Are you using email automation in your business yet? If not, you should be. While some business owners can consider email automation a bit spammy, it’s actually a mainstay of many online ventures. If you want to reach both existing and potential customers automatically without spending hours of your day planning and editing individual emails, consider email automation to take your marketing efforts to the next level.
With an autoresponder like aWeber (there are others available), you’ll be able to set up a series of emails that speak to exactly what your existing or potential customers need. Get some great emails lined up and let it take care of everything for you. The good thing about this sort of email marketing is that not only is it automated, but it also gets to people who might not have spent money with you yet.
It’s easier to get someone to give you their email address on their first visit to your site than it is to make a sale straight away. Especially if they haven’t heard of you already. So if you can manage to grab their attention with the right series of emails, you can turn that lead into a sale, and hopefully a customer for years to come. Prospective business owners can take a look at a Convertkit review to see just how effective email marketing is.
In this article, we’re going to look at how to use email marketing automation to help take your small business to the next level. As a small business owner, you’re probably really busy—so you don’t want to spend hours on this sort of marketing. But it’s hugely important to the success of your business, so it’s something you should take seriously. You might also want to look at info about Hubspot to improve your automation efforts. Automation can help. Let’s look at how to do it properly:
1. Get more subscribers
The best way to make your email marketing automation work well is by trying to get as many subscribers as you can. You should prioritise increasing subscriber rates and get as many of them as you can. Some people say that every email subscriber is worth $1 to your business. So you do the maths.
2. Make your opt-in panel clear
While you might have other paid ads and even an e-commerce store on your site already, it’s important that you make your opt-in panel as clear as possible. Try and reduce distractions as much as you can if you want people to opt-in and become an email subscriber.
Keep calls to action clear and above the fold. Make sure it’s obvious what you want people to do on your site—opt-in. Don’t let them get distracted and click away on something else. Try things like sticky widgets to keep opt-in panels at the top of the page at all times.
4. Offer incentives
Aside from making sure the opt-in panel is clear, there should also be a clear reason for someone to put their email address in it. That means good writing and a great offer. Try giving someone a free download or some other item of value like a report that they might want. Get people eager to receive your first email so that they keep opening your following ones. You’ve got to give someone a reason to opt-in, so make it a good one.
5. Value your subscribers
Once you’ve got subscribers, you’ve done the hardest part. But the next step is also important. You need to keep offering them value or else you’ll get unsubscribed. Far too many email marketers take their subscribers for granted and spam them. Don’t do that. A well-designed drip email campaign will deliver much more results than a bunch of promotional emails that flood your customer’s inbox. Make sure people feel valued and continue to get something they appreciate.
6. Send them something they want to open
When you set up the right series of auto respond emails they should be something people want to open and read. This will help you so much more when you get to the point of trying to make a sale. Your email quality is important, and you shouldn’t take your subscribers for granted.
7. Make sure the offer is good
When you finally get to the point of trying to sell something to your email list, it should be something good. They should already be used to opening your emails and reading valuable stuff, so make sure the thing you try and get them to pay for sounds REALLY good. Keep giving your email list something they can value and it should be worth it.
Remember, you can plan all of this in advance. It might sound like a lot of work but once you’ve got a series of emails set up, you can sit back and let it take care of itself.
8. Don’t spam them
This ties in with the last few points, but it needs reiterating. Spamming your emailers is a surefire way to get sent to the spam box or unsubscribed. That means all your hard work of getting them to sign up will be wasted. They’ll probably now have a negative view of your business from now on, and it’ll be hard to win them back. Don’t spam people too much. Try and only send automated emails every few days and make sure they’ve got something in them people will be interested in and want to know about. Don’t send every day, or even worse, multiple times a day. Never give someone’s email info to someone else.
9. Track progress
Make sure you know what works and what doesn’t. Use the right software to see which email campaigns are working and which aren’t. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, it’s as simple as that. Make sure you know how much you’re spending, what sort of offers are getting the most subscribers, and what sort of emails are getting the most leads or sales.
Hopefully, you’ve now seen how to make the most of automated email marketing. It could bring a lot to your business, so it’s important you take it seriously. Once you’ve set up a list or responses and fine-tuned your offer as well as making it seem appealing and clear on your site, you should see your marketing efforts go to the next level, hopefully without having to do too much more work.
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