How To Get Started With Email Marketing And Improve Your Business?

If you ignored email marketing, it is time to think and reconsider your strategy.

It is one of the powerful channels you can use when it comes to communicating with people who are going to be your customers.

Email marketing means the use of email within your marketing efforts to promote a business's products and services, as well as incentivize customer loyalty.

Recently, email marketing in Tanzania has increased in competition. To build relationships with your customers and clients, you have to work hard in this industry, to preserve your place.

Number of statistics shows that, the power and value email marketing holds as follows:

According to OBERLO, email communication will grow to 4.3 billion users by 2023. And Hubspot says ‘there are 3.8 billion users worldwide currently’.

A 2015 study found that for every $1 spent, email has an average $38 Return on Investment (ROI). In customer acquisition, email is 40X more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. Direct Marketing Association (DMA)

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?

It is the strategy that uses email to promote products or services. It also develops relations with leads, existing customers and reaches out to new customers.

It allows you to personalize your messaging and change messages based on customer’s actions.

You can also segment your recipient to ensure the right leads getting the right information at the right time.

One of the facts that make it best compared to other channels, in every stage it can be traceable.

It is always possible to track how many recipients have opened, clicked and took the desired action for your emails.

WHY EMAIL MARKETING?

It allows you to build relationships with leads, new and past customers. It is your opportunity to speak direct to them in their inbox to build trust.

So, creating a strong email marketing strategy helps you reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales.

Still, thinking it is not something for your company? BTL is going to give you reasons why you should never ignore it:

Economic and Cost-Effective 

It is easy, effective, and inexpensive. When practicing an email marketing campaign, it allows you to reach a large group of customers at a rate of 1% of your costs for messaging them.

According to Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email marketing is a channel that generates the highest ROI for marketers. For every $1 spent, it generates $38 in ROI. 

Most Effective Channel than Social Media

Don’t be confused, social media is a great channel to interact with your audience. And strengthening your relationship with them. Because of that, it is important as a first step to reach your ultimate goal.

BUT, when it comes to converting audiences into customer's email marketing is a way to go.

It delivers your messages

If you have to choose between adding a subscriber to the email list or gaining a social media channel follower, you should go for a subscriber. Why?

First, 90% of email gets delivered to the right inbox whereas only 2% of your social media followers can see your posts in their news feed.

Second, your subscriber has told you they want to hear from you when they willingly signed up to your email list.

It drives more traffic to your company Website

People have subscribed willingly. This means subscribers are more likely to be qualified leads.

As they provide relevant traffic which increases the chances of conversion which is one step towards reaching company goals.

It integrates well with other tactics

Email marketing integrates well with other marketing tactics as follows:

It integrates well with social media marketing. You can use it to grow your social media audience. By including social media buttons and CTAs within your content.

Another way that email marketing integrates is by promoting new content for your business is content marketing. It allows your business to connect with your leads and customers.

But, your content marketing is effective if you have a way to get your content assets in front of your audience. Email marketing is a way to promote it to your target market.

Increase brand awareness 

Email marketing can help boost your brand position through building trust between you and your subscribers. This will help strengthen the position of your company in a market.

The best way to keep your subscribers engaged to your brand is providing a solution to their problems and knowing their needs. You can create emails that are more memorable to strengthen your brand awareness.

Also a consistency structures such as company logo, color and images, can affect your brand recognition. Remember people likes to open messages from brand they recognize.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH EMAIL MARKETING?

Building a successful email marketing campaign is more important for marketers. But the problem most people face is, they don’t know how to do it right.

The following are the steps that can get you started with an email marketing campaign:

1. Choose the right service provider

This is an important step towards building an email marketing strategy by having a provider that works best for your business.

A good Email Service Provider hosts email marketing on their servers. It allows you to code and track their results.

There are many ESP but among them is Mail Chimp that can work better for your business. To choose, determine your email marketing goals, the number of your contact lists, and budget.

2. Create an email marketing strategy

People receive more than a hundred emails every day and among them are your customers. You need to develop a strategy to avoid your emails lost in a crowded inbox by following these steps;

Define your audience

When you choose the right buyer persona you are likely to send a relevant and effective message. Prepare your campaign according to your audience’s needs.

As a marketer, you will have some existing contacts to start an email list. Even if you are starting to build it from a scratch, don’t be discouraged.

You can start by putting a sign-up form on your website. And encouraging your followers and existing customers to sign up.

Establish your goals

Why do you want to start an email marketing campaign? What do you want your recipient to do when they get your email?

Having goals is a key best practice for sending great contents to your customers. It is important in your lead nurturing campaigns.

It’s worth spending some time thinking about what you want to achieve with your campaign.

Create a way for people to Sign Up

This will help you get an email list. An email list is a group of users who have permitted you to send them relevant content.

