Why Email Marketing Is Important To Grow Your Business (2021 Guide)
Email generates an average of $42 for every $1 spent, which represents one of the highest sources of ROI.
That is already quite a lead to see why email marketing is important for your business.
In fact, with the right email marketing strategy, you can increase your business revenue in a short period of time.
So today, I am going to show:
- Why email marketing is important for your business
- how to launch an effective email marketing campaign
- The best email marketing tools for any business
Let’s dive in to learn how to do email marketing!
Why email marketing is important for your business?
In this section, you are going to learn the main advantages of email marketing.
1. Email marketing has a high ROI.
The truth is that a well-planned email marketing strategy will make you money.
Recent studies show that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
What is also great is that email marketing is not only effective but inexpensive. With the right strategy and the right email marketing software, you can reach a large number of readers easily.
On top of that, the more you develop a relationship and engage with your subscribers, the higher the ROI can be.
2. Email marketing is more powerful than social media marketing in converting readers into customers.
If there is a good reason why email marketing is important, that is the time it will save you vs social media for converting readers into customers.
Social media can be great for your readers to engage with your content. But when it comes to buying products or services, email marketing performs much better.
If you think about it, people get buried into social media notifications all the time during the whole day. So the chances they read all your posts are very low.
However, when you send an email is different. The subscriber will have an email sitting in their inbox. They decide if they want to open it or not, but at least the chances of them getting your message are higher.
3. Email drives traffic to your website.
Some of the most difficult things in these times for any business or website is to get traffic.
Email is a great way not only to promote your products or services but to drive traffic to your latest articles.
In fact, it won’t only drive traffic. If you segment your subscriber list, every time you send out an email you will have targeted traffic with a real interest in your content. That is one of the main advantages of email marketing.
4. Emails allow you to engage further with your audience.
You can use your email mainly for your niche marketing strategies, sure. But you can also use it to engage with your audience and build a relationship with them.
There are many different ways you can do it and use it for your benefit:
- You can send them a short story related to the nature of your business and your audience’s interest. That way, they will know that not every email coming from you will try to sell them something and they will be more willing to keep opening your emails.
- You can create a quiz to provide them something different that can help you also to understand their needs better.
- You can send short surveys after someone buys one of your products or services to make sure all worked smoothly.
5. Email marketing allows you to reach different customer profiles.
One of the main reasons why email marketing is important is that allows you to segment your audience.
By segmenting your audience, you can target a very specific market each time you send out an email. And not only that, but it will also increase your opening rates, which ultimately will put more eyes in front of your product or services, meaning a higher revenue.
You will learn how to segment your subscribers in the section below.
6. Email marketing campaigns can be analyzed to keep improving your marketing strategy.
One of the most important factors to measure your marketing efforts are metrics.
Most of the email marketing services provide you with very useful analytics so you can see what is working and what is not.
By analyzing the metrics, you can repeat successful campaigns, and learn from the ones that did not work as expected.
7. More people use emails than social networks.
According to a study from Optinmonster, there are more email users than social media users.
That is a solid reason why email marketing is important for a niche website.
In the same study, you can also find that 58% of people check email first thing in the morning vs 14% check social media. Numbers only seem favorable to email marketing.
8. Email marketing requires less time than social media.
Social media can work great for your digital marketing strategy.
But you will know that social media can take a hell of your time; It is not that you publish a post and wait for the magic to happen. You have to keep publishing and maintain a good schedule if you want to see results with social media.
What I like the most about email marketing is that a single well-planned email marketing campaign can deliver amazing results in no time.
There are always many things to do with any online business. Anything that saves my time is already worth trying so I can focus my efforts on something else.
9. Email automation can make your business work in auto mode.
One of the things I like the most about email marketing is that it allows you to run email sequences in auto mode.
All you need to do is to use an email marketing software that allows you to create sequences and deliver them automatically. Then you just need to set up the frequency, your target audience, and the emails you want to send out. Once you have it running and working, you will see how you can keep making money in auto mode.
How to run an effective email marketing campaign.
But first, What Is an Email Marketing Campaign?
An email marketing campaign is an email (or series of emails) sent from a business to one or more customers with the purpose of generating more sales.
Now, there are many factors you need to consider to run an effective campaign. So I am going to explain each of them below.
1. Set your goals
Before you create any campaign, you need to plan what you want to achieve with a campaign.
