Is email marketing dead? Some businesses do not believe the power of email marketing. But for small businesses, email marketing can be an extremely cost effective method to grow their businesses.
Email marketing is about sending emails. When sending emails, you can blast your email to everything in your list regardless of relevance. A different approach is to do segmentation on your list before sending.
Segmentation
One of the first key points when sending emails is to segment your list, and the advantages of doing so include:
- Higher deliverable rate
- Higher open rate
- Lower unsubscribe rate
- Fewer spam complaints
- Better email relevance
- More leads or sales
- More new customers
- Higher revenue
- Better customer retention
- Better word of mouth
Prior to do segmentation correctly on your many lists, or usually one big list, how do you even know based on what rules you can actually separate your contacts the correct list? That’s the problem which needs solutions for many small businesses.
The solution is automation. These days, automated email marketing campaigns can be created through using tools such as Sendinblue, Activecampaign, Drip, etc.
The use of scores
Score just means that you can assign a score to your contacts. Cold, warm, hot, etc which are in easy to understand meaning words, or 1-10 which are represented by numerical numbers. Either would work well.
Basically, the score gives you an idea how good this “lead” is. The highest the score, or the warmer the score, the best chance this leads will turn into sales. This allows your sales team or salespersons to line up priority when they couldn’t decide who to contact first or last.
The concept is like this: You send one email to your contacts, this contact opens the email and click a link in your email. Because of the actions she has taken, you assign a score 2 to her.
The use of tags
Tags can be used to put contacts in your lists into different categories. And one contact can be assigned with no tag, one tag, or more than one tags.
Some examples of tags are: event-network, event-may-2019, website-contact-form, newsletter, seo, social-media-campaigns, self-imported, onetime, etc.
Where and how to build your contact list?
List building is not only important for email marketing, but also marketing automation which involves emails.
Usually, a starting point is your website or one of your marketing landing pages on your site. On the page, you may give out a coupon or a limited gift. For people who are willing to fill in your pre-designed web form with their email and/or other personal information, you will fulfill your promise to them by giving them what they have asked for. In exchange obviously you get their email addresses.
Another place is through local communities or local events where you meet people and exchange business cards. The downside is that you may have to manually input the contact details into your email marketing program.
