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Over the years email marketing has been proven to help companies maximize their sales growth potential by staying in touch with their consumers on a more personal level. One method in particular is offering a newsletter. Not only is a newsletter a great way to keep your customers looped in to your company’s upcoming products, but it’s cost effective too. We’ve compiled a few tips to share in helping you create more effective newsletters for your following.
One newsletter isn’t enough
As a business owner you should be asking yourself if you’re trying to engage with returning customers or create new ones. Sure we all receive newsletters from companies we’ve recently purchased from offering ‘$50 off your first purchase!’, or something similar in nature. That’s a great offer if you’re a first time buyer, but if not, that email is going straight to the trash. Tailoring your newsletters for each group of customers is a more effective way to capture your targeted audience’s attention and create tribal loyalty.
Personalization
People often receive newsletters and immediately delete them either because they aren’t geared towards their interests, or they’re just considered spam. In a recent article covering email marketing facts and stats, the article stated that personalized emails actually improved click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Most newsletter platforms allow you to create groups, which in turn allows you to tailor each newsletter based on specific interest(s). Knowing your audience is crucial, so when segmenting your customers, a few things to consider are their gender, age, location, interests, past purchases, seasonality, etc.
Incentives are key
Timed coupons or discounts are crucial when persuading your customers to purchase from you sooner rather than later. A perfect example, letting your customers know you have a 48 hour sale creates a sense of urgency for people to act quickly – otherwise they’ll lose out on the opportunity. Another idea would be to offer your customers a free gift or even an in-store credit (with purchase) for their birthday. Keep in mind that this helps create customer loyalty and that is definitely a plus. If you’re looking to bring in new customers, you can always offer $10-$20 off of their first purchase. Just be sure to set a start and end date on the offer.
Best Practices
We’ve shared some email marketing tips with you, now let’s look into a few quick practices to exercise when putting together your next newsletter.
Too many emails can be a bad thing
There’s no magic number as to how many emails you should be sending out to your consumers or how often. The trick is to make sure the emails you’re sending out provide some sort of value to your customers. Start by creating an email schedule so you can keep a consistent timeline as to when you should be sending emails and what offers those emails are providing.
Be creative
You only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention. If the subject line of your email isn’t creative enough, the customer could scroll right past it and not give it a second thought.
Spark interest by stating what you’re promoting
Generating interest is great, but you need to make sure you’re getting your message across as effectively and efficiently as possible. Make sure you are including all essential information and make sure its clear and eye-catching.
Be short, simple and to the point
When engaging your customers, make sure you are short and to the point when communicating the information you want to get across. No one like’s fishing through a wall of text to get to the main idea.
Add a call to action
You always want to make sure your customers have a way to get to whatever you’re promoting as easily as possible. Providing links or buttons on your homepage or even a category page that highlights your promotion are a few great ideas to start with.
Don’t overwhelm your audience
This can often be difficult but make sure to keep your tone in check when communicating to your customers. A typical email inbox gets flooded with multiple spam messages a day, and people will not hesitate to click that ‘mark as spam’ button when they feel they are being harassed. Before sending your email out to the masses, it’s often helpful to have a friend or family member review your content to ensure you’re not coming on too strong or just flat out being annoying. Be open to criticism and have them tell you their true feelings about it.
Statistics
Email marketing has some pretty eye-opening statistics. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. Marketers who segmented their email lists experienced 34% greater email relevance, 39% increased open rates, and 28% lower unsubscribe rates. When done correctly, these numbers show that email marketing can be a great way to help increase revenue for your store and should not under any circumstances be overlooked as a marketing method. If you have any questions or comments about your own personal experiences with email marketing, let us know in the comments below!
