Let's Talk About Email Marketing

 

Hi everyone. 

It's another day and that means another post on my journey to learning about digital marketing. 

Today we will be deep diving into Email Marketing. This might be a lot to take in so relax and take your time to read and understand all that I have to share. 

Email marketing is an excellent way to grow your business and connect with your customers. A way to build your email marketing list is by asking customers that use your platform online to sign up for a newsletter on/from your site. This is a good way to find out what your customers want and what kind of content they will like to see. 

After gathering the emails of your customers, the next step is to do something called customer segmentation. If you have customers that buy different things from you, you will have to categorize them based on their interest in your business. For example, if you sell animal(pet) food, it means you'll have customers that buy dog food and ones that buy cat food or fish feed, right? So you create a customer segmentation and separate them to create different email content based on their interest in your business. Because let's think about it, you don't want to be sending your dog lover customer emails about cat food.

Another example is a beauty salon. A typical beauty salon does nails, hair and lashes, right? Not all your customers come in to do all three, so you'll categorize them into what they come for and send them emails based on that. That way you keep them engaged on what their interests are. Remember, interest is very important to keep your customers interested in your content and not just overlook them like every other email. 

After you have done this, there is a typical format as to how to approach your customers so that you don't appear as "clingy" or desperate;

• The first email should be an introductory email to your newsletter subscribers. A soft introduction about who you are and the reason for creating the email content. This is a gentle way to get your customers to really warm up to your business and be open to reading the next content you drop.
• The second email should be about what your business is about and the products to sell or services you offer
• The third email and beyond will be content about their interest in your business, tips and offers. 

Next, we will talk about email marketing campaigns. Email marketing campaigns are very helpful in improving customer retention and building brand awareness of a business. There are tools that help in making the process easier for you so that you can manage and monitor. Most email marketing tools have a few things in common;

• contact database that stores all of your customers' information
• an online form you can add to your website 
• ability to schedule when your emails will go out 
• tracking what people do when they receive your email
• tracks who click the link in your email and track what they do on your site.

Next is Email Subject lines. This thing here can make or break your marketing and make your customers uninterested in your emails in general. Using the right email subject line is very important to keep your customers interested, because, come on, your customers most likely have a lot of emails coming in daily, your subject line will be how they would judge whether to open your email or not. 

Avoid using solar signs and exclamation marks for subject lines, as they are unattractive and could trigger the spam feature and your mail will end up in spam. Your approach shouldn't be that of an attack but a soft one. For example, don't use subject lines like "buy this cat food today!', no, your customers would most likely unsubscribe. Use something like "Have You Tried This New Cat Food Recipe Yet, Florence?", that is if your customer's name is Florence, lol. This has a softer tone to it. So use this approach and your customers will stay engaged. 

As you continue to grow in email marketing, you would have to advance in your methods. When you first start it would be like a trial and error phase. There is something called AB Testing. With this tool, you can put out two different types of email content and compare how both are doing and which performed better. That way you can improve better in your email content marketing.  This tool alongside other analytics tools can help you measure the success metrics of your email marketing campaign. 

Let's look at three useful email marketing metrics, shall we;

• email campaign open rate: it is the ratio of people who have actively opened the email versus the total number of people who received it. 
• conversion rate: it shows how many people you shared the email with compared to the number of people who actually ended up registering for the newsletter
• Click-through rate: the number of people that actually click the links in your email. 

These metrics help you measure if your method is working and how well your customers are interacting and connecting with your business. 

Phew! This was a lot. I hope you were able to read through and understand how to go about email marketing. 

That will be all for today. Till the next post.

Franny.