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While current marketing trends seem to favor social media, research shows that email is still far more effective at capturing online leads than Facebook and Instagram.

Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any channel, returning on average $42 for every $1 spent.

So if you want to grow your business, building an email list should be a top priority. It can have a huge impact on your marketing campaigns, traffic, and sales if used correctly.

To help you build a sustainable business, we’ve put together a few quick list-building tips.

1. Conversion of Important Content Into Gated Content

You probably have plenty of free content, from white papers to ebooks.

If you really want to grow your email list and increase engagement, try requiring users to enter their name and email address to access your best content.

To give the reader the expected payoff, gated content must be well-written and informative. It’s all about value exchange.

His e-book “The Beginner’s Guide to WordPress” is another good one. Signing up grants access to it.

2. Create Targeted Email Lists

Growing your email subscriber list requires knowing your existing subscribers.

So, who? Who are they? What do they like? What are their aches?

Once you have this data, you can start categorizing your audience. So your readers won’t get the same message, but only what they need to hear.

Some fashion retailers, for example, let customers choose which email lists they want to join. They can pick as many or as few as they want.

3. Personalize For Best Results

Personalized emails have six times the transaction rates of non-personalized emails.

More than 70% of consumers say a personalized experience is more likely to influence their decision to open and read brand emails.

Personalization in email isn’t just putting the recipient’s name in the subject.

4. Offer A Bonus

To get visitors to join your email list, you need to give them something in return. That is, make them want to hear from you.

If you offer incentives to visitors, they are more likely to take action and sign up.

Limited-time offers, free shipping, and exclusive content are common incentives. According to a recent RetailMeNot survey, discounts in particular entice 67 percent of consumers to make unplanned purchases.

5. Make Your Opt-In Form Visible

Opt-in forms are critical for increasing conversion rates when building an email list.

Studies show that 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website, so you need to grab their attention right away.

While the copy and design should be concise, the main goal is to make your form stand out from the rest of the page’s elements.

With an exit-intent form, a slide-in form, or a notification bar, make the pop-up stand out.

In Conclusion

Whether you use all five of these hacks or just a few, building your email list is an ongoing process. Your email list should accurately reflect changing consumer interests and needs.

It’s critical to regularly analyze your contact list and use the results to improve your campaigns and online reputation.

In order to increase communication, loyalty, brand awareness, revenue and customer retention, start implementing these strategies and watch your email list explode.

Set Up Automatic Drip Emails

Automatic emails are not only a good idea, but also a simple conversion tool. There are two types of auto-emails: transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping, etc.) and automated emails (emails triggered by a site action). Includes abandoned cart and product view emails. Automated emails include replenishment and education emails.

The transactional emails built into your web platform may already be customized to match your brand’s look, feel, and tone. Ahead of time, set up automated emails to increase conversions. If you have trouble converting visitors, consider including a coupon code in abandoned cart emails.

Choosing of an Email Marketing Platform

These platforms include the likes of Mailchimp, dotmailer, Mandrill, and Bronto. Examine their benefits and drawbacks before deciding which is best for you. Limit your search to platforms that work with your e-commerce platform and plug-ins. Integrated platforms save time and simplify reporting.

Consider the cost and read the fine print. When estimating costs, take into account your technical skills. Is there a team member dedicated to email? How technical is he? Does he/she code? If not, a platform with a team to help you create campaigns may be best. A platform’s low or no cost does not mean it will save you money. Given that time is money, it may be better to invest in a platform that can help you create email campaigns that convert.

Build Your Email List

My favorite way to build an email list is with a pop-up, but pop-ups often have issues on mobile. Mobile-friendly options like drop-downs and integrated sign-up forms can help you capture these users.

A loyalty program that requires email sign-up is a great way to build an email list. Giving away free products or services in exchange for email addresses can also help build your list, but these are less likely to yield high-value sign-ups.

