Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing is an extremely efficient and effective method of increasing your sales and your customer base, but as with so many other marketing tools, if you don’t know what you’re doing it can actually cause more harm than good. Don’t ever forget that you are marketing to other companies and not individuals so your messages need to be tailored to your actual audience. When your company is trying to establish a business to business email marketing strategy, there are significant differences in your approach then if you were working on a business to consumer campaign.
Here are a few of the major points you need to consider in order to create a more effective and profitable email marketing campaign:
1. Keep it simple.
If you were to meet with a prospect in person you would make sure that your pitch were straight to the point. When sending B2B emails you want to achieve the same no nonsense tone. Their time is valuable and you want to prove to them that you appreciate that fact by getting right down to business in your email, just as you would if you were talking to them in person.
2. Don’t forget the “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me) approach to your email messages.
Make sure that you clearly articulate what advantages your company can provide to their company and why it just makes sense for them to do business with you. You have to structure your email message in such as way as to set yourself apart from the competition.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask them for their business.
If you don’t have a clear call to action such as ‘click here now’, for example, they may not do anything. It’s one of the most common mistakes marketers make, they don’t ask the prospect to actually take action, they fail to ask for the sale. Don’t make this mistake.
4. Optimize.
To optimize the effectiveness of your email campaign make sure you take the time to learn more about your prospects business and what you can do to help them. This information can prove extremely helpful when you are composing your email message. By being able to add specific points to your email that would only apply to their particular business you are letting them know that you’ve taken the time to learn about their company and their needs which will help you build trust with them.
5. Don’t try too hard to ‘sell’ them
Remember, this is a business that has their own marketing campaigns and they are familiar with all the tricks. Don’t try too hard to ‘sell’ them. Keep your message short and on point and then follow up with a firm and clear call to action.
6. Track your results.
You want to keep track of open rates as well as an increase in sales and/ or customers. It’s important for you to know which campaigns work and which ones didn’t. This information will allow you to tweak the ones that work and reuse them and start from scratch on some of the less effective campaigns.
Email marketing can be a huge benefit to any business building strategy.
Take the time to research your market before you implement your business to business email marketing plan. This added step will allow you to make more money and increase your customer base for a very small investment.
When you own a business, whether online or off, you know the importance of not only staying in touch with your existing customers but constantly trying find new ones. There is so much automation available online today that it can make this process much easier. One of the best tools you can use is a service that will enable you to use contact email marketing.
Having a website can be an extremely beneficial to an offline business ( and mandatory for an online business!) but the sad truth is that for the most part, people won’t visit your website more than once (of course if your website offers a lot of products or services you will likely get repeat visitors) but if your website is more of an informative format it can be tough to get people to come back.
If you have a method for capturing their contact information, such as an opt in form, you can build a very large email list. When they opt in to your list they are telling you that it’s ok for you to send them emails. This is the very best way for you to establish yourself as an expert in your field and build trust with your customers, or would be customers.
Of course, as with most things, the implementation of this method might take a little trial and error. One of the biggest mistakes many people make with their opt in list is that they don’t spend enough time contacting their customers and offering them special deal. This can be as simple as telling your customers of an upcoming sale, and make sure they know that they are getting early notice only because they are on your email list. You can also offer coupons or other incentives.
Service Based Businesses
If your business is more serviced based you may want to use this method to inform your customers of any new services you are providing. The point is that this allows you a great opportunity to keep in contact with your visitors and provide them with some valuable perks and that will make them eager to open and read every email that they receive from you.
Another helpful tactic is to use your existing customer email list to find more customers and a great way to do that is to offer your existing customers an incentive to get their friends and family to become a customer too. For example, if you have an offline store you could offer everyone on your list a coupon off of the price of a purchase if they refer someone else to your store and that person signs up for your email list. There are a lot of ways you can do this but you get the point, an email list can be a wonderful way to leverage your existing customer base.
If you are willing to spend some time to build a list of customers, or potential customers, and then spend some time to keep in contact with them and build a relationship with them by offering them information and special deals just for being on your list, you will have an extremely powerful tool in building your business. Contact email marketing, when done correctly, can be like money in the bank.
If you are a new affiliate marketer you have probably already realized that in order to make money you will have to not only drive as much traffic as possible to your website but also to capture your visitors contact information so that you can build a relationship with them. This is where email affiliate marketing comes in.
It might be depressing but it’s true, upwards of 98% of the visitors you drive to your website aren’t going to buy anything and most likely won’t ever come back. That means a lot of extra work for you when it comes to getting traffic. How much better would it be if you could somehow have multiple contacts with these website visitors so that you could build trust with them and they would eventually buy from you?
When you install a simple opt in form on your website you have the ability to encourage your visitors to sign up to receive your email messages. If you use this tool properly you will be able to turn many more of these visitors into customers.
You’ve probably heard that it can take anywhere from 7 – 10 contacts with someone before they’re comfortable enough with you to buy from you. In order to get them to open and read your emails so that you can build a relationship with them you have to always offer them something of value. you cannot just use your emails as a chance to make a sales presentation. If you do, they will opt out of your list and you will have lost them forever.
Make sure that you step outside of yourself and offer your email list something that will truly benefit them, not you. By providing them great and helpful information you are proving to them that you are not only an expert in your field but also that you can be a trusted resource who can provide them with what they need in order to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish.
To get them to sign up for your list you can offer them a report or a short mini course. No matter what you offer as an incentive the same rules apply: make it something of real value that will help your subscriber in some way.
There is a lot of free information floating around the internet. It isn’t enough anymore to just offer someone something for free. It has got to be something unique that offers a lot of perceived value.
This same principle applies when you are preparing your follow up email messages. Whatever you include make sure it offers your subscribers useful information that isn’t readily available elsewhere.
The best way to monetize your email list is to include a post script at the end of each of your messages that includes a link to a product or service that will help them further.
Most of us want to make more money and when it comes to email affiliate marketing the biggest thing you can do to increase your income is to take the time and effort to build a trusting relationship with your email list subscribers. People are always much more likely to buy from a friend that they trust than they will from a stranger.
Continued in Part 5…