Are you using email marketing services to grow your business?

Email marketing is a personalized, direct, and targeted way of communicating with your customers. Be it solving a problem that they might be facing, providing important updates about the products or services that you offer, or sending newsletters, email marketing is the best chance that you have to reach them directly.

Sending mass emails is not email marketing

No, don’t get me wrong. Some people send out millions of emails to a huge list of email addresses scraped from somewhere with a generic email, hoping that the recipient might just open it out of curiosity. Most of these get classified as spam, thus serving no real purpose at all. I am sure that this is not what you want to do!

Email marketing services are much smarter and more sophisticated than this. It is a great way to communicate and stay in touch with your existing and prospective customers in a personalized way.

The intention is not only to market the company’s products or services but genuinely provide some value addition to the customer. This intention is your best bet that the customers will also expect the arrival of your emails, and open them when they reach their mailbox.

How email marketing services work

1. Build an opt-in email list

As mentioned earlier, email marketing services do not bombard random people with emails. Instead, an email list is carefully created using methods like an opt-in or double opt-in form. Some great tools like the WordPress Optin Forms plugin and MailChimp allow you to easily create email lists through your website.

When a user willingly subscribes to your email list, he voluntarily opts in to receive your mails once in a while. Don’t send emails too often, otherwise, you will also run the risk of irritating the customer who will never open your emails at all.

2. Personalize the emails

Once you have a list in hand, create the content that you would want to send via email. Remember that not all emails will be applicable to all the subscribers to your email list.

Apply proper filters and then create interest-based emails that address the customer as “Dear John”, not just “Dear customer”. You should also personalize the subject line wherever possible.

You should not include all the information in the mail body itself. Any email that has too much text or images might hit the junk filters and get classified as spam and never get noticed by the customer at all. If this happens, the entire effort you put into email marketing will get wasted.

To increase the chances of hitting the inbox directly, include an introductory text and then attach a link to an external resource like it a landing page or a website. You can also attach accepted file types to the mail, especially if it is a newsletter. 

When users feel that visiting that link or opening that attachment is going to help them in a way, they will click on it. This will increase your click-through rates significantly.

4. Send it

Once the email is ready, send it immediately or schedule it to be sent at a future date. Again, some tools and plug-ins allow you to automate this process.

Conclusion

Email marketing services are known to have a great reach and are your easiest bet for reaching the customer fast, as most people open their mailbox at least once a day.

Companies across the world are significantly increasing spending on email marketing, so including it in your digital marketing strategy is also a great idea.