What is email marketing? Email marketing is the process of collecting emails of leads and sending them emails from your business. What this usually looks like is providing some kind of valuable content for the lead in exchange for their name and email address. Then the business will send the lead the piece of content that they were promised along with some kind of nurture and sales email sequence. A nurture email sequence is used to keep your businesses in the mind of the lead and a sales email sequence is used to offer your products and services to the lead. There are over 4 billion email users worldwide and this is projected to grow over the years, not slow down. If your business can get in your prospective customer’s email inbox, that is a HUGE asset for your business and will lead to growth and revenue generation. Here are some main reasons why email marketing needs to be a part of your business’s marketing strategy.
As a business, one of your main goals is to convert leads into paying customers. Email marketing is a perfect way to convert those leads. The ultimate goal of email marketing is to convert these leads into paying customers. Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to do this too. The average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% compared to a tweet at around .5%. That’s a 600% increase. Looking at search engines, 2.49%, and social media, .59%, email still beats them at 4.24%. Another benefit of email marketing is that it is highly measurable. You can use campaign monitors to view metrics like opens, bounces, clicks, forwards, shares, and more.
When you’re investing in services to grow your business, you want to make sure that it has a high ROI. Email marketing yields an average 3800% return on investment for businesses. So every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $38. . . Think about that for a second. That’s insane! You won’t get this anywhere else. So why is this? I think it’s the relationship you build with your leads. If you watched the SEO module you know that three of the SEO rules were: Serve the best possible content for your audience, create a positive website user experience, and prioritize VALUABLE content on your website. Well, this also pertains to email marketing. If you nurture your leads with emails that follow those guidelines, you’ll turn them into paying customers when it’s time to ask them to buy.
Most people prefer using social networks as a personal form of communication with their friends and family. With email, it is a more professional medium and people would rather receive information about products and services they are interested in here. MarketingSherpa did a study where they found that people had 55% more promotional content through email than social media.
Some platforms may surpass email marketing for some time. . . but not in the long term. Take MySpace for an example. . . in 2005 & 2008 I, it was the largest social networking site in the world and even surpassed Google in 2006. Where is MySpace now? Imagine if your business invested a significant amount of time and money into building an audience on this platform only for it to disappear in a year or two. That would be catastrophic. Email has had a long time of stability and is only projected to keep growing consistently. Not only that, it’s not complicated! If you aren’t tech-savvy, you don’t even need a developer to help you.
Now that we know why you need email marketing, I want to go over exactly how you can get started, collecting emails, and creating a sales and nurture campaign. You can do all of this by yourself and don’t need a developer. Here it is, step-by-step:
To begin email marketing, you need email marketing software to manage your email campaigns. There is a lot of email marketing software to use, free and paid. I could do a full breakdown of email software, but I think Metrics Media’s “Best Email Marketing Software in 2021” video covers this topic greatly. The link will be posted in the description and the popup tag in the top right of this video. Watch that video and choose the software that best suits your business. Follow a tutorial on how to sign up for the software that you choose.
Once you choose software and finish signing up, you need to make sure that you have the best chances of getting in your lead’s inbox instead of their promotions tab. This is called deliverability. One great way to increase your deliverability is to add SPF records in your DNS Settings. Now, unfortunately, the way of doing this varies depending on your email provider and your domain provider. If you have a developer helping you, tell them you need this done and they will know what to do. I bring this up because of how important it is. Think, how often do you check your email promotions tab? I never check it.
The last thing you want to do is study your software. This can be boring but I know firsthand that if you try to skip out on this step, you will be losing valuable tips that can improve your email marketing deliverability and conversion rates. Also, it’s a good idea to make sure you know your way around the software that you are using. I recommend watching videos, spending time clicking around in the software, and just getting comfortable with the interface.
Now that your software is finished and set up, it’s time to collect emails from your potential customers. This is called lead generation. This is the fun part because you get to see your email list building fast right in front of your eyes! It’s like magic, instead of having to cold-call hundreds of people, they will come to you… and if you do this right, they are already pre-qualified for your services. There are many different strategies for lead generation and I’m going to cover a few of my favorite ones, but there’s one thing that all these strategies need. A piece of free valuable content that is relevant to your business in exchange for their name and email. This is something that you should not half-ass. When you are creating this piece of content, make sure it solves a problem that your audience has. Make it so useful to them that they have to have it because it wouldn’t make sense for them to not get it. Here are a few valuable pieces of content you can provide to your leads:
Once you have this piece of content created, you’ll need to create a campaign to automate sending this piece of content to your audience once they sign up for it. Once again, doing this varies with each email marketing software so you’ll have to look up a tutorial on how to do this with your email marketing software. Usually, you’ll have to click a button that says Create New Campaign. There you will name your campaign, create a group that the campaign will be sent to, create a subject line, and then you’ll be able to design the email. In this email, you’ll provide them with the content you promised in exchange for their information. For example, if you offered a free PDF, the email would look something like this: Hey FNAME, Thank you for your interest in our PDF. You can download it by clicking the button below. Under this is an image of the PDF, and under the image is the Download button. This button should be a direct download link to the PDF. Once you finish designing the email, send yourself a test email to make sure that it looks correct and functions properly.
Now that you have this campaign ready, it’s time to offer it to your audience in exchange for their name and email address. The easiest way to do this without a marketing expert is to use your Facebook Page to run automated ads to your web page where they can sign up for that piece of content. The two things you’ll need for this are a website and a Facebook Page. You can check out the Facebook Page Module and the Website Module on exactly how to get those two things set up if you haven't already. Let’s go over how the website should look like then how to set up your Facebook Ad.
There are two things we need to do with the webpage. Create the design and connect our email marketing software to the form on the webpage. First the design:
Once you have the web page created, you need to get your Facebook Ads set up to send leads to your web page. Here’s exactly how to do this on desktop:
Now that you have a lead generation system in place to collect emails while you sleep, you need to create a sales campaign to sell your products and services to your customers and a nurture campaign to always stay in your customer’s minds. Both of these campaigns are a series of emails that are automatically sent to the email subscribers in a group on a set basis after they subscribe to your email campaigns. This is usually a paid feature in most email marketing software but if you are using MailerLite, it’s free. You’ll have to watch a tutorial on how to do this because it varies from software to software. Make sure to test each email before you turn on this automation to make sure they are working properly. Let’s get started with a sales campaign first
What is a sales campaign? These emails are meant to sell your products and services and should have a Direct CTA at the end of each email. There is no other objective in these emails. After they receive their free piece of content, this automation needs to happen within the next day if not a couple of hours. I recommend creating 5 emails for this sequence. Pre-write them in Google Docs. This is how they should look like:
What is a nurture campaign? These emails aren’t meant to hard-sell your products and services, but more to help your subscribers with valuable information about solving their problems as it relates to your business. So going back to a fitness business, their nurture campaign would be a series of emails providing helpful information about dieting, weight loss, exercises, and other emails relating to fitness. These emails should be sent regularly such as once or twice a week or even once a month.
Email Marketing keeps you in the mind of your customers and leads, generates leads for your business, and converts lead to paying customers, therefore growing your business and generating more revenue. If you neglect this, you will miss out on a HUGE opportunity. If you follow through and get started with Email Marketing, your business will have:
Get started on this ASAP. You now have all the steps to starting with email marketing. While we don’t do Email Marketing for all of our client’s, we do select a few to provide this service to. If you want to save yourself time and effort, contact us and my team will do it for you along with other services to help your business convert your website visitors into paying customers. Click the “Get Started” button, or go to pickasite.com/get-started.
