A beginner’s guide to Email marketing – Part 1

One of the best ways to generate traffic to your website and increase revenue is by making smart use of the people who have previously engaged with you. These people will be more partial to your brand name, so long as they had a good experience previously. 

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to re-engage your audience and welcome them back onto your website.

You Might Already Be Sitting On A Gold Mine

Email marketing, if done well, delivers great bursts of qualified traffic that can convert as well as any direct and organic traffic that comes to your site. 

Best of all, you might already have access to all the things you need for it and can start without any extra investment.

When’s The Right Time To Start?

As with anything, proper email marketing requires nurturing before getting it to a point where it’s a substantial slice of your traffic or revenue. As the name suggests, the reach of email marketing bottles down to the number of people who have granted you permission to contact them. 

For a new website/business, these numbers might be significantly smaller and not warrant the time and effort to get a mailshot out. So initially focus on building your list and once the monthly unique visitors get up into the 100s, it might be time to plot out your email marketing strategy.

Data Capture

The first step is to think about the data capture element. This is obviously someone’s email, but it is not limited to just that. The power of email marketing lies in having the ability to have a personal touch to it. For example, having a first name might already affect the ‘open rates’ significantly. Open rates describe the percentage of emails that will be opened by the recipients. 

Additionally, say you are running a webshop selling men and women’s t-shirts, being able to personalise a web shot showing a good proposition that is gender-specific goes a long way in getting the all-important clickthrough (to the website).

Balancing Ease and Value

Beyond data capture of email, name and gender, there are plenty of other business-critical information points that can supercharge your email marketing. 

The trick is finding the right balance between the effort someone has to go through (read: the number of fields to complete) and the perceived value that the person will get from it. 

Another, not unimportant factor is to make sure you get a positive opt-in from your users. This means that any email (and accompanying extra data points) you get from users needs to be explicitly agreed to as being used for marketing purposes.

This has all to do with data protection laws that have cropped up the last few years. GDPR is a recent one that has triggered a lot of companies to review cookie policies and email databases. 

Make Sure to be Compliant

Be sure to make clear at the point of asking for a user’s email that you intend to use it for marketing purposes, have this as an explicit opt-in (i.e. users have to check off a box actively) and make sure the data of this opt-in is registered with a date & time stamp. To read more click here!