“If Social Media is the cocktail party, then email marketing is the ‘meet up for coffee’. The original 1 to 1 channel.”
-Erik Harbison
You would’ve thought that in a world of social media, email marketing would be on the bottom of the tier of effective marketing strategy.
How come even the big and established businesses still opt makes a massive effort to perfect their email marketing game?
The answer? Because it works! Even if a person does spend an average of 2 to 3 hours on social media, sending out those email still yields a higher percentage of acquiring clients/customers.
Why is that?
Suppose, you’re browsing on Facebook, do you really pay attention to those paid ads?
I, for one, tend to tune them out. I kind of think they are a bit of a nuisance.
Or you’re on Twitter, you follow people you are interested in, people you know. And when those people plug businesses you read them and then scroll up again. You don’t click links you don’t find interesting or doesn’t cater to any of your needs.
Then there’s Instagram. A lot of people seems to also have taken a liking in promoting their business there. However just like on Twitter, you scroll up and don’t really pay attention to the captions, no?
Marketing through social media only works if you have a massive following. Even then, not all of those are generated into actual income. Am I right? All these alternative marketing platforms and yet, why does email marketing stay as the top marketing platform for digital marketing?
Why does it work?
Almost everyone has an email account. And people are naturally wary of giving away personal information online. And the safest way for them to let you establish contact is through email. Thus, Email marketing provides a more aggressive interaction with your prospective consumers/customers.
What do I mean by “aggressive interaction”? Meaning that you are actively pursuing communication with your target audience than just passively waiting for the business to pick up by just posting a lot of content on social media. It helps in terms of promoting, of course.
You see, the thing is, in social media. You can be filtered out by people. Meanwhile, making your email marketing game strong will definitely make people excited to get content from you.
However, building the perfect email marketing game plan doesn’t do much on its own no? what’s next then?
Build Your Email List
Building your email list sounds easy enough. You just need to get people email addresses, right?
Question is how? The answer lies on your landing page.
Okay. You’ve got people interested enough to click on your link. You’ve been really great at your social media campaign. Now the ball is back in your court. How do you persuade your site visitors to sign up for your email newsletter? How do you catch their attention to guarantee a subscriber?
Well, I have mentioned all about the “Storybrand” book. And that it has been one of the frameworks of marketing strategy that I find to be working the best.
What I continue to learn from that is that you need to make your customer the HERO. I remember blogging about making your client your hero and how that actually made a guy generate 10 million on sales! If you haven’t read about it yet, here’s the link.
But that’s about blogging Bernie! Well, you can still apply the same principle for your landing page.
Make it all about them.
You’re selling your space yes, but what good does it do them? Does knowing you’ve won multiple awards, going to sell it for you? Bragging hardly seems the right approach, ain’t it? I’ve also talked about that in my other blog post. For now, let’s focus on your landing page.
Make attention-grabbing “CTA”s
What prompts me to actually sign up for an email newsletter is that they have a very good “Call to Action” section.
You got to elicit a response to your viewers. Give them the prod they need to sign up. Even if you have great content if you don’t have a call to action, then it all for nought.
However, what I find compelling for me, might not be compelling for you or your client. Nevertheless, you can make a note of it, see if you can tweak it and make it work for you too. You can make it your inspiration! There is nothing wrong in experimenting. Although, you have to be constant on what you market.
What’s your edge? What are your values? Do you have the answer to their questions?
At this point you must be thinking, ‘what do all of those questions have to do with email marketing?’
To that, I am going to ask you: What would you put on your email newsletter then?
What is the sense of a great landing page with an email newsletter with crappy content?
Content is where the magic happens.
So you’ve got a great landing page, you’ve built an impressive email list. What’s left? Your CONTENT of course!
Sure it’s easy enough, thinking of content for your landing page. Those are kinda constant. You don’t actually have to change what it says as frequently as you would.
However, your email newsletter needs to be fresh. You have to put out new content every time.
Here are some ideas that can set a foundation for your email marketing content.
Are you a start-up? You can focus on putting your brand out there. Your story. What you can do for your client. The whole introductory shebang.
You’ve been around for years? You can promote new products. Give freebies. Reintroduce your brand. Milestones of your business. You can even let your clients know who is your freelancer of the month.
Still a bit confused? I’d be more than willing to guide you through that! Just book a complimentary call and let us chat all about it! Or if you think a chat isn’t going to cut it, take a look at my email marketing workshop and start sending out your brand of email marketing.
