Did you know that marketers sent over 838 billion emails last year? According to Marketing Sherpa, 60% of marketers believe email marketing produces one of the best returns on investment.
With all of the amazing statistics on the success of an email marketing strategy, businesses often times fail to implement a stellar e-marketing campaign for their very own company.
We have developed a strategy that can make you an email marketing all-star in 6 easy steps! If you follow this blueprint, your database of contacts will continue to grow and you will generate a higher open percentage on your emails along with more clicks to your website. This should ultimately result in more leads and business for your company!
1. Grow Your Database:
Every business or e-commerce site should make it a primary goal to obtain more email addresses each and every day. We work with a dry cleaning company that has over 20 locations. Their receptionists at the front desk weren't obtaining email addresses when a new customer came on board! By simply asking for an email address to receive coupons and updates, this company was able to increase its email-marketing database by 400%!
Whether you are capturing email addresses in a physical location or trying to entice people to enter email addresses on your website and social channels, your email marketing database should continue to grow each day.
2. Create a Schedule:
Email marketing can be extremely time consuming. What does this mean? Marketers have to stay organized. Each month, a calendar should be created which outlines the dates that you will be sending out the emails and the topics for the various promotions.
If you are a retailer, having promotions in place during Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a no-brainer. If you are a divorce attorney, having an email message automatically fired off to someone who filled out a contact form is a solid idea.
Create a schedule and a rules engine that caters towards your business. The worst possible scenario is when you are able to capture a boatload of email addresses but there is no marketing strategy in place to target that potential customer.
It is important to think ahead of time so you can be prepared in regards to email marketing. Look at past data so you can make decisions that will pay off for your company.
3. Social Media Capture:
We discussed earlier the importance of growing your e-marketing database. One way to capture email addresses is by running clever social media promotions. There is potential to capture more than 5% of your social media followers contact information through social media if you entice the user with a giveaway or incentive to sign-up for your email-marketing list.
The value of "Likes" has clearly diminished within Facebook's newsfeed algorithm as they place less and less emphasis on organic content from businesses. That being said, if you are able to capture 5% of all of your Facebook fans contact information, this can be extremely valuable and generate a solid return on investment.
4. Invest in a Stunning Template:
If you are going to dedicate so much time formulating an email marketing strategy, the template that people receive in their inbox should be unforgettable. It is important to invest the necessary resources into having a great template for your company. Don't forget to make this mobile friendly!
5. Research the Competition:
You should immediately sign-up for 3 of your competitors email marketing messages. This will allow you to see the promotions that they are sending out. At the same time, it will allow for you to grade your work versus theirs. If they are missing out on opportunities, you should jump on their lack of execution! If they are extremely effective on certain messages, while you won't want to copy them, formulating a similar strategy will be extremely beneficial to your business.
6. Analytics Research:
Integrating your email marketing campaign into Google Analytics will be extremely valuable while gauging the overall performance. For an e-commerce company, you can actually see how many orders were placed directly from someone clicking on a promotion inside of your email marketing campaign. The same can be done for a B2B company in terms of contact forms and leads that are filled out of their website.
Make sure to test various headlines, images, body text and call to actions to see what generates the best value for your business.
After you have a stunning template in place and a strategy to capture email addresses, make sure to start dedicating the proper amount of time to an email marketing campaign so you can generate more sales and business!
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