Your Email Marketing Strategy is Your (Not So) Secret Weapon

Email marketing is extremely effective for increasing ROI. That might seem counterintuitive as you think of the hundreds of emails sitting in your inbox, but it shows no sign of stopping. In fact, email marketing remains one of the most efficient, cost-effective ways to engage your customers. With it’s unparalleled ability to deliver targeted content directly to consumers who are already interested in your brand, email marketing is a valuable resource no business can afford to ignore.

Email marketing is critical to reach and inform customers on mobile platforms, and provides an estimated 4,300% ROI. (Still not convinced? Check out Entrepreneur’s other powerful email marketing stats.) It can also generate increased leads and customer loyalty with less effort than old-school methods.

What methods are you employing to increase ROI and engage customers? Check out 5 ways to boost your email marketing efforts and increase your success.

Email Marketing Relies on a Cultivated Subscriber List

Blue Interactive recommends starting off with cultivating a subscriber list comprised of gated content, social media, your blog, and your website.

(Mini-refresher: Gated content is any content which can only be accessed once a website visitor has provided lead information. It works by incentivizing lead generation. A previous brand touchpoint (predominantly blog) will have convinced your website traffic that you know what you’re talking about. You know your stuff, so you’re worth hearing from. You’ve also created something comprehensive and seriously valuable.)

Build an Acquisition Strategy

Both LinkedIn and Marketing Cloud recommend building an acquisition strategy for enlarging your audience. First, they recommend that you analyze the places that your customers have already actively engaged with your brand. Then, look at those experiences. How could they be enhanced or optimized to drive more interactive engagement? Think of tools and techniques you haven’t tried yet.

One hard and fast rule they swear by? Always optimize acquisition forms for mobile. “If a customer is on a tablet or smartphone and can’t fill out your form quickly and easily, you’re sure to lose the opt-in.”

Offer Gold as Part of Your Email Marketing Strategy

Offer an incentive to get people to sign up. Your free content should be at least as valuable as possible, maybe even more so than other people’s paid content. When someone sees value in your free content, they’ll be more likely to take the plunge and buy your premium content in the future. You’ll see a spectacular increase in conversion rates.

Email Marketing and Automation Go Hand in Hand

Marketing automation, as it applies to inbound marketing, uses targeted emails (along with social media posts) to initiate interest and facilitate conversations with prospects and clients. You can nurture leads by carefully cultivating relationships with them, engaging prospects one-on-one and slowly moving them through the sales funnel until they become customers.

Today’s prospects are savvy, and they want truly relevant information that answers their questions in a timely fashion. Therefore, the one-size-fits-all approach of the old-fashioned email campaign no longer works. Enter: marketing automation.

Segment Your Leads

Group your customers and clients by their shared characteristics, needs, or interests so that you can create more personal, timely, effective messages.

Your clients and potential clients will never all be in the same place at the same time. They will be in different stages of your buying cycle at any one time, and will have different relationships with and opinions about your company and the product or service you’re trying to sell. So if you deliver content carefully curated for your customers, you will have a higher conversion rate to sales/purchasing. The better your segmentation, the better your ability to drive the next step in that customer journey.  And, better content equates to customers reading your emails and perusing your website for longer periods of time.

Segmentation is also effective in closing sales with those leads and generating new business with old customers.