Does email marketing work?

When it comes to communicating about your brand or selling your products, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods. With studies showing for every $1 spent, email has an average $42 return on investment (ROI). When shoppers are ready to buy something, they often look for emails from their favorite stores.

Email Marketing | Focus Ecommerce and Marketing

How do I get an email list?

To see the highest ROI you need to build and maintain an engaged subscriber list, made up of people who want to receive your messages. Building a clean list can be time consuming work at the outset of your email marketing strategy. There are lots of ways to find people who’ll look forward to getting your emails, but here are a few that perform the best.

To build an email list:

  • Create a signup form on your website. When people come to your website for the first time and like what they see, they’ll want a way to keep up to date about your brand. Create a form for newsletter signups and install a pop-up to collect customer data from your visitors.
  • Use a good old-fashioned signup sheet. Whether it’s at an event that you’re hosting or attending, or in your brick and mortar store. When you’re surrounded by people who are interested in what you do, provide a place for them to sign up and learn more.
  • Drive signups through social media. If you have an engaged social media following, tapping into that resource can be a way to increase your list. So share your signup form on your social channels. Also look to use paid social media ads to drive awareness of your sign up page.
  • Host a contest or offer discounts. Often you’ll need to give people an incentive to sign up for your email list. Contests work well if trying to drive awareness, promote these on your social media or on 3rd party sites. By offering discount code for a first purchase you’ll not only increase your email database but also increase your chance of conversion.
  • Make your emails easy to share. When your create beautiful, compelling email, with a lot of valuable information people will want to share them. Include share buttons and social media post builders that let the word about your emails spread quickly.
  • Build a landing page. Landing pages offer one more way to grow your email list. Using your best imagery and content, landing pages give people a clear call to action to drive email signups.

Can I buy an email list?

NO. You should NEVER buy an email list.

 

Purchased lists are ineffective, If you send emails to a list of people whose contact info you bought, many of the emails will get identified as spam and you’ll also get high unsubscribe rates. Also you will find the data is often just garbage, massively out of date.

 

  • Email platform systems do not allow the upload of such lists and it’s important that all users abide their Terms of Use, which enforce anti-spam laws. 

  • Don’t use third-party lists. This includes purchased or rented mailing lists, and lists scraped from third-party sources, including public websites.

  • Always get permission. Everyone on your list should have opted in to receive emails from you, and their permission should be express and verifiable. If you use an email platform signup form options, you can track the permissions.

  • Include an unsubscribe link. Federal anti-spam laws require you to give people a way to unsubscribe from your list in every campaign you send.
Email Marketing | Focus Ecommerce & Marketing

Email marketing tips to get you started

1. Create an email marketing plan.

To make the planning part easier, here are some best practices you’ll want to consider when devising a strategy for your email marketing.

 

Define your audience

Regardless of what you sell, you should have a clear idea of who your audience is in order to effectively communicate with them. Segment users within your audience so you can send them personalised and targeted emails that help increase engagement, build a trustful relationship and generate greater ROI.

Signup sources

Understanding where your subscribers initially signed up for your list is valuable data. Knowing where customers joined your email database can give you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your marketing efforts going forward.

 

Segments and groups

The more relevant the campaign, the better the results. So once you’ve identified smaller groups of people within your larger audience, you’ll be able to create groups and segments to send more relevant and personalized emails to your recipients. There will be times when you’ll want to send to your entire list, but by segmenting your users you can significantly increase the click-through rates and e-commerce orders your campaigns generate.

 

Decide what to write

Now that you know who you’re writing to, it’s time to think about your content. What do you want to say to your audience? What is your content marketing strategy? You’ll want to send emails with purpose, that really speak to your subscribers, so always keep in mind what they signed up for.

 

Establish your sending frequency and goals

There’s nothing set in stone about how often you should email your customers, but sending too often subscribers are likely to stop opening your emails or unsubscribe altogether. Some users that run a blog or news website might choose to send daily updates to their subscribers, while other users only send twice a month so subscribers stay excited and interested about their emails. Choose to send your email campaign at a pace that suits you and your customers. Check the unsubscribe rates and the click through rates to adjust the frequency as and when its needed.

 

Email Marketing Calendar | Focus Ecommerce and Marketing

Make a schedule

A good way to make sure you’re staying on track is to create a content calendar to schedule your campaigns, blog posts, social media posts, and more.

Your email marketing schedule will depend on your industry, the types of content you send (content marketing strategy), and your sending frequency.

For more advice on email marketing why not get in touch to see how we can help you add email marketing to you business  – Contact us today

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