Email Marketing: How to Make it Work For Your Business
Email marketing has been around forever, isn’t it a bit old fashioned?
Well, it was, but now it’s not (trends come around and around, flared jeans anyone?) and there’s a reason. Additional consumer and data protection and a little something called ‘consent mode’ mean that the days of marketing to audiences using third party data (via cookies usually) are all but over. Google has responded to the changing privacy environment but making it much harder to track people around all the corners of the internet they choose to go and consumers are, at the same time, getting wise to marketing and making conscious choices about what data they are prepared to give away for free.
Great for us as consumers but for us as marketers and business owners, how do we reach people who might genuinely be interested in what we have to offer?
Enter, first party data. By which we mean, consumers actively and willingly providing their data; usually their email address.
Email conversion rates vary across industries, with e-commerce being one of the highest. But even in B2B, if you adopt the right strategy, your ability to generate leads can easily outstrip the performance of other channels such as your website (often rather passive) or social media (very crowded).
Aren’t people sick to death of receiving emails?
While many people receive hundreds of unsolicited emails daily and most of them end up in the bin, if you genuinely provide value or entertainment there’s every chance your missives will cut through. Read on for my top tips for how to ensure your emails don’t get left unread, sent to junk or worse, get blocked.
Define & reach your audience
Your very first job is to be very clear about who you want to reach and why. What job do they do? What companies do they work for? Where are they based? What else can you find out about your target audiences through research?
Develop a set of personas for the people you are trying to reach so that you can segment the emails you create to more closely meet their needs. For example, I’m working with a client right now who has identified certain job titles and each will have different needs:
A: Compliance manager
B: Health and safety manager
C: Property manager
Though it will take more time to craft emails that speak to these individuals, the chances of successfully cutting through are very much higher if content is tailored for them.
I’m using a tool called apollo.io which is a resource for prospecting. With this tool, I can create personas that closely match the information my client has about the people he wants to target. I can then help him to personalise the content and send segmented email campaigns (to their work emails, we are GDPR-compliant around here).
Provide value
Honestly, this is not easy to do. It takes time and thoughtful care to create content that is of genuine value to people. But if you don’t do this, you may as well send your own emails straight to the bin. No-one wants the hard sell and if you’re attempting to convert cold prospects, it simply won’t work.
My advice here is to really think about your industry as a whole and consider what you know about your target market. This article is a perfect case study. I’m writing this as I feel there are business owners who might benefit and those business owners, having read my article and found it useful, may one day consider engaging me to build them a website or handle their marketing. I’m giving this content away, but in some cases I ask readers to provide me with their email address in order to get the content (this is called a lead magnet). Gradually, I can build a list of people who are sufficiently interested in the subjects that I cover that they won’t instantly delete my emails, but it takes time!
You can also use email to entertain. If you’re good at humour (or can get help to add humour) don’t be afraid to liven up your emails this way. It can be a great way to stand out but make sure you don’t undermine your brand by going over the top and keep it clean!
Nurture your subscribers
Simply-put, lead them gently down the path towards your product or service. Check their activity (open and click rates) and respond appropriately. Further segment your lists to identify those who interact with your content and those who don’t and send appropriate follow-ups.
Don’t be hasty about the sell. Let your content stand on its own to do the job of establishing trust and, if your audience wants your product or service, let them come to you. It’s important to see email marketing as one part of your overall marketing strategy; supporting your other activity and not as your main sales channel.
Grow your list
If your list of prospects starts in the thousands, don’t expect to get them all signed up at once. Conversion rates vary between 2 and 5% for email marketing. And conversions come in steps:
A prospect becomes a subscriber. So, of an initial list of 10,000 you might get 200 sign up.
A subscriber becomes a lead. Of those 200 you might get 4 leads.
A lead becomes a customer.
So you must ‘rinse and repeat’ many times to grow the list to something meaningful and continue delivering value and/or entertainment to build trust over time.
Be patient
The above three steps are not necessarily so linear as they seem. It really can take a while to get results from this type of marketing so it’s a long term investment but one that can be repeated over and over again once you hit the right strategy.
As well as being patient, make sure to evaluate what you’re doing. What kind of engagement are you getting from your content? Are people clicking through? Are they watching your videos? Test and refine your ideas until you see some traction and keep testing and refining to ensure you stay relevant and interesting.
