Email Marketing

What is it and Why is it Important for a Business? 

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy. The name says it all: marketing via e-mail. It’s a tool when it comes to communicating with your audience online. Email marketing is the perfect way to get your products in front of the people who are already on your email list. You can promote your products with them, build your relationships with your audience in a personal way and encourage people to take action. Think of promotions such as buying products or services that you offer, watching content that you send out into the world or signing up for a free service.  

But now that you know that, what else can you read in the article? I’ll start by telling you about the benefits of email marketing. Then you read about how people actually end up on your email list. Then about the goals and process of email marketing. Finally, I’ll also tell you why cleaning up your email list is important and how to do it. 

Benefits of Email Marketing 

Email marketing offers many advantages. Below are some of them. 

• You can boost your conversions. So your sales go up and so does your turnover. 
• The cost of email marketing is low compared to other forms of marketing, such as online advertising. 
• The ROI, return on investment, is genuinely amazing: for every euro you put in, you can get 42 dollars in return. 
• When you want to start a new campaign, the first thing you can do is test it out on your audience, who already know you. This allows you to get feedback, from the audience itself and/or from statistics, which you can use to boost your campaign. 
• You can automate your email marketing. As a result, you don’t have to send everything over and over again. Think of a welcome email that you would send when someone has subscribed to your newsletter. You don’t have to send it every time you register for new registrations. 
• By automating, you also save time. You can spend that time on other things. 
• You can personalize your emails. For example, you can name each person who has signed up. You do this in your email marketing software, so you don’t have to do it yourself for every person on your list. 

Okay, that’s the list, but there are more. 

Disadvantages of Email Marketing 

Are there any at all? Yes, but you can work on each disadvantage to minimize them. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the cons: 

• Sometimes emails end up in someone’s spam folder, so there is a chance that they will not be read. 
• There is often competition in someone’s inbox. After all, many businesses use email marketing. 
• Legislation can also be an issue. You have to comply with privacy legislation. 

But how do you minimize those disadvantages? To stay out of someone’s spam folder, you can tell them to look in the spam folder from the start. You can do this by posting a message that can be seen after they have subscribed. In the mail they get from the spam, you can leave an extra message and tell them to add your email address to contacts. After that, you won’t end up in spam anymore

Although you will no longer end up in spam, you will end up in a different jungle. Those of your competitors. You will be competing with other companies that also use email marketing. You want them to open your email. To do this, set expectations with your reader from the start, build a strong relationship and provide interesting, intriguing and valuable emails. 

There is very little you can do about the legislation. You just have to stick to it. Read it, so you know what to do and what not to do, and don’t violate it. That’s really all I can say about it. 

How do People Get on Your Email List? 

Your mailing list is a list that you want to make as large as possible and that you are constantly replenishing. 

But how does that happen? There are several ways to do this. 

Some people visit your website and sign up for a newsletter that you offer. Often, they do this because you’re giving something valuable back in the eyes of those visitors. Examples of something so valuable are a 10% discount, tips and tricks or a free e-book that they can download. 

Things that people consider valuable and can be downloaded ‘for free’ are also called lead magnets. You can read more about lead magnets here.

Things that people consider valuable and can be downloaded ‘for free’ are also known as lead magnets. When something is very valuable and free, people often don’t mind giving their email instead. You can reuse these email addresses for your own marketing. 

However, you don’t always have to give away something valuable. It will make it easier to get people on your email list, and it’s the most obvious move, but not everyone takes advantage of this. Sometimes the message or reason why someone should sign up for a newsletter is already so convincing that people feel they should subscribe. 

Goals of Email Marketing 

Before you start an email campaign, you need to know what you want to achieve with the campaign. You may want to increase your sales volume, increase website traffic, or collect feedback. 

It is important to first have your goal set and only then to draw up the emails. Without a purpose, your email is useless, because you don’t know what you’re working towards. 

Even though you may think you can still build a relationship with the people on your list, that’s not entirely true. Because you build that relationship for a reason. Ultimately, you want to let them know about certain things and get them to take action. You always do it with a goal in mind. 

Your goal is not one-sided, and you can also perform multiple goals at the same time. 

Personalization of the emails is therefore very important to generate an action with your audience. The more personal you approach them and also show your own personality, the easier the actions are to generate. 

The Process

The process of email marketing depends on your business. A sole proprietorship will not send the same emails as a multi-million dollar company. But in general, you can assume this process:

• You will get a new email address on your list. 
• You send automatic welcome emails to build a relationship. 
• You send valuable things, depending on your company. Think of even more discounts, free downloads, tips, tricks and updates. 
• You send marketing emails, in which you promote your products. But you shouldn’t just start sending marketing emails. Do this throughout your series of valuable emails. So, for example, 2 valuable emails and then 1 marketing email again. 
• You analyze the results of your emails to optimize your email marketing strategy. 

You can also expand it. For example, if you also keep an eye on things on your website, you could also send emails when visitors have viewed certain things and/or put them in their basket, but have not paid. Then you could send a kind of reminder email. Or a friendly email asking if they need help or have questions of their own. 

If you are active on social media or have posted a new blog post, you can even email about it. Those kinds of things are often looked at more closely when you also email about them. 

You can also email with a more personal story or experience that you want to share with them. It doesn’t have to be so black and white. You can email whatever you want, as long as it ultimately suits your goal. 

Clean up 

By clean up, I mean removing people from your email list. And yes, it sounds weird to clean up your mailing list, because you want the largest list possible, but it is important. 

When people don’t open your emails for a long time, it’s bad for your email marketing for a number of reasons: 

1. If many people don’t open your e-mails, you as the sender may be labeled as a spammer. And you don’t want that. You want your emails to arrive so that you can eventually sell something to people, of course. You can’t do that if it ends up in spam. 
2. Another important thing: you pay for the people on your email list. It depends on your email marketing software how much that is. This is often divided into quantities and not per person. But you probably also want to reduce your costs where possible. So delete people who haven’t opened your emails for a long time, because they are of no use to you anymore. You can no longer deliver value, sell nothing to them, and collect feedback. 
3. And finally, you get the most reliable information for analyzing your results when you have an audience that regularly opens your emails. When it comes to email marketing, testing and analysis is important so that you can optimize it. Because people don’t open your emails, you can’t analyze their results either, so you don’t know what you can optimize. 

But how do you actually clean up your list? You don’t have to do that abruptly by removing people immediately if they don’t open your emails for 6 months. Cleaning up can also be done neatly. You can send them an e-mail, with a question or announcement about your e-mails. If they no longer want to receive it, they can indicate it. Or you can delete them afterward if they don’t open it again. If they still want to receive your emails, they can also indicate this. 

Recap

Email marketing is therefore extremely important for your business. It can be used for a variety of purposes, depending on your business. The big goal behind email marketing is, and remains, sales. Email marketing offers many benefits, such as personalizing, automating, and seeing results easily. Everything can be monitored and therefore analyzed in order to optimize your strategy. Cleaning up your list should also be part of your strategy. If you want more info, follow our socials. If you want a copywriter who can help you with your email marketing, contact us via info@luminarywords.com or schedule your appointment via: https://calendly.com/luminarywords/_