Email marketing is using email to get your marketing message in front of your audience. It is an essential tool to growing your business in the fast-paced world of internet business because it offers open, conversational, and interactive communications.
The most popular form of email marketing is the email newsletter. Permission-based email marketing also includes special email promotions, daily deals emails, solo blasts, advertising, follow-up sequences, and autoresponders, email courses, and more.
Email marketing is popular because it is relatively easy, quick to get started, and inexpensive. When done right it can also generate quite a bit of profit. The premise behind email marketing is that you as a business owner build a list of clients, customers, prospects, and subscribers who want to hear from you. You then market to them by email regularly to stay top of mind and make more sales.
You may be reading this thinking that email marketing has already hit its peak, that everyone’s doing it, and that maybe you shouldn’t even bother because all people seem to complain about these days is their overcrowded inboxes. But rest assured, email marketing is one strategy you shouldn’t ignore. Email newsletters that deliver real value still get read, saved, shared, and clicked. Plus, email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your audience, increase brand exposure, continue to deliver value, and cement your authority status.
Here are 10 ways email marketing can help your business grow:
1. Save valuable budget dollars
Save money and some trees! By going digital, you’ll avoid printing, paper, envelopes, mail handling, and postage costs. Plus, with an email newsletter, you can work with a designer to design a custom newsletter template you can use over and over again, and get your message out much faster than good old snail mail.
2. Increase brand recognition
Get your brand image and name in front of your audience more often by including your logo, tagline, color palette, and brand graphics in the template design of your email communications. Seeing your brand elements in every issue will build brand awareness and recognition — even if they old see it for a second.
3. Connect with your target market
Email marketing helps you stay in touch with your audience on a regular basis, keeping you top of mind and at the tip of their tongue. This ensures that when your services, products, or programs are needed, they will buy from you or refer their friends, family, peers, and contacts to you.
4. Increase your credibility
Consistent, quality email marketing that is relevant, on-topic, and full of value will help you earn and grow the trust of your target market making it much easier for you to then promote and sell your products and services.
5. Educate your current clients
Your email newsletter is a great place to keep your clients up to date with what’s news in your business. By sharing what you’re working on and what’s going on, you can also keep them informed of the products, services, and programs you have available for them — and maybe entice them to hire you or buy from you again.
6. Attract new opportunities
Publishing an email newsletter can help you generate new opportunities such as strategic partnerships, joint ventures, media interviews, speaking engagements, and more. All it takes is the right person to see your message at the right time — and the opportunity may not even come from a subscriber, but from someone, your ezine was forwarded to.
7. Create new streams of income
You can use your email newsletter to recommend as affiliates, products, programs, and services you have used yourself or truly believe in and earn commissions on any sales made from your referrals. Once your list grows quite large, you can also sell ad space in your ezine.
8. Expand your network
Email marketing helps you grow your network and build your list by allowing you to capture the email address through a website opt-in box. By entering their name and email, visitors give you permission to market to them by email and make offers to them by email. Remember to promote your email newsletter via social media, on your website, when speaking, in products, and even in your email signature.
9. Organize your industry knowledge
A series of articles written for your email newsletter on one topic can be repurposed into an ebook, whitepaper, guide, or even free audio for content marketing. Use your email newsletter to test content topics, subject lines, headlines, and more, then turn your most popular content into an information product or opt-in gift.
10. Reach a wider audience
Drive your email newsletter subscribers back to your website by promoting recent blog posts in each issue. Repurpose your ezine content or archive your ezine articles on your blog to attract new visitors via social media. Share your ezine articles on article marketing and article sharing sites to gain exposure and visibility for your brand.
Author – Buddira Edirisooriya
