In the world of online business, having a strong email campaign can be an enormous asset to your entire marketing plan. Being able to contact customers with newsletters, promotions, and friendly reminders keeps you on their mind and in their inbox. Getting someone to give you their email is much easier than getting them to buy something from you, though getting that email can very well be the first step towards that purchase. With the opportunity to follow up with clients, your email list can help build a strong rapport and lasting clients. The question is, then, how to build a better email list?
Getting The Emails
Utilize a Landing Page
Drive traffic (often by using ads) to a landing page specifically designed to motivate a client to leave their email address. Have a strong call to action, telling the visitor exactly why they should leave their contact information for you. The motivation could be anything from a give away, a special discount, newsletters, or the promise of updates about new products and sales. Make sure your page is free of any distractions and gets the point across: leave your email here!
Offering discount codes as an incentive for the visitor providing their email has proven to be extremely effective. Once they have the discount, not only do you have their information, but they are also more likely to buy. New buyers can be wary of a new product or company, and offering the same product for less can make the stakes seem less high. Even if they don’t purchase right away, you have the opportunity to follow up with them and remind them about the money they can save, along with why they should choose you. A lot of sites offer an initial discount when you sign up for their email campaign. Why? Not only does it increase the odds of a first purchase, it increases the odds of purchases later when they can remind you about their amazing product.
Utilize Ads To Drive Traffic To The Landing Page
If you want to get the most bang for your effort’s buck, you don’t want to get everyone and their mother to end up on your landing page—you want your target audience landing there, one who will actually be potential clients. Creating ads targeted for your likely clients can save you a lot of time and money on marketing. Facebook, for example, has developed a system that allows you to advertise directly to your target audience. You can select general aspects, such as age, gender, location, and interests (evaluated by “likes”) to the audience you think would be most interested in your product. You pay Facebook a minimal fee for every visitor that clicks to your landing page, a fee well worth the chance of having a member of your target audience coming face to face with your landing page.
Refer a Friend
A simple strategy, but an effective one, will always be the refer-a-friend offer. Someone forwards your email to a friend, they get a discount. If said friend signs up for an email, maybe they both get an extra discount. Either way, you have one loyal customer sending your product to someone who they think would be interested, someone who likely trusts your customer more than a random sales associate. The more people you get to your landing page, the more opportunity you have for nurturing relationships and building a larger base of clients.
Strategic Opt In Boxes
Just in case visitors either start out or end up on a page that’s not your landing page doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be prompted to subscribe to your email campaign! Having a sign up box at the bottom of every page in a header or footer is sometimes all a visitor needs to leave an email address—some visitors are interested enough they don’t need prompting in the form of promised discounts or freebies. Putting it near a navigation bar—somewhere the eye will frequently travel to while going through your site—will help draw the eye to the email sign up, something that can be hard to do on busy web pages with a lot to look at. Always have one at the bottom of blog posts (visitors will be more likely to subscribe if they made it all the way through the post and were intrigued) and at the checkout page (they liked your product enough to buy it once, after all!).
How To Use the Emails
The Drip Email Sequence
Drip marketing is, simply, a sequence of emails sent by automatic software to a predetermined list of contacts according to needs and preferences. Marketing software like Mailchimp is crucial to success with this strategy, but is easy and quick to use. For this type of marketing, you want to keep content simple but enticing—not enough to overwhelm someone, but enough to keep them interested (or get them interested!) You can even set up an automated response to be sent to brand new subscribers after sign up! This would include the offer made in return for the customer’s email, whether that was a discount code, a free promotional item, or even just a “thank you for joining us!”
Using drip marketing mass emails like newsletters, blog posts, or news about promotions and sales can continue to save you a great deal of time. You only have to create content once and your work is done. You don’t have to stress over whether or not you forgot to send a welcome email to a new customer—the software takes care of all of that for you. It helps keep you in the customer’s mind, building a familiarity and a trust over time.
Offer Exciting Promotions
Offering promotions, discounts, or sample products are great to get people to trust you with their email, but it may not be enough to keep from getting sent to the spam folder later. You need to continue to provide a reason for clients to open your emails, and one of the best ways to do that is to occasionally offer new promotions. Advertising new clearance items, discounts on a new product or service, or a holiday sale can all be motivators for clients to return to your site and to purchase now. If the deal is really good, they might even pass it along to their friends. We’ve all signed up for emails that we regret, quickly unsubscribing when it feels like there’s nothing in it for us but an extra click to send the email to the trash. Offering exciting promotions will help keep them clicking on “open” instead of “trash,” and could easily lead to increases in purchases at the same time.
Offer Loyalty Incentives
Loyalty incentives add a personal touch, even if it’s pre-established and sent via a drip campaign. Offering something special (again, it can be a discount, a sale, or a freebie of any sort) to customers who have stayed with you for a while can make them feel appreciated. Whether the client has been with you a certain length of time or has purchased over a certain amount, offering incentives for loyalty will help keep that loyalty and make it stronger.
Get Competitive
Contests incite the competitive side in all of us, so hosting a contest be a fruitful way to get customers engaged. One of the best aspects of a successful contest? It requires clients to actually interact with you. Again, if it’s something that captures their interest, they could end up sharing it with friends and family (especially if you encourage them to). Asking clients to make a video advertising your product to get a freebie, for example, can end up as great advertising for you, and free items for them.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to keep your company fresh in your clients’ minds without making it feel like you’re just milking them from money—it takes away from the aggressive salesperson feel.
The key to a great newsletter is obvious: great content. This starts in the headline and goes all the way down to the final punctuation mark. Again, keeping content simple but engaging is what will keep customers reading them. As a general rule of thumb, the more frequent your newsletter is, the shorter it should be. Few people will read a five page newsletter three times a week (though if your customers are willing to, you’re definitely on to something). You also want to make the newsletter visually appealing— planting a big ole’ block of text with nothing breaking it up on a plain white page isn’t quite going to cut it. Using headlines, different fonts, and separating information can make the newsletter manageable for readers to digest.
You can make the newsletter informative or all in good fun. You can post excerpts from the blog posts on your site to your newsletter, boosting your credibility as an expert in the field. You can talk about promotions or about new products. No matter what you decide to do, you have to make the content original and exciting. If it’s not, not only will customers not finish it, they won’t read anymore, either. Using newsletters can be a great way to inform your customers and keep them up to date. Evaluate what your competitors are doing with their newsletters—see what they’re doing right, and what they’re doing wrong. Add something different, something new, something that will make you stand out on your own, and you’ll have content that customers will always make sure to read.
About Tariehk Geter – Tariehk Geter is the Director of Marketing at OSI Affiliate Software and he loves to share strategies that help businesses sell more. Follow him on Twitter and Google+
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