The only way to expand a business is to invest time and money into marketing. However, how do you know which channel should you choose? Among tons of online marketing tools available today, there is one that has been around for as long as the Internet has been in existence – email! 

Almost every modern person uses email for communication, work, education, and personal purposes. Being so widely-spread, this is one of a few channels that allow marketers to reach out to millions of Internet users worldwide. Thus, using it as one of your primary channels for online marketing has its purpose and potential benefits for your business.

On average, a person spends about 28% of their working time reading and responding to the messages. This fact makes it a powerful marketing tool available to every business at literally no cost.

Key Concept of Email Marketing

Whether you are a dedicated manager, marketer, or entrepreneur, the main goal that unites all these specialists is to nurture and grow their businesses. Luckily, in the 21st century, there are numerous opportunities for advancement.

Among tons of different marketing strategies, email marketing is often being undervalued. Many entrepreneurs have probably heard of this technique. However, most of them don’t realize its full potential and have no idea how to use it to benefit their businesses.

So, exactly what is email marketing? In simple terms, it’s a strategy that allows you to promote your business by using email as the primary channel. Here are some of the key goals that email marketing meets:

• Boosting loyalty among current customers;
• Attracting new clients;
• Sharing news and updates related to your business;
• Increasing awareness of your brand;
• Cultivating trusted relationships with current and potential customers;
• Providing information about sales/sending coupons to clients, etc. 

These are only some of the goals that can be easily met with the help of email and the correct marketing strategy. Nevertheless, why do entrepreneurs neglect using this handy promotion tool? 

One of the main reasons is that many people believe that email marketing is outdated. Indeed, there are plenty of modern tools, but does this mean that your business doesn’t need a solid email marketing strategy? Absolutely not!

There are many ways to add some creative flair to a good old newsletter. You may not even need to provide brand new content every time. Try compilation strategies like Moz does with their “top tens.”Another example is short daily overviews provided by the bunch of geniuses from theSkimm. Life is too short for longreads anyway, they say!

Though, the guys from Longreads may not agree. Otherwise, why would people sign up for their “Weekly Top 5s” or “Monthly books” newsletter with reviews, excerpts, author interviews, and conversations on craft? 

Email marketing is valuable in so many ways. First of all, it is one of the few forms of direct marketing. It is also much more price-efficient than almost any other channel. What other benefits does it offer to your business? Here are a few key pros:

• It helps strengthen the brand’s relationships with customers and build trust.
• It allows businesses to reach a wider audience and attract customers since 94% of users use email on a daily basis in the studying process, at work, and at home.
• It offers a pretty high return on investment and simple tracking of this indicator.
• In most cases, unlike other strategies and tools, email marketing costs less while the results still prove great.

Knowing about the fundamental concept behind email marketing and its key benefits, now, you are probably wondering how to integrate it into your business model. At this point, it is crucial to understand that this form of marketing can bring excellent results, but only with the right strategy!

How to pick it and make the most of your email marketing campaign? Below, we have collected the most effective ideas to get you started!

Rethink Your Offer

Let’s start with the basics – the first thing that holds you back from getting more subscribers is a weak offer.

An offer that converts is the most significant part of your campaign. Not giving a compelling proposition, you’re being penny-wise and pound foolish. Therefore, if you are hoping to get more subscribers, the first move should be to rethink the offer you make. 

There are a few tips that can help you make the offer more attractive to a user. First of all, it is vital to know your audience well. The better you understand the needs of a potential customer, the higher are the chances that you can make an offer that satisfies one’s needs! 

How to find out what a target client wants? Unfortunately, there is no universal formula for success. The most effective way to reach this goal is to conduct in-depth research and then keep experimenting with the offer until you get those high conversions.

Another handy tip is to offer your potential customers something for free. Regardless of age, nationality, sex, and other characteristics, all people love free content, and businesses can use this to their benefit. 

Let’s consider a few working samples of such techniques. You must be well aware of different giveaways that are being continuously conducted by many brands and bloggers themselves on various platforms. Offering a free template, service, or product in exchange for a client’s email address, you get more subscribers and also a unique chance to let the customers try your service or product.

