In our first chapter of free online email marketing course, we have shared the basic of email marketing and the role of email marketing in business.
In chapter 2 of the email marketing course, we are going to discuss:
- What is an email marketing list?
- What is the significance of the email marketing list in online business?
- How to start an email marketing list?
- What are the best practices to create the email marketing list?
- How to segment the email marketing list for business purposes?
- And, what are the ways to grow an email marketing list?
Here we go!
What is the Email Marketing List?
An email marketing list is a list of subscribers/customers who are a part of periodic mailing distribution by businesses. The email marketing list generally includes each person’s email address rather than a postal address.
As per the experts, it is always a good idea to include as much information with the mailing list as possible; like that:
- Helps in tracking which services/products are used or purchased by that customer.
- Track how they make purchases.
- And, track how often they contact customer service.
Why are contacts and lists important?
For any business, email is always taken as the trustable source to interact with customers. With the prevalence of social media and hundreds of other messaging services, emails are considered the most appropriate way to communicate and share business with customers as well.
However, having an accurate and responsive email marketing list of current customers is always a goldmine for any business. More importantly, having an updated and tested mailing list can be the ultimate reason for any successful marketing campaign.
These lists play a big role in any marketing strategy as they provide leads for sales, a group for testing new products and a group to provide feedback on satisfaction.
Still not sure, read out astonishing email marketing statistics that you need to know……
What is the role of the email marketing list in online business?
More People Will Read Your Messages
No doubt, people are more active on social media than on any other platform. However, there are many ways that add lots of worry surroundings the use of social media. The readers don’t accept every social media post to be read and followed.
Secondly, from a marketer’s perspective, the social media platforms’ algorithms keep on changing which makes it sometimes not easy to share descriptive information.
These algorithm limits won’t let you drop your message directly into your customer’s inbox. The emails help to deliver your content straight to your subscribers’ inboxes and urge them to read at their leisure.
Therefore no worries about the algorithms and limited access, you can directly send your product details to your subscriber’s inbox and increase the traffic simultaneously.
Share the Launch of New Products
Once you gain trusted readers from your email marketing list, you can share various information related to your businesses; like product launches, posts related to new products and much more.
Your current subscribers who are happy to read your email will definitely invest his/her time to read about your new product launches and show the interest to try your new product as well.
You can even utilize your designated email marketing list to create the curiosity among readers before the product launch as well.
Like, sharing the complete information about new events on time and getting the people to talk about your product/business (which is the ideal motto of any mailing list). It’s a great way to get ideas for new products that will do well in the market.
This element is generally beneficial in the case of e-commerce. For Example, you might have noticed in your inboxes that e-commerce companies keep on sharing their upcoming sales and new seasonal product launches to keep their customers ready and alert enough to make the most out of the sale.
To Generate Sales Leads
Once you have built the required trust, shared enough information with your subscribers and people who have already purchased from your company are more likely to purchase again provided have given a good experience.
An email marketing list gathered from your subscribers is a great way to start your sales strategy; particularly if you are a company with multiple SKUs or products. As I have mentioned earlier, mailing list plays a big role in the case of e-commerce companies or companies with multiple product choices.
For example, a company that leases vehicles and provides roadside services can contact their customers who have only purchased one or the other. The sales team can try to persuade their customers to purchase the other service through the right content and email marketing list.
Customer Service
A great email marketing list can also build by providing good customer service. Also, the list can be effectively used to get feedback on satisfying levels. Giant companies use call center applications like Optimum and ask customers to complete a survey on their experience.
The email marketing list can be utilized to find the areas of your company and work on bringing low to high satisfaction levels. Learn from your customers and let them help you improve.
Return On Investment
If you still do not believe what wonders an email marketing list could do and how it can be more powerful than social media, then you need to focus on these three words:
Whatever you do to bring the best out of your marketing campaigns; all will go in vain if it’s not generating conversions.
And, the conversion can be in many forms like clicks, reviews, purchase, download etc, depending on your call-to-action buttons.
With the help of various email marketing tools like AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Benchmark, etc, you can keep track on your conversions and build your upcoming campaigns on the basis of the tool analysis.
Best Practices to Build an Email Marketing List (Step by-Step Guide on how to start building your Email Marketing List)
It is even said by many marketers that the secret of a great campaign lies in a great email marketing List. However, you need patience.
You can not start sending emails to your subscribers and expect conversions in just minutes. You need to create the right email marketing campaign.