Create A New User Welcome Campaign

Set up a welcome flow for new subscribers so you can reach out to them within 30 days with valuable content. This will help build user engagement and loyalty without much effort. Create an exciting welcome campaign. Depending on how people respond to the welcome campaign, you can categorize them as purchasers versus non-purchasers, or engaged versus non-engaged. You can also ask customers for content preferences to help you categorize them and serve them relevant content.

Track Your Email Content

The most important thing in email marketing is to focus on what works. Marketing is said to work 50% of the time. That means that even if everything is equal, there is a 50% chance that your campaign will fail. Instead of focusing on what doesn’t work, find the commonality. What subject lines worked well? Customers click where? What kind of content has worked? Create templates to see if the same thing happens again.

Some Advice Are Bad

There is a lot of information on the internet about email marketing, but not all of it is applicable to you. Because your email list is unique, what works for your competitor may not work for you. Focus on email marketing strategies that work for your brand and ignore irrelevant advice. We are a skincare brand. If someone says emails with puppies always get 100% opens, great for them, but not for us. Adding a customer service contact in the footer increased click-through rates by 20%, which aligns with our customer-focused values. It’s vital to stay true to your brand and avoid email marketing trends.

Creating new email content takes time and creativity. Look for emails from other companies that inspire you and save them in a folder. Stay tuned next month for a primer on product launch.

The world has become more digital, by choice and necessity. Since in-person events are on hold, digital networking tactics are the new norm. So, if networking events and conferences are part of your brand and marketing strategy, rethink it.

Networking events already have a million moving parts, so taking them digitally presents some unique challenges. Keeping attendees engaged when they aren’t in the same room as you is one.

80% of marketers believe live events are vital to their company’s success. Creating engaging content, meeting revenue goals, and, of course, getting enough people to sign up and attend have all been obstacles in previous years. The challenges of digital events are easily seen when free food and networking opportunities are removed and replaced by a computer screen on the couch.

Events are still an important part of connecting with existing customers and leads as well as attracting new ones. Here are some tips for making online events engaging and effective.

Boost your guest list

You don’t have to worry about overbooking because there are no physical spaces, so invite as many people as you can.

It’s pretty much a given that not everyone who RSVPs will show up. Even with no-shows, if you can get your event details in front of more people, you should still have a successful and engaging event.

Take your event advertising to the next level to generate more interest and responses. Use social media, email marketing, and client communications to promote and invite.

Know Your Audience and Your Expertise

The best professional events perfectly balance expertise and audience needs. To keep your audience engaged, you must first understand their interests, challenges, and questions. It’s also vital that you know your stuff. If you aren’t, find others who are and invite them to your event. You don’t want angry attendees who came to your event only to feel swindled.

Before implementing any marketing strategy, ask yourself, “Will my target audience find this valuable?” Curating content carefully ensures your event is focused on your audience’s desires, increasing engagement and interest.

Encourage participation with polls

Many companies poll event attendees afterward for feedback. And while that’s great for engagement, why not poll your audience as well?

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a digital event. So we know how easy it is to get distracted and lose focus, especially when pets, kids, and phones beckon. Using polls during your events will keep your viewers engaged and encourage their input. It also allows them to ask questions and participate in a more interactive way. You’ll also get some interesting data to help you refine your content for your next event.

Prepare these questions ahead of time and schedule their posting during the event. This way you won’t forget to use them and you’ll use them when it makes sense, encouraging more engagement.

Humanize

Let’s face it: things are a little tense right now. Instead of dreading hosting a live event from your home office or living room, welcome it. It’s perfectly fine to be less formal and more laid-back than before. This can help you connect with your audience and get on the same page.

Audiences love it when you interact with them as peers. Rehearsed or robotic brands and faces simply imply there is something to hide. It tells your audience you don’t trust them enough to show the real you, and that can backfire. Instead of being afraid to show your “true” self on camera, use this time to make your event more lighthearted, fun, and relatable.

