Email marketing you should think about in 2017

Email marketing you should think about in 2017

Every business owner is looking to make more money or generate more leads but a lot of them fall short of email marketing because they think it's just spam.  Are you one of the businesses who are not capitalizing on email marketing to generate leads and sales?  Emailing is one of the best ways to contact new and existing clients in order to get them to come to your website or physical location.  If you can set everything up so it doesn't look spammy, you can build a massive following in a much shorter time than you would think is possible.

Now you can't just buy a list of emails and think you're going to make an extra $10,000 by spamming them with your advertisements.  You need to finesse your campaigns and build them gradually.  Below I'll go over the 4 main parts of any successful email marketing campaign.


Building Your List(s)
Let's say you have the best email marketing campaign in the world and you know it will succeed, you sitll need people to send it to or you won't make a single dime.  There are corporations that hire teams of email marketing experts just to build their lists.  If you don't see why they do that, then keep reading

A few ways to build your list

• Through Your Store - If you have a brick and mortar type business (physical location) then you can easily ask your customers to sign up for your newsletter when they're trying to check out.  They will more than likely tell you their emails since they think it's for a digital receipt or to get coupons in the mail   You will then add them to your list and that's all it takes.  You can now send them emails (if they opt in of course) and possibly get them back in for another sale.
• Through Your Website - This is one of the easiest ways to collect emails.  You simply put a mailchimp, constantcontact, or aweber form on your website so users can fill it out and be added to your list.  You'll have to say something like "Join our newsletter to get discounts right to your inbox!" and people will usually sign up because they all want to save money
• Through Social Media - You can post on your social media pages, similar to your opt in form, and say something like "Come to our page and sign up for giveaways and exclusive discounts!".  People like free stuff and will come if they think they could get something without paying for it.
• Through Your Content - A lot of people don't think about this, but you can actually get newsletter sign ups by posting niche related content and getting traffic from the search engines.  We all know that search engine traffic converts into sales well, but it also converts well for newsletters and list building!
• Through Online Sales - What I like to do is integrate my shopping cart with mailchimp and every time I make a sale, the customer is also signing up for my mailchimp list.  They will have to opt in, but at least they are adding their email.  I've noticed that a good amount of people will opt into my lists this way and I would highly suggest you use this trick

As your list grows, you'll want to start automating everything.  Again, I like to use mailchimp because I can automate my newsletter.  I simply set it up so that people who are new to my list will get an initial email for signing up, an email after day 1, an email on day 3, and email on day 5 and then an email once a week for a long time   Of course they can unsubscribe and not get emails anymore, but if they liked my site they will usually stick around


Your Engagement With Customers
Are you currently engaging your customers?  It's actually tough to determine if you're engaging them if there's no accurate way to figure this out, but if you're actively talking with them whenever you can, you're usually engaging them lol.  Engaging with your potential customers on something like social media will increase your sales a good amount.  This is due to the people who are lurking and watching your responses.  They may not ask a question on your facebook page, but they will see what your response is and base their judgement on that.  

If you're engaging your followers and clients, they will usually see you in a good light and likely sign up to your newsletter if you put it in front of them


Get Personal
If you're sending out emails with "Hey There!" and not "Hey There, [username]" then you aren't personalizing your emails.  Sure you don't know everyones name, but if they're signing up to your email list and it's configured to capture their name, you can set up emails to be personalized  

If you can pair up the [username] with a discount code to something they were searching for on your website, you're striking gold!  Have you ever noticed what Amazon.com does?  If you use their app, they know it's you and they track what you're looking at and what you save.  They will then send out an email a few days later and it will contain a lot of the stuff you were looking at as well as some recommendations in order to get you to come in and spend your cash.  They also do this very well when it comes to re-targeting, but that's for another discussion lol.

The online world is extremely fast paced and cold hearted, but if you can crack through the users armor by using their actual name and what they were already looking at, you're going to do just fine   I'm still testing out some things for this part, but I'll gladly cover it when I figure out what the best system is.  I don't like recommending a few different ones if I haven't found one that works best.


Retention Rates
Getting the emails is one thing, keeping the user signed up is another battle in itself.  If you can make everything user friendly and customize what you can, you will usually create a good experience for the person you emailed and in turn they will keep coming back.  Don't spam them too much because that's the easiest way to get them to unsubscribe.  You need to add value to your posts and not make them all about an advertisement, because people want content to read and not a product shoved down their throats everyday.

Email auto reponders need to be set up so that your users know you're looking into something, you're away, you're going to respond as soon as you can, or anything else you can think of.  People want to be talked to if their contacting you, and auto responders are a nice way of saying "I see you contacted us, we'll respond shortly, thank you for your patience".  You can configure auto responders to work for abandoned carts as well.  If you aren't setting up anything for abandoned carts, then you're making 25% to 35% less than you should be.  Another great thing auto responders do is bring people back in to finish a registration.  A lot of users will go half way through the registration process and just stop, or they'll get 9/10 done and close the page.  If they entered their email, which should be the first thing they do, you can send them an automated response in order to get them back in to sign up



If you can put into affect everything that I touched on above, you will be on your way for an amazing year in email marketing   Keep it simple, keep it personal, keep them coming back for more



In Conclusion:
Email marketing isn't easy at all, if you don't know what you're doing then I would highly suggest you have someone come in and set everything up for you.  I was never good at setting all of this up and I would pay a guy to do it for me.  Only recently I started doing it myself and sometimes I do hit a few walls lol.  You have to stick with your campaigns, they won't grow instantly overnight.  If you're patient, you can be successful with email marketing in 2017


Remember to follow me!
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Razzy


Thanks!

Razzy