Email Marketing Strategy

An email marketing strategy is part of your overall marketing strategy and business plan. It helps you market your products and services with the use of the email channel with the best chances for making a profit and reaching your goals. That is because any effective email marketing strategy takes into consideration what your target customers are, their preferences and benefits they are looking for as well as your products services and industry and which email marketing messages are most effective. The cutthroat inbox of your standard consumer roils with marketing messages, competitive subject lines, and scores of attention-seeking emails. With over 150 billion emails sent each day, email marketing remains one of the elite channels for business communication.

Email marketing involves permission-based email broadcasts either to customers (or prospects) on an in-house list or prospects on third-party list (list rental). When devising plans for email marketing communications, marketers need to plan for:

• Outbound e-mail marketing, where e-mail campaigns are used as a form of direct marketing to encourage trial and purchases and as part of a CRM dialogue;
• Inbound e-mail marketing, where e-mails from customers such as support enquiries are managed.

Email is thriving thanks in large part to the channel’s familiarity, flexibility, and universality. A whole new generation of mobile smartphone and tablet users are also driving anywhere, anytime email usage. Indeed, when you dig into the data, any assertion that email is “dying” with consumers is laughable. Evolving—yes. Dying, absolutely not. An effective email marketing strategy transforms ideas into actions. Over the years, email marketing has gotten a bad rap because of spam. Realize that spam is everywhere, even on social media. People still respond to the right kind of emails. Smart entrepreneurs use email marketing to create new business and turn customers into repeat customers.

Listed below are what we believe to be the top ten tips to a powerful email marketing strategy. It starts with building a list, continues with data management, and ends at revenue generation.

• Offer an incentive to get people to sign up: Entrepreneurs know the value of offering a free digital download/video as an incentive to get people to sign up for their email list. The problems is most of these “gifts” are terrible. It’s worth your time to create a free gift that makes signing up for your email list a no brainer. When someone gets good value from your free content, they are more likely to buy your premium content. You will see a dramatic increase in conversion rates.

• Use automation: One of the great things about email marketing is that you can have automated campaigns running 24/7. You can set up auto responders with services Mailchimp, Aweber or Infusionsoft. These campaigns are designed to introduce new customers to your company and, eventually, what your company offers. Automating these emails frees up your time to work on your other marketing efforts.

• Focus on the little things: Many emails from entrepreneurs are not opened because they’re missing some of the basics: Strong headlines, Research guiding the best time to send emails, being straight to the point, Presentation and Clear takeaways. Making tweaks here and there can dramatically increase your open rates. When you have a captive audience, you create an opportunity to close the sale.

• Send out exclusive content: Your email list should feel like a VIP club. At least once a month, send content exclusively for your email list. They will realize the value and stayed subscribed. If the exclusive content is good, they’ll recommend your email list to other people and make it a point to open every email they receive from you.

• Don’t oversell or be afraid to sell: Entrepreneurs create a ton of free content to build an email list. Whether it’s your blog, podcast or videos, this free content establishes your authority. The problem comes when you only offer free content, and don’t sell regularly. When you do get around to selling, people opt out like crazy because you’ve confused them. They don’t want to be sold to because you’ve trained them to only expect free content. You also should also avoid the other end of the spectrum. You risk coming off as the sleazy marketer if you’re always selling. A smart entrepreneur will figure out the right balance.

• Never stop growing your list: Whether you have an email list of 50 people or 500,000, always work on growing your list. People will come and go, so adding new names is vital to keeping your email list healthy. We live in an unprecedented time where the Internet and social media have created tremendous opportunities to grow an email list of engaged fans and future customers. Take full advantage of social media, webinars, video, guest posting and joint ventures to grow your email list. Grow that list, and nurture it.

If you can use these strategies to make your email marketing efforts better, your influence and income will increase. Use social media, but don’t neglect email. It’s still working and not going away.