Email marketing is like having the ability to converse with many people at the same time, you can ask opinions and you can share ideas, most importantly – you can sell products, offer deals, and have people leave feedback; which you can then use to further enrich your company.
As technology continues to evolve, we’re getting access to tools that allows us to better understand our subscribers. We can see at which time they most favorably open the emails we send them, we can see how many actions are being taken on each email, and we can use that data to better prepare for our future campaigns.
For starters and small-time bloggers, email marketing might be a little bit difficult to maintain, because it does require a considerate amount of time and effort, but I feel that it’s still a very good time investment that you can make for yourself, and your blog/website/product. Why email marketing, what’s so special about it?
1. Instant Gratification
To build a great project, you need to understand the needs of your particular audience, and the best way to do this is by asking them directly. Email marketing enables us to have a platform that we can use to reach out to our loyal audience members, and ask them any questions that could help us improve the overall quality of that which we’re building.
You will rarely achieve the same results just by writing a blog post about it.
2. Building New Relationships
Okay, maybe for a site with 20,000 email subscribers, building new relationships might not be on the top off the list, but for smaller sites that could use the extra boost – having an email marketing strategy might come in handy. Depending on your niche, there is a likely chance that your email subscribers also run businesses, websites or projects that could benefit each other. Try to look at it this way, too.
3. It’s Cheap to Get Started
Honestly, if you’re just starting out, the last thing to worry about is the pricing of setting everything up. There are tons of WordPress and non-WordPress plugins out there to help you setup the necessary forms for collecting emails, and email marketing companies such as MailChimp – offer their customers a free plan that enables up to 2,000 email addresses, with a total of 12,000 free emails you can send each month. Plenty to get you started with!
4. Better Conversion Rates (over Social Media)
Email marketing is a direct relationship with your readers, quite often they will have to double opt-in to your email list, which fully confirms that they’re interested in what you have to offer. Though, it doesn’t mean you should bombard them with lousy emails. Here is an article that covers some of these tactics as well, and also talks about the success of email marketing over social media, in terms of conversion rates.
5. Learning Communication and Customer Care
It’s quite big on the list of benefits of email marketing. It’s not just about learning how sending a well-crafted email works, or how you can sell products using email marketing. It’s also about learning how to communicate with multiple persons at the same time, in a way that benefits all parties involved.
On top of that, you also learn how to treat customers and how to make someone into a customer. The good thing is that these lessons stay with you even after your project ceases to exist. Something worth thinking about.
Conclusion
I think these are more than enough reasons to consider investing some time and energy into a proper email marketing strategy, begin by analyzing how many emails you can gather in a month, and then use that data to further enhance your chances of making new subscribers.
Once you get to the 50-100 mark, start experimenting with sending out some emails that encourage people to take action, or share feedback with you. Out of those 50, at least a couple will give you constructive feedback on what you could do. Give it a shot and let us know how it went!
