While it may seem shocking that email is still growing, Gmail has over 1 billion users worldwide, and 86% of professionals prefer to use email for business communication. So, it’s no wonder that digital marketing agencies are still embracing the power of email marketing.
Using emails as part of your inbound marketing strategies can help nurture leads into customers, reinforce your clients’ UVP and send people messaging based on the actions they take. Take a look at why we still love email marketing and why you should, too:
- Speak Directly to People Who Want to Hear From YouWith opt-in email lists, contacts willingly provide you with their email addresses in exchange for downloading premium content. This ensures that you are sending emails to people who actually are interested in what you have to say, rather than people whose email addresses have been rented or purchased, and thus know nothing about you.
- Segmented Lists Allow Us to Send More Targeted Emails As your email lists grow, start placing people in segmented lists based on their industries, the content they’ve downloaded from our site, etc. This lets will help you get the right message in front of the right people, increasing the chances of them becoming a high-quality leads.
- You Can Send More Information at OnceSocial media is fast. On these social platforms, your posts have to be short, sweet and to the point. A blog, on the other hand, is more long-form, allowing for expansion on the topic, linking to other great resources throughout and adding imagery for your readers. Email is a way to send information directly to your readers and expand on topics you feel needs greater explanation.
- Email Literally Puts Your Business in the Palm of Your Readers’ HandsMore than 80% of users report that they read their emails on their mobile device. With this information, you can write and design your emails to make it easy for people to skim through the content, assuming that the majority of the people receiving the emails will be reading them on their phones or tablets. Catchy headlines, short paragraphs, attention-grabbing imagery, and clickable buttons make emails easy and fun to read and even help improve your click-through rate.
- Leads Are Automatically Nurtured Through Automated WorkflowsLong gone are the days of having to immediately follow up with a prospect. Email now does it for you. Using automated workflows, or drip email campaigns, you can send potential customers a series of lead-nurturing emails that give them just enough information to intrigue them and get them to reach out to ask more questions.
- Your Brand is Reinforced Through Personalized Emails At the end of the day, email marketing lets you reinforce our marketing know-how to everyone on your contact list. You can remind them that you’re here to help them reach their marketing goals with a personalized touch. And by using the automated workflows mentioned above, you can even send your contacts a happy birthday wish—because who doesn’t love a birthday wish from their favorite brand?!
Kickstart Your Email Marketing
Here’s how you can get started with email marketing in 4 simple steps:
1. Choose Your Email Client
Here at Designzillas, we use HubSpot both for ourselves and our clients. But you can use any platform. A couple to consider would be Constant Contact, MailChimp, SharpSpring.
2. Generate Your Email List
This part can be tricky if you don’t already have a database of contacts that you can begin using. But! It’s not difficult to generate your very own list of people interested in getting the latest updates from your business.
Make it easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter by having an easy-to-access form in various places on your site and give them a reason to subscribe by having consistent updates to your blog. We were able to grow one of our client’s email list by over 200% using this model, and they started at zero contacts as well, so don’t give up!
3. Designing and Building Your Email
So now we gotta create our email. This is the fun part. Depending on the email client you’re using, it’s pretty simple for anyone to create an email with the right tools.
Choose your content, create your imagery and use your email client’s editor to format your email—depending on what you’re using it should be as simple as using a basic WYSIWYG editor.
4. Send It Out!
Now you gotta distribute. For me, this is the scariest part. I will send myself half a dozen tests to ensure I didn’t overlook a mistake.
Using your email client, you can either send right away or schedule your message out. After sending two or three emails, you’ll start to get a better idea of when people are opening your emails, and you can time your delivery with when your users are most active.
