Today, we're going to go over a couple of reasons why email marketing is important and why I think you should start it. There are many benefits to email marketing for businesses. The big things that I wanted to mention for why you should maybe consider email marketing is that there are 4 billion daily email users and 99% of email users check their inbox every single day, with some checking up to 20 times per day.
Of those people, 58% of them will check their email first thing in the morning. That means 99% of people with an email check it on a daily basis. A lot of them will check in in the morning and 20% of retail e-commerce consumer goods and services companies will personalize their emails to their customers. That is a more customized way of email marketing.
You can do those specific ways of targeting inside of Facebook, but that would typically require a little bit bigger of a budget because every time you split off one audience segment, you've got a divvy out campaign spend for that as well. The nice thing about email marketing is that for the same flat monthly rate, you can create multiple audience segments, and then have it set up with personalization tokens. It's a very dynamic customer experience. Another cool thing is that one in five email campaigns are not actually typically optimized for mobile. So, if you are going to start, we're going to want to make sure that we're optimizing for mobile there. 80% of web traffic is done via a mobile device.
We're always trying to optimize for mobile. Right now only one in five people are optimizing for mobile. We kind of have a way to differentiate ourselves from a lot of the market. We could be one of the one of the five, you know what I mean?
Something else is your audience will reward you with higher open and click rates. If you don't send more than five newsletters per week. That kind of gives you a gauge of the maximum newsletters to send per week. If you're subscribed to any email lists right now, then you are probably aware of those kinds of the bigger spenders with the efforts on the email campaign.
You might get a daily email from Target, versus, a mom and pop store in your city may only send out one per month. I think that's just another cool thing is that it doesn't take a whole lot of work and a lot of it can be automated.
So that's another reason I think that you should try it out. One of the first things that you're going to figure out when you go to do this is what platform do I choose to do this? What software program do I need to buy or subscribe to in order to start email marketing for my business. A lot of them go on a subscription model.
They want that monthly recurring income as we all know and love. So, we are not looking at any individual platforms, but I'm going to tell you some of the benefits behind why you should choose a platform for yourself and I'll let you decide. Now it does seem to be that MailChimp is the most popular overall. They've been in the game for a long time. You can start with MailChimp if you like, but the biggest thing I would recommend is probably trying to get on a trial basis. Some email marketing companies, like Klayvio, will contact you and then give you a live demo.
Obviously it's a sales tactic, without kind of getting any skin in the game, you are able to see how the software works. Now, another thing, would be going to YouTube. If you're going to look up instructional videos and tutorials on how to use some of the platforms it would at least give you an insight as to what it looks like.
MailChimp is where I would say to start, if you use a CRM like HubSpot or any of those kinds of platforms, they normally have them built in. You might check some of the current softwares you're using. One thing when you're looking for these email platforms, the personalization tokens and the open rate reporting is huge.
If you don't know what a personalization token is, you can have it set up to where the subject line could say your first and last name and so what it would do is it would pull the first name of the person into that subject line of the email, and it would personalize it for each and every person.
So for me, it would say “Rich hopped into summertime” or whatever it may be. So, that's kind of what I was getting at earlier, you can do this personalization for the people, to a level of where you're saying their first name, last name, their phone number. You can also collect their birthdays.
That's a huge thing. You can collect all of these data points on customers and then personalize the emails, typically the emails will automatically be able to do that. Personalization tokens are huge.
Open rate reporting will basically tell you which will do this, but for me, it's an accuracy thing. It will tell you when they open the email or how many times they've opened it. So like all, it might say 6:50 AM, 7:00 AM, 15:00 AM, 7:20 AM.
This gives you insight that you don't normally get. The drag and drop editors are also pretty standard nowadays, but those are really big for people that are doing this themselves. If you're really wanting something that's not only intuitive, but pretty quick in terms of speed, I think that having a drag and drop editor inside of the email thing is pretty big. What you can basically do is look at other people's emails or find templates throughout the software you use.
There's a lot of actual volume that you'll be processing in terms of the number of emails sent out. Say, if you get to two per week, then it's going to be over a hundred emails a year where you've going to be dragging things in, putting in discounts, tagging products and doing the personalization tokens. That can become a pretty big task.
If you are not careful with the one you choose. If you're having to manually do everything, you're going to have a lack of speed. One other really cool thing is A and B testing. Let's say we have an audience of all of your customers and you split it right in half, you would send an email talking about denim jeans, you basically will use a ton of photos and just a couple of calls to actions.
You would look at the number of things clicked on inside the email, which will actually turn into more sales, and then you can figure out which one was the more effective method. What is split testing? Essentially, just running two different things to the same audience. Sometimes even to the same people. Normally we split to figure out what's the most effective thing.
Some of the Email softwares have split testing built ends with they'll even give you a report of how the split testing went and who won the fight basically.
How often should you be sending emails? That's a really big question that I get asked all the time. I think one of the first things to probably look at when you're going to be determining how often to send out emails is if you're selling services or products.
How many of these services are harder to market via email? There typically aren't as many numbered services. With 10,000 products, there's not only more content and more things to send out, there's also typically better margins and discounts that can be given. So typically the product based emails are easier.
If you do something like introductory offers, that's not going to be really good for an email list because you've already captured these people's email. If you're doing something where it's a repurchase on something, try it! If it's an upsell to another product and you're able to discount, that can work really well also.
If you're service-based, there's not as many emails going out. If you have products, there's typically more. I would say if you do have a lot of ongoing promos for products, start with maybe weekly emails and then you can bump that up to one to three per week after a couple months, or when you get comfortable with it. Too many emails will cause an unsubscription to the marketing lists, so try to limit how many you are doing based on the company you have.
If you say, you make that leap from one per week to three, and then your unsubscribe rate goes from like 6% to 15%. You might want to consider what's going on there. If that starts decreasing, that doesn't necessarily mean that the books and the revenue are going to decrease.
