Email marketing is one of the most effective tools for attracting and retaining clients. Finding customers and maintaining stable relationships is always difficult for small businesses. A lack of knowledge and experience are factors that affect a company’s ability to find new customers. 

Small business owners may also be reluctant to invest money in acquiring customers until they start making a profit. This is why email marketing is a small business owner’s choicest tool for growing a profitable business.

How Valuable is Email Marketing? 

The advantages of email marketing are many. Email marketing is powerful because it forces the user to take some kind of action. Essentially, an email will sit in the recipient’s inbox until it’s read, archived, or deleted. 

With a potential return on investment of up to 4400%, email marketing remains the best way to attract and retain customers.

61% of email users prefer to be contacted by brands via email. 

Importance of Building an Email List

• It’s easy to reach a large number of customers
• Email enables personalized communication
• Email is excellent for building the know, like, and trust factor
• It can help you build a loyal customer base
• It can help you successfully launch a new business or service.

How to Build Your Email Marketing List

You have seen the importance of building an email list, so now you may be wondering how to build one. Creating your list requires what is called Lead Magnets. Lead magnets are what you give (a digital product) in exchange for someone’s email address. You should always aim to serve. What you are offering should be good enough to make someone hand you their email address. 

Here are five simple ways to build your email list while serving your audience.

Webinar

Delivering your first webinar is not as difficult as you might think. It’s a very effective way to introduce yourself to your audience and showcase your expertise in a personal way.

Mini Course or Challenge

Shorten the learning curve for your audience or guide them through topics that help them get to where they want to be. Mini-courses and challenges are great for this.

Free Download 

A checklist, ebook, templates, and how-to guides are examples of free download materials. If you can help people save time, skip a step in a process or learn from you, you have given them much value. 

Host a GiveAway

A giveaway is a common form of lead magnet. A giveaway can be in the form of a product or service. These are effective and fun, but Keep in mind though that the purpose of the giveaway is to set the scene for a conversation that will take place with your target audience in the inbox. 

Create a Private Community

A private community is one of the most exclusive ways you can engage your target audience. Everyone wants to be a part of the ‘exclusive club.’ What better way to make this a reality than by creating a private community?

Where to Share Your Lead Magnet

1. Post links to your landing page on your social media
2. Create a pop-up on your websites
3. Add a subscription form to your website

Writing Effective Email Copy

At the core of email marketing success is copy that converts. This doesn’t mean you have to be an expert at copywriting. But the basics of copywriting are something every business owner needs to learn. 

Simple things you need to do to craft compelling copy.

• Know your audience: this is the first step to creating a compelling copy. Knowing who you want to serve will help you segment your email list and craft high targeted email copies.

• Craft hard-to-ignore subject lines: an email’s subject line is like a book’s cover. It’s the first impression the reader has about the content of your email. Therefore making it sound great is essential. Most email marketing platforms allow users to A/B test their emails. This way you can learn what style of writing works best for your audience and then you stick with it.

• Leverage the storytelling technique: storytelling provokes emotions in people. Buying is more emotional than logical. If you can tell a good story, then you might be able to sell your offers faster. The Attention – Interest – Desire – Action concept will provide a good guide for you. 

• Use Psychology: when used right, this could be a game changer. You can use the fear of missing out (FOMO), social proof, and colour psychology.

• Make your emails easy to read: people have busy schedules, so you need to get to your point. Use bullet points in your writing, and use short sentences and paragraphs. 

Email Marketing Best Practices

• Remove inactive subscribers. Send an email to those who would normally not open your email to learn what might be their concerns. If they don’t respond, remove them from your list.

• Clearly define your goals. Why do you want an email list? Do you want to increase sales, get customer feedback or build a community? Having a clear goal is important because it makes measuring your success easier.

• Keep your email list warm. This simply means keeping your email list engaged. Consistency is so important when it comes to serving your audience. Send emails regularly. Nothing is worse than sending emails only when you want to sell something. As you stay consistent, your audience will begin anticipating your emails.

• Define what your KPI is and monitor them. The success of implementing email marketing as part of your wider marketing strategy goes beyond sending weekly or monthly emails. In order to understand the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy, you need to have clear Key Performance Indicators and a means of monitoring them. 

Some examples of KPIs could be: 

1. Open rates
2. Unsubscribe rate
3. Website/blog traffic
4. Sales

Conclusion

If there is one thing marketing experts agree on, it’s that building and growing your email list is an important aspect of finding and retaining clients. And what is great is that you don’t need a “perfect” lead magnet to start collecting emails and building your mailing list. Following the guide in this blog is a good place to start. 

Do you need help with implementing email marketing in your business? As an Online Business Management service, this is an area in which we support many of our clients. To discuss your needs, you can schedule a discovery consultation here.