With a 3,800% average return on investment, email marketing is in its own league as far as bang for your marketing buck. However, despite blowing direct mail and just about every other marketing tactic out of the water, email marketing is also the most misunderstood and abused tool for many businesses.
In order for your business to excel with email marketing, you must provide value. Here are four tips to do just that.
Make it About Them
Many companies treat email like an ATM machine—they figure that sending an email blast should yield instant sales.
Understand that email marketing is not about you; it’s about them. Sure, you’re utilizing email to promote your business, but in order for an email to even be opened—much less read—it needs to resonate with your audience.
How many uninteresting and uninspiring promotional emails do you receive every day? Probably at least 20, maybe even 30. Meanwhile, you likely have somewhere between one and four companies that you actually enjoy receiving email blasts from. The question becomes: how can your business replicate the same qualities that you see in the emails you engage with?
Asking yourself that question will likely lead you to the realization that your email marketing should be used not as a hammer-to-nail sales channel, but instead as an outlet for providing free tips, information, and thought leadership. Naturally, you will also sprinkle in special promotions and discounts, but that’s about as far as the marketing speak should go.
Provide Relevant Value
“Value” means something different in every industry. Don’t mistake basic content curation for value. If you’re a real estate agent and you’re sending the recipe of the month, that doesn’t really do anyone any good. Subscribers to a real estate email are interested in real estate-related information, such as interest rates, new listings, and the like.
Include your recipe of the month or community event calendar if you must, but the bulk of your information should be relevant and applicable to your business. They want you to share your expertise!
Provide Insider Value
Here’s another question to help guide your strategy: if your subscribers were paying $10 per month, what would you need to do in order to make your emails worth their money?
Instead of approaching email marketing with the attitude of wanting your recipients to buy from you, treat your list like a membership and find ways to provide your recipients with a reason to pay attention to you. Then, conversions happen naturally.
Introducing a new product? Don’t just announce it after it’s released; send a sneak peek and pre-order form. Offering a new service? Provide your list with a discount code, and remember that it’s not just who you send to, but who they forward to. Don’t be afraid to say, “Send this discount to your friends, too!” Email blasts are shareable by nature.
Measure by Success, Not Failure
Email marketing is a numbers game. Just like home runs in baseball and three-pointers in basketball, a 20-30 percent success rate makes you an all-star. Anything higher makes you an all-time great.
Too often, a business owner will say, “Our open rate is only 25 percent,” when that 25 percent far exceeds industry averages and is bringing hundreds of even thousands of people to the business’ website. Avoid sabotaging your own efforts and measure your email marketing by the people you reach rather than the ones you don’t.
Let’s Reimagine Your Email Marketing Together
Looking to re-engage your email list with true value? Raindrop Marketing has helped countless clients achieve fantastic results with email marketing. Contact us to learn more.
By: Jacques Spitzer