I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times before but you should use email as part of your overall marketing strategy. Everyone will tell you this, especially me. But that’s not enough.
What you really need is an email marketing strategy you can implement quickly and easily, so you can grow your email list, get more customers, and make your business more profitable.
There are lots of blog posts, articles, courses, etc. out there that will give you the basics of email marketing, including on this blog.
This blog post will lay it all out for you as a basic roadmap, so you can easily implement an email marketing strategy for your own business.
This is the first post in a series that will delve into more detail on ways to make your strategy more effective, so your business grows faster.
But first…
What is an Email Marketing Strategy and Why Do You Need One?
As mentioned above, an email marketing strategy is really a roadmap or step-by-step plan that shows you how to implement email marketing in your business.
This series won’t cover how to write emails specifically. You can learn how to do that in my series on How to Write Emails that Convert.
This post will cover the pieces you need to put your email marketing strategy into motion. The following posts will cover details you can add to make it more effective.
An email marketing strategy helps you determine what kinds of emails you will send to whom and when you’ll send them. Not every email is appropriate for every subscriber.
For example, if you sell hair maintenance products and hair growth products, you wouldn’t want to send information about a product that promotes shiny, supple long hair to someone who suffers from fine, thinning hair and can’t get their hair to grow past their ears.
In this series, I’ll lay out the steps you should take to send the right message to the right person at the right time, so they’re primed to buy and are willing to take the opportunities you give them to make a purchase.
Because the point of having an email list is to have a steady stream of customers, some of whom buy right away and some of whom you need to nurture until they’re convinced you’re the right company to buy from because you have the perfect product or service to solve their problems.
Why Is Email Marketing So Important?
This is a fair question, and one every business owner needs to ask themselves. Every business is different and has specific goals for growth.
Email marketing helps with every one of those goals.
First, email marketing gives you a return on investment (ROI) of 4400% on average. That means for every dollar you put into an email marketing campaign; you get $44 back. Email marketing out performs social media ads, PPC, organic search, content marketing and affiliate marketing.
Next, your email list is the number one most valuable asset in your business. Yes, I am serious about this and no, it doesn’t matter what kind of business you have.
You could lose every other asset your business has, including your product production line or the ability to perform whatever service you offer, which would be devastating to any business. But, if you have an email list, you could start over and grow your business again faster than you can imagine.
Why?
Because your email list lets you build a relationship directly with your subscribers. Unlike social media or SEO (organic search), when your emails land in your subscribers’ inboxes, you are having a one-on-one conversation with them. You’re a known quantity and you can use this personal relationship to position yourself as the authority in your field of expertise.
By sending regular emails, you’re also keeping yourself top-of-mind. That way, when a subscriber is ready to buy, they think of you first.
Even if everything collapses around you, if you have an email list of subscribers who hear from you regularly and love what you send them, you have a bunch of people who want to support what you do, whatever you do. That viable customer base is exactly what every business needs, regardless of the stage of growth they’re at.
Your Email Marketing Strategy Roadmap and How to Put It Into Place
Some of this may be a bit repetitive for those of you who read this blog regularly. However, I repeat these ideas because they’re important and I continue to see email marketing from people who have obviously skipped steps or who don’t have a good handle on their email marketing strategy to begin with.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience
When you know exactly who you’re talking to and how your product or service will best serve these people, writing your emails becomes much, much easier.
It also means your emails will convert your subscribers into customers with more regularity, because the people you’re writing to feel like you’re writing to them specifically, instead of to the world at large.
You may think your product or service is perfect for everyone, but it’s not. What’s more, once you identify and write to your target audience, you’ll save a ton of money on advertising, because you’ll be reaching the “right” people instead of wasting your marketing budget on people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer.
For more information on how to find your target audience, check out this post.
Step 2: Build a Lead Generation Funnel
If you want a steady stream of new customers, you need a way to introduce new people to your products and services. A lead generation funnel is a necessary part of your email marketing strategy.
A standard lead generation funnel includes:
- A Lead Magnet – a free, downloadable digital item you can give to someone in exchange for their email address.
- A Landing Page – A standalone page that promotes your lead magnet and includes a sign-up form so someone can give you their email address.
- A Thank You Page – A page that acknowledges the receipt of a person’s email address and tells them what happens next.
- A Welcome Sequence – A series of emails that delivers your lead magnet, sets expectations, and positions your product or service as the solution to your subscriber’s problems.
You can find out more about what goes into a lead generation funnel here.
Step 3: Nurture Your New Subscribers So They Become Customers
This is the most important part of your email marketing strategy. It’s also the part that many businesses don’t do well, regularly neglect, or flat out ignore.
Email nurturing does involve some work on your part, but it pays off in the long run. When you write to your subscribers on a regular basis and provide them with valuable information that shows why your product or service is the best solution to their problem, you’re doing two important tasks:
- You’re giving your subscribers the information they need to make an informed decision about your product or service.
- You’re keeping your product or service, and your company, top of mind, so when your subscriber is ready to buy, they buy from you.
Your goal is to build a relationship with your subscribers by providing value before you bombard them with sales messages.
Get more ideas on email nurturing, including what to write about here.
Step 4: Send Regular Sales Campaigns
The point of having an email list is to make money. Now that you have subscribers who have raised their hands and expressed interest in your product or service, you get to sell to them.
Depending on your sales cycle and how aggressive you want to be, you can send sales emails every day, every other day, every week, once a month, or as often as you deem appropriate.
You intersperse these with your nurturing emails (which you can also use to sell if you do it right), so your subscribers are getting value as well as a sales message.
Use This Simple Email Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business
Follow these 4 steps to build a solid email marketing strategy and you’ll see your email list and your sales increase.
Download the Email Marketing Strategy Checklist now, for reference as you go through each step in the process.
Next week, I’ll talk about how email personalization can improve your conversion rate and how to set that up in your emails.