EMAIL MARKETING
Nurturing fruitful relationships with your leads and customers
Emails continue to play an important role in the marketing strategy of every business. These days, however, they have to be personal and helpful to have any chance of engaging the reader.
The best email copy doesn’t rely on quickly drafted messages. If you want your email campaigns to be successful, you need to use a professional email copywriting service.
The continuing importance of email marketing
If you think email has had its day, think again. When it comes to marketing to the masses, there’s no medium with a wider reach than email. Not convinced? Consider this: Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Part of the reason is the 91% of US consumers that still use e-mail every day.
Of course, it’s not quite as easy as blasting out emails and waiting for the orders to role in. To produce results, you have to have an email marketing strategy. Above all, you need to abandon traditional outbound marketing tactics and apply best inbound marketing practices instead.
What's the difference between
inbound and outbound email marketing?
In outbound marketing, emails are sent to everyone and anyone, whether they've had contact with the company or not. This interruptive style of email marketing is often used by less reputable marketers, who purchase contact lists from third parties to batch-and-blast. It’s an indiscriminate email strategy and—for the recipient—extremely annoying. What's more, it's highly ineffective compared to inbound marketing.
In inbound marketing, the recipient has to give permission to be contacted. Nearly every website we visit these days asks us to 'opt in'. By giving our name and email address, whether we're signing up for a newsletter or downloading a white paper, we're saying to the company that it's okay to email us. As long as those emails are relevant to the opt-in, the chances of conversing with your new contact are much higher.
“When an email is not personalized, 52% of customers say they'll find somewhere else to go.”
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How important are emails to inbound marketing?
Emails touch almost every part of a company's inbound marketing strategy, from welcoming and lead nurturing emails to transactional emails like order and shipment confirmations. And it doesn’t stop once a lead has been converted into a customer. There are plenty of opportunities to stay in touch, from subscription reminders and sales announcements to product updates and monthly newsletters.
Inbound marketing is all about sending the right email to the right person at the right time. For that, you need to do two things: (1) build a healthy email list with a cutting-edge mailing list plugin like Thrive Leads, and (2) determine where the person is in the buyer's journey. The first lets you comply with regulations and segment your contacts. The second lets you send relevant, helpful content to your contacts, so they’re one step closer to buying.
“Segmented, targeted and personalized emails generate 58% of all revenue.”
DMA
How can email marketing (done well) benefit your business?
By entering into friendly and meaningful conversations via email, you’re giving your contacts an opportunity to build a relationship with your company. If that all sounds a bit fluffy, consider these hard-to-ignore statistics:
I told you those statistics are hard to ignore...
So, what makes a successful marketing email?
First of all, you’ve got to have a specific goal. After all, if you don’t know why you’re sending the email, how do you know if it’s successful or not? There are many reasons you may want to send out emails. Perhaps you want to get people to register for an event, buy an item that’s on special offer, or respond to a survey.
Whatever your goal, it should fit in with your overall marketing strategy, whether that’s to drive more traffic to your website, grow your subscriber list or build brand awareness. You also need to send it at the right time. It’s no good sending a customer feedback survey if they haven’t purchased anything from you yet.
Other elements that make up a successful marketing email include:
Marketing emails that have a goal, incorporate the elements above, and are sent at the right time to the right person are ‘optimized for conversion’. In other words, you’ve maximized your chances of readers opening your email and clicking on the call-to-action. And that’s the measure of your success: how many people 'open and click'.
Make every word count with email copywriting
Content and context make a happy marriage, according to HubSpot, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s the essence of inbound marketing. It involves matching the email’s copy with its subject line and the reason it’s being sent. So, if a lead visits your website’s case study page, you might follow up with an email highlighting one of your popular case studies.
As an email copywriter, my job is to write copy that complements the context and the overall marketing goal. I ensure the subject line grabs attention (the ‘open’ bait), the language is clear and friendly, the structure is scannable, and the reader’s interest is drawn from the top all the way down to the call-to-action (the ‘click’ bait).
To see an example of my work, check out a marketing email that I've written:
Is it time to start your next email marketing campaign?
Email is still a vital and successful way of communicating with your target audience. It not only gives excellent ROI but also supports your marketing conducted through other channels, including social media. Do not overlook the importance or effectiveness of this marketing tool.
Whether you’re ready to start writing the content of your email campaign or you want to discuss your ideas first, drop me a line today at [email protected]. I am Email Marketing Certified with HubSpot, so I'll write your email copy and help you develop a coherent email marketing strategy for your business.
