5 email marketing secrets to boost your sales

In business, you can expend your valuable time and effort chasing customers who will only purchase once from you or you can invest in building loyal, customers who will come back to you time and time again. 

Which one of those options sounds better to you? Most business owners like having loyal customers.  Loyal customers plus a quality product and services equal to lifelong customers who are devoted to your brand. 

The easiest and most cost-effective way to do this is with email marketing. Despite the popularity of Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, email marketing is still king when it comes to increasing sales and engaging with your customers and would-be customers. 

Want to unlock the secret to awesome email marketing campaigns? Listen closely… 

Step 1: Recognise your goals

Before you start running you need to walk, think bottom line what would you like to achieve with your campaign? Before deciding on a strategy, creating opt-in forms or testing tools first ask yourself do I want to:  

• Drive more traffic to your product pages
• Encourage past customers to buy again
• Encourage would-be customers to buy for the first time
• Sell more products
• Develop personal relationships with your customers 

Obviously most business owners will be drawn to one goal and that’s great! In order to be more successful, you should be thinking about more than one goal. Focusing on 1-3 primary goals can help develop your strategy when thinking of your goal keep in mind the SMART goal technique (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).  

Step 2: Choose the Right Tool 

After establishing your goals the next step is an effective marketing strategy. This involves trying out lots of different platform’s each one offer’s something unique so it’s important to find one best suited to your needs. Keep in mind ultimately it needs to help you scale and automate your email marketing campaigns. Here are our favorites for you to check out:  

• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Remarkety
• Rejoiner
• Aweber
• SendinBlue

Step 3: Keep building

Once you’ve established your goals and the tool you would like to use you need to be actively building your mailing list. The easiest way to do this is with a pop-up form on your website but that might not be enough in order to collect the most leads you need to place a variety of opt-in forms in different places throughout your website, for example:  

• Within blog posts as content upgrade offers (learn more about content upgrades here)
• In blog sidebars and footers
• On active product pages
• In pop-ups and welcome mat screens that appear whenever a new visitor lands on a page within your website

It’s important to keep in mind that your goal isn’t to overwhelm or spam website visitors with these from’s, your goal is to make it easy for visitors to sign up. Offer visitors something of value when signing up, for example, a special offer. As always it’s vital to track results of your opt-in forms in order to measure and optimize the placement and frequency.    

Step 4: Value

Remember in step 3 where we suggest giving visitors something of value by signing up? Well now’s the time entice your subscribers with offers.  Offers are the easiest and quickest way to turn would-be customers into just customers. Who doesn’t like it quick and easy? Here are some examples of offers that you may want to use. 

• Coupons for new subscribers
• Free shipping for returning customers
• Promo codes for people who abandoned their shopping cart before purchasing
• Special campaigns for seasonal time periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s, or any other holiday that aligns with your specific business.
• Refer-a-friend discount

With these offer’s you are giving potential customers the little push, they need to become loyal customers. Once you begin with your offer’s it’s then time to optimize with time-sensitive deals and exclusive email specials. 

Step 5: Test, Optimize, and Analyze Everything

In order to truly run a successful email campaign, you need to test and optimize everything!     

You need to change things week by week, the ultimate purpose of testing your emails is to zero in on the most effective tactics in order to drive the most traffic and conversions.  Here are some examples of tests you can initially run: 

• How often you email your subscribers each week
• The discounts you share with subscribers
• Plain-text emails vs. photo-heavy emails
• Adding more offers and CTA’s in your transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping confirmation, thank you emails, etc.)
• The size, colour, shape, and placement of CTA buttons that appear in your emails

Testing is only half the battle – the other half is measuring, tracking and analyzing your results this way you can make informed desitions when you decide to optimize your campaigns.