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The Best Way to Reach Your Customers (Hint: It May Be E-Mail Marketing!)

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The Best Way to Reach Your Customers (Hint: it may be E-Mail Marketing!)

We’re a social media company, but we’re not here to tell you that social media is the only way to reach your customers, because it’s not… while it is a superb way to reach new customers, plus a very good way to keep existing clients engaged, once you have found a great contact, perhaps the ideal way to market to them is actually e-mail marketing (aka email blasts, drip marketing, or email sequencing).

Sit with this for a moment: e-mail campaigns have a higher average conversion rate than traffic from Google or social media AND a higher return than you can expect from many other forms of marketing. Obtaining a prospect or client’s e-mail address is far more sacred than a social media “follow,” and you don’t have to worry about an algorithm ruling who will receive your message. Unfortunately, businesses often miss the mark when it comes to e-mail marketing and email newsletters by either not doing it well or not doing it at all.

Did you know e-mail marketing is one of our special flavors here at iScreamSocialMedia? We deliver customized, beautiful, elegantly written e-mails to your clients’ inboxes and ensure you have a monthly e-mail strategy that drives leads and sales. Reach out here to learn more. In the meantime, these are a few of our top tips for e-mail marketing:

1. How to Capture More E-Mail Subscribers

You could pen the e-mail marketing campaign of the century, but your inspiring prose is useless if you don’t have an audience. Build up your subscriber base by including a “Subscribe” button on your website. The more eye-catching, the better. It’s also helpful to offer an incentive for subscribing, such as a free product sample, e-book, or a discount code. Plus, make sure your content is valuable, educational, or entertaining so more people want to join your email list (more on this shortly).

Another uber-easy email address collection trick is to have your front office team enter every new client’s e-mail into your system at the time of their first contact with your office or the moment they enter your brick-and-mortar business. It only takes a few seconds to add on this step, but it’s a cut and dry way to add authentic leads to your subscriber base. A lead that’s taken the time to call is far more likely to engage with an e-mail marketing campaign. Of course, always gain permission and follow applicable laws for your industry and location.

Finally, encourage your DMs on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to share their e-mail addresses before continuing the conversation. This is a great way to continue engaging with social media leads through e-mail.

2. Keep File Images Small to Improve Email Blast Deliverability

Did you know that file size can directly impact your clickthrough rate and success of your email marketing campaigns? Keep the size of your e-mail images to under 1MB. Images larger than this will take forever to load and use up your subscriber’s precious data, and more importantly, their time. No one has time to waste these days, so your reader will surely click away if they have to wait for an image to load.

There are dozens of free and paid image-compressing applications that can compress your files with the click of a button.

3. Include CTAs in Your Marketing E-Mails

You’ve probably heard this one before, but we’ll say it again for the people in the back. No e-mail marketing campaign is complete without a good old-fashioned Call-To-Action (CTA).

Ideally, you should have at least one CTA in every email. And there should always be one at the very top of the email—a button or clickable link works great here. We also suggest incorporating a few others throughout the copy. Aim for diversity and focus on creating urgency or necessity. A few examples include: –

– Read More

– Book Now

– Reach Out

– Schedule Your Appointment

– Limited Offer – Click Here

4. Provide Value—Don’t Just Sell

And that leads us to our next point: don’t be that overly zealous salesperson. Nobody likes the feeling of being sold to and being too pushy will cause your clients to lose your trust, minimizing email blast open-rates. This minimizes your chances of making that future sale. You need to establish trust and credibility first through education and entertainment and with time and subtlety incorporate some appropriate sales opportunities.

Think about it this way: would you rather purchase a car from the dealer that rushes you through your test drive and can hardly wait for you to park before hurtling offers at you? Or the salesman who lets you take your sweet time and try out all of the cool features? Heck, she even makes suggestions for other cars based on the feature you especially liked.

Don’t be afraid to give a little before you get. No, you don’t need to hand out a bunch of free products or services, but providing potential customers access to valuable insight, education, or advice (think YouTube videos, blog posts, and guides) or a small snippet of your product line (think samples, free printouts, etc.), shows your email subscribers that you’re confident in the quality of your product or service and encourages them to open and read each email newsletter you send whether they feel they are in the market to buy or not. With time, you’ll find those who were not in the market, suddenly are, or may be enticed by the right well-timed offer or special. But more importantly, it shows they can trust you to meet some of their needs before they even commit to a purchase.

5. Test, Test, and Test Again

There’s no rest for the weary. You need to consistently re-visit your completed e-mail marketing campaigns. You’ll not only want to check links and have an editor look over the copy, but also focus on areas to improve based on collected performance metrics. What you decide to monitor is up to you, but here’s metrics a few we track for our clients: –

– Open Rate

– Clickthrough Rate

– Conversion Rate

– Bounce Rate

– ROI

Analyzing your e-mail data to make changes for future e-mails is crucial to improving the performance of your e-mail marketing campaigns.

In today’s overly saturated market, successful email marketing campaigns are about more than just your product or service. They’re about the experience. They’re about the brand as a whole. Remember, your e-mail campaigns are a direct reflection of your brand. There’s a high chance that your e-mail is one of the first interactions a potential customer has with you and from what we’ve seen recently most companies’ email marketing acumen trails far behind their overall brand and goals. So do it right or talk to some experts (hint: experts not only save you time and do a better job, but they allow your team to focus on core competencies and net-net, you’ll save money long run by outsourcing email marketing).

The iScream team offers expert e-mail marketing and social media services. Get the full scoop on our offerings here or call (305) 455- 0720 to hear more about our customizable packages and consulting options.