Email Marketing For Small Business: How to use email for your marketing strategy

No matter where you're doing business and who you're targeting, chances are, your customers are using email. There are 3.9 billion email users worldwide, and in 2023 this figure is set to grow to 4.3 billion users. That's half of the world population. Email marketing also has a massive return on investment. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return on investment of $42. Give away a dollar and get back 42. That's an amazing deal, right? This is the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Get ready for the digital marketing strategies and tactics that attract great customer relationships to your business. Here is your host, Monique Idemudia. Hi there. This is Monique, and you're listening to episode number 11 of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Today I'd like to talk about email marketing. This episode is an email marketing 101 for beginners, and I'll teach you the most important basics about email marketing. Email marketing might seem archaic to you in comparison to all of the new emerging technologies. You know, there's chatbots, social media, artificial intelligence, there is virtual reality and augmented reality, and all of those new fancy things. Email has been around since 1971. Nevertheless, you still need email marketing, and here's why. No matter where you're doing business and who you're targeting, chances are your customers are using email. According to a recent statistic from Statista from 2020, there are 3.9 billion email users worldwide, and in 2023 this figure is set to grow to 4.3 billion users. That's half of the world population. According to Optinmonster 99% of consumers check their email daily, and for 58% of people it's the first check of their day. Wow. Most people check their emails before they even check their social media, company intranet, perform a search, or check the news. No matter how small your business is, you have the power to reach people through email marketing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Email marketing also has a massive return on investment. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return on investment of $42. Give away a dollar and get back 42. That's an amazing deal, right? Another benefit of email marketing is that your email list is all yours. It belongs to you and no one but you. Any social media platform could be suspended or deleted at any time, for any reason, without notice. However, no one can take those leads on your email list away from you. Email marketing still remains one of the most powerful and thoroughly understood forms of digital communication. It remains one of the most effective ways to nurture your leads and to turn them into your customers. Email marketing has a global reach and a high ROI. It's low cost, and you own your email list. It's a preferred and a thoroughly understood method of communication and it's direct communication. You can use email to do surveys, and it's easy to personalize your emails, and emails are also easy to automate. And it makes it easy to group people into different buckets and then serve content to them in a more targeted way. Email marketing is easy to set up and run, and it's also easy to track and optimize. It boosts your sales and gets you more leads, and it also generates you website traffic. There are a lot of great things about email marketing. If you need help to sort and organize all of your thoughts, I got something for you. I have a free email marketing campaign planning calendar template that you can use to strategically organize all of your email marketing campaigns in 2020. For example, now in May, you can delight your audience with an email around Mother's Day and doing something great for your mom. The template gives you suggestions, just like this one, on what kinds of emails to send, so you never run out of ideas for your email campaigns. Download your free email campaign planning calendar template number. The link is down below. And if you're listening from a podcast platform, the link to the show notes of this episode is in the episode description, as always, so you can download your template as well. Now you know why email marketing is so important and why you need it for your small business. Let me give you the definition of what email marketing is. Email marketing is the highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to interested people, leads, prospects, and customers. That's what it is. Now you need some actionable tips on how you can get started. Here is how you can start doing email marketing in three easy steps. Step one. You need an email list. Obviously, you need an email list with people who you can send messages to. So the first step is to get an email service provider. There are a number of different email marketing services out there. Each one is suitable for different types of businesses and different types of email marketing goals. I'll leave you a link to a comparison site in the show notes of this episode on dragon-digital-marketing.com, so you can compare all of the different email marketing tools and check out the differences, if you're interested in learning more. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation tool that is specifically for small businesses and designed to meet small business email marketing needs. It's the best email marketing software for small businesses, and it makes it super easy to start collecting leads right away. You can get started for free, and the best thing is that their 14-day free trial doesn't even require a credit card, so you can literally get started with building your email list right now. Step two. Build your list by placing opt-in forms on your site. Once you got everything set up, you need to get your audience to sign up. This is how you build your email list. You need to create an opt in form and place it on your website, so your visitors can enter their name and email address, and subscribe to your awesome updates. You can create and design and opt in form in your email marketing tool and then simply embed it on your site. It's super simple. Step three. Grow your email list with freebies. Now you got your email marketing tool. You got your opt in form for people to sign up, and your tool will keep track of that for you. Now you want to grow your email list even further and attract more people to your business, right? To grow your email list even more,, you'll need something that motivates your visitors to sign up for your email news. You can give away something useful and actionable for free in exchange for the email address. This is called a freebie or a lead magnet. Here are examples for popular freebies that you can create. You can create an ebook, a cheatsheet of tips or resources, a template, or a worksheet, a white paper, case study, webinar, a trial, sample, or product demo, a quote or consultation, a quiz or self assessment, a coupon, a checklist, or a how-to guide. Successful email marketing campaigns are conversational, engaging, informative, entertaining, relevant, coordinated across channels, strategic, and showcase your trustworthiness. Congratulations. Now you can start sending out emails. Summing up. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Email marketing is one of the most relevant and important forms of digital marketing out there, and it has a high ROI, as well as other unique benefits that you don't get with other forms of marketing. You can get started with email marketing today in just three simple and easy steps. Step one. Sign up for an email marketing tool. Step two. Create opt-in forms and build your list. And step three. Grow your email list with freebies and lead magnets. If you need content ideas of what to send, and what themes you can use, what to write on, check out our free email marketing campaign planning calendar template. It helps you to strategically organize your emails for the whole year. And don't forget to also check out the further resources I've linked to in the show notes on dragon-digital-marketing.com. I put the most useful further information in there for you guys. For example, there is this awesome subject line generator tool. It generates email subject lines that get more people to pay attention to you and open and read your emails. Make sure that you check that out. It's a free tool. And if you feel like you could use some guidance and help with your email marketing, check out our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing. We are more than happy to help you out even more. That's what I got for you today. Until next time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. You can visit us at dragon-digital-marketing.com for more resources and for more episodes. Let us know how you like the show and write us a review. We are grateful when you like, share, and subscribe. We appreciate you.