Why Should You Use Email For Marketing?

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach customers and prospects. And, if there’s one thing that I can say with absolute certainty, it’s that using email for marketing is the number one way to reach your audience or community with your message, your offer or your point of view!

Email marketing for me is a direct and incredibly successful way to get cut through. It’s a great way to deliver your message and to get results fast in your business.

According to Mailchimp, average email open rates are up around 21% and while click through rates vary, the average is nearly 3%. That means if your list is only 1000 people (which is totally achievable) you can expect around 200 people to open any email correspondence you send, and around 30 to actually click through to your content or offer. That’s not a bad result at all!

While other channels can have variable results, email marketing, if your lists are robust, can give you a brilliant return on your time and money investment time after time.

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What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a direct type of digital marketing that targets your ideal customers with content, education, inspiration or an offering direct to their inboxes. Email marketing is easy to set up, cheap and provides a great return on your investment.

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing. Long before Facebook and Instagram, email marketing held its own with businesses as a way to connect directly, and en-masse with potential customers and leads.

Email marketing provides an incredible return on investment, delivering around $36 for every $1 spent. That’s higher than basically any other digital channel.

What’s the one platform that you typically check regularly every single day? You guessed it… your inbox.

No matter what other channels you choose to get your content from- your inbox is the number one platform where you repeatedly spend your time.

Why is Email Marketing Important?

With so many channels to choose from- and so many seemingly more fun and glamorous channels to explore, you might be asking why email marketing is important. Why should you pay attention to email?

Your email list is your number one way to generate revenue for your business.

Your email list is simply, gold!

Email marketing is direct. It’s cheap and it works.

Email Marketing Strategies

How do you create an email marketing strategy that gets results? Results for me mean that people, one, open my emails, and two, click the offer or links that I provide = revenue OR traffic (that ultimately will turn into revenue).

Remember in the intro when I talked about average one and click rates? Around 21% and 3% respectively.

You want to aim for at least these types of results and depending on your niche, and your email marketing skills! Your results will vary.

I typically get pretty good results from my email campaigns using ConvertKit. Open rates are usually well above 35% and open rates normally above 10%. Which, for me means that I both have a well qualified list and my emails are following a format that works well for me.

Your email strategy should always aim to do two things. One, provide value to your audience and two, build confidence in your audience so that at some point you can convert them to paying customers.

Your strategy should include ways to grow a qualified list, ways to engage this list in a meaningful way, and ways make money off this list.

Once you have your email strategy, you should create yourself a plan. A plan will help to keep you on track to your goals! Tailwind is about to launch a super cool email marketing planning tool that will definitely help you get your email marketing humming called Tailwind Copilot. Stay tuned for more deets!

How to create an email marketing plan

We all know that email marketing is one of the top ways to reach your audience and your prospects with a direct form of engagement. And we all know we should be using email more and more in order to reach our perfect customer and ultimately convert those leads into sales and revenue for our business right!

But once we have our strategy set in place.. and we know what we should be doing, its often the execution phase that lets us down.

A great email marketing plan will help you stay on track and stay motivated to reach your email marketing goals. But what does a great email marketing plan entail? and what does a great email marketing plan look like?

Tailwind is about to release a new email marketing tool called Copilot which will help you create an email marketing plan for your small business – looks to be super cool. The best thing is that Copilot thinks about email marketing in line with your overall content marketing plan and lets you integrate your social media plan into your email marketing plan.

Copilot will help you personalize your goals and reach your targets when it comes to marketing your small business. Things like acquiring new customers, increasing sales ands revenue, driving profitability and getting more engagement on social media.

Email, along with Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram is the first point of call… but TikTok and LinkedIn are also on the radar.

Copilot will also help you break your activities and campaigns down into various parts of the funnel.

Awareness at the top, through to consideration in the middle, and decision making at the bottom.

Copilot focusses heavily on helping your grow your email list! A win win win!

Starting with your goals and your business type, Copilot auto generates a tailored plan made especially for you!

One of the best things about Copilot is that it tells you exactly what to do! The types of content you should be sending, which stage the content relates to and when to send it.

If you don’t already have access to Email Marketing Plans in Tailwind, it’s not far away! September/ October 2022 is the roll out timeframe to all users. Check your dashboard!

