Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly
Email marketing remains one of the most common marketing methods out there. It is a low cost way to market to customers with a high rate of return. Here are five ways email marketing can help you grow your business. All of them are within easy reach of every business utilizing email marketing, and none of them involve spamming your potential and current customers.
Use Email Marketing to Enhance Local Outreach
When someone talks about local outreach to potential customers via digital marketing, they initially think about local search engine optimization or sending messages to those customers in your marketing database and local area. However, you can use email marketing to improve local outreach. Some services allow you to buy an email list by zip code so that you know your emails are being sent to customers in your local area. The benefits of this include a high return on the investment of time and money in email marketing, reaching those whose snail mail service filters junk mail and generating statistics on the rate at which they open messages and click through to your landing page.
A/B Testing
So many people focus on crafting a perfect marketing email that they forget that the message that attracts one customer may repel another. Try out different subject lines, email marketing messages and call to action buttons. Intentionally test messages that are the same except for one specific variable, the A subject line and the B subject line, the same subject line but newsletter A versus newsletter B. Study the data on your email marketing to see which subject lines result in the most opened messages, which pieces of content resulted in actions being taken and which call to action messages led to sharing of content or signups. Run these same tests of messaging against each customer segment, since this will give you the information you need to market to each community with the greatest success.
Newsletters
Creating newsletters sent out via email is a cost effective alternative to printed newsletters. Maintaining the newsletter with quality content is an excellent opportunity for offsetting the limited cost by offering complementary services and recycling content from your website. Add social media sharing buttons to content in your newsletter to generate brand awareness, backlinks to your content and positive signals for your website through social media sharing. And here’s an in-depth guide on email newsletters which will help you generate higher open rates, better CTRs and ultimately, more revenue for your business.
Keeping Up with Customers to Complete the Sales Funnel
There are little things you can do to increase the odds someone will complete the sales funnel. One option is sending an email to someone who abandoned their shopping cart mid-transaction, increasing the odds they’ll come back and finish the purchase. Another option is reminding people of items they put on “watch lists” or “save for later” lists so that they come back and buy the item. A strong lure is informing them that an item on their “buy later” list has been marked down or become eligible for free shipping. The reminder that they were interested in the item and notice of a short term deal is enough to entice some to go ahead and buy it.
Rewarding Repeat Buyers
Rewarding repeat buyers is an excellent way to build brand loyalty. You can use email marketing tied to customer relationship management software, triggered by purchases. Sending a coupon code to someone automatically after a specified number of purchases makes them want to come back and buy from you again. Rewarding new customers with free shipping a while after their first purchase increases the odds they will become repeat buyers. You could also send coupon codes to people who haven’t bought from you in a while to solicit them to come back. A side benefit of sending rewards like this is that it prevents people from unsubscribing from your emails.
If you want to get the most out of your email marketing efforts, these tips should help.
by 
Here’s a helpful resource about the 6 BEST business email providers. “Email providers are service providers who host email addresses for businesses or individuals. We looked at more than a dozen business email providers and narrowed the list down to the top six, comparing each on price, attachments and data storage, security, accessibility, spam and virus protection and available integrations, finding the best overall.” https://fitsmallbusiness.com/best-business-email-providers/
You can’t deny the importance of email marketing in 2018! But before that, it’s important to have a professional business email. This article here details the 6 best email providers in 2018 – https://fitsmallbusiness.com/best-business-email-providers/ the article takes into account factors like price, ease of use, storage, etc and judges providers based on these factors.