Why Email Marketing?

Email marketing is an online business strategy that involves sending a series of specific messages (emails) to a list of existing subscribers (a segment) or potential customers. You may be informing them of new products or services available for them to try/buy, or build a relationship with them to create interest.

Marketers use these emails to solicit sales, donations or even send ads to targeted audiences. The main purpose is to create brand awareness, build trust and loyalty among customers, as well as increase the customer base & purchase patterns.

An email list is however needed to make this marketing campaign a success and fruitful. In addition to this, the marketer needs to have a creative way of crafting the promotional emails to attract the target audience’s attention and get the message through.

Although it may seem like a simple marketing strategy, many factors have to be considered to make it a success.

It is for this reason one needs to be creative enough to make the most out of an email list.

Outlined below are a few tips and tricks on how to use email marketing to drive more traffic to your business to record higher sales and profits.

10 Ways On How to Drive More Traffic Using Email Marketing:

1. Encourage people to subscribe to promotional emails:

The first step in email marketing is collecting email addresses from interested potential customers. Collecting viable and credible email addresses to use in a marketing campaign is one of the toughest tasks marketers have to undertake. Discussed below are a few tips and trick on how to encourage prospects to subscribe to your promotional newsletters.

a. Use your Facebook accounts: Social media marketing is another powerful marketing strategy that every marketer should use. If you already have a Facebook page for your business, you can then use it to collect more viable emails from interested audiences and friends. Allowing your target audience to subscribe to newsletters while on Facebook can help you generate more leads than you anticipated. They can sign up directly, or via a landing page that you send them to.

b. Use blogs and forums: Blogs have a huge influence on the online market today – this is especially important for blogs offering informative content for the online community. Most people search for information on blogs and other informative sites they can find online. If you already have a blog linked to your business website, you can then use it to collect email addresses from visiting viewers and audiences. You however should make sure the blog contains informative content, and what the target audience wants, for them to feel obliged to provide an email address. Often you can capture this via a freemium, an offer that has value to them, in exchange for an email. We call this an ‘ethical bribe’.

c. Use promotional or explainer videos: Although most marketers are yet to realize this, you can collect tons of email addressing by uploading a promotional video – or an explainer or funny video clip with a call to action button on video hosting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. YouTube has over a billion users and creates massive traffic every day from all corners of the world. You can therefore tap into its traffic and even collect email addresses from the same. As mentioned earlier, you need to give these subscribers a reason to subscribe to your newsletters and other promotional content for them to provide you with their personal email addresses.

2. Tell subscribers what to expect:

Most people focus too much on acquiring a potential customer’s email address without telling them what to expect from the process. One of the basic principles of email marketing is making it known to these subscribers why you need their email addresses. None one will just hand you their personal address without a good reason to.

Telling these subscribers what to expect from you gives them a peace of mind – this means they will most probably open the promotional email and read through the mail. You however need to be careful not to send too many emails, as some of the audience may be annoyed and hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button. You can easily manage this by watching your statistics. Their engagement (clicks, responses) will tell you when to break up the frequency of email messages.

3. Make the emails scannable:

Most people are too busy to read long lines of text, which is the reason why you should strive to keep your emails short and precise. Make sure the reader can scan through the email with one glimpse and get the idea behind the text without having to read through the text. (Note: this can obviously vary depending on the market. If you are an educational center for example, more detail may be ok.)

Including graphic images and including subheadings can greatly help how fast a reader can comprehend the mail hence saving his/her time. You also need to include a call to action link to help interested customers to click to make a purchase or order easily.

4. Use mobile-friendly emails:

Many people today use their smartphones, tablets, iPads, and other handheld devices to surf the internet and access their personal emails.

It is for this reason you should ensure all promotional emails send are mobile-friendly and easy to read in limited screen sizes. Many of these handheld devices use inbuilt emailing apps to deliver messages to the user, which is another reason you need to ensure the text is readable across multiple emailing platforms and apps.