How to Build an Email Marketing List

You have an email list but no one knows about it. It’s time to grow your email list!

Theres a couple of great ways to build up your email list. But the one thing you need to remember is to think quality over quantity!

In fact, aim to prune your email list regularly and keep it meaningful and full of your prime audience.

By prime audience – I mean the audience of people who want to hear from you, who fit your main messaging and who are willing to buy your product or service.

There’s zero point in cramming your email list with subscribers who don’t exactly fit your value proposition. You want people who will become customers!

You want to find a way to capture email leads when people visit your website. Ideally, you want these leads to be high quality, or qualified leads. So they have a much higher chance of converting. This just means that the leads you collect are meaningful and will likely buy from you, at some point.

In order to match up the propensity to convert with the offer, make sure your offer or lead generating activity is aligned with your ultimate product offering.

For example. If you sell printable for budgeting. Make sure your leads gen aligns with that topic. Or, if you offer coaching or a course, ensure your lead gen offer is closely alined with your niche. That way the emails you collect and your list will be much more likely to turn into revenue.

Here’s three ways to build your email marketing list.

1. Opt in forms

Possibly the best way to collect leads. And in my opinion one of the easiest.

An opt in form is a form that is either embedded or pops up (a pop up) on your landing page. The form offers a great freebie normally in exchange for the visitor entering their email and name. And being added to your list.

You can easily create a freebie, like a checklist or printable, or ebook in Canva.

ConvertKit is my go to for creating forms and lead gen on my website. It’s super easy to use and really inexpensive.

Simply create your form in ConvertKit, then add the code to your site and voila. Your form will appear on your web page and you’ll be on your way to collecting qualified leads.

2. Subscribe to email list form

The other way you can capture leads on your website is to provide a way for people to to subscribe to your email list. This is a little more passive compared to a specific offer or opt in form. But still beneficial.

And, if people are willing to passively subscribe overall to your site – then, they are most likely willing to hear from you with regards to content and offers.

You can create a subscribe function on your homepage or sidebar easily in ConvertKit or through your email provider.

3. Gaming options

Spin to win or spin the wheel types of pop ups allow you to entice your audience into spinning a virtual wheel in return for offering up their email to you.

Visitors have the chance to spin a wheel on your site, either on exit or via a pop up that appears after a certain length of time or scroll action. They can then win one of a number of valuable pries.

You decide what types of prizes are on offer. But good examples are your digital products, like high value course or coaching, a discount on your products, or even a consulting phone call or complimentary live session with you depending on your niche.

Some great spin and win plugins to get you started include Wheelio, Spin-a-Sale and WP Optin Wheel.

While spin the wheel type email list builders are fun and often reap good results. Bear in mind that they may not yield great conversion results. As you will capture many more people interested in a freebie, and sometimes not that well aligned with your offering.

So, they may unsubscribe early form you list (win, in my opinion) or they will not open or not click or … and this is a biggy, not buy.

Email Marketing Tips

There’s a few easy things to remember to help you get great results from your email list.

The first is to keep your email and your email subject lines short and sweet.

Think about what you really want to achieve with each email. What is the MAIN message of that email?

What link or offer do you want people to click. Then, write consciously.

• Aim for short sentences. Lots of breathing space for the words and make sure you introduce only one main concept.
• Include a CAT (Call-To-Action). Make sure that each and every email you send has one thing you want your reader to do. Then don’t confuse that message! Ensure you have only 1 action you want them to take.
• Think value, not sale. Add value to your audience with every interaction. Think about what it is that will get them to click. Think about what it is they need. Solve their problems. Solve their biggest issues. Grow trust and give, give, give.

Pro tip: Follow up with a PSS, or PSS to add in extra info or valuable links to adjacent content that you think fits well with your theme.

Email marketing is one of the best return on investment marketing strategies that you will ever use to reach your preferred audience. It’s easy, it’s fast and it really adds up quickly when you take the time to deliver consistent campaigns.

You own your list! No other channel provides you with this type of stewardship over your messaging, delivery and engagement. You are in control of your list and the amount of eyes that get to see your message. Make it great and you have the potential to instantly increase your conversion metrics!