Spreading the word about a business is difficult in today’s bloated markets. This article will showcase for you some of the best email marketing websites that you can use to bring your audience the messages you want them to see. While in general, many people regard email marketing as an advanced form of spam, some people can find ways to use email marketing as a genuine way to attract customers.
Understanding Email Marketing
Unlike some of the common perceptions, email marketing is about more than just sending emails willy-nilly hoping someone clicks on them. The best email marketing websites would tell you that email marketing is similar to advertising. It’s about being ever-present.
While many consumers won’t respond to a single email in their inbox, with enough exposure, the name of the business in question will get engrained in the minds of those reading the emails. You can see this form of marketing from several larger companies, like Uber and Skip The Dishes. These companies often send emails about their company to their emailing lists.
Consistent emails eventually catch the attention of even the most stubborn consumer. That being said, attracting more consumers to check out emails is as easy as including an inexpensive bonus within the email. If you’ve ever used a food delivery service like Skip The Dishes, then you know that they love sending coupons via email.
Whatever business takes to email marketing, they can apply these techniques to their business with ease. The best email marketing websites offer many ideas for how to attract customers, like including coupons, a free trial or consultation, a link to a webinar and other free and inexpensive things like that.
These are called lead magnets. A good lead magnet is short and sweet, and relevant to the business it advertises.
The Advantages of Email Marketing
One of the great bonuses of using a dedicated email marketing service is that, unlike with social media, you are the master of your own content. While on services like Instagram or Facebook, you are beholden to the rules of those sites, some of the best email marketing websites use inhouse email systems, called Email Service Providers (ESPs).
With this technology, organizing your email lists and content is simple. Take a site like OptinMonster, which provides both email marketing services, and articles explaining how their service works. While initially, email lists can feel like spam, they really are a powerful way to garner a loyal and large fanbase.
Along with the advantage of bringing in new customers and cementing relationships with new ones, email marketing is inexpensive and low risk. The worst-case scenario for an email is that it is ignored and sent to the junk folder. With that in mind, the best email marketing websites are sure to turn prospecting consumers into customers.
The Best Email Marketing Websites for Different Businesses
While any of the many email marketing services online can work for most business types, some market themselves towards different business sectors.
Take Constant Contact, which specializes in E-commerce. Their service automatically integrates a storefront’s products into its email lists. What that translates into is an email that sends discounted product recommendations to its email list based on the customer’s previous purchases.
Amazon, in particular, uses a system like this, which is why their emails so often contain the items you might not even know you were looking for.
The fact that Constant Contact automates the system of product recommendation saves money on marketing teams and saves time for employees that can be better spent in other sectors of business.
Another company, Zoho Campaigns, is useful for smaller scale and lower budget entrepreneurs looking to send out emails to their potential customers. While having fewer options than some of the more expensive options available online, Zoho Campaigns is one of the best email marketing websites because it offers similar services to its competitors for much lower prices. Its cheapest plan is only two dollars a month.
Further specializations exist, and the list goes on, with the last major email marketing site being Marketo Engage. This is a service provided by Adobe which specializes in, well, specialization. It tries to send emails that are targeted towards individuals and allows for powerful A/B testing with emails.
It can split email lists into A/B groups and can evaluate the success of each type. With some simple Google searches, you can find yet more of the best email marketing websites with ease.
Creating Effective Email Campaigns
The first step to any email marketing campaign is to establish goals and milestones. Have an idea of what you want from email marketing. Your business should have attractive options already for your customers to pick from and should already have at least some customers that you can send emails to.
Email marketing services seek to create a platform on which your company can present itself to potential clients. They do not create services and products for you to sell. A reasonable goal for an email marketing campaign would be to achieve a certain increase in traffic on your site or a direct increase in sales from online sources.
After having set a reasonable milestone, it’s important to create a list of email recipients that you think will respond to your marketing well. If your average consumer is not the type to check emails very often, then it likely won’t work very well for them.
For example, a younger demographic that doesn’t use email much wouldn’t benefit from this style of marketing much, but the early-20s and beyond would be a better target market since emails start to take on an important role in the lives of consumers around that age.
While you may already have some email lists ready to go, acquiring more emails to send your marketing to is invaluable for increasing your reach. A great way to obtain more emails for your list is to provide consumers an incentive to subscribe to your email list.
