6 Ways to Effectively Use Email Marketing

The typical person checks their email 74 times a day – three times as often as they check their social media accounts or messaging apps. Doesn’t it make sense to use email to reach your customers?

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to acquire and retain your customers. It’s also one of the most cost effective ways, costing only a few cents per message – the average return-on-investment (ROI) for an email marketing campaign is 122%.

How do you effectively use email marketing to acquire and retain customers?

Build Your Email List

Your email marketing campaign success is only as good as your email list, so get your customers to sign up anyway you can.

Put a subscription sign-up form on every page of your website  and make it easy for your customers to see. You don’t want them to have to scroll to the bottom of your page to sign up because they might decide it’s not worth the effort.

Ask customers during the checkout process if they’d like to sign up to receive emails from your company. If you run an e-commerce business, put a sign-up form on the checkout page. If you run a brick-and-mortar business, have your cashiers ask customers at the register if they’d like to sign up to receive emails.

Offer a welcome discount to entice customers to sign up, and make it easy to share your emails so that your customers can get their friends to sign up themselves.

Personalize Your Emails

Most readers expect emails to be personalized and will quickly delete emails that aren’t personalized.

The easiest way to personalize an email is to use the recipient’s name in the body of the email and even in the subject line. You can also reference a recent purchase or visit to your store, or tell them you’ve missed them if they haven’t shopped in a while.

You can also segment your email list based on their demographics, past purchases, location, etc. By segmenting your list, you can send each group emails based on what they’re interested in. If you sell clothing, you can send one set of emails to the men on your list, another set to parents, etc.

You can also segment your email list based on customers you know are going to make a purchase and people who signed up to see what you’re all about and might buy later. You can change the information in each email based on whether someone is actively looking to purchase or just wants to browse.

Make Your Emails Stand Out

Like you, the people on your email list get hundreds of emails a day, so you want your emails to stand out.

Each email should have a strong subject line that sells the benefit of the email to encourage people to open it. Personalizing the subject line – “Happy Birthday, Mary – Surprise Inside!” – will cause your customers to want to open your emails.

Use templates to create clean and easy-to-read emails. You should also make sure that you’re using professional photographs and eye-catching graphics.

Most people check their emails on their phone, so make your emails optimized for mobile. Nothing is more frustrating than opening an email on your phone and having a hard time reading it – if that happens too often, people will stop opening your emails.

Make Your Emails Valuable

Once you’ve gotten the people to open your emails, provide value. Ensuring that your emails provide value  will convert your readers to customers.

Providing exclusive discounts, coupons, and sales is always a good idea, but if you’re solely providing coupons or discounts, your customers might only read your emails when they know they’re going to buy something.

To make sure your customers are reading every email, offer useful information. If you own a clothing store, provide your readers with the top 2017 fashion trends, including pictures of your products.

Combining useful information and discounts will lead to higher conversion rates and a larger number of sales.

Build Relationships with Your Customers

Use your emails to build relationships with your customers. In all your emails, encourage your customers to reach out to you through social media or email with any questions or concerns. You can also ask them to rate you on Facebook or relevant review sites.

Your emails provide a great opportunity for you to get to know your customers better. At the end of each email, pose a question and encourage your customers to reply to the email with an answer. You can ask them what type of information they’d like to see in future emails or ask them what their favorite thing is about your business. By asking questions, your customers will feel valued – instead of feeling like they’re just being used as part of your marketing strategy.

Track Your Results

When you’ve spent a lot of time building your email list and formulating the perfect content for your emails, you want to make sure your efforts are worth it. Track your results. You’ll want to track how many of your emails are being opened and read.

You’ll also want to track which emails lead to the most sales so you know what information your customers are most drawn to.