Starting a new business can be both exciting and stressful. The best advice that an entrepreneur can be given is; adequately prepare for all eventualities and, if possible, do your research. Email marketing, a time-tested marketing channel for building strong relationships with your customers, should be an important part of your marketing strategy. Check out the text below to learn the most important steps you’ll need to take towards building a robust email marketing strategy.
Save Money and Time With Automation
Contrary to popular opinion, incorporating automation into your marketing efforts does not mean that your otherwise unique communication style would fade away into dry, lifeless uniformity. Allowing automation to do the heavy lifting for you will free up your time to focus on other, more important, aspects of your business. Instead of wasting your time on repetitive, administrative tasks, your team can devise creative strategies to engage with new customers and grow your book of business.
Take, for example, the insurance industry. Some insurance agents need to keep in touch with thousands of policyholders throughout the year. For example, instead of spending time and resources on recruiting additional staff, insurance agencies reach out to third-party SaaS companies which provide them the tools needed to send automated emails every time their insurance policy is about to expire. Marketing and communication platforms are tailored to the needs of specific industries, and insights from a recent automated email marketing study confirmed this. Platforms that are tailored to meet the needs of insurance agencies, such as the example we just mentioned, can yield email open rates of almost 50% – a remarkable success compared to the average of 21.36% that is achieved with regular email service providers such as MailChimp.
Keep Your Email Campaign True To Your Brand
A successful email campaign is one that converts subscribers, i.e. gets them to complete a specific action. Suppose your goal is getting subscribers to attend an event. A click-through to the registration page is just one step along the way, but a completed registration counts as conversion. Before you even begin to set up an email campaign, you’ll need to feel comfortable with your brand voice. This means knowing and actively using the tone of voice which is best suited for your target market is key to actually connecting with your audience and making them feel comfortable enough to engage with your company online. Brand voice also includes building up a unique visual style, complete with a logo and distinctive brand colors. After all, your email recipient is expected to land on your website. A strong brand image helps make your emails instantly recognizable, making it more likely that the trust you’ve built with your audiences will translate across multiple platforms.
Invest in Mobile-Friendly Design
According to recent studies, as many as 61% of all emails are opened via mobile devices, a trend that is only expected to become more prevalent. This is an important aspect of your user experience to consider when setting up an email campaign. If you want to grab, and more importantly keep, their attention long enough for them to convert, you’ll need to test the way your emails look across a number of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Not optimizing your email marketing campaigns for mobile devices is guaranteed to impede their overall success.
Make Audiences Feel Special With Personalization
As a new business, you’ll need to build up an ideal customer persona, and shape your marketing strategies accordingly. Every subscriber on your email list wants to feel as if you were speaking to them, directly. This is why email personalization, such as addressing your recipients by their name and/or including their profession, matter. Automation can be a crucial part of creating a personalized email campaign, and automated marketing and communication platforms will also ensure that email messages are only sent to people who are the most likely to convert. You can create multiple parallel campaigns which greet new subscribers with a welcome email, send existing customers get upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and offer repeat customers special discounts.
Measure Your Success Regularly
As you decide to start new business ventures, differentiating between a hit and a miss will be crucial to your success. Which decisions are smart moves, accelerating your rise to the top, and which ones are sabotaging you? Nearly every aspect of your business will need to be closely scrutinized, and your email marketing campaigns are no exception. In fact, keeping score will actually put you ahead of the curve compared to your competition. Measuring the open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate on a regular basis contributes to a higher ROI over time. Reuse the subject lines and design choices that were the most popular among your subscribers, and ditch the ones that fell flat.
Conclusion
If you want your audience to trust you with their time and their money, you need effective email campaigns. Make sure your campaigns are in sync with your brand image, and don’t forget to invest in responsive design. For a small upfront investment, automated email marketing solutions will provide you with the time needed to get creative with other parts of your business and reach your business goal quicker.