7 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Sales

Does email marketing work? If you manage to do it right, the answer is a resounding yes. If you’re not actively pursuing email marketing as an integral component of your overall strategy, you’re missing out on huge potential profits.

Building an email list and marketing to it is one of the most valuable marketing efforts you can put to improve your sales and overall brand awareness. While there may be a tendency to think email marketing is dead because the audience has moved to the social channels, the reality is far from this.

Email marketing is not dead. It has simply changed. When used effectively, it is a marvellous relationship builder and a highly influential sales tool. However, when not done correctly, it is marked as ‘spam’ (gasp!).

This article highlights the tips you can apply to use email marketing as a tool for laser targeting an audience and promoting click-throughs from prospects who you may have engaged on social media, your website or elsewhere. Let’s dive right in.

1. Get a Plan In Place

Nothing in marketing (or life) works unless you have a plan. Trying to fluke it might work once or twice, but it’s not a habit you want to build for the long run. Go with the odds — figure out the end result and work backwards from there.

Take out a pen and paper and write down the steps you need to take. It can be flexible but start out with a strategy and adjust as necessary. Ask these questions to get an idea of where you’re headed and how to get there:

• Who am I talking to?
• What is my objective?
• What does a good result look like?
• What happens after the reader takes the desired action?
• Do I have the bandwidth for these new expected customers?
• How do I make the process for the receiver smooth and easy?

2. Keep A Single Call-To-Action

It’s imperative to keep emails focused on a single action. Having more than one call-to-action in your email message can confuse your reader. Each email should be clear, simple and directed towards a single response. This will mostly be the action that moves the customer one step closer to what you want them to do.

Here, remember it is important that you provide value before you try to make the sale. Your email marketing campaign can be focused on more long-term goals; but you can still base each email around a single action, such as clicking through to see the benefits of a loyalty or rewards program.

3. Brand Your Email Addresses

The more specific your email address, the better it’ll resonate with your audience. For you to establish your professionalism and convey that you mean business, it is important that you create an email address that communicates that. There are hundreds of new domain extensions available today that can help clearly specify your niche. For example:

• If you’re an eCommerce or retail store, you can go with .STORE
• If you’re into technology, you can go with .TECH
• If you’re a journalist or a publication, you can go with .PRESS
• For personal or community websites, you can go with .ONLINE or .SITE
• For blogs, portfolio or keeping customers up to date, you can go with .BLOG

These domain extensions will then become part of your email address making the sender (you) relevant to the receiver.

4. Automate It

There are a bunch of tools out there for you to create email campaign once and they do the job of repeating them. Most businesses are targeting hundreds and thousands of people at a time, and so it would be impossible to write emails all the time. There are more important things that need your time and attention.

This automation makes it easier for you to reach many without it being much of a hassle. Craft your email and some of the processes can be ‘set and forget’. These can only be ‘some’ because it’ll be difficult to set everything as certain things always need measuring, adjusting and improving.

5. Make It Personal

Put yourself in the shoes of the reader. Wouldn’t you prefer receiving an email that is directly addressed to you compared to something that is generic? There is no bigger ‘turn off’ for a customer than to be treated as one of the crowd. There is a software that can help you personalize emails that make your customers feel special.

It goes beyond mentioning their name in the ‘thank you’ emails when they confirm your subscription. Referring to a customer’s profile details, buying preferences, you can make personalization a powerful selling tool. You could also run a special promotion on their birthday.

6. Keep It Engaging, Original and to the Point

The content of your email needs to be simple, to the point and most importantly engaging. Original and engaging content can help you build a relationship with your audience and influence them in a positive way.

Try incorporating humor into your content. Use GIFs and memes if you’re trying to raise a chuckle, but don’t overdo it. Your reader’s time is precious. Respect that.

A general point for every type of email you send out is to keep it to the point. Every word counts therefore, it pays to get them professionally written. People do not want to read through waffle of irrelevant information to find what they’re really after.

7. Think Mobile

Tired of this one? There is a reason why it keeps coming up everywhere — because it is super important! Over 50 percent of your customers will be reading your emails on their mobile devices. Make sure your emails are optimized to be clicked and navigated from smartphones.

Keep your subject lines short, have enough white space, keep your content consumable and easy to scroll through. These are simple edits but they go a long way in generating positive results. So when you’re penning down your plan, think mobile first.

The points mentioned in this post only touch the surface of what you can do with email marketing, but it is enough to help you kickstart your campaign and explore the possibilities as you go along.

Make efforts to capture email addresses as soon as you can and try to build a large database quickly. Keep this list up-to-date and it’ll be one of the most powerful tools you have.

Share great personalized content and keep monitoring, testing, and tweaking until you get the best results. Keep nurturing your campaigns until they start to look after themselves.

That’s the power of effective email marketing — and if you’re not using it effectively, you’re leaving a LOT of money on the table.

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