Email marketing – done properly!
Benno Purin
Director Clients & Operations, Co-Founder @ Digit-One
These days you can send and receive email from anywhere. 79% of Austrians use this communication channel; in Germany it's as high as 89%. Hardly any other channel lets you address and reach such a broad audience. The number of emails sent (excluding spam) comes to 1.86 quadrillion — a figure that's hard to grasp. And 89.4% of Austrians use email on their smartphone.
These facts make email, despite newer options like WhatsApp Business, still the most effective communication medium.
The magic words: opt-in emails
Even in the age of social media and ad campaigns, email can be an enormously effective marketing method. The prerequisite, though, is doing it right. However broad the audience reachable by email may be, you have to make sure you send email campaigns with clear intent. As a rule, only send emails that contain usable, helpful or interesting information about your company, your products or your services. Sending out bland promotional emails indiscriminately, by contrast, should absolutely be avoided. It clogs up inboxes and leads to frustration among customers. At worst, it earns your company a permanent place in the spam folder.
Your address list is pure gold!
An email list is more than a collection of contacts. It's part of what your company delivers and the tool with which you can serve and retain your customers. Well-structured email marketing lets you be in direct contact with people who are interested in you, your services or your products, who have already bought something or who have been in touch with you. For sustainable, long-term growth and to make sales easier, building a valuable mailing list well should be your highest priority. With any number of tools — HubSpot, for instance — you can collect not just contact details but preferences too, which lets you define audiences and address them in a targeted way.
So that your emails become more targeted, so you can build an optimal list and improve your existing strategies, we've put together four tips for anyone starting out with email marketing.
#1 – Use suitable lead magnets
Data and email addresses are very valuable. Your users know that too. Which means not everyone will simply hand over their data and their email address. So in order to collect contacts, you have to offer your users something of value in exchange for their address. That's what's known as a lead magnet. Fundamentally it's nothing other than a "gift" you give potential subscribers so they're willing to hand over their data and email address. What kind of gift it is largely doesn't matter and depends very much on your business idea and your audience.
What's important to keep in mind is that your "gift" balances out the perceived price of your audience's data and email address.
When it comes to devising and coming up with ideas for targeted lead magnets, you can be creative. Here are a few common methods and examples:
Special offers & discounts
Everyone knows this one. Sign up to the newsletter and you get an instant discount plus notification when products are on offer. This method isn't just long proven — it's still used by large companies like Zalando, Saturn and many others. Most people know from their own experience: an incentive like an instant discount for signing up to a newsletter, or the promise of benefiting from discounts and exclusive information on future purchases, usually works. Think the idea through and you'll notice there are no limits to what's possible. It's perfectly feasible, for example, to build your own "member community" around how you market those discounts. That raises the perceived value of the discounts and gives people a reason to become part of your community and trade their email address for discounts and information.
Prize draws
Another entirely common practice is running prize draws. There are two important points to keep in mind here, though. On the one hand you have to think carefully about how you set a draw like this up so you're on safe ground, because online prize draws are subject to a number of legal rules. Look into the subject properly so you're legally in the clear. You also have to think about how you'll retain the leads and contacts you generate through the draw over the long term. Entering a prize draw doesn't necessarily mean the users who signed up are also interested in receiving marketing emails and information about your products. That's a point you should definitely bear in mind when looking for quality contacts that generate revenue over time.
Pay-with-mail: free content & giveaways
A very good incentive for signing up to your mailing list is free content that offers your users convincing value. Ideally that content has a sales connection to your product or your services.
Fundamentally there are two ways to generate contacts with content. On the one hand you can make whitepapers or other information your users find interesting available on your website and then hand it over free in exchange for an email address (known as pay-with-mail). On the other you can write regular newsletters with genuinely interesting content that only users registered on the relevant mailing list receive.
With this route to gaining addresses too, you can get creative and tailor the concept ideally to your own audience. What's often important, though, is that users and potential subscribers have something to consume immediately after signing up — that they feel the value of signing up straight away.
