Email Marketing – The Secret Sauce to Growing Your Business

• Email marketing is how you connect your customers to your product, service, or craft.
• Mastering the fundamentals is essential
• With email marketing built on fundamentals, you can weather any change in the market and platforms.

A great thing about email is how easy it is to now communicate with your customers directly. Before, you had to rely on customers reaching out to you or hoping they don’t hang up on a cold call, with email marketing, you can reach out to them individually about new products and services, sales, and company information.

How can you make your email marketing most effective?

First you have to know the fundamentals of marketing. With a strong understanding of the overall fundamentals, you’ll have the foundation you need to build a better relationship with your customers through your email marketing efforts.

What are the marketing fundamentals?

• Building websites
• Blogging
• Vlogging
• Podcasting
• Building products
• Selling
• Building relationships with customer

We all know these methods work well to grow a business. But they do require planning and learning the technical side of things. They require time to prepare your content and mental energy.

Where does email marketing come in?

The reason email marketing is the thing that brings your fundamentals together is that it helps you control your audience. Email marketing is essential to growing and maintaining your business, especially if you are trying to make your living through your blog, vlog, or podcast.

At its core, email marketing is how you connect your customer base with your craft and products. You have a message to share and as important as it is to develop the fundamentals, no one will know about it without the communication.

How can you take your email marketing to the next level?

1. Develop a new strategy
   • If you don’t have a plan for where you’re going, you’ll likely get lost – and that’s true of email marketing. If you find yourself now realizing you don’t have a well-developed strategy, you are not alone. The Relevancy Group reports that about 60 percent of email marketers say they struggle to coordinate their marketing campaigns.
   • One way to easily develop a strategy is identifying why your brand or service or product is important to your target audience. You know it’s important and could benefit them; they don’t know that yet. Once you can summarize your value in one sentence, you can develop the rest of your strategy around that.
   • You should also be involving others in the planning discussions. The best way to avoid the pitfalls of poor communication is to be sure everyone is on the same page. If you know what the executives or designers or sales staff think about what you’re marketing, it can help you to round out your next campaign.
2. Data is your friend
   • Data and numbers get a bad reputation of being impersonal. They aren’t! Data is how you can personalize your marketing easily and effectively. The 2017 Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report showed an overwhelming majority of customers appreciating personalization in their marketing emails, with 79 percent of the customer surveyed saying it was of medium to high importance.
   • The data can come from several places, but it should be telling you where your customers are coming from, what they’re looking for, and how they move through the funnel of your marketing. If you know what your target audience does with your interactions, you’ll have a better chance of creating better interactions in the future.
   • So, picking the right analytics programs and data is vital to your future success. This can mean investing some of your resources into your marketing to get the right tools. By researching and spending the money on the right software, you’ll have a much higher return on investment.
3. Improve your content!
   • This seems like a no brainer but it can be difficult for email marketers who might be stuck in a rut. Again, you need to know what the data shows about what kind of content your target audience enjoys. As you start to develop your next marketing campaign, identify and plan out the content that your audience will most likely open.