Email Marketing: The Relationship Long After They’ve Left Your Website

Email marketing is an effective way to build an authentic connection with the people that keep our businesses alive and growing.

Think of email marketing as having a great conversation. A good conversation attracts the right visitor to your site and allows you to engage with them while you nurture them through the customer lifecycle. We can have these conversations on a number of platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, but don’t underestimate the power of email marketing relationships.

Email marketing is a reliable tactic to influence your leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey. When you allow your email contacts to get to know, like, and trust you, over time you’ll find yourself with more relationships that lead to, “Yes.” Yes to repeat purchases. Yes to referrals. Yes to long-time loyalty. 

Email marketing also allows you to control the message, when it goes out, and who receives it. Subscribers have already actively made a decision to give you permission to contact them, which means they’re interested in what you’re offering.

How does email marketing work?

Simply put, email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email. With email marketing, you’re able to work on boosting conversions and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help them achieve their goals.

When should you use email marketing?

You should use email marketing when you want to:

• Build relationships and connections through personalized engagement
• Boost brand awareness and keep your company and your services at the forefront of your customers’ minds
• Promote content
• Generate leads by enticing subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for something they’d find value in
• Promote your products and services
• Nurture leads with content that can help them succeed in their own goals

What are the benefits of email marketing?

• There are approximately 3.8 billion email users worldwide.
• Low cost and good ROI. On average, email generates $38 for every dollar spent, which is a $3,800% return on investment.
• Approximately two-thirds of customers have made a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing message
• Email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
• Help to increase your brand awareness
• With email marketing, lists of each market segment based on demographics, interest, past behavior, etc., can be created, enabling you to craft a marketing message that speaks directly to each target audience.
• You own the channel. Outside of compliance regulations, there is no external entity that impacts how, when, or why you reach out to your subscribers.

Creating an Email Strategy

The average person receives over 100 emails per day, which means if you don’t take the time to develop a strategy, your emails could get lost in crowded inboxes or even in the spam folder. Yikes!

Think of the following steps as an outline.

1. Define your audience. Like just about everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona. An effective email is a relevant email and knowing what your target audience wants helps you to tailor your email campaign to their needs.
2. Establish your goals. Research the average email stats for your industry and use them as benchmarks for your goals. What is their Mean Open Rate? Their Mean Click-Through Rate?
3. Create a way for people to sign up. An email list is a group of users who have given you permission to send them relevant content. To help build that list, you need different ways for prospects to opt-in to receive your emails. Things like lead generation magnets and enticing opt-in forms can help you grow your email list organically
4. Choose an email campaign type. Do you want to send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements? Email campaigns vary. Setting up different audience lists and templates for different types of emails will help you to stay organized. HubSpot makes it easy to create emails tailored for every stage of your buyer’s journey. To address leads in the awareness stage, your emails should contain relevant links for your readers to follow, encouraging them to move further through your funnel. Readers in the decision stage would benefit more from call-to-action buttons that easily allow them to move from lead to customer.
5. Make a schedule. How often do you plan to contact your list? Try to inform your audience upfront, so they know what to expect, and be sure to stick to your schedule. This will help you to build trust and help keep your business at the forefront of your audience’s mind.
6. Measure your results. Look at every key metric. Even making small changes to your emails can help yield major results.

The most important thing to remember when you’re working on your email marketing strategy is to treat your subscribers like humans. Keep the conversation flowing. With this, you’ll be able to reach all of your email marketing goals.