Email Marketing

Email marketing is all about sending emails to target customers. It can be very effective if done well.

You can use email marketing to do these 5 things:

1. Find new customers
2. Engage existing customers
3. Encourage inactive customers to come back
4. Increase revenue
5. Get referrals

Finding new customers

To find new customers through email, you must first create an email list of interested people.

This can be done through content marketing and optimizing your content to capture emails. For example, you can ask readers to sign up for your email newsletter at the end of blog posts.

Another idea is to create a mini email course that educates these potential customers about your product and the problem it solves. At the end, you can ask them to purchase from you or take another important action.

You can also advertise your product or service on relevant email newsletters that your target customers read.

Engaging existing customers

Sometimes people sign up for your product or service, but don’t know how to get the most out of it. If you’re not careful, you could lose these customers.

To keep them, help them to engage with your product so they can understand its value.

Use emails to take your customers through the ideal path of your product (the steps you want them to take to get the most value out of it).

For instance, you can write a series of emails that shows new customers each main feature of your product.

Or as soon as they sign up, send them a quick hello from your personal address asking for feedback.

You can use tools like Customer.io to set up automatic emails if a user hasn’t been active for a certain number of days.

Encouraging inactive customers to come back

Emails can be very effective at getting churned or inactive customers to come back to your site.

An easy way to do this is to show the user messages or things they’ve missed on your product or service since they’ve been gone.

You can also remind them of all the value they’ve already gotten from your product.

Or you can choose to send regular reports to a user to keep your product in the forefront of their mind.

If they’ve used your product and benefited a lot from it, you can send them a surprise email congratulating them on their progress.

If they’ve been gone for a while, showcase something great that they did with your product or service a year ago to jog their memory.

Increasing revenue

Statistically, email subscribers are much more likely to make a purchase than non-subscribers.

WP Engine uses email to upsell its customers. They offer free information by email, and then finish with a pitch for their premium services.

If the subscriber doesn’t seem ready to buy, the person is switched to a less frequent mailing list that simply features interesting content. Then when the person is ready to buy, they are more likely to choose WP Engine.

Other ideas for increasing revenue include: sending a special offer for an item they’ve left in their cart without buying, or asking users to upgrade right before their subscriptions expire.

Getting referrals

A personal email from a friend recommending your service is much more persuasive than a share on social media.

Groupon creates an incentive for users to tell their friends about its discounts, because the discounts only apply if enough people sign up for them.

Dropbox users get more free storage space if they invite their friends to the service.

Asana asks new users to import their contacts into the app in order to invite their friends.

Each of these services understands the importance of email marketing in sending out these personalized invites.

How to make email marketing work for you

Since you’re entering someone’s personal inbox, it’s best to keep emails written in a personal, direct tone. No one likes spam.

Use automated mailers like MailChimp or SendGrid to make sure emails are sent correctly, on time and are actually delivered.

A/B test everything about your emails: the timing, images, subject line, copy etc.

Send your emails from a personal email address so they don’t seem spammy.

And most importantly, make sure your writing is up to par.