There are a ton of ways to market to potential customers these days. The traditional methods, like radio, TV, and print media are still used occasionally, but most companies focus online. Social media, SEO, and paid advertising are some common ways of reaching customers. One method that’s remained in style despite its relative old age is email marketing.
Email Marketing is a Proven Marketing Tactic That You Should Be Taking Advantage Of:
According to a MarketingSherpa survey, 91 percent of American adults prefer to receive promotional emails from companies that they like. This means people who sign up for your email list expect and want you to reach out to them with your marketing emails. Still, you can’t send them worthless messages. Your content has to be thoughtfully tailored in order to be considered helpful or of interest to your subscribers while also being advantageous to your business goals.
Here are Three Ways You Can Use Email Marketing to Your Advantage:
#1 Target Specific Groups:
One of email marketing’s greatest strengths is that, if done right, it can be highly targeted. The people on your list have already expressed interest by subscribing to your mailing list. That means they’re already targeted and more likely to show interest in the promotions and product information you send them.
You can break your email marketing list up into further targeted groups so that you’re hitting the right people with the right emails. You can segment your email lists in a variety of ways such as dividing your lists by:
- Geography
- Age
- Gender
- Education level
- Job position
- Income
- Purchase History
- Interests
- Amongst several others.
You can even pick a variety of factors and group people that way. We refer this tactic as targeting customer personas. And targeting your lists to well defined customer personas is the best tactic you should be implementing in your next email marketing campaign. You can learn how to start building your own customer personas for your next email marketing campaign here.
When you divide up your email list, you’re able to provide more impactful and personalized messaging, which is the second advantage we’re going to talk about.
#2 Personalize Your Message:
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing, according to Comm100, is that you can personalize your message to best appeal to the customer you are targeting. You can use any information that a person has given you when they subscribed to your mailing list, such as their name, location, or job position. Also, you can use any past customer information, such as recent purchases they made, to suggest similar items that they may also like.
By personalizing your message, you’re building a relationship with that person and that in itself can go a long way towards optimizing your customer conversion and click-through rates.
Personalizing your message and segmenting your email marketing list goes hand in hand. When you have segmented audiences for your email, you need to provide a specific message to those various groups. This will ensure that you’re providing valuable content to your email readers and ideally move them through the buyer’s journey towards a conversion opportunity.
#3 Encourage Sharing:
While most sharing happens on social media channels these days, there is still a lot of information shared via email. In the emails you send to your subscribers, encourage them to share your content with their friends. Literally, tell them to “pass it on.” There are a few ways to implement sharing opportunities in your email marketing content:
Think Forward:
Encouraging your readers to forward your email marketing content to their friends and family via email is the most straightforward method.
Get Social:
Another way to encourage sharing within emails is to harness the power of social media. Place social media sharing buttons in your email content. Just make sure your email share buttons are prominent and visible (not hidden in the footer of your email) and infuse your content with relevant, and clear calls-to-action such as “Forward Me to Your Friends,” “Share Me on Facebook,” “Follow Us on Facebook,” and “Shop Now.”
This will make it clear to your email recipients that you want them to share the content. And by making it easy for them to do so will get your messaging in front of even more people.
What You Also Need to Know Is That Effective Email Marketing Doesn’t End There:
There are a few other tactics you should know about how to implement in your next email marketing campaign. This includes target messaging, effective calls to action, lead nurturing, timing, format, landing pages and other customer conversion and retention strategies.
The good news is, you don’t have to go it alone. We’ll take the guesswork and grunt work out of your email marketing campaigns for you and ensure they’re as effective as they can possibly be. Call us today at McAllister Marketing for a no-obligation discussion about your options and the benefits we provide.