Are you using email marketing to help grow your business? Staying top of mind with your current and prospective clients via email marketing is an essential marketing channel and one that has a high return on investment.
According to Litmus, the average return on investment for email marketing is 38 to 1. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take that kind of return all day and every day!
Email can be a fantastic tool to add value to and nurture your target audience. If you are just getting started, the first thing you need to do is build an email list and pick the email marketing platform you want to use. (Visit the online version of this story on residentialsystems.com for links that will help with those processes.)
Once you are ready to start sending email marketing messages, the following secrets will serve you well.
1. Know Your Audience
To add value to your audience, you first need to understand what they will find valuable as it relates to your business. Knowing your audience may sound obvious, but many overlook this. Armed with this information, you can create a plan for what type of information you need to send via email and how often you should send it.
2. Focus on Mobile
Did you know that 61.9 prcent of email opens occur on a mobile device? That’s a lot! But, more importantly, it means now more than ever, your email messages must be easy to read on smaller screens. All of the popular email marketing platforms have mobile-friendly email templates, so make sure you pick a good one and test to see how your messages look on a phone. If people can’t easily read your email messages on a mobile device, they will quickly delete them.
3. Consistency Is Key
This secret comes back to my first tip on knowing your audience. How often does your audience want to receive email messages from you?
I am on email lists that send daily, weekly, and monthly. You might think daily is too much, but the daily lists I’m on have significant enough value to me that I’m okay with it. Offering value is the key!
The frequency you choose should be one your audience wants AND a frequency you can meet. The last thing you want to do is start sending daily and then fall off the face of the earth for two weeks.
4. Personalize
Personalizing your email messages is a great way to remain relevant and will significantly impact how many people open the email you send. Outside of using first names, one simple way to personalize your email messages is by segmenting your email list. For example, if you do residential and commercial work, you might segment your list this way. With segments, you can send messages that are relevant to each group and make your messages more personal to their wants and needs.
5. Use Calls to Action
Email marketing should help you grow your business, but you’ve got to ask for the business to get it. Most people don’t take action unless they are called or challenged to do so. Set a goal for each email marketing message you send and create a specific call to action you can include in the message.
6. Take Advantage of Automation
With most email marketing platforms, you can set up what we call automated email sequences, which will save you a ton of time. Let’s say you offer a “5 Common Home Theater Mistakes to Avoid” cheat sheet on your website. You can use your email marketing platform to email the cheat sheet to the prospect, but you can also continue to send a series of follow-up email messages to get them familiar with your business and how you can help them.
Other helpful email sequences you might want to use: customer onboarding, review requests, and after-project follow-up.
7. Nail Your Subject Lines
The goal of your subject lines is to pique interest enough that people choose to open your email. Did you know 47 percent of people choose to open an email based on the subject line?
Subject lines are super important and will impact the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Keeping your subject lines short (less than 60 characters) and to the point is an excellent practice. For more subject line ideas, check out this resource: https://optinmonster.com/101-email-subject-lines-your-subscribers-cant-resist/.
I hope you found these tips helpful. Email marketing can and should be a critical marketing channel for your business. Email marketing is relatively inexpensive, and it’s simple to get started. All you need to do is to take the first step, and I’ve given you plenty of resources in the online version of this article to do so.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you need more help.
Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing (www.rialtomarketing.com). He spent 10+ years in the consumer electronics industry as a partner in a distribution company before getting into marketing consulting and digital marketing. He helps take the guesswork out of marketing for system integrators so their business’ can grow. www.facebook.com/rialtomarketing; www.twitter.com/rialtomarketing
