Email marketing is an excellent way to generate new customers, but the trick is knowing how to get their email and what messages to send once you’ve acquired it. This article shares the tips and strategies that will help you succeed with email marketing and beat the competition.
Email marketing has the potential to provide a return of $36 for every $1 spent, which is a massive ROI. Therefore, it’s among the most cost-effective marketing methods if you get it right. Whether your business is launching or has an established reputation, it’s never too late to overhaul your email messages to increase the level of engagement and sales.
Advantages of Email Marketing
Before we dive into the strategies of generating new leads with email marketing, let’s take a look at a few reasons why it’s a great marketing channel for any business.
- Low cost: generating new customers with email marketing is inexpensive since you can integrate email capture forms into existing digital infrastructure. For example, adding email capture to a website doesn’t cost much. Also, sending emails to a large subscriber list is negligible compared to the possible returns.
- Multiple messages: once you have an email address, you can send as many messages as possible until the lead unsubscribes. This allows you to send multiple messages to convert the lead into a buyer. On average, you’ll need to contact leads around 7 times before they buy, which is why email marketing is effective.
- Targeting: through customized emails and list segmentation, you can send the right offers to the relevant leads. This increases the conversion rate and reduces the unsubscribe rate.
- Content marketing: email can be part of your content marketing strategy. In fact, you can repurpose articles and video content into emails, which is a fast and effective way to create email copy.
- Measurable: most autoresponder services offer analytics tools to help you understand campaign success. This includes the number of people that opened your emails, unsubscribe rate, and readers that bounced.
How to Create an Email Capture Form
Email capture forms are required to extract emails from visitors, and there are multiple things you should know to increase the chances of success. This section shares the top tips you should implement in the next email capture form:
- Fewer fields: only ask for the name and email in the capture form. Adding more fields decreases the chance of a successful subscription. That’s because some visitors might not be bothered to complete a long capture form. You can ask for more details after communicating with the lead through email.
- CTA: the CTA (call to action) is a message that prompts a visitor to perform a specific action – in this case, it would be to fill out the email capture form. The CTA should be short and stand out. Also, it must indicate the advantages of signing up for your email list. An example of a good CTA is “Sign up with our newsletter to get the best discounts”.
- Placement: it’s important to place the email capture form where the visitor will see it. Hence, placement above the fold will increase the subscription rate. Also, you can use website analytics tools to determine where users interact most on your pages. These locations are also great for placing the email capture form.
- Incentivization: consider giving something away for free to incentivize website visitors to subscribe. This could be a free ebook, video series giveaway, and even free samples. However, to shoot the subscription rate through the roof, you need to ensure the incentive is targeted to your audience.
- Mobile-friendly: it’s important to create mobile-friendly forms to ensure that the subscriber rate doesn’t drop on smartphones. At least half of all internet traffic is generated from mobile devices, so the UI for this audience must be as good as the desktop.
The Importance of A/B Split Testing
A/B split testing is a strategy to test two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. The idea is to send equal amounts of traffic to each page and measure metrics such as the conversion rate.
Hence, you can create two pages with different email capture forms to find the ones that convert better. You can change the number of fields, offers or CTA messages. However, ensure that you only change one variable at a time to determine what change contributes to the performance change.
Furthermore, sending meaningful traffic to each page is important to draw conclusions. As a rule of thumb, 10,000 pageviews is a great start to ensure you can generate a good sample size.
How to Choose an Autoresponder Service
Now that you have a strategy for increasing the subscriber rate with email marketing, you need to find a good autoresponder service. These companies will be used to create email lists and send emails to subscribers.
Make sure advanced features are available such as sending attachments like audio, images, videos, and documents. Also, automated spelling and grammar checking tools help ensure emails are crafted professionally.
Autoresponder tools with templates help users quickly create visually impressive emails that will impress subscribers. Hence, check the template library before signing up for an account.
Finally, the tools available to automate and personalize emails must be top-notch. This helps manage large email lists and increase the ROI of each subscriber. Does the autoresponder provide integration with your CRM (customer relationship management) software? This would be ideal for automation.
Final Thoughts
Creating a successful email campaign can be a fun experience since you get to interact with your target customer. Not sure what type of emails to write? You can subscribe to newsletters from your competitors to get inspiration. Pay attention to the subject line, email format, sending frequency and other factors.
You should start generating your email list as soon as possible. It’s one of the best ways to get repeat buyers, and email lists are a valuable asset for any business. You can use the tips in this article to succeed with email marketing in any niche.
