RESOURCE GUIDE
Email Marketing
Build your customer network
A STEP UP FROM TRADITIONAL MEANS
A Complete Guide To Email Marketing
Email marketing is arguably the oldest form of communication in the digital age. It remains one — if not the most — effective channel to reach your audience.
Mobile use is getting ubiquitous every year; that isn’t all that surprising. For many, whether it’s B2B or B2C, email remains their go-to form of communication.
Ask yourself: When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing you check on your mobile?
That’s right, your email.
The problem is that small and large companies compete in their target audience’s inboxes. So how can you stand out in that saturated space?
You can implement a few strategies from this guide to get an edge against the competition.
What Makes Email Marketing Different?
Email marketing has an unparalleled reach and ever-growing customer retention and loyalty. Thus, making it the optimal method for engagement with existing clients.
It sure is the cheapest way to connect and build customer relationships. That’s why it’s more cost-effective than other digital marketing methods.
People outside the marketing realm may think negatively about email as a marketing tool.
But this is not the case for marketers, strategists, digital agencies, and technology vendors who know how powerful email marketing is and how to utilize it.
Email marketing has been used for more than four decades. It remains a powerful marketing channel, both a form of direct marketing and digital marketing.
It primarily uses emails to promote a business’s products and services at one’s fingertips. This can also be used to:
-Build brand awareness
-Generate sales
-Target the audience with your latest products
-Promotions and offers
This also plays an important role in building relationships or keeping customers engaged from the purchase until they become promoters of your business through getting up-to-date news via email.
As an inbound marketing agency, LOJO provides its clients with digital marketing expertise and support. We can help your business by attracting potential customers, engaging prospects, and turning them into future clients and promoters.
For more information about our email marketing services, contact us today at (916) 303-4080 or drop us a message!
Email marketing can generate huge returns for minimal investment and reach wide audiences. It can also help you with customer retention and loyalty through well-timed and written emails.
Types Of Email Content And Their Uses
You can choose from several types of email content to include in your campaign. Below are the details of each so you can determine which is best.
Cold Outreach Emails
These are sent to a set of targeted customers or small-medium businesses that had no previous contact. This will set the tone that the salesperson has done his part researching the prospective customer’s business, visiting the website, and getting a good grasp of the company’s marketing business.
Prospecting Emails
This type of outreach is when a salesperson email a potential customer to introduce himself, the company they represent, and the benefits he can bring to the prospect’s company.
The main goal for this type of email is to secure an appointment via phone, video, or in-person to discuss the relevance of the business to the client’s company.
Pitch Emails or Email Pitch
These are straightforward and concise emails to your targeted prospect. Based on their preferences and behavior, you only send a relevant email pitch to your client to leverage your business.
Introduction Emails
While both introduction and cold outreach emails are sent to a prospect with no previous contact, they differ in terms of motives and functions.
Introduction emails are exactly the way they’re named and are sent to introduce your company and get a response. This aims to start a conversion and broaden your network.
Check-in Emails
This is a way of letting someone know you are waiting for a response regarding your offer. It is a type of email that attempts to know the prospect’s current situation and an update on their decision.
Email Newsletter
This type provides direct information about the salesperson and the company he represents. It also lays down an update or reports that a company or brand sends out to its subscribers periodically.
It gives your prospects information about what you’ve been up to. This may include an overview of your company’s successes and newly launched products and services.
Email Marketing In The Buyer's Journey
The buyer’s journey or customer journey is best summarized as “the customer’s path to purchase” a product or service. This is an overview of what stage the customer is at through a research and decision process.
HubSpot puts it in such a distinct way the buyer’s journey is the active process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service.
3 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
Every stage is a critical step toward the path to purchase. This leads us to the realization that email marketing plays a challenging and pivotal role.
This also gives us a glimpse into the customer’s mindset through their interaction with the business. They move through the stages from a wide range of audiences interested in your product or service to the small net of the audience in the final stage.
We can go through each of these stages where the essence of an email is to lead the customer one step closer to the action you want them to take.
1st Stage: Awareness
This is the initial stage where the prospects are introduced to your product or service for the first time. It is crucial because you cannot overwhelm them with emails that may not be relevant to them.
Considering it is the first time they’re interacting with your brand. It’s best to keep your emails short and simple by welcoming them and stating why joining your list is of value to them.
You can bank on answering this question, “What’s in it for me?” That could be a powerful communication starter.
During this stage, the email should revolve around providing them with reasons why they should stay and how you can help them.
2nd Stage: Consideration
This stage captures the fact that the prospect has shown his interest in your offer or brand. It’s also the stage when prospects want to know more about your product or service.
The email messaging during the consideration stage should be about your product’s FAB (Features, advantages, and benefits).
You can add a product demo. So your audience can get enough information before they move to the next step.
3rd Stage: Decision Stage
This is the stage where the prospect discerns or weighs up the pros and cons of buying your product.
Your role is to help your prospect make the right decision. A decision should be beneficial to both parties.
This is also the stage where you want all your prospects to end up. Every stage of the buyer’s journey makes your responsibility crucial, especially as the prospect buys or makes a purchase.
That means you have to keep your customers warm. That’s why the essence of email marketing here becomes all the more important.