An ideal marketer will always start the best campaign with the best email marketing lists, understand its reader’s interest and create a brilliant design with engaging copies including graphics.
You should have three main priorities for building a quality list. In order, these are:
- Quality- You want real information from real people who check their email frequently.
- Relevance- These people should be genuinely interested in your brand and industry.
- Volume- If the first two priorities are squared away, you can start focusing on quantity.
Step 1: Start Early As You Can
An ideal marketer will understand the importance of email marketing.
One should start looking for various email marketing tools and read various case studies to understand how big companies make their name in this competitive world through email marketing campaigns.
With the right strategy and tools, your email list will be able to compound the growth that you deserve and the time you spend developing it. The Sooner you start, the faster you will be able to build the email marketing list and the longer it will help.
Start with the basic and simple segments, crafting email campaigns that target the specific groups of your email subscribers basis on their interests.
For example, divide your list into 2 segments:
1) customers who have already made a purchase from your company, and
2) prospects who have expressed interest in your company.
AND;
Start With Who You Know
Just start with the current email marketing list you have. If you have nil, then import all of your existing customers’ contacts you have in your CRM system which would give you a decent start. You can also dig list of your previous email list from old campaigns.
For building your email list, you can use one of the many email marketing services available. Some that we recommend are MailChimp, AWeber, and Infusionsoft.
Step 2: Build a Great Content
What would you share in your email campaigns? The content, right? Before using your email marketing list, you should be sure enough that you have paralleled content to be shared.
Prepare your content strategy, try to use more graphics, fewer links, advised information, and attractable but non-offensive content.
You should only think to serve and direct your customers/subscribers to your website as well as an incentive to subscribe (so that they can receive exclusive content/emails in the future).
We do understand creating ideal content takes time. You should have enough resources who can create content strategies for you or you can try them yourself as well. Once you have done with the content, add graphics and videos if you can.
Do not forget to add Call-to-Actions for the email subscription or your call out action like download, signup, purchase, call back, etc.
Step 3: Analyze Your Email Marketing List
With the help of your email marketing tools, you can analyze whether the email marketing list is worthy enough to give you the desired conversion. Are the emails going to spam? What are the opening rates? These minor details will not only help you to build an ideal email marketing list but also gives you the chance to target the right customers.
Note: Test and optimize your segmented email campaigns regularly.
In addition to opens, clicks, and conversions, be sure to measure success using such metrics as sales, return on investment, and overall revenue. Based on the results, adjust your email content and segments to continually improve your performance results.
Step 4: Get Your People Sharing
I won’t deny the fact that social sharing is also the most powerful and easiest way to get more followers/subscribers. For example, adding a “SHARE” feature on the body of the email content and social media page links at the bottom of each mailer can increase the click-through rates by 158 percent which is huge as per marketing experts.
However, sharing isn’t just about getting more email subscribers to engage with your content, it’s also about getting more people interested in becoming subscribers.
For example, you have shared some coupons in your email content to discount your customers. Few of your customers want to share the same content as a good coupon in their contact lists.
It will be more convenient for them if they can easily share the same content through social media shareable buttons. It will give you a natural inclination to join your list for future offers (assuming that you have a new customer, to begin with).
Segmentation: Why do we recommend to segment your email marketing list?
Likewise, we stated in one step, segmenting your email list is very important if you want to build a strong email marketing list.
If you are in product sale business, you can segment your subscribers/customers into 2 segments:
1) customers who have already made a purchase from your company, and
2) prospects who have expressed interest in your company.
In a recent study, marketers have analyzed many email marketing tools and realized that segmentation impacts your email marketing performance results.
Like,
In a study, MailChimp looked at the results of about 2,000 users who sent approximately 11,000 segmented campaigns to nearly 9 million recipients.
The results of the segmented campaigns were compared to the results of the same customers’ unsegmented campaigns, which demonstrated that email list segmentation:
- Increased opens by 14.31%
- Increased unique opens by 10.64%
- Decreased bounces by 4.65%
- Increased clicks by 100.95%
- Decreased unsubscribes by 9.37%.
And what about the impact of segmentation on email-marketing revenue? Compared to sending one-size-fits-all email campaigns, the Direct Marketing Association found that segmentation increased email campaign revenue by 760%.
This is huge!
Well, that is all for this chapter. We hope the chapter has given you an idea what is email marketing list is all about and how it can help you gain more customers (of course ROI) in the simplest ways.
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