Don’t Worry About Digital

We’re all in this together, sorry. Marketers worldwide are having to quickly adapt their live events to the digital space, so it’s natural that there will be some growing pains. Takeaways can help inform future events, such as audience feedback. Keep an eye out for less obvious indicators like how many people sign up versus how many show up and stay.

Digital events have a lot to offer, but first you must iron out the kinks. Don’t be intimidated and don’t wait until things “get back to normal.” We don’t know how long that will be, so connecting with others is critical now.

We’ve been stuck inside, so we’re scrolling through our favorite eCommerce sites, looking for a glimmer of joy. It’s a natural reaction to the current state of affairs.

But not expected. COVID’s surge in orders hit retailers and shipping companies worldwide. Supply chains halted, causing shortages of everything from toilet paper to paint.

Recent Customer Experience Trends

Due to the unprecedented demand, many companies struggled to meet consumer expectations.

The customer experience deteriorated. Customers were frustrated by backlogs and long shipping times, if orders were even fulfilled. Emails from customers piled up. Users tagged brands with stories of extreme delays on social media. The pandemic’s impact on business will be long-lasting.

The pandemic’s economic turmoil has exposed many supply chain vulnerabilities, but consumers’ expectations aren’t going to change to make business owners’ lives easier. They’ll probably keep rising.

So, how can you keep your customers happy as you adapt to the new retail landscape? It’s all in the message.

Provision of Solution With Email Marketing Automation

Just as we make extra efforts to soothe our loved ones during difficult times, retailers can ease their customers’ frustrations with supply shortages by communicating with them.

A human touch is important for small businesses, which often build customer relationships. Automated, personalized email campaigns can help eCommerce businesses smooth over any unavoidable pain points.

Supply shortages are beyond the control of marketers, but your team can help customers feel seen and understood. Email campaigns can inform subscribers of changes in average shipping times or remind them of their value. You can also use supply chain email marketing trends in your messaging.

Distract from supply issues with marketing campaigns that subtly guide your email list away from backordered inventory and toward new products or items with no supply issues.

Email Marketing Tips to Calm Customers

1. Make a live order tracker

An email will be sent to a new customer when their order is fulfilled. So they’ll never be left wondering if their order shipped, when it should arrive, or if it’s delayed (or coming early).

2. Offer in-stock options

A customer abandoning an online shopping cart due to a long delivery estimate can be emailed with suggestions of similar products that are currently in stock.

3. Thank customers for their patience

This can be in the form of a discount, as customers appreciate being recognized for their time’s worth, but it can also be in the form of extra reward points or free shipping. Your customers know they can shop around, so a little price incentive goes a long way to building and maintaining loyalty.

4. Remind them of their loyalty

What is it about your brand’s messaging that entices your clients? What keeps them opening your emails? Whatever it is that keeps your customers engaged, find a way to build on it and maintain your brand personality.

With 94 percent of Fortune 1000 companies experiencing supply chain issues, retailers and other businesses are worried about shortages. However, just because email marketing can’t solve physical inventory issues doesn’t mean it can’t keep customers happy.

Thanks to thoughtful content and effective email automation, your company can remind customers of its presence.

The last 18 months have been a roller coaster of ups and downs for many people, both professionally and personally. Congratulations to those who experienced business growth during the pandemic.

The economy has slowed for many business owners. No matter who you are, we are all grateful that restrictions are being lifted and people are gathering safely again. Recovery is all around us.

However, we can align our goals with comprehensive strategies to kickstart our businesses for the remaining part of the year. If you are willing to work hard and invest in yourself and your business, the post-pandemic climate is ripe with opportunity.

Here are four post-COVID marketing strategies to improve your business.

Measure your marketing

As you look forward, it’s important to look back and assess what worked and what didn’t. Action + Measurement = Results, AJA Marketing’s tagline, addresses this specifically – you must measure your actions to achieve desired results.