You have to provide value to your customer or buyer to make them stay and subscribe to your emails. As mentioned earlier, include your products’ FAB and them on your upcoming offerings.
Benefits Of Email Marketing
Email marketing is an excellent tool for every business. It guarantees that you get valuable information directly to your email inbox.
Here are other benefits you can reap from the outreach efforts with your lists and subscribers.
1. Targeted Audiences
Emails are customizable. For example, you can deliver the same message to different customers on a more personalized level.
A smart way of doing this is by segmenting your contacts list based on their demographics, interests, preferences, locations, etc. Targeting emails make it a point that each of your prospects receives the relevant content specifically suited to his needs.
2. Instant Impact
Nearly 4.26 billion email users worldwide belong to different age groups and other demographics. It can astound you as quickly as possible that you could reach an audience across all segments and walks of life at a snap of your fingers.
That’s where email marketing comes in. It can create a sense of urgency and make you connect with your target audience personally, whichever stage they’re in the buyer’s journey.
3. Distribution at Scale
Email marketing is one of the simplest forms of marketing. It’s easy to grapple with and share with your colleagues or marketing team.
By just ticking the forward button, it’s easy for your subscribers or customers to share your products, offers, and latest offerings with their families and friends.
That’s why an email is a powerful tool, especially for your customers, as they become your brand ambassadors. Plus, their own words will matter more than billion-dollar commercial ads.
4. A/B Testing
A/B testing, also known as split-testing, means sending one variation of your campaign to a subset of subscribers and a different one to another subset of subscribers. The goal is to determine which campaign variation is most effective.
For beginners, here are some helpful tips to consider when trying A/B testing:
-Subject lines
-Send/delivery times
-Customer segmentation
-CTAIncentive/promo
5. Low Cost
We know how budget constraints can be impactful to business owners and marketers. Email marketing brings in an
ROI of £42 for every £1 spent, which you don’t want to miss when it can make you pay less yet can help you generate leads and revenues.
This is an undisputed return on investment and a game-changer in your marketing efforts. That’s because it’s one of the cheapest ways to interact with your customers.
3 Industries That Can Benefit From Email Marketing
Any business owner or manager would be glad to know they can benefit from email campaigns. Here’s a list of some industries improving most from email marketing.
Beauty and Personal Care Brands
Who says beauty and personal care products don’t need engagement?
If social media rules in this industry, then email marketing should have incorporated the strategy by combining the top influencers’ photos and videos or animated GIFs via email.
You can’t downplay this because email marketing creates an opportunity with highly personalized interactions and real-time data. You could email subscribers a reminder of their top favorite beauty brands and how they can qualify for deals no one can refuse.
The best way to integrate your brand is by placing a header banner where your website is linked. It should flash right in front of your subscriber upon opening the email.
It won’t be surprising that more subscribers would visit your website than scroll down what you offer from your email.
Luxury Brands
Capturing stunning photos with the stories behind them is how luxury brands use and explore them as a marketing tool. And what better way to make that happen than through email?
These brands have perfected the art of dealing with and inciting emotions through photos and videos to convey their message. They know how to connect and engage with people in such a powerful.
They can use every season and make their brand stand out. It becomes more captivating when they email their subscribers every season of the year across all stages in the buyer’s journey.
Wedding Industry
Email marketing is one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. It’s a crucial component in the travel and hospitality industry.
That’s because it attracts the most attention in this industry since it can create direct revenue opportunities with past, present, and future customers. It also boosts revenue opportunities throughout each customer’s purchasing life cycle.
It can be catered to whoever the customer is. They can come from any of these three groups of email audiences:
-consumers (leisure or business)
-travel intermediaries (travel agents, wholesalers)
-corporate clients
Other reasons email marketing can be beneficial in the hospitality enterprise include a wide range of audiences, a more personalized approach, and rich media capabilities.
There’s also the ease of access and sharing with greater audiences (i.e., friends, family, and colleagues) when using email.
According to The Knot , the average engagement length is 14.5 months. This plays a huge part in the success of email marketing in this industry.
Every stage of the buyer’s journey is important, which is captured beautifully in the wedding industry. The engagement, preparation, and wedding celebration are items to grapple with your audience.
This is also an industry that attracts attention to itself by simply storytelling. Plus, email marketing with photos and videos brings more colors and creative juices that subscribers can’t get enough of.
LOJO's Recommended Strategy
Here at LOJO, we know you are wearing many hats. You also wish to save more time and focus on higher priorities in your business.
We are with you. We want to help you reach your goal of impacting your target audience.
We can also help you increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty through email marketing. We can interact with your prospects wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
And as part of your content team, we can plan, create, distribute, share, and publish content via different platforms. It could be social media posts, blogs, website content, podcasts, print publications, and so much more.
As an implementer of the inbound methodology, LOJO Digital Marketing is committed to building meaningful, lasting relationships with its clients. We can also tailor-fit recommendations to make all its customers reach success.
We can share our insights, strategies, and recommendations to achieve the maximum potential of your marketing efforts.
Our high-performance team can do the work to attract, engage, and delight your prospect. We do this by helping you target your ads, control your costs, measure your success, and manage your campaigns.
With this inbound methodology, we get things done to turn strangers into customers and customers into promoters. For more information about our services, call us today at (916) 303-4080 or drop us a message.
