Starting a business is just the beginning. The business idea planning is once. Sales and operations come as a daily job. Apart from making calls and personal visits, marketing is a way to attract volume business. Marketing efforts like digital and email marketing will improve your reach well. Best practices of email marketing campaigns are essential skills to learn.
Out of 3 marketing channels, email, SMS, and social media, email is one of the oldest modes of communication. It roughly started in 1978 and picked up in the dot.com era just before the millennium or Y2K.
DnD blocks SMS. Social media follows stringent laws of GDPR. Emails are getting filtered with spam filters.
Emails may not be shiny as some newer channels like IMs and social media, but effective way. The only challenge is how to dodge spam filters.
Email marketing isn’t just about your company. It’s about the reader.
Let’s find out when you should email marketing.
1. Side hustle and best practice of email marketing
This blog area is about business ideas and side hustle. It nudges you around to think about business to start. Entices the idea of starting a side hustle with the primary job. It is about side hustle to make money. Making the business idea work is crucial. Marketing makes you visible to the buyer. Email marketing is one of the best ways to get visibility and traffic to your website or inquire over-call for your services.
Here are business ideas that should kick start email marketing:
- Blogging
- E-com sales
- Selling course content
- Dropshipping
- Freelancer, any services
- Selling stuff travel plan
- And everything you can think of can be business ideas
So when should you start email marketing?
- Promote your product or content: Use email to share snippets of your product/blog for call for action and attract traffic
- Build a relationship: between your brand and reader/customer. The recall work very well.
- Boost brand awareness and advocacy: As you nurture and connect with the reader, you need to have continuity by sending mail to the latest happening
- Lead creation: When the reader makes up, he should not find us but be ready to reply to our mail asking for details
What should you do in order to make your email campaign a success? In short, we will discuss best practices of email marketing step by step.
I. Before first marketing mail, set email marketing strategy
Today’s email reader receives over 150 emails a day in multiple email IDs. If you miss the strategy, you might miss the resource of sending emails.
Sending mail is not cheap. Make sure you know who you are sending to. 5 things to keep in mind for side hustles as best practice of email marketing.
II. List your audience right
Sending emails to anyone and everyone can be dangerous. It can lead to no response from recipients and increase bounce mails. Find your persona and make a list of your recipient. It will help you score well in readability and connect to the right audience. The conversion will lead to the success of the email marketing strategy.
III. Set your goal before you start email marketing
You need to know why you do email marketing. Just reading the best practices of email marketing will not give you the result. Set your goal based on the emails going to send. The email marketing campaign can get 40% readability and 5% call-to-action click. Looking at this stat, set your goal.
IV. Entice the reader to sign-up
A reader would find take away like knowledge or freeware. There needs to be a takeaway. Consider every email ID as a resource to connect to the sales. Your email should have relevant content that your persona would look for in a situation. It should make them sign-up free trial or ask for more details.
V. Email campaign type and template
The most important thing to decide about is email type. Are you sending email as a newsletter, or is it a new update you want your audience to know? Whatever it may be, make sure you communicate precisely.
VI. Schedule your email
Don’t send mail without a plan on when it should hit the reader’s inbox. In case you are sending the newsletter, make sure you don’t send a newsletter every day. It can be fortnightly or monthly. Similarly, you send nurture mail, send a maximum of 1 per week. More than this will harm your email marketing campaign.
2. Email magnet
The email body is fine. Need to attract your reader to continue reading, as giving away like a survey report, step-by-step approach to get maximum out of your service or even comparison with the competition.
People like to get relevant content to proceed with knowing more. It will entice the reader to click the link and download the content freely. Or enrolling for your free service. IT can be a subscription.
Here are some email magnets:
- Ebook
- Infographic
- Sign-up for free usage
- Report on survey or study
- Template or checklist
- Video collateral
3. Don’t be shy to ask to opt-in/unsubscribe
The most important point in the best practice of email marketing campaigns is to show maturity by asking for an opt-in or easy unsubscribe link. To show maturity gives away such links an easy to access and doesn’t make it difficult. The reader will appreciate it and even by the spam filters engine.
The collaterals and content in the mail need to be enticing for the persona you are writing. Show them long-term benefits if they are sign-up, that can be knowledge or freebies. Opt-in would be easy if you connected well with the persona.
Learning best practices for email marketing campaigns is one and implementing is the next enormous challenge. A side hustler needs to work on email templates, a platform for email marketing, call of action, and even give away.
Read this space for more on email marketing. We would be specific for early entrepreneurs and side hustlers. Catch up.