#2 – Use a dedicated landing page for generating leads and contacts
A targeted, successful email marketing concept definitely includes a dedicated landing page focused 100% on persuading prospects to subscribe to your newsletter. It's important to leave out distractions such as sidebars or other advertising.
The following content matters on the landing page for your users:
- A clear, convincing headline
- Testimonials that underline the credibility and quality of your newsletter
- Video or imagery that catches users' attention
- The benefits of subscribing, with a short description
- The newsletter form
The landing page doesn't need much content. The fewer words you need, the simpler and clearer it is. When creating that content, though, make sure it's tailored precisely to the audience you want to reach. Ideally everything fits within one screen so users can see it all at once.
#3 – Get users onto your lead landing page
However well you've devised your lead magnet, if nobody sees it, it's useless. There are countless ways to get enough users onto your landing page.
Organic reach
With a pinned post on one of your company's social media channels, you can present your lead magnet to every visitor the moment they land on the page. Beyond that, most social platforms let you set up a call-to-action button that can point straight at your landing page. If anyone knows your fans, it's you — and you should make full use of that when sharing your landing page link on social media: follow your fans' interests and use images and eye-catching headlines to steer them to the page.
If you've chosen your content well, organic reach alone will usually generate plenty of contacts.
Promotion via AdWords and social media
If it's hard to drive organic traffic to your landing page, or that traffic isn't enough, running paid advertising is an alternative — whether you run it through Google Ads, Facebook or another medium. Here you should always be clear on who your audience is, where you'll find them and which keywords will reach them.
Ideally the message of your ad speaks to a problem potential customers might have. Your lead magnet then provides the relief they're looking for.
The more precisely you target that promotion and hit your audience, the cheaper your generated contacts become — and the longer they stay part of your mailing list.
Link your landing page
Wherever you achieve reach, the value your landing page promises can be used almost anywhere. If you write blog posts, for instance, it fits in very well. When users read your articles, watch your videos and engage with your content generally, they're evidently interested in your business, your product or your service. That generally means these are users more likely to click the link to find out more or get more information.
But every other channel you use can also serve to market your landing page and therefore your lead magnet. If you send and answer a lot of email, for example, that's an excellent opportunity to place your landing page link in your signature. There too you reach people who bring a certain level of interest with them.
#4 – Use your existing contacts too
When collecting those first contacts, it's often easiest to start close to home. Whether through personal conversations with clients or over the phone — by mentioning your newsletter in the right setting you'll build up your first contacts quite quickly. Building on that, you can widen the circle and keep growing and expanding your list, using the tips above and your own creative approach.
Always keep in mind:
In the end it always comes down to the right mix and to the consistency with which you pursue the goal of growing your list. Quality should always come first, though. Only with high-quality, targeted content that's genuinely valuable to your users will you achieve sustainable growth.
"Newsletter marketing is 40 times more effective than social media"
Despite many newer marketing channels, the newsletter remains a very popular marketing instrument. The reason is how well customers accept this channel: they sign up voluntarily and out of their own interest. According to an email marketing whitepaper from Newsletter2go, newsletters are customers' favourite source of information — ahead of social media. With an ROI of 28 euros per euro spent, this form of marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. No wonder around 93% of all e-commerce companies rely on newsletter marketing.
Old school but pretty good
Email marketing may sound dull and it certainly isn't among the shiny new marketing channels. But it works, and for many companies it's still the strongest and most important channel when it comes to customer retention. Because unlike channels such as SEO or social media, your email list isn't remotely as volatile or subject to shifting topics. A well-built list can instead become a loyal support for your company over time — one that brings you new and returning visitors continually and for the long term. So among the countless ways of reaching your audience, email marketing shouldn't be underestimated. Paired with newer tools like HubSpot, it's possible to act even more precisely, increase the value for your customers further and get even more out of this channel.
The best time to start acquiring new visitors is today! Our four steps for email marketing beginners are only the tip of the iceberg, after all. Always in the back of your mind: create value.