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Small businesses have always been looking for ways to attract clients without spending too much money. It’s simply impossible, for example, for a smaller online casino brand to match the marketing budget of one of the corporate giants in its niche. Luckily, the digital world provides plenty of creative opportunities to reach clients without plastering the brand’s name on a big-budget TV commercial or every billboard in the city.
Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to help grow SMBs, especially the ones that rely heavily on E-commerce sales. The biggest misconception about email marketing, though, is that a brand needs to spam its potential clients with useless information. Understanding how often a brand should contact its customers is a major step toward mastering email marketing.
The First Step in Any Good Email Marketing Strategy
Apart from not knowing how many emails to send, another element people get wrong about email marketing is the first step.
The first step towards a successful campaign will always be to build a good mailing list. There are several ways to do this, and any of them can be effective.
Before getting into some of the ways to build an email list, something needs to be added to this first step. The list size is not as important as how well it can convert. What good is an email list that includes a million emails if it only generates conversions occasionally?
Having a smaller list of loyal fans interested in the products is usually much better. Once business owners understand this, they can move on to the next key step.
Organically Building a Mailing List vs. Ads or Buying Premade Lists
Small businesses typically need to generate sales fast. Because of this, many of them shy away from email marketing. The truth is that building an email list organically can take some time.
Overall, the best way for an E-commerce site to build an email list organically is to ask customers for their information during the check-out process.
However, to begin with, they’ll have to create content to grow the site organically in order to attract these customers. All of this can take quite a bit of time, even for the best marketing agencies on the planet. Knowing this, the best way to create an email list may be to combine organic and paid methods.
Paid methods include buying emails from large databases. The problem with this option is that these databases aren’t always built organically. That means the company emails will typically arrive in these people’s spam folders.
Social media ads can be a great way to quickly build an email list filled with people who at least showed an interest in the products at some point. Through paid ads, the brand can achieve a wider reach in the short term that’s impossible to obtain organically, at least not in the beginning stages of the process.
Finding the Voice of the Brand
The next step in the process is where some creativity is really going to pay off. There’s this idea that dull email marketing campaigns will never convert. Then again, everything comes down to the products the brand is trying to sell.
It’s not like every company under the sun should email positive phrases to the people on their mailing list daily. Yes, being positive is generally a good idea, but there are ways to be positive while staying short and to the point.
Other companies may find more success by creating a sense of urgency within their emails. It’s important to remember that finding that brand voice can be a trial-and-error process. There’s no shame in pivoting off an idea that sounded good at one point but isn’t paying off.
A Mixture of Promos and Interesting Facts to Increase Interaction
Once the “voice” of the emails is set comes another of the hard parts of email marketing. How often should the brand be sending promo emails? What other types of emails will the client base truly be interested in?
Just like in the previous point, finding the right balance of promotional emails and updates on different things the brand is doing will be a trial-and-error process. Some email marketing strategies will lean towards saying that sending more emails is always better.
Going back to the casino example from the beginning of the article, do users really need a daily reminder to get back on the app? It may be a better idea to set up an email marketing campaign focusing on the upcoming big boxing and UFC matches. Email updates with the weekly odds of the top NFL games for that week could be great converters as well. Email marketing is one of the career paths available when you start working in casino industry.
The key to mastering email marketing lies in finding relevant topics that align well with the products a company sells. Then, going on to create emails that speak about these relevant topics while promoting the brand’s products. Some businesses will have an easier time finding those relevant topics, while others may have to send more promo emails.
The Slow and Steady Way Usually Leads to Better Conversion Rates
The last thing that business owners typically want to hear is that email marketing takes time. As mentioned previously, most small businesses need sales quickly to sustain themselves. There are ways to speed up the creation of an email list, but that’s just one part of the process.
It could be a good idea to have email marketing as the tool that’s meant to provide sustained sales numbers in the long run while simultaneously running other ad campaigns, particularly on social media, which may have more of an immediate impact. Undoubtedly, one of the main reasons some companies never master email marketing is because they give up on it.
Final Thoughts on Mastering Email Marketing
Any type of marketing will typically be a trial-and-error process. People who want to master the skill must be patient with their campaigns. Once the brand has found a voice and built up a large enough audience, email marketing can be one of the cheapest and most stable ways to keep sales numbers up.