If all your target audiences in your mailing list are able to open and read the emails with ease, you can then be assured that most of them will make orders or even log into your business website.

5. Use video email marketing:

Video email marketing is the newest marketing kid on the block. As mentioned earlier, most people lead busy lives and rarely get time to read long blocks of text in their emails.

Nonetheless, the reading time can be reduced to a few seconds by simply using a promotional, high quality and informative video clip as the main message.

You however should make sure the video quality is exceptionally good but lightweight to enable fast loading even on emailing programs. HTML5 video clips are mostly recommended as they load very fast even on slow networks. Showing a video player graphic with your smiling face on it, and a link to the actual video on a landing page is also best practice.

Audio visual content is more converting than written content in that, it is easier to comprehend – it only takes less than 15 seconds to deliver the intended message. The best thing about this is that, most smartphones, tablets and iPads support 3G and 4G networks, which means viewing these videos on these devices is a breeze and present a smooth viewing experience.

6. Send personalized emails:

Both loyal and potential customers will greatly appreciate if you send them personalized emails custom designed for their needs. This means you have to categorize your emailing list according to customer preferences and needs. This ensures the recipients get mails related to their needs and what may appear to them as “spammy” mails.

It would be more advantageous to inject personalized recommendations for your clients for an ultimate one-on-one communication. Although sending personalized emails may be time-consuming, your business or website should receive at least 25% higher conversions and even higher traffic from the same. The returns on investment on sending personalized emails are much higher than sending one message to thousands of recipients.

If you use dynamic responses to email clicks and events, you can make it work in this way.

7. Ensure the landing page is properly optimized:

Although investing in a promising and effective email marketing campaign is recommended, it would be advisable to ensure your business’ landing page is optimized properly. Most businesses lose potential high-value customers simply because their websites aren’t presentable or optimized (high value messaging, offers and speed of loading).

For more return visits (and for potential customers to refer their friends to your website) it would be wise to ensure your business website is optimized and designed properly. The website should be very easy to use and navigate. A presentable, informative, and easy to use website attracts more return visits than an unresponsive website.  Tools like leadpages and unbounce can help get the process started.

8. Automate post-purchase messages:

A strong website, positive customer experience, and effective email marketing campaigns form a stable footing for your business and interactive marketing. You however shouldn’t take your customers, whether one-time or loyal customers, for granted.

Provide them with exclusive and attractive deals to encourage them to buy more, or even refer their friends to your website.

Taking some time to thank them after a purchase (through a personalized automated message) can be uplifting to them. This paves way for more return visits hence increased traffic and more sales. Psychologically, you are also “training” and preparing them for future interactions with you. The first email they get is the most important for establishing trust and good relationship from the outset.

9. Be friendly:

Although using a casual tone in promotional emails is recommended, it wouldn’t hurt to use an informal but friendly tone especially to loyal customers. It is by being friendly that you can break the ice with new audiences and customers.

This also creates a tighter relationship which makes potential customers want to try your services or products.

10. Respond to email replies:

Some of the potential customers (on your mailing list) may have questions/queries they need to be answered or cleared before they can make an order. Be sure to respond to their emails professionally by providing them with the answers they need to clear their doubts.

Do not be like any other marketer who uses a certain email address to mail potential leads and never checks emails or what the recipients hand to say.

Responding to a customer’s mail builds confidence and trust thus increasing their chances of visiting your official website, or better still, make an order.

In Summary:

Your business can benefit greatly from proper and well-executed email campaigns. As long as you do everything right, and aren’t too nagging or use a sales-pitchy tone in the emails, you should then expect some returns from the same. (Note: Certain times in the email sequence, it’s ok to be more direct. Don’t be shy about asking for the sale). Be sure to monitor the emailing address you use to contact the target audiences as you never know what they have to say, or what good it will do to your business.

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