Setting your goals is something you should do for any marketing strategy and not only email.
Once you have established your goals, you will be in a better position to know how you want to run your campaign.
Some of the most common goals are:
- Sell a product or service.
- Engage with your audience
- Welcome new subscribers
- Get feedback from your subscribers or customers.
What you need to do next:
Set clear goals for each of your email marketing campaigns. You can use a FREE tool like Click Up to control all your projects and goals in one place.
2. Build a Targeted Email List
The first step after you have set your goals is to build a targeted email list according to those goals.
It is key that the audience you target is interested in what you have to offer.
The best way to build a targeted email list is by converting your website visitors into subscribers.
And how do you do that? With attractive opt-in forms
An opt-in is a form of consent given by web users, acknowledging interest in a product or service and authorizing a third party to contact them with further information.
The way you create a targeted audience is by creating an opt-in form with something totally related to your product or service. That way, if someone signs up using that opt-in form, you will know they will be interested in your offer.
For example, let’s say in your campaign you want to sell recycled Covid masks. Then, you could create an infographic with the benefits of using recycled Covid masks. So if someone wants to download the infographic, will give you the email in exchange.
That is how you can segment your audience and build a targeted email list.
We’ll cover how to segment your audience in-depth in the next step. For now, you need a good email opt-in and lead generation plugin.
The one I have used and I can recommend you to build your email list is Convert Pro. It is very easy to use with a drag and drop editor, load very fast, and makes the work converting your readers into subscribers. Take a look by yourself and see how Convert Pro works.
What you need to do next:
Use a tool like Convert Pro to create irresistible opt-in forms to convert readers into customers.
3. Segment your audience.
Segmenting your audience will make the numbers work much better for your business.
The goal is to send your subscribers only relevant information to their interests. That will make your open rates higher, increasing your chances of generating more sales.
It will also allow you to engage with your audience in a better way since most of them will be interested in the emails you will be sending.
To segment your audience, all you need is an email marketing tool.
The one I use and is providing me with great results is Converkit.
You can segment your audience easily with Converkit using tags and segments. In essence, this is to add a tag to each subscriber.
The way you can do this is by tagging your subscribers according to the offer they signed for. Then, when you have a product or service related to this topic, you can simply target this audience by using the tags.
For instance, using the same example as above, if somebody downloaded your Covid information infographic, you can tag them with “covid interest” for example. Then you can use that tag to promote any of your Covid related products to that audience.
Simple and powerful.
What you need to do next:
Sign up for a FREE account in Converkit, and create different tags according to the products or services you are going to promote. That will allow you to segment your audience.
4. Know your audience.
If you want to send relevant emails, not only you need to send offers adjusted to your audience interest. But you also need to understand who your audience is.
You would not use the same voice and tone for people of different ages and interests. So you must know who you are talking to.
The best way to get to know who your audience is by checking your Google Analytics. It will allow you to check useful data like demographics, interests, and behaviors.
This will allow you to create even more targeted email marketing campaigns.
What you need to do next:
Go to your Google Analytics and identify the key characteristics of your audience such as demographics and interests.
5. Adapt each email to your goals.
Every email you send out probably won’t have the same purpose. So you should use a different kind of email adjusted to your goal and your audience.
The different kind of emails you will be sending to your audience are:
- Informational: This could be to let them know about a new blog post or any kind of information that can be useful to them. A newsletter would normally fit into this category.
- Transactional: These are emails you send to your audience after they sign up; like a welcome email, or if they buy something from you.
- Engagement: These are emails you send out with the purpose of engaging with your audience. It could be sending out surveys, quizzes, ask for questions or opinions, etc.
- Promotional: These would be emails where you send out your offers and sales.
What you need to do next:
Create different templates for each of these emails. You can use Canva to create visual templates for your promotions.
6. Follow up with your new subscribers with a welcome email.
In email marketing, the opening rate is very important.
The average opening rate for emails is 21%, but there is an easy hack that can help you improve it; Start your email sequence by sending a welcome email.
Welcome emails have an opening rate of 82%. That is quite something!
They will help you create a relationship with your audience and also establishing trust. It is important to send a short but useful email explaining the benefits of being your subscriber and what they can expect from you.
That will help you increase the opening rate in the upcoming emails.
What you need to do next:
Create a welcome email so all your subscribers receive it after they sign up. You can easily do this using Converkit.
