Email marketing is becoming increasingly more effective when done well. As spam filters become more sophisticated, and people have increasingly switched to using social media and instant messaging apps to communicate, the email inbox is now a good place to catch the attention of a well targeted and carefully chosen audience. You can do this without the high marketing saturation of other platforms.
Ensuring your email marketing campaigns are effective requires a few things. Firstly, good messages and a strategic approach to what to send and how often. Secondly, a place to direct recipients or a call to action – whether it is visiting your site or replying to your mail. Finally, you need a very good list of valid email addresses to send these emails out to.
The last point is the most important. Finding messages and strategies that work well can be a process of trial and error, and you may have to tweak things for some time to discover what works. Without a good list of recipients, even the best messages can fall flat.
Of course, the easiest people to market to via email are those who have already engaged with you or are aware of your presence. People already residing within your network, such as existing customers, can be among the best people to target with your new offers, promotions or upselling attempts. This is because they are already friendly with you and will recognise your business name. You can also get a good list of pre-qualified people if you have a decent blog with a lot of readers, by asking people to subscribe.
A lot of successful sites and businesses give away an incentive to join their mailing lists, such as access to extra content on their site or a gift like a free eBook. Offering a discount code to use on a purchase can work well to get people to subscribe if you are an e-commerce site, or are partnered with one.
Of course, you may not have as many people as you'd like on your mailing list, or you may not have the kind of site which attracts subscribers. Also, in a B2B situation, it can be harder to build a good base of warm leads to contact with your emails. You can, however, look for the email addresses of people within different companies and put in a bit of work to find the most relevant people to contact as cold email prospects. This is made possible by using tools like a bulk email checker.
If you have a message and you want to reach out to a lot of people, email can be highly effective. It is also cost and time effective. Do make sure, though, that you put in the effort to build the strongest possible mailing list, and keep it up to date. This will help make sure your emails are appreciated, and not be seen as spam.