The concept of marketing through emails sounds like an outdated email marketing strategy. However, research has shown that the best marketing strategy with the highest return on investment is email marketing. The importance of email marketing for the growth of a business cannot be emphasised enough. We have covered the advantages of email marketing elaborately in the other sections.
In this section of the blog, we bring you the top tips for creating your email marketing business. Adopting these tips can help you create your own email marketing list. Having a reading of these lists will help in ensuring success with your email marketing strategy. The reading covers the guided approach to choosing email marketing as one of the most reliable tools of marketing to build relations with your audience and witness unparalleled growth in your business.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing, on its own, involves the act of marketing a product or service through emails. On the other hand, a list consists of the email addresses of prospects and customers through which sales messages, advertisements, and special offers from businesses and enterprises are being received. This marketing strategy has helped both small and large-scale businesses to grow their sales and global awareness. Despite the billions of dollars in profit that are being generated with the billions of emails sent daily by business owners, some businesses are still lagging behind by not taking advantage of the many benefits of email marketing. This is either because they don’t know the advantages of marketing through emails or because they do but have no idea about how to create an email marketing list from scratch.
This article aims to give advantages and tips for creating an email list, especially if you don’t have any experience in the email marketing industry.
5 tips for creating an Email Marketing List
No one wakes up one morning and starts advertising their products and services by sending out emails to people. The point is, if anyone does that, such an effort will only be wasted. There are chances you have more campaigns and advertisements from businesses you don’t know out there in the spam and promotion box of your email than you have in your primary inbox. This is so because those emails are not meant for you, and the senders target the wrong audience, which is common among bad email marketers.
However, a good email marketer must first set out his plans and tactics in such a way to understand his target audience, their problems, and how his product or service will be of use to them. This will avoid sending campaigns to people who are not interested in whatever you are advertising to them.
The following is the list of the top 5 tips that must be considered for creating an email marketing list for the email marketing objectives of your business:
1. A good ESP (Email Service Provider)
Just as we need a telecommunication company’s service for us to make a telephone call to another person in another geographical region, an email service provider is also needed in email marketing.
The choice of selecting an email service provider is based on what you need to achieve with your campaigns and the tools needed to achieve your goals. There are many ESPs out there, including MAILCHIMP, MAILFENCE, HUBSPOT, and FastMail, among others. Be diligent in examining the options available and select the platform that best meets your goals.
2. Call to Action from your website
This tip is for businesses that have a working website. And every business in this digital age is expected to own one if they want to grow bigger and faster. If there is a proven way to get an email list, it is through a persuasive and irresistible call to action. When designing your website, you must employ creativity so that people won’t but sign up to your mailing list for them to get the most out of your service.
And when they sign up on your website, they become your direct audience, whom you can contact at any point in time. For this to be effective, it is expected that such a company must have put some measures in place to generate lots of traffic to the website, which will lead the visitors to the Call to Action.
3. Incentives and give away
Using the word “free” has been said to be a notable path to many roads in the hearts of humans. As such offering values to people for free has been one of the proven ways of stealing people’s attention. Not just attention alone, but it serves as bait to get them to act.
To generate more lists, give more hard-to-resist incentives in the form of discounts, coupons, free tickets to important events, etc. Do so in such a manner that their desire for the incentives will lead them to sign up for your mailing list. The number of lists you’ll generate in a small space of time will amaze you.
4. Take advantage of social media
Most business owners using email marketing underestimate the effect their social profiles can have on the growth of their email list. At the same time, social media is one of the best places to grow your email list. This can be done in various ways, depending on the medium you use. For instance, your website’s link can be added to your Twitter profile. This is necessary because most people dig deep into the social presence of business owners to confirm their genuineness and that of their business. Also, there are various ways you can use Facebook to your own advantage when growing your mailing list. One way is by running ads for your incentives and discount offers, which will lead them to sign up for your mailing list. Another way is by promoting your landing page on Facebook groups consistently, sharing your campaigns, and inviting people to sign up. You can apply this method to every other social platform as well.
5. Take advantage of offline events
When possible, offline ways to get emails from people are another way of creating a marketing list. Most enterprises forget that they can have easier access to the email addresses of their potential customers when they meet physically on different occasions. The exchange of business cards, among others, is a common method of achieving this.
Occasions like marketing conferences, organisation launchings, webinars, business-oriented fairs and events are some of the easiest ways for gathering data on email lists. Notwithstanding the method, the aim is to achieve growth in your list-building tactics.
5 unique advantages of email marketing for every business
1. Uninterrupted space:
Marketing through emails ensures focused attention on every marketing campaign being sent across. Unlike marketing through social media, where there are tons of distractions competing with the concentration rate of prospects on marketing advertisements, email marketing offers a distraction-free platform for marketers to pass their sales message across.
2. Cost-effectiveness:
Email marketing provides an outstanding return on investment. This is one reason why businesses are shifting a lot of their attention to this aspect of marketing. Statistics have it that the ROI for this marketing strategy is 3800%. For every $1 spent, there is a return of $38. And what do they say about numbers? It speaks louder than a voice.
3. Autonomy:
Advertisements placed on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google are subject to strict policies, and your ad account can be banned. But this is not the case with email marketing, which is why it stands out among other marketing models. This means you have full control of the activities going on in your account and campaigns without fear of your advertisements getting banned.
4. Personalised engagements:
There is nothing more interesting than personalising messages to prospects and customers while trying to market your product. This is made possible and easier with email marketing. With personalised sales messages, customers feel like they are being communicated to on a one-on-one basis. A drastic rate of engagement is assured by organising your email list in such a way as to send the right messages to the right set of subscribers.
5. Measurability:
One way to ensure consistent growth in business is to track and evaluate past successes and failures. Evaluation of the performance of a campaign or advertisement can be done with the use of web analytical tools. Contents that are being sent out can be tracked to know how well they are working and how best they can be improved to achieve better and desired results. These and many more advantages of email marketing are subject to how well each individual and business enterprise knows how to generate, build, and grow their email marketing list. This is the part where most people face difficulties, and they don’t get to enjoy the benefits of email marketing.
Final Words
Conclusively, it takes time to build an email list. And more than just building a list is the ability to keep the list and ensure that people do not unsubscribe themselves from your mailing list. Therefore, you must ensure that your mail list subscribers are not discouraged from clicking the unsubscribe button when they get choked with your messages. As much as you want to be consistent and make your brand stick in their hearts. Also, you must send out a campaign that is user-friendly for all devices. And avoid sending only sales messages as much as possible. It has been commonly observed that some people unsubscribe from the email list because every email they get from you is an advertisement to buy your products or services. Communication is not supposed to be about you and your product alone. Show some care and empathy and strive to gather engagement and response from your recipients.