7. Craft an attention-grabbing subject line.
One of the key aspects of a successful email marketing campaign is the subject line.
It can make the difference between people opening your email or ignore it.
Some subject lines that seem to work very good are:
- Subjects that include curiosity, urgency, or scarcity.
- Subjects that are personalized. i.e. include the person’s name in the subject.
- Subjects that include the word “free” or “sale”
- Subjects with a character count of 43 on average.
What you need to do next:
Use a free tool like Coschedule that analyzes your titles and help you improve them.
8. Hook your audience with an interesting email copy.
Next, you need to focus on your email copy.
You want to make sure you hook your audience right from the beginning.
You can use the AIDA approach to help you with this purpose.
This is how you would use AIDA in on your email copy:
This is a great technique you should use not only in your email copy but also for your blog posts.
It will help you to keep your audience engaged and ultimately to take action.
What you need to do next:
Use AIDA approach to craft a compelling email copy to hook your audience.
9. A/B testing.
A/B testing consists of testing more variations of a single element, splitting the traffic evenly among them to find out which perform better.
For example, a common A/B testing you would do in email marketing is to try with different subject lines; You send two different variations of a subject line to your audience, splitting them into two halves. So 50% of your audience see a subject line 1, and the other 50% see a subject line 2. Then you compare which performed the best and you can use that with the rest of your audience or on future campaigns.
You can do the same with email copies and call to actions.
The objective here is to find what resonates more in your audience and take advantage of it for your email marketing campaigns.
What you need to do next:
Test different variations of subject lines, email copy, and call to action button to find out which one performs better. You can use Converkit A/B testing feature.
10. Analyze your campaign results.
Lastly, you can always improve your email marketing strategy by analyzing the data you have obtained from previous campaigns.
By paying attention to your email analytics, you can keep improving your opening rates, click-through rates, and reduce the number of unsubscribers.
Think like one of your customers when sending out emails and keep testing until you find what works best for you.
You will soon see how your numbers keep improving and realize why email marketing is important for your business.
What you need to do next:
Use the metrics from your email marketing tools and analyze what is working and what is not.
The best email marketing tools for any business
There are endless email marketing services out there, but I am going to provide you only with the ones I have tried and I think are worth it.
1. Moosend
There are plenty of email marketing tools designed for beginners and small businesses, but most lack the key features you need for effective email marketing.
Moosend makes email marketing easy, effective, and affordable. They offer everything you need to set up a successful campaign:
- Custom Sign-Up Forms.
- Email List Segmentation.
- Responsive Newsletter Templates.
- Email Marketing Automation.
- Triggers, Filters, and Automated Actions.
- Email Marketing Analytics and more.
And what is even better is that they offer very affordable prices for any kind of business.
It might not have the robustness of well-established services like Converkit or Hubspot when it comes to integrations and deliverability, but it is still a very solid choice.
Moosend is great for start-ups and small businesses since is easy to use, affordable, and deliver results.
2. Converkit
ConvertKit is a great email marketing tool mainly used by bloggers and online course instructors to develop their personal brands.
Its design is pretty simple. They haven’t fancy templates. It is mainly used to send plain-text emails that provide higher deliverability overall. But the lack of more elaborated templates might make Converkit not the best fit for users who need more visuals.
On the other hand, it has been designated to be extremely functional and works great to serve your audience with regular newsletters.
Sequences and automation are probably the most powerful features since it will allow you to run your business in auto mode.
They offer a free plan where you can manage up to 1000 subscribers.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the big fishes in the game. They offer all in one sale and marketing functionalities:
One of the main advantages of Hubspot against others is analytics; You will hardly find the level of detail they provide in any other email marketing tool. That is why it is one best email marketing service for agencies and B2B.
Also, whether you need to send simple emails to lead offers, HubSpot Email Marketing’s free version can do that and more. It features a handy drag-and-drop visual editor, and it also comes equipped with ready-made templates to get you up and running immediately.
Lastly, what makes HubSpot email marketing stand out is its native integration with other HubSpot tools, such as free CRM.
Are you convinced now that email marketing is important?
As you can see from this post, email marketing has a lot of potential.
If you include the tips and strategies in this post, with these niche marketing strategies, the limit for your online business is the sky.
Now I’d like to hear what you have to say:
Are you going to implement these tips in your next email marketing campaign?
Thank you for your reading.
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Originally published at https://thenicheguru.com on November 10, 2020.