What is email marketing and its benefits?

What is email marketing and its benefits? E-mail marketing has a potential to significantly grow your business. It will drive more traffic to your website and increase sales.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email as its main medium of communication.

This means that you right now most likely have emails or newsletters in your inbox that a company created and sent out to you for their own email marketing campaign.

Basically, any email that you send to a potential or current customer can be considered email marketing.

The goal with email marketing is to cultivate a relationship with your customers.

Start thinking about the types of emails you can begin to send out to your customers or people subscribed to your email list.

Started with email marketing

To get started with email marketing, here are some first steps.

First, find businesses in your industry that are doing really neat things in the marketing space. I always recommend taking a look at what these players are doing in your industry. Often, they work with expensive marketing firms that use cutting edge technology and data.

For the smaller guy, this means that you can look at what they’re creating, and use that information to grow your own marketing strategy.

Once you have determined some marketing-savvy industry players, go ahead and get on their mailing list.

I recommend setting up a filter that directs these emails to a specific folder in your inbox. That way, they’re all stored somewhere easy where you can review them.

Second, dedicate some time to observe their approach to email marketing.

You can do this by paying attention to the subject line, the content, and the email itself, the frequency in which they send these emails out, and the time of day they do send them out.

Take notes on what you like and what you dislike. What I like to do next is keep my email marketing research folder up to date with emails and offerings that serve as a constant source of inspiration and education.

There really are some amazing email marketers out there. You’re not going to copy, but this is a great way to start modeling what others are doing until you find your own voice.

Advantages of EMAIL MARKETING

Whether it’s Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, everyone has an email address. Simply put, this is the dream for marketers since email delivers the highest ROI out of any marketing method. Let’s dive into the key advantages of using email marketing in your business.

First, email marketing is a must have today. It’s expected. Email is a professional marketing medium, and people expect to receive information about products and services through that channel. Studies show that 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email as compared to 17% who prefer social media.

The second key advantage is that it’s accessible to any business big or small. Email marketing, at it’s heart, is inexpensive. Unlike Facebook advertising, you don’t have to pay to get in front of your customer. Granted, you will need to use an email marketing provider, someone like MailChimp in order to send our emails and maintain your lists. Often, there are free accounts, so you don’t need to invest a lot of money up front. This means, email marketing is totally scalable and easy to get started.

Third, it’s measurable. It’s really easy to see how your email campaigns are performing. And these measurements take all the guesswork out of your email marketing. Most service providers offer dashboards with real-time metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, forwards, social shares, and more. Lastly, email marketing compliments all other marketing strategies. Email’s a great direct marketing tool. Meaning that you can influence your customers or prospects with one-to-one content.

But it also works great as an amplification tool. So suppose you’re having an in-store sale. Of course, you’re gonna have all your other marketing tactics in play, like in-store signage, coupon codes, and the like.

With email, you would then craft a strategy to amplify these efforts. You would send a newsletter out to your list letting them know of your sale, when it starts, ends, and the benefits for them. Now that you’ve considered why you need to get started with email marketing, let’s set a goal. How can email marketing benefit your business? Where do you see email marketing complimenting your existing efforts? Uncover your why, and you’re ready to get started.