Sabrina Turman — April 11, 2017 Everyone knows all about email marketing or do they? It seems like a pretty simple concept you build your list, craft the perfect email and send it to everyone on the list. Once you do this you sit back and wait for the money to start rolling in. How hard could it be, right? Actually, what I just described is more email blasting, which may or may not reap the results you desire. This is one tactic among many others. If you really want to make the best use of all of those emails you’ve gathered it’s time to dig a lot deeper. It’s time to implement some email marketing best practices and use some resources you may or not be familiar with. I’m talking about email automation which comes with a wealth of functionality that can take your small business marketing to the next level.
Here are 5 ways that email automation can help your small business’ marketing efforts:
More Conversions
Conversions are the main reason anyone markets their product. The idea is to eventually make a sale and proper email marketing can help you accomplish your goal. Some prospects need a little more pushing than others to make a purchase. A well thought out email strategy can provide the right push to finally make that sale. A strong email campaign will include a long-term email strategy that sends automated emails over a few months. These emails tend to give examples of services and provide additional information ideally leading to a conversion. Email messaging answering a few more questions or showing results can be real closer. If you still need convincing consider that 66% of online consumers made a purchase due to email marketing.
Nurture Campaigns
The most common use of email marketing is email blasts, but is it the best? Email blasts can be effective but if there is no true strategy, they can come off as inconsistent and scattered. Consistency is a pillar of email marketing best practices. It is the key whether it’s about retail sales or events to providing information on a product or service. Those are just a few examples but other messaging can be included depending on your goals. A proper plan will consist of multiple emails in a reliable order such as daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. These emails should already be ready to go because automatically sent emails see a 70.5% open rate compared to regular emails.
24/7 Sales Team
Let’s be honest you would love it if you could hire around the clock sales personnel but that would be very expensive. The good news is that email marketing can serve as just that, multiple 24/7 salespeople. Yes, you will still need someone for certain communications, but overall prospect interaction is much smoother. Once you have a good strategy and campaign in place you can send automated emails, get notifications on site actions by prospects, track the life of a lead and make well-timed follow-ups. All of these benefits can take a lot of time if it was done manually, but with email marketing, the process is mostly automatic.
List Segmentation
Consumers want different things and respond at different times. This is where the ability to segment consumers based on interaction comes into place. An example would be if someone were to open an email or/and click on a link expressing further interest, they can then be placed in a separate list. The new list would receive emails that are more appropriate for someone who is further along in the purchase funnel. This new list can be set up at no risk to those who haven’t shown as much interest yet, as they will continue to receive the standard emails. List segmentation is serious business, as marketers saw a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.
Personalization
The most important but often underutilized part of an email is the personalization. The idea is that you can automatically have a prospect’s name placed in an email, from subject line to salutation to the body. This creates benefits such has an increase in open rate and clicks. For example, emails with personalized subject lines are more likely to be opened, 26% more likely to be opened to be specific.
These 5 benefits of email marketing will take your small business to a new level and save you tons of time. You will also see better responses from leads resulting in more revenue.
If you would like help improving email marketing best practices for your small business or just have questions reach out to the beasts for more information.
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