This week we’re looking at email marketing and the benefits it can have for your business! So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
1. Relationship building
Whether you’re just starting out with your new business, or you’ve been in the business a while, you’ll be aware of how important relationships with your customers are. Email marketing gives you that extra avenue to touch base with them and to keep them informed with any updates or news. This can be useful for prompting a repeat subscription, a booking, repeat purchases or even building a community.
Email marketing can be useful to use when sending out a survey, so that you can find out more about your customers and build those vital relationships with them. You can use incentives to entice them into completing your survey so that you get maximum engagement with it. If you’re a product-offering company, this can be useful to find out what your customers want to see from you next rather than paying for a focus group. This method is cost effective, quick, and almost instant!
Regardless of what kind of business you’re running, a great way to build relationships with your customers through email marketing, is a newsletter. Whether this is weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly, this is your opportunity to create something that your customers look forward to receiving.
2. Increased sales
You can utilise email marketing to increase your sales by using it to showcase deals of the month and your brand’s top picks. You can use your sales data to track customers’ spending habits, this way you can notify them when you think they might be due a top up of a certain product – this is very common within the beauty industry but can be translated into a variety of industries. For example, if you can see that a customer brought a mascara in January, and on average it takes 3 months for that mascara to run out, you can use a prompt email to retain that customer to get them to re-purchase the product.
Make sure you use links with trackable URLs to drive traffic to your website so that you can easily pick out in Google Analytics what your customers are clicking on and track their journey through the sales funnel.
If your customers are putting things in their baskets but not following through with the purchase, this could be a great opportunity for you to send a follow up with something like ‘forgetting something?’ to prompt them to follow through with their purchase.
3. Brand awareness - keep your brand front-of-mind
Email marketing is useful to keep your brand in the front of your customer’s mind. It allows you to keep leads warm but also to build brand awareness for your new customers. This could be especially important for businesses where customers might only purchase from them once a year, such as high value items like cars or houses or legal requirements such as insurance. It’s important to touch base with your customers to let them know you are still trading and will be ready to fulfil their purchasing needs as and when they are ready.
Your brand identity can really shine through when it comes to email marketing. This is your business’ opportunity to show your customers who you really are. Top tip: the more consistent you are with your marketing across all channels, the better! For example, if you’re running a Facebook Marketing Campaign and you’re planning on sending an email at similar times, it would be useful for them to marry up nicely.
For businesses who are new, you need to build your brand identity. Similar to how when customers think of Ketchup, they think of Heinz. Your brand voice can be portrayed well in an email - allow the copy you choose to define your business . Beyond this, even if your customer doesn’t take the time to read your email, simply seeing your brand name in their inbox once a month will help build brand recognition. Pair this with all your other marketing channels as part of your wider strategy, and you will be onto a winner!
4. Builds credibility
Regardless of your industry, building credibility is always important, and using email marketing can be a great way of doing so. If you keep your emails branded, professional and consistent, your customers will know what to expect of you and this will make it easier for them to spot fraudulent emails, this is especially important for businesses where finance is concerned.
Credibility can be built through using authentication protocols such as DMARC, SPF and DKIM – also known as the golden trio of email authentication. These tools help to build the authenticity of your emails and help them to avoid being marked as spam or fraudulent. These precautions are particularly useful when it comes to Gmail, as there are so many different inbox options you could land in. The golden trio will give you more control over your email deliverability, giving yourself more opportunities to land in your customers inbox.
If you’re a new business and you don’t have a strong heritage, email marketing can be useful to prove to your current or potential customers that you are the right person for the job – show them you know your stuff and show off!
5. Affordable marketing at scale
Most email providers such as MailChimp have affordable plans for small, right up to large businesses, allowing everyone access to deliver fantastic campaigns. Don’t have a designer? No problem. Email providers have templates so that you can create your email campaign all on your own. If you’re a new business and you have no data, you can purchase data from a reliable source which will allow you to tap into this marketing strategy while you get on your feet.
6. Data segmentation and targeting
With most email providers, you will be able to segment your audience depending on a range of different factors, these could be:
- Age
- Gender
- Purchase spend
- Trade
Once you segment your data, you can then decide if you’d like to personalise your emails even further with personalised creative, a specific subject line – you can even personalise using their name or any other factor that you think might make your customer open the email.
7. Identify business development opportunities
Once you have sent out your email campaign, providing you have made use of adding links into your email, you can use your reporting tools on your preferred sending platform to look at who has clicked on which elements inside your email. This is a great form of lead generation, as you know exactly who was interested in which parts of your email. If you are a customer-facing B2B business, you can contact those who have clicked on your links and follow up with a personalised email or call, if you have their phone number. You could take this a step further and produce targeted campaigns and segment your data further to bring your customers highly tailored content.
So to summarise...
Emailing your customers is a cost-effective strategy that you can tap into as little or as often as suits your business model and your overarching market strategy. The focus should be to stay consistent and stay on brand. This way, you will be able to build relationships with your customers that matter and that will enable you to touch base with content they value.
Once you have established good relationships with your customers, you should hope to see increased sales and use tools such as Google Analytics to further improve your campaigns. Email marketing can be an effective tool for building brand awareness and credibility. Rome wasn’t built in a day – your prospects might need to trust you before they invest in your products or services, this is especially true for high value markets.
It’s always advisable to make use of the segmentation and targeting methods mentioned as well as following up on new business leads. Email marketing can be done at scale, but remember it’s important you don’t overload the inbox, this can deter potential prospects and customers – it’s all about finding the right balance.
Finally, remember to make sure that your emails are GDPR compliant. Every email you send, will need to include a box where the reader can unsubscribe easily if they want to.
If you’re thinking about starting to communicate more regularly with your customers via email, and don’t know where to start, get in touch with a member of our team today.