Believe it or not, the first marketing email was sent in 1978. The result was an astonishing $13 million in sales. Email marketing has been and continues to be one of the most successful and highly used marketing channels to date. Social media gets a lot of attention, and rightfully so, but email marketing is still king in many ways.

Straight to the Benefits

There’s a reason why email marketing continues to be the best marketing channel for reaching customers and prospects.

• Builds Relationships – Personalized engagement builds connections with customers and prospects.
• Brand Awareness – When your prospects are ready to engage you’re on the top of their mind.
• Promotes Content – Email is a vehicle to share value-packed blog content and other useful assets with your prospects.
• Lead Generator – Give your subscribers valuable content in exchange for their permission to market to them on a regular basis. A huge opportunity to build trust and convert.
• Product Marketing – An easy way to promote your offerings.

You Need a Strategy

You know why email marketing is critical to your marketing efforts but how do you have a strategy? Your customer and prospect are receiving 100+ emails every day. If you don’t have a strategy your emails will get lost in the crowd, never opened, or even sent to the spam folder. In order to establish a strategy, you need to identify 5 key areas.

• Audience – Effective emails are relevant emails. Like in all forms of marketing you need a clear picture of who your customer and prospect are. What do they want? What are their hesitations? Your email campaign will speak to their wants, desires, and fears, and show them why your offering is the solution they didn’t know existed.
• Goals – Goals you something to work towards. Research email stats for your industry and use them as a benchmark for your email marketing goals.
• Easy Sign Up – How are people going to opt into your subscriber list? You need to create easy and obvious ways for potential subscribers to sign up to your list.
• Campaign Design – You have a lot of options when it comes to the type of campaign to run. You could send a weekly newsletter, product announcements, blog posts, or a combination.
• Schedule – Deciding on how often you plant to contact your list and doing it consistently is important. Let your subscribers know what to expect, then deliver consistently to build trust.

Results Matter

The numbers don’t lie. In fact, the numbers tell us everything. Paying attention to all the key metrics will help you tweak your emails until they’re producing great results.

• Deliverability – Measures the rate at which your emails are reaching your prospect’s inbox.
• Open Rate – The percentage of people that open your email.
• Click-through Rate (CTR) – Percentage of people that click on your call to actions.
• Unsubscribes – The number of people who opt out of your email list after receiving one or more emails.

Putting it All Together

You know you need email marketing for your business, but how do you get started? It starts with a good ESP (email marketing provider). A quality ESP will have the ability to deliver on several areas of importance within their platform.

• Should be in good standing with internet service providers
• Have easy-to-build forms, landing pages, and CTAs
• Custom Automation
• Can easily comply with email regulations
• Built-in analytics
• Downloadable reports

The great news is Gobiggi’s free email marketing does all of this for you! We work with you to design your campaign and then we execute. Ready to take your marketing to the next level? Take Gobiggi email marketing for a spin. Nothing is easier or more effective for getting your message heard, building leads, and converting prospects.