(i) Building of An Email List : Emails are sent not to the streets but to email addresses or email inboxes. You need to compile a list of the email addresses of your potential or actual customers before embarking on an email marketing campaign. You can build this list by just putting a form or a proposal on your website and request your respondents to subscribe, ensure one of the information they will supply in their subscription is their email address.
Let us begin this article by giving a brief explanation about email marketing as very major type of digital marketing activity. As the name suggest it is the process of using internet/electronic platform to send mails to your prospective and actual customers. As at 7th April 2021, about 306.4 billion number of emails has been sent on just this particular date. This goes to show how much individuals and organization are tapping in the opportunity of using email to reach their target audience.
Before we get into the things that make email marketing essential for business growth, let us check some of the steps that are not only necessary but very crucial in an email marketing campaign.
In the form or proposal, you must offer the prospects something that can motivate them to drop their email address. It could be a coupon, discount, free product etc. You have to be specific on what you exactly want while requesting for the emails. Your offer to them must also be specific and definite. To guarantee more people subscribing, you can offer such things as:
- Free downloads
- Free e books
- Update with current trends and other useful information. Also ensure that you keep to whatever promise you have in your offer.
(ii) Great Content: One of the major steps that is crucial to have a successful email marketing campaign is to provide a great content. It must be great not by title, but by what the content offers. An attractive content that meets the expectation of its prospect is a great one indeed. Make sure you are ready to deliver on your promises.
For instance if you promise a daily update, in practice, don’t change it to weekly and think your prospects will understand. In your content, always give opportunity to unsubscribe if the prospect choses to do so. Create some automations in your email, like automated welcome, automated reply or follow up.
Do your best to foster a good relation with your prospect by the content of your emails. Try and make your mails consistent, so that your prospects will not forget your proposals. Also endeavour to craft your email content such that it does not end up in the spam.
Now, let’s look at factors that make email marketing an essential for business growth.
- It is Easy to use
- It can be customized
- It is easy to measure
- It can generate traffic
- It can reach an engaged audience
- It can help retain customers
- It is cost effective
1. It Is Easy To Use: For anyone to undertake a successful email marketing campaign, he does not need to engage a retinue of staff neither does he need a very high level of technical ability. In fact, as long as email marketing is concerned, high quality content of the email is of greater importance than technicalities. Softwares for email marketing are usually very simple and can easily allow you create good templates for email marketing campaigns. You can also easily automate some of your emails, like welcome messages, product recommendations, reminders of all sort, survey request etc.
2.It Can Be Customized : One good advantage of email marketing that makes it an essential for business growth is the opportunity to customize the email messages to any identified or targeted group or audience. Email lists can be divided and segmented by geography, age, sex, engagement levels, product purchased etc. Customers can be made to receive different emails depending on the category they feel into in our email list segmentations or according to how much they know of our products. For instance the mail you send to those who may be seeing your products for the first time can differ from one you send to old customers who are used to your product. Addressing customers based on their identified needs and segments has always proved result oriented.
3.It Is Easy To Measure: Email marketing is very easy to measure and that’s one of the things that stands it out among other internet platforms. Email softwares can allow you to check or track, rate of open, click through and conversations. This opportunity of tracking these basic activities of email marketing enables the marketer to know what the customer agrees to and what he does not agree to. It enables the marketer to know what is working and what is not working, what to change in the strategy and what to retain.
4.It Can Generate Traffic: Email marketing give opportunity to put links in your mails, this has proven to be an effective way of driving traffic to the websites where the link directs them. For instance if you include the name of a product, video or whatever that is of use to the target audience in an email, and put a link in the email for the customers to download or watch the video, it is almost guaranteed that the email will make the customer click on the link.
5.It Can Reach and Engage Audience: Email marketing provide a very good platform for engaging customers and prospects. Based on the strategy employed, often customers are the ones requesting to be communicated and kept in touch via email because of previous engagements. Through blog posts you can prompt customers to opt for emails, and when they do, they have created a platform for a continual engagement, which the marketer can exploit to make them patronize whatever he is promoting.
6.It Can Help Retain Customers : In business and digital marketing in particular, retaining the customers is key to the survival and excelling of the business. Email marketing offers both the opportunity to acquire new customers and the opportunity to retain them. when customers are retained, it gives security and guarantees success for the business. Email marketing is essential to attain this because it keeps you in constant touch with the customers and enables you to build a relationship which is very important in business. Retained and loyal customers can become the link of the business to new customers because of their recommendations.
7.It Is Cost Effective: Email marketing is very typical of the digital marketing platforms as it does not involve so much and elaborate logistics like cost of postage, transportation, so many personnel, elaborate accommodation space etc. So much costs can be avoided in an email marketing campaign. The cost of email marketing software’s is not much compared to the costs involved in other types of marketing campaigns.
Wrapping It Up: Email marketing is an essential platform for every business venture because it’s easy to use, can be customized, it can be easily measured, it can generate lots of traffic, it can help any business engage and retain her customers. With all the above benefits, it is yet cost effective and can give a high return on investment, (ROI). Email marketing is one digital platform all individual and organization cannot afford to ignore.