The underlying concept behind email marketing is not to generate sales, but to improve the overall customer experience. This involves taking your customers through a relationship-building process that helps you influence them so that they feel confident in their choices and enjoy a wonderful experience. Maintaining this relationship through email marketing helps you achieve long-term business goals.
However, when it comes to startups, email marketing becomes even more important as you desperately want to build your customer or client base. To make email marketing work for your startup, follow these important tips:
Whether it’s a startup or an established firm, the biggest asset any business is its email list. This is why building your email list is the primary phase that makes your email marketing work.
The way you manage the sign-up on your website greatly determines the growth of your email list. One of the common mistakes startups commit is complicating the sign-up process for site visitors. For instance, if the subscription form is semi-hidden on your website, very few people will sign-up for emails. The same would be the result if the subscription form is too long or requires too much information from the visitors. Many individuals who would otherwise want to subscribe for emails are put off by the number of fields a sign-up form includes.
Thus, the sign-up form should automatically appear on pages as a pop-up form as people navigate through the website and engage with the content. Using exit-intent technology, you can direct the website to display the sign-up form when visitors are about to leave the website as one last chance to subscribe.
Also, make sure it is easily accessible for those who wish to subscribe. Include the form on the homepage, in the widget portion on the sidebar, near the navigation menu, the footer section of the website, and in the blog content. Through increased subscriptions, you’re likely to convert 35% more people who would otherwise be regarded as lost visitors.
Offer Something of Value in Emails
While simplifying the sign-up process is critical, it is not sufficient to generate leads. You need to offer something valuable to make people want to subscribe. Generally, people are more like to share their email addresses when they get something in return. The most common practice is to offer content upgrades, but you might also want to offer a discount coupon or a gift such as an e-book for anyone who subscribes to emails.
This conveys to people that you’re not just after their money, but have something valuable to offer. Once you have the emails, you can send amazing campaigns that bring them back to your website and perhaps generate sales.
Keep the Email Content Diverse
If all your emails are promotional, they will lose value as people will get used to them. If you want your subscribers to be excited about the upcoming campaigns, your email campaign strategy should be focused on keeping the content diverse.
Besides Promotions, the content in your emails can be about events, newsletters, product or service information, new product launch, etc. Yet, varying the content doesn’t mean you stop thinking about promotions. No matter what, your subscribers will still be most interested in special deals and other promotions, which will ultimately drive revenues.
Conduct Email Audits
As a startup, you can’t afford to have typos or other errors in your emails, as it will take a toll on your firm’s reputation. Therefore, when launching email marketing campaigns, it is imperative to conduct regular email audits to eliminate any mistakes from the content. All emails should pass through a thorough email audit before they are sent out to subscribers.
Integrate Mobile Responsive Designs
The way we look at our emails is different for each smart device. More than two-thirds of the people access their emails through their smartphones. Hence, the integration of mobile-responsive designs must be kept in mind when devising an email campaign strategy. This will ensure maximum reach for your startup business.
Segment Your Email Lists
However, the traditional practice of blasting out a standard email to every single subscriber won’t be effective in maintaining this relationship. No matter which email marketing solutions are used, businesses, especially startups, need to adopt a personalized approach with customers or subscribers by segmenting the email lists into various groups.
For instance, you can group the email lists into the following 5 segments:
- New subscribers
- Those who haven’t opened any of your emails
- Those who opened your emails but did not click on the shared link
- Those who recently made a purchase
- Loyal customers
Once you’ve segmented your email list, prepare a different email template for each segment so that meaningful and relevant information is sent to each segment. However, avoid making each email promotional, because it will defeat the purpose of segmentation.
If you use an email marketing solution, you will explore more personalization options for your target audience in terms of age, gender, interests, and location.
This way your customers will feel more valued and be more likely to follow the links you share in emails. You’ll notice a significant increase in the click-through-rates.
Include a Call to Action
Finally, always include a call to action (CTA) in all your emails, even if the primary goal is not to convince the customer to make a purchase. You can encourage them to learn more, get in touch or take other actions. This will increase their engagement with the website and your business.
Closing Thoughts
Email marketing can be an effective tool to build up and manage a strong customer base for your startup business. The above tips can make your emails effective and likely generate more response from your email lists. To make the most out of email marketing for your startup, reach out to an email marketing consultant. Click here to learn how you can skyrocket conversions through email marketing.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
- How to Make Email Marketing Work for Your Startup - March 18, 2020