There are two key elements that help to grow subscriber numbers that are lead magnets and opt-in forms.

To learn more about how to develop an effective email lists, our great team of experts has a pleasure to help you

3. Email marketing analysis

Does analyzing your marketing emails important? Yes, consistent analysis will help you continue to develop relationships with your contacts.

How do you analyze them?

In an age where email marketing activities are increasing, knowing how to measure and track their performance is important.

Before sending it ask yourself “what is the goal of my email marketing?” Is it to grow subscriber’s lists? Or to convert existing subscribers into customers?

Whatever your goal is, you need to figure out which metrics you will use. Also determine how progressing your goal is.

Every marketer should analyze their email marketing by using the following key email metrics:

Open Rate (OR)

Among the metrics, the open rate indicates the number of emails opened compared to the total amount of which has been sent.

When looking at open rates, it tells you how well you have built your relationships with subscribers.

If your open rate is low, it usually means you have a lot of unengaged subscribers. You need to work hard on providing value and managing expectations.

The elements that affect opening rates most are the subject line and preheader.

Formula to calculate OR is;

Email (opened divide by delivered) * 100

Click-through Rate (CTR)

This is the number of clicks on the links contained in a content. The click-through rate is determined by the content including images, copy, and calls-to-action.

If your CTR is low, it means that message is either not targeted enough or not getting through. In this case, focus on improving your copy.

The formula to calculate CTR is;

(Clicks on link divide by emails delivered) * 100

Bounce Rate 

The bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses that had an error after being sent. Errors can be either permanent (hard bounce) or transient (soft bounce).

Hard bounce includes invalid addresses that can't deliver the message. Soft bounce indicates full inboxes or temporary server issues. In these cases, delivery will proceed when the issue is resolved.

Overall Return on Investment (ROI)

It is the total revenue divided by the total spend, this is the most basic formula to calculate ROI. As a marketer, you should be able to determine the overall ROI of your campaign.

Ask yourself:

How many leads did you generate via email marketing? How does this translate into potential revenue?

Being able to answer those questions will help you prove how valuable email marketing is as a channel that increases sales in your company.

4. Set up your welcome email

This is the first message your subscribers will receive from you. Welcome emails are important because they serve as a first impression when you are building trust.

You can expect a high than the average open rate for it. Since it is the time when people are engaged with your business. Make sure you are delivering something of value.

Start with a warm greeting, provide an overview of what they can expect in the future, and at the moment offer them something useful.

5. Learn to write good subject lines

Your subject line is the most important part of your text. Why?

Subscribers see your subject line even before opening your message. Make a good impression that people won’t be able to resist opening your email.

Your subject line should be short and snappy. The length of the average characters on a subject line should be around 41-50 characters.

6. Send your email (Timing)

After completing preparing your message and are ready for sending, timing is an important factor to consider.

Based on customer data provided, you can create a consistent sending schedule for every subscriber and stick to it. This will help your customer to develop the behavior of expecting you on their inboxes at a particular time.

7. Track your results

Email marketing doesn’t end with a send. Track your open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, bouncing rate, and improving them every time.

If you want to see a real result from your email marketing, you need to know how it performs so you can make improvements. You need to perform a test!

A/B Testing

Is a method of comparing two variables against each other, to determine which one performs better? “That which is measured improves” Karl Pearson.

In an email marketing campaign, testing creates value for content sent and their return to the business. It focuses on data-driven analysis versus a guessing game.

Before developing a test, ask yourself:

-Why am I running this test?

-What would I get out of this test?

A/B testing is a great method to increase the open and click-through rates. The small changes provided through testing can make big differences in outcome.

What should you test?

As a marketer it is important to understand key areas to run the test, here mentioning a few;

The subject line; is the most prominent element of your campaign when viewed in the inboxes. You should focus on length, word order, personalization of the subject line as they affect the open rates of emails.

Personalization: According to studies by Bloominari shows that including personalization in your email marketing campaign can increase the click-through rate by over 14%.

If you have extra details about your subscribers such as company name and location, you can personalize them on the copy on your next campaign to see if they can increase results.

Tone; the tone you use in the body copy can have a big impact on the number of clicks you will receive. Consider testing whether a positive tone can outperform a negative tone in clicks and sales.

Images; research by Thermopylae Sciences shows that the human brain process visual 60,000 times faster than text and 90% of information transmitted to brain is visual. Using images in your email marketing campaign can be powerful and get your message through.

Calls to Action, will help increase the click-through rate by telling the reader what the next step is. It is good to test them to make sure they provide the best results.

The common mistake when running A/B testing is ending your test too soon. If you have a problem running the test we can help you.

WRAPPING UP

Email marketing should never be your afterthought. It needs the same amount of attention that you put on other areas of your business. This will help you to increase sales in your business.

If this article has been helpful and you want to learn more, check out our next post on how and why email marketing is important.