However, not only free samples can attract people. It is also of crucial importance to remember that anyone becomes more open once we receive some personal touch rather than obviously an automated response or a mail created by a robot. 

A good example of following such personalized strategy can be the one used by the guys from The Conversation. Instead of seeing not that attractive “uk.newsletter@theconversation.com” near the subject line of each email one gets to know the name of the person who wrote it. Here are the samples – Annabel and Joe from The Conversation: 

Together with a catchy subject line, you just can’t resist opening the email composed by their business and economy editor, Annabel Bligh or outreach manager Joe Abrams!   

Make It Mobile-Friendly

With the overwhelming number of mobile devices in use today, it is vital for businesses to build their campaigns and resources for both desktop and mobile users.

According to this study by Litmus, almost 50% of all email opens are done from a mobile device. What does this mean for your campaign? This basically means that if you don’t make your newsletters mobile-friendly, you lose that 50% of potential customers and, thus, miss a big deal of potential revenue.

Waving bye-bye to almost half of your earnings just because of how bad your newsletters look on a mobile device doesn’t sound like a fair deal. Respectively, the better your messages look on different devices, the more subscribers you can get. Thus, don’t underestimate the value of mobile-friendliness!

Subject Lines

Subject lines are the most vital elements of every email! This is the only thing a recipient sees prior to clicking on a particular message and, thus, a subject line pretty much determines whether a person will open your letter or not. 

Here’s an example of an attention-catching subject line. True kings of the Internet entertainment industry, BuzzFeed writers seem to know everything about a subject line and a call to action. It is almost impossible to ignore the email with the line “Hi, You’re Fired.”

How can you empower your strategy with the help of subject lines? Here are a few tips to follow:

• Make it engaging – start with a phrase or offer that will immediately evoke genuine interest in the recipient;
• Keep it concise – you will only need a small number of characters to grab the recipient’s attention, so be sure to keep the subject line straight to the point and concise;
• Make it stand out – marketers have long been using additional tricks such as the use of emojis in the subject line to make it more eye-catchy!

Let Social Media Enter the Game

As we mentioned earlier, 94% of all Internet users have an email and use it regularly, which makes it a perfect channel for reaching out to a broader audience. However, the best results can be reached only when you empower your strategy with additional marketing forces such as social media.

In 2019, a regular user spends on average over two hours a day on different social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and others. Due to increasing popularity, social media platforms have became powerful sales and marketing tools for businesses. Now, these channels are on every marketer’s radar, so why lose an opportunity to benefit from them?

By integrating popular social media links into your email marketing campaigns, you can complete two essential tasks:

• Spread the word about your brand
• Get more subscribers

Both of these goals will allow you to reach the ultimate goals: growing your business and increasing revenue.

Create the Right Conditions for Subscription

Finally, the best strategy for success is simplicity! The more comfortable and simple it is to subscribe to your newsletters, the more people will do so. Therefore, our last tip is to create the right conditions for a quick subscription.

How can you make it easy? We recommend businesses use these two simple tricks:

1. Minimize the clicks. We all know how annoying it can be to have to click continuously in order to complete a specific action. Therefore, the fewer clicks a potential customer needs to make to subscribe, the better! Ideally, you should make a single-click subscription. Also, it is crucial to ensure that the button is noticeable.
2. Make entering an email easy. When shaping the subscription form, you will face a few dilemmas, such as whether to ask just for an address or throw a few extra questions at your potential clients. The second option, without a doubt, will let you learn more about a new customer. However, it can be quite annoying and may scare some potential subscribers away. 

Thus, we recommend businesses to hold on to their questions and make the opt-in form as straightforward as possible! Both these tricks work pretty well regardless of the business niche or profiles of your target customers.

Final Thoughts

Whether your potential customers are college students, retirees, young parents, or anyone else, email is a channel that different groups of people use on a daily basis. It is fair to say that every successful business should be running email marketing campaigns to expand reach and get better conversions!

Creating a killer email marketing strategy isn’t that hard if you know your objectives and audience, and have a clear idea of what a good plan consists of. Hopefully, this article will help you get on the right track!