Important of Email Marketing

Email  marketing is still relevant in 2020. You can’t just focus on social media and completely forget about email marketing. Social media is like the cocktail party and email marketing is like the coffee date. Email is a great way to get personal with your audience and send the right message to the right customer, at the right time. I have seen a single email generate $3,000 in sales for a startup company and $12,000 in sales for a more established company. So no matter where you’re at with your business, there is money to be made in email marketing.

 But before you can start generating revenue, you first need an email list. But before we hope into the tactics, I just want to let you know that if you have any questions throughout this  articles, feel free to drop them in the comments below, and I will make sure to get back to every single one of them. Email co-marketing is a partnership between brands where companies promote an offer to a shared niche audience. To do this, you’re going to want to partner with complimentary brands rather than competing brands. A perfect example of this was when pottery barn and Sherwin-Williams collaborated on a campaign called “color your room”, where they created an exclusive line of paints. They also had a section on pottery barn’s website where customers can go and choose the paint colors that complimented the furniture. This is genius because this partnership anticipates a problem that the consumer is likely already having. When you first move into a house, what’s the first thing you’re going to do? You’re going to paint the walls. And then secondly, you’re going to choose some furniture. So by collaborating, they’re solving the problem of choosing complimentary finishes. I also love this example because the collection of the emails almost feels like a byproduct of this partnership.

You want to make sure that these relationships are rich and multifaceted so that everyone involved is experiencing many benefits. To figure out which brands to partner with, you first want to think about a pain point that your audience might be having. Then you want to think about how you can package complimentary products and services together in order to solve their problem. Another fun tactic is influencer marketing. This is personally one of my favorite tactics because it is a strategic long term play. So not only are you getting a fresh new email list, but you’re also connecting with influencers in your industry that have the potential to be a long term relationship that’s mutually beneficial. Have your influencers speak to your offer that drives to a landing page. 

Collect email addresses from that landing page for customers to be able to redeem their offer. If you’re wondering what kind of an option you should do, consider a mini course, a bootcamp or a discount code. But anyways, going for an influencer with a healthy following is really only half the equation. Here are a couple of things that you’re going to want to keep in mind as you’re going through Instagram to find the right influencer. How similar is their audience to your desired audience? A high quality email list is one that shares your brand values. Take a glance at how many followers they have and how engaged their audience is. How many likes, how many comments are they getting? If their audience seems participatory in conversation, that’s the kind of audience that you want for your brand as well. If you’re having trouble eyeballing the engagement rate of an influencer, check out flanks.com. Flanks is a great tool to help calculate the engagement rate of any influencer. While you’re doing your research, take a look at their feed aesthetic, and also check out their tone of voice to make sure that both of your brands align. And finally, this might be the single-handedly, most important thing to note. An influencer that has an emotional connection to their audience is key. So someone with say 7,000 followers and a ride or die audience is going to give you a better return on investment than someone with 50,000 followers and very little engagement. Something I see a lot of small business owners get caught up on is how they should be reaching out to influencers and what they should be saying. If you’re also struggling with this, let me know, and I will leave you a template in the comments down below of how you can start reaching out.

The first step in building out your mini course is figuring out what the topic is going to be on. The courses that tend to succeed are going to have answers to the problems that your consumer is having. I would recommend using Google auto complete, Google trends, and Google keyword planner. This is going to help you gain insight as to what are the questions that your target audience is having and searching for. Once you have that down, create a landing page for people to sign up for your free course. From there, you will distribute an email or a sequence of emails with the course content and bonus. At the end, you can plug in your product for people to learn more about what it is that you offer. Get eyeballs on your mini course, by promoting it through social media, paid ads and playing with SEO, and even better, if you can get other brands to collab on your mini course and to promote it to their audience, that’s going to grow your email list exponentially. The team at Skinny Me Tea created a free 14 day booty challenge, and they promoted it across multiple social media accounts. They were able to gain 8,000 new emails in the first 24 hours, which is actually insane. . I won’t go into too much detail about this method because we have more on that in a articles to come and actually perfect segue,  Try adding an email sign up form in the footer or the bottom navigation of your website. Keep in mind though, nobody’s just going to give you their email address for free. You want to have a couple of sentences explaining why someone should sign up to your newsletter.

Maybe your company has really fun parties and really cool culture and people want to be invited, or maybe you have really cool one-of-one drops and people want to be notified to get first dibs. Also try adding a pop-up offer to your homepage. I could see why someone might have mixed feelings about this because it can seem intrusive, but keep in mind that customers really count on these offers and really enjoy them. I know at least for myself, whenever I’m ready to make a purchase on colourpop.com, I always navigate to the homepage just to see what offers they have going on. . It’s a fun way to offer your customers a deal, and it also is going to help you boost sales and collect email addresses. This is one of my personal favorite tactics because I have seen this go extremely well. Holding a contest or a giveaway on social media has a tendency of growing an email list like wildfire, a tale of caution, though, if you’re generating an email list like this, it has the tendency of attracting a value shopper. If that’s your target audience anyways, then definitely go for it. But if you’re a luxury brand, this might not be the tactic for you. Contests and giveaways are not great for the brand image of a luxury brand.

I was working with this incredible Toronto brand called Finley that does sustainable jewelry. We collabed with other brands in the sustainable fashion industry to create what we called the ultimate sustainable giveaway. We created a landing page that captured email signups, and every participant advertised it on their socials. We ran a few contests like these over a three month period, and in that time we were able to take our email subscriber list from 5,000 all the way up to 10,000. My favorite thing about this is that Finley is a startup brand, which means that could just as easily be you. Creating a quiz is dope because you’re killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, you’re creating your email list. And then secondly, you’re segmenting that list. So here’s how I used the quiz. First, I did research on my target audience and realize that they were having a frustration with finding the right foundation match when shopping for makeup online. So I created a quiz that would help them find their right match. I got in front of my phone, I took a video of me talking about how to take that quiz. And then I ran that video as an ad on Instagram. People clicked on the ad and then they were taken to a landing page to complete the quiz. 

In order for them to get their personalized foundation match, they had to input their email address, and then I would send them a personal PDF of their results. And that’s how I captured their emails. If your quiz takes five to seven minutes to complete, then you found the sweet spot. Getting your customers to invest a small amount of time is going to increase the chances that they’re going to give you their email address. If your quiz is too long, then you’re going to lose them. And if it’s too short, there’s not enough time investment. The tactics that we talked about are infinitely scalable. I’ve got a couple of examples of tactics that aren’t as scalable, but they still have a time in place. So collecting email addresses in person is one of them. This is not a scalable tactic, but let’s say for example, you’re at a trade show with a high volume of people that might be an example of when it would make sense to use this. I’ve also seen some companies add inserts to their shipment, with a CTA to sign up for the newsletter. 

You’re not going to see massive growth with this tactic, but it does help with brand awareness. So just keep that in mind. So that’s it. This should get you on the right track to building your email list and keep in mind that once you build these tactics out once, they have the potential of running in the background and helping you grow your email list over time. Other than that, if you had any questions about anything that we talked about in this video, feel free to leave it in the comments below, and I will get back to you with any answers. Also, we’re all family here, so feel free to answer each other’s questions as well.