One of the excellent ways to get connected and engaged with your clients is using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. However, people claim that email marketing no longer remains effective and relevant because of the success of social media.
Stop listening to them, as these are just misconceptions. Email marketing is still alive and doing well as one of the most effective and powerful techniques of online marketing and being in touch with your clients.
Defining Email Marketing
Firstly, you must know what email marketing is, before moving towards the reasons explaining why it is so useful in business.
When a person visits your website and thinks of subscribing to your mailing list with the aim to keep in touch with you through email, it is known as email marketing. A mailing list like this is quite important if you are selling a service or product. Email marketing enables you to build customer loyalty, earn trust and promote brand awareness while encouraging your subscribers to purchase from you more often.
Email marketing has several benefits. Although, it is a great marketing tool however, unfortunately, it seems to possess a bad reputation with a few businesses, who fail to understand it fully.
Some companies are of the view that people immediately consider finding an email from a stranger and they delete it, thinking badly about their company.
This may be true to some extent, chiefly because businesses have failed to take the time for nurturing their list. Nevertheless, with responsible marketing, an email marketing campaign can be made to work exceptionally well for your business.
Email Marketing Against Social Media Marketing
As explained earlier, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are superb ways to connect with both existing and potential clients. They are ideal platforms to go for word of mouth advertising, creating strong bond with your current audience and putting yourself in front of a new audience.
Both of these tools are necessary for your business. However, you cannot keep a check over who is seeing your updates or when they are seen.
Apart from this, you cannot control these connections fully, as social media sites like Twitter, Facebook keep making changes without notifying how they could affect the way you are connecting with your followers.
Social media sites do not provide you the opportunity to connect people one-on-one as you can connect through emails. Using email marketing, your promotional campaigns can be fine-tuned by you, while forming a list of people who show genuine interest in whatever you are offering.
With Twitter for example, your message is competing with hundreds or even thousands of other Tweets from companies promoting similar products or services to yours. The same is true on Facebook.
Even if you have a huge number of fans, they certainly are following other pages as well, which reduces your message’s effect. The same thing is true about emails but by sending a personalized email, you can gain their attention as they would actually open and read your email. The distractions present on social networks including recent status updates, chat options and new photos are not there in email marketing.
For this reason, it is important for you to make an effort and transform your followers into your email-marketing list as soon as possible. Once it is done, you have full control and authority as they are in the list of YOUR contacts. You will lose them only if they choose to unsubscribe from your email list.
How Can You Make Your Social Network Followers to Subscribe Your List?
It is not at all difficult. You just have to provide them with the reason for joining you. For instance, offer them something for which they would not mind giving their email address is a good idea.
You could offer a how-to guide, special offer or an answer addressing a particular issue or problem that is bothering your audience, exclusive information or special type of voucher or discount, especially for all your email subscribers.
You must select something that is not only of real value to your email subscribers, but is also of interest to your target audience.
Such actions are not enough to keep your email list active and interested. To avoid losing these valuable connections, you are required to think how you can constantly deliver information that help them remain engaged and persuade them to open the email sent by you.
Consider Your Email Subscribers as Royalty
Customers visiting your offline business or contacting you over the phone, have high expectations that they will be treated rightly and in a special way. Undoubtedly, when you deal with your customers face-to-face, you get recognized for superb customer service and for offering an excellent buying experience. What you should do is, offer the same experience to your email marketing contacts.
When a person heads towards you by subscribing and trusting you with his/her email address, he is in fact conveying you that he likes whatever you are offering and wants to know you more.
Think of it this way, you have been invited by them into their inbox. Therefore, it is your responsibility that this relationship and trust should not be abused by the bombardment of your sales pitches that keep promoting your services and products. You must nurture your email list. Try to be helpful as well as informative and send news and offers, which you consider that they like to know about.
Do not consider your mailing list like a group of faceless names. Keep in mind your ideal customer and exchange thoughts with them one to one. This makes your emails more informative and personal, strengthening the bond with your target audience.
Design a Newsletter
A perfect way to remain in touch with your email list is a newsletter. It gives you an ideal mix of updates, news, information and special offers about your business to develop engagement with the subscribers and enables them to know more about you. Newsletter is also a superb way of encouraging calls to action, may be with limited time offer.
