With the advent of the internet and its social and news websites, email marketing has become a significant tool for businesses. For those who are wondering what is email marketing, it is a form of direct marketing that utilizes electronic mail to send marketing messages to customers. It is one of the most effective online marketing tactics. Emails are used to promote services or products and develop relationships with potential clients or customers. They are sent for the purpose of acquiring new clients or convincing existing clients to purchase something instantly. Email marketing encourages repeat business and customer loyalty.
Advantages of Email Marketing
When compared with other kinds of online marketing practices, email marketing is an inexpensive way to advertise your organization and its services and products. It is also very easy to build and run an email marketing campaign, especially for small businesses. You can send out newsletters to your email list (people who are interested in knowing about your company and its products and services) reminding them that your organization exists, and also building traffic to your website. It’s also very easy to monitor and analyze the responses to your emails.
Email Marketing Strategies
Having talked about the advantages of email marketing, let’s move ahead to learn different email marketing strategies:
Building an Email List
When you start with the email marketing strategy, the first step you follow is building your email list. It is an ideal way to transform your organic traffic into more involved readers who regularly view the stuff you publish and share it with their contacts and this cycle continues. So, it is very important to focus on organic traffic and convert them into your email subscribers as the rate of conversion is much higher when compared with any other audience type.
Personalization
Here, personalization doesn’t mean you send out individual mail to each and every subscriber. Instead, it implies you use the data of a particular customer to send an email. For example, “Dear John” instead of “Dear customer”, and “you may like these (based on customer’s buying history)” instead of “you may like these (random things)”. Using personalization in your email marketing strategy boosts your company revenue but most companies are not using it yet. So, it’s time companies give importance to this tactic and incorporate it into their email marketing strategy.
Asking for the right information
Within a sign-up form in your email, you should include data such as the name, organization, and place. Remember, the key is to ask only those details that you would need and avoid any unnecessary stuff.
Read Also: 3 Different Ways to Market Yourself Effectively
Using the email address with the reply-to option
When you use an email address that doesn’t have a reply-to option, it takes away the authenticity of your message. The primary reason for you to send an email is to make readers respond to your messages and engage with you. So, it makes no sense to exclude the reply-to option from your email. When you use this tactic, your email appears more personal and thus, improves your credibility.
Send your emails at the best possible times
It is important that you determine the best times for sending an email if you want your potential customers to open and read it. If you send the email during odd times, it may simply get lost in other emails that the customer receives in his/her inbox. So, it is important to analyze the appropriate times when customers are most likely to open your email. According to one of the researches done by a leading email marketing software, a trend is being observed – weekdays seem to be best for email marketing with Tuesdays and Thursdays as the most promising days as compared with other days of the week.
Conclusion
Apart from the above-mentioned strategies, there are other tactics like sending mobile-friendly emails, segmenting your subscribers, marketing automation, and enabling social shares from an email. Email marketing has evolved a lot and there is a drastic change in the way it is being implemented nowadays. Sending personalized messages, optimizing messages for various devices, testing new elements, ways to automate your emails etc, are all part of modern email marketing practices. So, it’s time you update your email marketing strategy as soon as possible to gain better results and stay ahead of the competition.