If you keep using the same strategy “because we’ve always done it that way,” dig into your data to see what has worked in the past. The world has changed, and methods must evolve.

Do a “marketing audit” – go through your analytics and see what you can learn. Are you getting new referrals? Is your radio ad no longer generating leads? Has your direct mail campaign increased sales by 20%? Understanding your data is critical to advancing your strategy. Don’t waste money on bad marketing; know your numbers.

Reconnect with clients, colleagues, and sources of leads

If you prefer to meet people in person, you can now choose from a variety of live events. Attend something that interests you and allows you to network while having fun. AJA Marketing is located in central New Jersey (yes, central NJ exists!) where there are many wonderful local networking opportunities, including golf outings and happy hours. Look to your local Chamber of Commerce and associations for convenient opportunities.

If you’re not ready for a crowd yet, invite a colleague or referral source for coffee. Absent in person? No worries! Virtual networking is here to stay. This is a result of the pandemic.

Virtual events are a great way to expand your network beyond your local area. There are countless virtual networking events to choose from – register for one that interests you and turn on your camera!

Use of LinkedIn

Social media, especially LinkedIn, is another great way to market your services. Depending on your business, spending hours on Snapchat or Instagram fiddling with filters may not be necessary.

For example, if you run a non-profit and want to promote your resources to your members, Instagram reels may not be appropriate. Instead, get strategic and spend your time where your members, clients, and colleagues do.

A lot of professionals use LinkedIn. Research shows that a complete LinkedIn profile can double your chances of meeting or exceeding sales targets and increase InMail acceptance rates by up to 87 percent.

LinkedIn has both sellers and buyers – don’t ignore it!

Content and social media marketing can dramatically increase your audience and customer base. But starting with no prior knowledge or experience can be difficult.

It’s critical to grasp social media marketing basics. Following these ten rules will help you build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand, and most importantly, your bottom line.

Listening Law

Listening is the key to social media and content marketing success. Participate in online discussions and read your target audience’s content. Then you can create content and conversations that add value to their lives.

Quality Law

Quality trumps volume. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share, and discuss your content than 10,000 who only connect once.

Focus Law

Specialization beats being a jack-of-all-trades. A focused social media and content marketing strategy that builds a strong brand outperforms a broad strategy that tries to please everyone.

The Patience Law

Success in social media and content marketing takes time. While it is possible to catch lightning in a bottle, most likely you will need to be patient to see results.

Influence Law

Find online influencers with quality audiences who are interested in your products, services, and business. Connect with them and build relationships.

They may share your content with their own followers, exposing you and your business to a huge new audience.

Compounding Law

If you create amazing content and work hard to grow your online audience, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

Sharing and discussing your content allows search engines like Google to find it more easily. It’s possible to find you online in hundreds or thousands of ways.

Value Law

People will stop listening if you spend all your time on social media promoting your goods and services. You must add value. Focus on amazing content and building relationships with online influencers rather than conversions. Those people will eventually become powerful advocates for your brand.

Acknowledgment Law

Don’t ignore someone who contacts you online. Relationships are key to social media marketing success, so thank everyone who contacts you.

The Accessibility Law

Don’t publish and then vanish. Show up for them. That means posting content and engaging in conversations regularly. Online followers are fickle and will quickly abandon you if you disappear for weeks or months.

Reciprocity Law

Don’t expect others to promote your content if you don’t promote theirs. So, spend some time on social media sharing and discussing other people’s content.

Marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver results. And decision-makers evaluate each channel’s worth. Email, social media and direct mail are all being evaluated. Pandemics, political turmoil, and extreme weather events have made marketing more complex, focused, and time-sensitive.

According to Magna, companies spent about $15.9 billion on direct mail in 2020. The focus is often on the offer, creative, and database of a mailing program. Most marketers target these to increase campaign response. Other aspects of a mailing campaign that you may not have considered can help increase ROI.

Which Day Gets the Most Response?