The main purpose is to make available the relevant information, which your ideal clients want to read. However, you should be careful about not to make them bored. The information should be passionate and interesting.
Establish a Strong Bond with Your Subscribers
With the passage of time, your connection with your subscribers will grow. As it becomes stronger, the loyalty of your subscribers to your business increases and consequently, your business sales and profits get a boost. Your company will get new referrals, opportunities and mutually beneficial associations together with building new customer base.
Your Business Gets Repeat Business with Email List
If you do not use the internet world, you might go for placing an advertisement in your local newspaper or investing in flyers or using any other advertising media.
Here, you capture new customer only if a good number of people see your advertisement. However, an email list provides you the opportunity to bond and nurture with your subscribers and in the long run, you successfully form a base of loyal customers who like to purchase from you repeatedly.
Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective tools for establishing a large core of new clients online apart from your regular local clients in your business.
If you realize how powerful it could be to send out emails, which result in gaining extra sales as well as leads, you will eventually be able to formulate a marketing campaign making your business more profitable than before.
Cheapest as well as Effective Advertising Technique
Nevertheless, email marketing is one of the lucrative ways for promoting any business. With the passage of time, you can form a mailing list with numerous potential customers who show deep interest in whatever you are offering by giving you their email address.
Communicating with your subscribers is absolutely free and each of your email results in huge sales.
Underestimating the Power of Email Marketing is a Mistake
Email marketing tool is neither dead nor obsolete. Email marketing provides you more control and access over the message. In fact, by giving their email address, subscribers actually permit you to contact them. This action reveals their interest in whatever you have to offer.
Through email marketing, you are provided with the opportunity to form a strong relationship with your subscribers. This relationship is the one that empowers you as people like doing business with people. Looking after your list properly means your subscribers will like you more and trust as well. Ultimately, you are provided with a much better opportunity of increasing sales than your competitors.
Now you have understood the power of email marketing, you can create and run campaigns yourself and continue to establish a stronger bond with your online customers.
Becoming successful in creating a winning email marketing campaign and establishing a relationship with your customers, is surely a big achievement of yours. This is because, you actually become successful in winning their trust and acquiring their email address is definitely a huge and a rewarding responsibility.
If you do it properly, you will see your business profits bar rise. If you do it badly, you will see your business sales to decrease and it may also damage your brand reputation.
6 Tips to Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Productive
It Should be Interesting
Make sure you have included lots of valuable information in all your messages. It should be in a way that captures your reader’s interest. Avoid sending out sales pitches or making it only about you. Add information that is actually interesting and useful for your target audience. If your subscribers think that you send emails only with the aim of enhancing your sales, they will never feel special or valued and you will fail to stop them from hitting the delete button, or unsubscribing from your list. They will not bother giving a look to your email messages any more.
Provide a Visible Link for Unsubscribing
You might consider it as a negative approach, but it is in fact a positive one. Your readers feel comfortable when they feel that they have full control and are not being pressurized to do anything. Therefore, never forget to include a link for unsubscribing in your email. Trying to hide it or not providing any link will only earn you frustration and anger of your subscribers, leading you to achieve completely opposite results of what you want to achieve.
Ask for Feedback
Feedback from your audience is necessary to make your relationship with them stronger and to enhance your email marketing projects. Therefore, keep asking for opinions, suggestions or feedback from your readers. Another way to receive passive feedback is through email marketing programs that track information regarding the number of people opening up your emails, or clicking on the links present there. All such feedbacks are essential for you to continuously improving and engaging with your audience.
Targeting the Right People
It is important to target the right people to achieve fruitful results. If you keep sending your emails to wrong customers, you will achieve nothing but their aggression and annoyance. Targeting wrong audience is simple a wastage of time of both, you and the targeted people. It is better to put in your efforts and time in your campaigns targeting audience who is actually interested in hearing from you.
Try Making Your Email Messages Mobile Friendly
In this technological world, your customers now can access their email messages on their tablets or mobiles. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you format your emails correctly to ensure that you can read them easily.
Make Exclusive Offers Only for Your Mailing List Subscribers
You can show your gratitude to your subscribers by sending exclusive special offers, which is not available anywhere on your website. Such offers can be free delivery, discounts or any other deal that attract your customers encouraging them to buy from you.