A common way to this is to provide first-time purchasers a discount for also giving their email. Something as small as a 5% or 10% discount on whatever item or service they’re purchasing in return for an email will quickly build up a large email list for you to incorporate into your already created list. If your business ships out items to addresses, try cutting off shipping costs in return for an email. Many people love to avoid shipping fees.
From there, you now have a list and a goal. It’s time to create some emails.
Creating Email Templates for Your Customers
Depending on what your business is all about, you may have different ideas for what you want to send to your customers. Some companies send out deals to their consumers that entice them to make a purchase they otherwise wouldn’t have made.
While your customers may be unwilling to purchase your product or service for the first time at full price, they may be willing to do so with a discount as low as 10%. Psychologically speaking, urgency is an important factor for bringing in wary customers. A 10% off deal for the next 24 hours encourages customers to take the dive. The hope from this system is that the customer will like what they’ve gotten from you, and continue to make similar purchases, this time at full price.
The template you use will be based heavily on what your business is trying to do, and you should consider features like urgency and appealing to your demographic. For a demographic of low-income youth, discounts and urgency work the best, but for an older demographic, an interesting blog and some light reading might do better. In the end, you would know your customer base better than anyone else would, so plan accordingly.
Personalizing Email for Customers
One technique that has been seeing some rising popularity among the best email marketing websites is personalized emails for each customer. With the rise of data collection, and the ease of access to it, emails can more easily target the potential wishes of potential customers.
Creating personalized emails is time-consuming unless it is automated, but automation doesn’t always do a good job of presenting genuinely interesting purchase choices to its targets. This is why services like Marketo Engage are rising in popularity with their effective automated personalized marketing. In the future, the best email marketing websites will likely take on further personalized email strategies.
A simple form of personalization that is easy to implement is to add the consumer’s name in the body or header of the mail. Emails with names in them tend to feel more friendly and have higher click rates than those without names.
Creating Appealing Emails in Today’s Market
In recent times especially, using both names and emojis in emails has become a standard. Emojis, in particular, are good for encouraging social media and mobile-friendly advertising.
Among younger markets, emojis make an email more likely to appeal, and it can have the powerful effect of your own customer base marketing for you. If your email base spreads your interesting emails around on their social media, you’re getting extra marketing at no cost and creating a loyal fanbase.
Even further, if a particularly large personality on social media takes an interest in your emails, they may just be willing to create an advertising deal with you and create yet further marketing opportunities for you.
An appealing email will also feature relevant information and be fairly concise. Avoid having too much information that bores the reader. Most people will only briefly check their email and then leave without much notice.
Some may even just read the header and subject line. Putting your products and services in the forefront with whatever incentive you’ve decided on as the centerpiece is important for garnering attention before it disappears.
Staying in Contact With Your Customers
It’s important to not just send one email. Optimally, your emails should arrive at scheduled and consistent times so that the person will begin to integrate your emails into their schedule.
While some customers might ignore your emails for weeks, it only takes one email that successfully captures interest to create a new loyal customer. Keep sending emails out to your customers, even if they haven’t interacted with them in months.
The only thing that is important to avoid is seeming like spam email. Ending up in the junk folder will be the death of that consumer as your customer most likely.
Sending emails with varied offers and continuing to maintain personalized subject and header lines will eventually pull in most consumers in your email list. Most consumers don’t bother to unsubscribe from email lists, even if the ability to is presented to them.
This means that your email list will probably continuously grow to be bigger and bigger, even though some of your email listees will have subsided into junk boxes. Many of the email marketing services have ways to display to you which of your email listees are junk or active, but even emails in the junk box are worth sending.
Email Marketing and Its Place in Your Business
Whatever your business is, email marketing can be useful for it. Although email marketing is better suited to some businesses than others, it still has merit for just about any sector. Particularly by working with some of the aforementioned best email marketing websites, you can grow your business into a profitable and revenue-generating endeavor.
Along with that, you can create a powerful consumer base that is loyal to you, and which spreads the word for you without any input on your behalf.
In today’s marketplace, word of mouth and social media marketing are powerful tools that go hand in hand with email marketing.
Your business could greatly benefit from these email techniques and it might just make you into the next Amazon given enough time. Personalized and easy-access concise emails are the best way to encourage your customers to engage with your site and to spread the word about your business.
Email marketing has a place in any business sector and might just be the perfect fit for you.