With all the social media marketing tactics that are being floated to improve your business profitability, you would think that the conventional techniques have gone out of vogue. Call me old-school, if you want, but I still believe that the conventional marketing technique of email marketing still holds a special place in today’s world. While most of the large and small businesses do have an effective mailing list, it’s a shame that they don’t know how to use this list properly for monetization purposes. Here, I have listed some simple, practical, and result-oriented ways that you may want to apply in your business as well to get the maximum use of email marketing.
Natural and easy way of sign-up
Having a proper and ethical email list is essential if you want to improve your brand awareness and profitability. When I started my fashion business online, I had a website ready and had some tools in place to check the traffic that my site was generating. On my homepage, I had given a link to a subscriber form that my users might want to click if they are interested in getting emails about my business. A couple of months passed and I was frustrated to note that not even 1/3rd of my website visitors clicked on the subscriber form link that I had given on my site.
It was only when I researched the internet and connected with similar business owners on social media platforms that the issue dawned on me! My subscriber form was ethical, but it wasn’t made easy for my users to sign up. I understood that people might not be very interested in scrolling through my entire home page and then finally clicking on the link that I had given at the end of the page. I only made a slight change, and it has worked wonders for me. I included the subscriber form link at various places on my site (home page, social media platforms, sidebar, header, footer, at the time of exit, etc.) so that the link was easily visible and clickable. This is one of the most natural ways of getting a good email list of genuinely interested customers to improve your visibility.
Improve your brand recognition and visibility
Email marketing is one of the best ways to improve your brand’s visibility and position your product well in the minds of your users. When brand awareness increases, your website visitors will eventually turn into customers, thereby increasing your profitability. Whenever you send out emails to your target audiences, ensure that you use your brand logo, colors, mission, and vision statement and your objective in each of them so that people remember your brand well.
Don’t go overboard by sending emails to your contact list every day. This will compel them to unsubscribe quickly. Ensure that you use your email marketing skills diligently to share information about new arrivals, discounts, stock clearance, and the like. Also, encourage your users with a voucher or a gift if they forward your email to a specific number of contacts. For example, when I started sending out promotional emails, I used this line as my last call-to-action statement, and it produced magical results – Forward this email to 10 of your friends copying us to win a complimentary voucher worth $50. Use something like this to entice your customers to read more into your emails and act upon them with utmost sincerity.
Don’t shy away from sharing success stories
When your customers are happy with your products/services, I see no reason why you shouldn’t share the fact with the world. Your customers may leave good reviews on your website about a product that they recently tried. These reviews are visible only to people who visit your site and only to those who search for that particular product. Why not share the joy with the world to let them know how credible you are? campaign.
Send an email to your contact list about a few impressive customer testimonials with an attractive subject like “What are you waiting for”, “You could be next”, “You are missing out on this” or something on these lines. This will make your audiences intrigued and will compel them to open your email to check on what they have been missing. Thus, they will get to know about the success stories of your loyal customers. This may motivate them to visit your website to check on your products. This results in two benefits – more people visiting your site means more traffic for you and the visits could also eventually lead to potential sales as well!
Email-specific offers
After so many years of being in the business, I have understood one simple fact about my customers – each one expects and appreciates preferential treatment. When I send out generic promotional messages and details about season sales, I don’t see a huge jump in my sales figures. However, when I advertise offers for a selection of my customers, they are super-happy to grab the offers. Those days, I have been pleasantly shocked seeing my sales figures increasing like never before. Apart from sending out promotional offers and other updates about my business through emails, I also attract my email-list customers with an exclusive offer.
For example, once I had written to my contacts this way “Use code xxx if you have seen this email to avail an extra 10%discount when you check-out”. The response was phenomenal! The people who received my email were thrilled that they were being given the preferential treatment of an additional 10%discount. They were more thrilled knowing that the other customers who were on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and anything else but not on emails weren’t qualified for the discount! So that’s the mantra, these days. Today, I send out special offers for the contacts on my email list twice a year, informing about them additional discounts, so that they are happy. Eventually, it is a win-win situation for me. This strategy has been working fine so far, and I am sure that it will work wonders for your business profitability as well.
