketing is a highly effective channel with the power to convert prospects to customers. It is also useful to build loyalty among your existing database.
Depending on your industry, email database size, and goals, it can be as easy as setting up a welcome email and a few automated messages. Or, it may involve creating complex email branches and nurture campaigns.
While it will change for every business, here’s a high-level look at how to do email marketing:
Set goals: Before firing off your campaign, make sure you’ve established clear goals around what you hope to achieve. Do you want to drive traffic to a blog post? Want to increase sales? Or do you want people to sign up for a webinar.
Build your list: Once you understand your goals, it’s time to think about who to send your email to. There are two main ways to build your list: you can either import your current list of customers and/or build your list from scratch.
Decide what type of campaign you want to send: There are several different types of email campaigns you can send, including newsletters, promotional emails, welcome emails to new subscribers, event/webinar invites, and nurture campaigns. When deciding which format to choose, think about scalability, revisit your goals, and factor in time commitment.
Create your campaign: Look for email marketing software with an intuitive, easy-to-use campaign builder. You don’t want to spend time wrestling with the HTML code to make sure your email looks right.
Measure the results: Once you’ve sent the email, wait up to a week before collecting and measuring the results. Make sure to track open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. These metrics will give you a high-level view of how well your email performed and how you can improve your next campaign.
Is Email Marketing Dead?
Some say that email marketing is dead and old school. This is not to be believed. Email marketing is alive and well.
Email campaigns work. They are a low-cost, effective way to reach thousands of customers in a single moment, with the option of personalizing each message to build even stronger relationships.
Email optimization is fairly easy once you start sending regularly, and with a little bit of effort, you can grow your email list and watch your revenue grow along with it.
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