What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a highly personalized form of marketing that takes advantage of direct email to develop relationships with potential customers and clients and promote product and services.
Email marketing is a very special tool for every entrepreneur and business owner cannot afford to ignore while striving to build a strong customer base. Unfortunately, what is email marketing in Nigeria is largely spamming and mechanical email bombardment. This misuse has made email marketing the least welcomed by your audience.
You’ll learn here just how to run successful email marketing campaigns that work. You’ll also find out what smart moves to make so that your emails can stand out distinctly among the abundance of unopened mails in your reader’s inbox.
Why Email Marketing?
Is email marketing really important in growing your business? Yes.
In the midst of the resources and tools available to marketer today, the approach for a highly effective marketing campaign still remains the same. This is that nothing beats connecting with your audience in a highly personalized way.
No other marketing platform does this well. Today, with all the marketing blares going on the social media feeds of your customer, the best bet is to meet him in the quiet of email inbox.
Call it “the other room” for digital marketers.
Email marketing is very cheap, easy to track and direct. With social media campaigns, you may never know for certain exactly who will get reached by your message and how to track him up. This is not the case with email marketing.
Email addresses are very personal, direct the chances of your message not getting delivered is smaller. You even have the advantage of tracking how your email is performing with each reader and a very direct way of following up on each category of your readers.
How to Run an Effective Email Marketing Campaign?
Access to a customer’s inbox is like a great privilege that is why it is important not to mess things and get shut out in the spam department of your email subscribers.
How can you run an effective email marketing campaign?
Growing an Email List
An email list is a directory of email users that your email campaigns get delivered to. As a rule, every user on your list must have given you consent to send messages to their in box. Sending an unsolicited message to an email is spamming.
Truth is that’s how we get around email marketing in Nigeria. You buy a bulky email list from everywhere and anywhere containing random users and send an “email blast” and just count on luck that it meets someone who may just be interested.
First of all this method is worth a good laugh. Don’t you think so? We are in a world where artificial intelligence is promising highly clever means to reaching your potential customer. Shouldn’t it be too far below standard for you to have little structure for targeting your email campaigns?
Instead of spamming, you can grow an email list by various forms of soliciting.
Opt-In and Pop-Up Forms
Add an opt-form to your website, where visitors can sign up for your newsletter. It is important to position these forms where it is easily seen. You can also make it pop up on the screen when your customer has spent some time on your site.
Your Opt-in Form should have an interesting invitation that convinces your audience they will benefit from your emails. You can also add a promise not to spam them, this way they will feel you can be trusted.
FREE Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a very generous offer of value you promise your audience in exchange for their email addresses. It could be exclusive deals, special discounts, or free eBooks. It is important to emphasize the value you are offering. Make an irresistible offer.
Provide useful content you know your target customer will need like fashion guides, how-to guides, or a free course. When your potential customer is happy to do business with you because he knows he will be getting value giving you his email address will be very prompt.
Compelling Landing Pages
A landing page is another direct way of getting users to sign up for your form. You can start a unique online campaign online that sends people to your landing page, where they give you personal details including their email addresses. You can link to your landing page through a blog post, or a social media post. Add the landing page link to your social media profile, like your Instagram business page bio or a pinned tweet on Twitter. You can even run an online advert.
Your landing pages should be creatively written with strong headlines and attention-grabbing images landing page. Add some text emphasizing what you are offering you this may be an occasion to use good storytelling to convince visitors to your landing page.
Securing Your Reader’s Attention:
What is the point of spending time and money creating an email campaign if your emails remain unopened? Your emails must be able to hook your readers.
- YOUR TITLE: The first thing is a convincing email title. Your readers should want to open
your email by just reading the title. Don’t use ambiguous email titles, keep it simple. Make it sound very personal by using add your reader’s name to the sentence and even in the body of your message. - CONTENT: Ensure the body of your email is in agreement with the title. Your reader will notice if the title
was merely bait . Engage your reader with beautifully written content and powerful storytelling. Don’t just bombard products to be bought into their faces. Talk about things that matter. Always leverage how relevant your business is to your customer’s needs. Solve his problems. - EMAIL SOURCE
: Your email source should carry a personal email. Do not use the official email address of your company. Instead of using [email protected], our readers will relate more personally to our emails if they saw that they came from [email protected]. Also, while attributing your email at the end instead of using a general attribution as this:
“Best Regards,
The Giga Lagos Digitals Team”
it is very much better to use a personal attribution instead, for example:
“Best Regards,
Dorcas Agbogun
Head of Content, Giga Lagos Digitals”
Tailoring Emails
Email marketing is primarily about directly reaching every customer. This is why it is important for your emails to be tailored to each category of readers. Among your list, there will be different classes of people. For a better experience, each readers should be reached with the most relevant emails. If your male email subscriber keeps getting special offers for women’s items when it’s not valentines, he may assume the emails are misdirected and unsubscribe from your list.
To avoid this, categorize your list based on various factors: gender, age, and interests – some subscribers may just be interested in your discount offers; others may just want to be notified when there are new releases. You can ask for these details as they fill out the opt-in forms. Send tailored content to each category.
Making Customers Out of Email Subscribers:
There are two things an email marketing campaign does better than any other marketing platform.
- Call To Action
- Follow Up
In your emails, you can clearly state a call to action for your reader. After a persuasive email copy, your reader should be able to decide what he wants to do about your current offer.
With email campaigns, you can always track, whatever action he has taken and follow him up with supporting emails, to help him reconsider your offer. You might also request he fills out a survey form to tell you why he is not interested in your offer.
A follow-up is a strong tool for converting a potential customer. Always follow up on your leads consistently, and be very personal, convincing, and promising value with each follow-up attempt.
