Do you want to know how to use email marketing to increase your sales?
Email marketing is the most effective way to build connections with your potential customers and direct them to be your loyal customers.
But, before we give you a complete guide on how to build your email marketing, you need to be reassured first as to why email marketing needs to be done.
So why is email marketing important to do?
According to a study conducted by Radicati Group, more than 34% of people worldwide use email-like e-mail. The exact number is about 2.5 billion people. The number of email users is expected to increase to 2.8 billion users in the next 2 years.
The Research Institute also reckons that the world sends about 196 billion emails every day. Out of this total of 196 billion emails, 109 billion are business emails. Big number? It's huge.
Well, you may be a little dizzy with the data we described above, let's think in a simpler way.
How many of your coworkers or friends don't have an email? A little of course. Now, users of smartphones and computer devices continue to multiply and to access many applications in it of course they use email.
Email marketing is also a personal way to communicate with your customers. Not just anyone or company gets an email address. Even if they get an email address, they send a message based on the permission of the targeted email user.
That's why email marketing works best when it's more optimally personalized. Emails can be tailored to customer actions so that each communication can be relevant to their interests.
Your email can cover topics like changes in your company, company success, requests for feedback or suggestions from your customers, and many other topics that can increase your customer engagement. If your company's engangement with customers increases, chances are your conversion rate increases as well.
#1 The Early Stages of Building Email Marketing
The first thing that's most important to you or your company is ask your customers or potential customers for permission. These permissions should clearly contain the core of your message, explain what kind of topic or kind of message you or your company will send them via your marketing email if they allow it.
Buying an email list may seem like an interesting and convenient shortcut, but we don't recommend it.
We also don't think it's good to add your email list from someone else's business card that you collected at a particular conference. Unless you have applied for permission or informed them in advance of this matter.
Technically, emails that are as they please without prior permission are spam.
You certainly don't want to make people who can be your potential customers feel irritated and see you as a bad company or just looking for profit and not rewarding customers.
In addition, people who don't let you email them or register their own emails with your company are people who won't want to buy or rent your services or products. So, such an act of spamming is a waste of time and money.
Email Marketing Tools
There are many tools that can actually help you or your company to build and manage your email marketing. The tools we will present below are a ladder for you to achieve the effectiveness of your email marketing so that the company's profits or sales increase. Here are some of the best email marketing tools we summarized for you!
A. https://kirim.email/
kirim.email is the best and most widely used local email marketing service by online business people in Indonesia. Already more than 12,000 users are registered in kirim.email.
kirim.email is very easy to use even for new to learning email marketing though. In addition there are many features that you can use for free such as broadcast email, autoresponder, landing page builder, drag and drop email buidler and integration with many platforms such as Facebook Ads, WordPress and WooCommerce.
The subscription fee is also quite affordable. For only Rp3,300 per day you can get all of the above features and experience running email marketing very easily.
B. https://mailchimp.com/
MailChimp is an email marketing software that is very popular among online business people. For those of you who are just starting out email marketing, this tool is very easy to follow. You'll also get an intuitive user interface from MailChimp.
This one tool is free for the 2000 subscribers you have. After all, if you want more optimal and interesting features, you need to switch to the paid version. Of course, the bigger the email list you build, the more expensive it will cost you.
C. Constant Contact
Constant Contact arguably the world's largest email marketing service. This tool allows you to manage your subscribers and create professional emails with varied templates and drag-and-drop editing tools. You can try it for free for 60 days, after that period you need to pay.
#2. Building an Email List
To build an email list, you need to attract people with attractive offers. You can call it lead magnets.
What is a lead magnet?
Lead magnets are something you give free to people and in return they will provide their email address as your subscriber. Most lead magnets are digital materials such as PDFs, MP3s or videos that you create yourself at no cost. It can actually take the form of anything you want to share, as long as it's valuable to your customers but it's free.
What are some examples of popular lead magnets?
- eBoook
- Webinar
- Free trial
- Coupon
What kind of lead magnet is good?
Surely lead magnets are very effective. There are at least five criteria of good magnetic lead that is easily accessible, can be practiced, can produce improvements, relevant and instantaneous.
#3. Email Marketing Personalization
Most marketing experts will advise you to simply build an email list. But they don't necessarily tell you that it's ineffective without knowing in advance your email list segmentation.
What is email list segmentation?
Email list segmentation is the process by which you break down your subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria, so it's easier to give them personalized and relevant emails later.
Instead of randomly sending emails to all the contacts you have, this email list segmentation makes you send only to the most specific targets. These targets are subscribers who you think are very interested in the specific content you want to share and generate a high conversion rate.
There are many ways to divide your segmentation. These are some basic segmentation points that can help you in sharing them!
#4. Remove Inactive Subscribers from Email List
It's important that you send emails consistently, so your list doesn't miss out. Some people may change their email address, or simply be disinterested in your brand.
So, try to keep your email list fresh by paying attention to which customers deserve to be called enganged subscribers. Set aside your inactive subscribers periodically. Inactive subscribers are those who are no longer enganged with your email campaigns within 6 months or more.
But don't rush to get rid of them, try sending last-ditch-effort emails first to see if they're really no longer interested in your campaign emails.
For example, you can send an email with a question like "Do I bore you?" to subscribers and give them a hit button for voting whether they still want to be subscribers or not. It's possible that some of them ignore your email, but that doesn't matter because they can instantly be classified as inactive subscribers.
#5. Creating an Outstanding Subject Line
You definitely know at the top of the email (a kind of letterhead), you need to enter your email subject in a sentence or a few words. This is the determinant of the fate of your email campaign. Be careful!
Try creating a short, clear or to the point email subject at the same time interesting. Try comparing "September Discount Info Especially for You" with "Cheap Ethnic Bags For You".
You can make your subscribers curious, but don't overdo it to the point that your subscribers don't understand what exactly you're talking about. Enter numbers, there is a very interesting thing for the reader when you enter numbers on a line. Try experimenting with adding jokes and using flowing language styles like you're having a conversation with your subscribers.
#6. Ensuring Your Email Campaign Is Mobile Friendly
Based on data released by BlueHornet, 67.2% of consumers use a mobile device such as a smartphone to access their email (open and read incoming emails in their inbox). That is, you can't ignore this fact so you need to customize your email campaign to be mobile-friendly.
Make sure your email is mobile-friendly with responsive format and media content that can be loaded via mobile device.
In addition, you also need to be aware of the different screen sizes on mobile devices that are smaller. With this fact, you need to make your words short, clear as well as interesting as we previously discussed in the email subject discussion section. Try to make your email campaign good to see from mobile device.
Here, we'll give you some additional tips so you can produce a mobile-friendly email campaign!
- Try simple (single-column) format, below 600px wide.
- Use larger fonts – small fonts are hard to read on smartphones.
- Use smaller size images to speed up loading time.
- Provide a larger CTA button to stand out and draw
- Don't place more than one link close together so that subscribers don't click wrongly and upset them.