Liz Church
Marketing Director
Emailing your audience is one of the best ways to keep your clients up to date with the latest trends in your business, highlight any offers or events they should attend, and maintain a strong business-to-client relationship. When selling a product or service, there must be a drive in the sales funnel to enhance conversion. In our industry, where we offer intangible products and services, we know the importance of staying fresh in our clients’ minds. In this post, we will discuss how to make email marketing part of your business plan for 2023.
I know what you may be thinking:
- “Why should I get involved with email marketing?
- ”What if I send too many emails or not enough? I don’t want to annoy my audience, nor do I want them to forget about me.”
- “Is there any return on investment in implementing email marketing?”
There are a lot of questions to ask yourself, but remember, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to your marketing needs. Let’s think about this as expanding communication and reaching your audience differently. Here are some key attributes to think about:
Give your subscribers a reason to subscribe to your email list
It’s estimated that over 306 billion emails are sent daily. That’s a lot of data to be coming through email providers. With those numbers, you should capture someone’s attention with your email, right?
To sign up on an email list, for most of us, means we’re interested in the content, or we’re looking for more than one solution to our problems. Here, it requires a bit of psychology and getting into the minds of your target audience – knowing how to make your subscribers tick.
FEAR OF MISSING OUT
Give your audience a reason to act and be active when they receive your emails. A sense of urgency is a way to captivate your audience’s attention. Running a sale for Black Friday weekend? Make sure to highlight when it ends Sunday night in the subject line, so that your audience can act quickly or they lose out on any deals you’re offering.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
Make your platform a place where your audience has something to look forward to when your emails pop up in their inbox. Every month, our Founder, Michealle Gady, speaks on a topic that aligns with our values and work interests. It’s a personalized piece, but it opens a doorway for others to join and share their own stories on our social platforms. As a result, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than ones that don’t.
REMIND THEM OF THE BENEFITS
There’s a saying, “Reward, and you shall receive.” This applies in the world of email marketing. Always give your consumers a reason to keep coming back, whether because of discount codes for items on sale or savings they’ll garner in your rewards program.
Build a Strategy that Works for Your Audience
I receive many emails from marketing blogs and magazines every day. It’s once or twice for some, and for others, it’s multiple times a day, every day. Let’s just say it drives me insane, and when the emails come through, I don’t even read them. Instead, I hit “mark as read” and move on.
I know what you’re thinking; just unsubscribe!
Shortest explanation, I can’t because I need this provider for my work, and there isn’t an option to adjust my notifications outside the mass number of daily emails. For this reason, I’ve lost interest in the company’s emails and struggled to stay involved. When your audience loses interest, you’ve lost a potential conversion.
So, how often should you send an email? Let’s start with the basic questions first.
HOW CAN YOU ENSURE YOUR AUDIENCE IS RECEIVING THE EMAILS THEY WANT?
For example, in early 2022, Atrómitos ran a webinar with the Greater Wilmington Business Journal. However, when subscribers signed up for notifications about our next webinar, they received far more than a notification email and what they initially signed up for. This phenomenon is called graymail. It’s when a subscriber has signed up for a particular segment in your list, but they don’t want all that comes with it. While we all want large email lists, the biggest key in any marketing channel is to be aware of the level of engagement.
ALRIGHT, SO HOW OFTEN?
Simply put, it depends on your business and audience. This is where that strategy build comes into play. First, adjust your frequency to how active your email list is and continue from there. Databox asked marketers how they went about the frequency of their email engagement, discovering that many companies were sending out emails weekly. Marketing Director Derrick Lawless remarked that it’s an ongoing experiment, tuning into what works for your client base. There is no end-all or be-all for this approach.
ASK YOUR AUDIENCE WHAT THEY WANT TO RECEIVE IN THEIR INBOX.
There is no harm in checking in on your audience and surveying the list. For example, we ran a survey at the beginning of November to check in on our subscribers to ensure they were satisfied with the content. While tricky, if done correctly, survey emails can give you lasting results and an eye for what might need some tuning.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?
Everyone, including myself, will tell you results from email marketing campaigns aren’t instantaneous. It depends on a variety of factors, like the time you plan on dedicating, how often you test your campaigns, study your audience, and how you stand out amongst the competition.
PLATFORMS TO CHOOSE FROM
This can be overwhelming, but the list of email marketing providers is endless. Atrómitos uses Mailchimp (a personal favorite of mine), and its features help us in every campaign. From its Resources Blog, which educates you on the government laws of email marketing and how to build and launch a successful campaign, the dashboard allows us to tailor our needs with every test. We can segment out subscribers, personalize messages, and the automation feature makes my life easier every time.
Return on Investment, Goals, & Starting Point
To find out if you’re putting the time and dedication to good use, how do you find out your gains and losses? While it would seem logical to calculate based on your employee’s salary, the time it took to build the emails, and the potential revenue from that campaign, let’s step back a second.
HERE IS WHERE YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY COMES IN.
To know what to calculate, you need to set goals. With the right strategies in place, email marketing goals can raise brand awareness, lead generation, increase profits, and garner web traffic. Then, you can pull the right metrics from there to determine the correct percentages.
If you need it, the formula for ROI: (Revenue – Expenses) ÷ Expenses = ROI [as a percentage]
How you track metrics, such as clicks and open-rates are wholeheartedly up to you. It depends on how you set up your goals.
In closing, this is my marketing pitch to why you should go ahead and begin planning for a segment of email marketing in your plan for 2023. Then, you can thank me later when you see your engagement and audience growth. Need another reason to see email marketing in action?