It’s more important than you think to mail on time. Targeting your delivery to a three-day window with a higher response rate is 100% possible. The day of delivery can make a difference of up to 20% in response rates.

Are You Mail or “In-Home” Focused?

You shouldn’t focus on a mail date. Smart marketers now use in-home dates. Target your mailings to coincide with your customers’ preferred in-home dates.

Are You Optimised for Postage?

There are ways for merchants to optimize their campaigns, ensure timely delivery, and stay within budget. The best results come from optimizing these two factors. Yes, higher postage can get the mail piece into the hands of the customer at the best time.

Is your cadence working?

We know that consumers don’t buy the first time they get mail. Consumers need multiple touches, usually via multiple channels, to buy. Most businesses send the same person multiple offers. Marketers should monitor this cadence to ensure consumers receive the correct communications.

Address Hygiene: What Works?

Do you know where your leads come from? Are they made in-house, by a partner, or organic? Regardless of origin, keeping data current is critical. Are you using CASS and NCOA for direct mail production? Do you use ACS? It’s time.

Are Vendors Delivering on Time?

Do you compare the delivery times of multiple lettershops when mailing? Trust the person launching your campaigns. Having a system in place helps them meet their obligations.

Use Informed Delivery?

Thanks to the USPS’s Informed Delivery service, a mail piece becomes a digital tactical moment in the receiver’s inbox.

Retargeting with direct mail?

Digital mail continues to merge both channels. Advanced Addressable Direct Mail (AADM) is a new concept that allows you to send direct mail to a website visitor if you have their address.

While it is not required for every campaign, incorporating them into your efforts will give you valuable insight into every aspect of your mailing.

Corporate responsibility and social causes are becoming increasingly important to retailers. Companies like TOMS have built entire business models around them.

69 percent of Gen Z say they are more likely to buy from a company that supports such causes.

To influence purchase decisions, retailers must integrate social cause messaging into their promotional channels, including email marketing.

Here are 6 ways brands can use email marketing to promote causes:

Promotional Emails with a Cause

1. Use of Banner

Include a banner promoting your cause at the top of each email or in the recovery section. TOMS does this in the recovery section of each email. Using these banners will help customers understand your brand’s commitment to social change.

2. Social update emails

Companies with loyalty programs send out loyalty point update emails, and social cause brands should do the same. Try showing the company’s progress thanks to its customers. Purchases could result in a donation or the provision of products, items or services. These emails are ideal for social sharing, so include a “share now” CTA to maximize your email’s reach.

3. Make use of Cause campaigns

Cause-related campaigns can be a great way to drive sales. Another TOMS campaign featuring limited-edition shoes in partnership with Save the Children. While partnering with a charity isn’t required, consider how you can use specific giving campaigns to drive sales while making the buyer feel good.

Consider all the holidays you can use as tentpole giving campaigns. If you use national holidays, pick ones that fit your brand, like Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. Use signature designated periods such as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, National Adoption Day, or World Autism Awareness Day to promote your brand.

Cause Marketing in Lifecycle Emails

4. Welcome messages

If doing good is important to your brand, don’t be shy about it. Inspire new subscribers to join your mailing list by sharing this message and explaining why they should align with your brand. This can be a competitive differentiator for new subscribers considering a purchase.

5. Post-purchase

Keep the messaging going after the sale. This is your chance to reassure the customer about their purchase and your brand. Include messaging that shows how their purchase has helped others, and make sure to connect this to social media to turn the customer into a brand advocate. You could create a purchase-related hashtag and ask customers to share their purchases.

6. Cart abandonment

When a customer is close to making a purchase, you want to use every trick in the book to get them to finish. But for socially conscious consumers, it’s also social duty. Include social cause messaging in these messages, even if it’s in the recovery section.

In Conclusion

These aren’t the only options, but they’re good places to start. But don’t worry about writing the email content. Often, your website and social media pages will suffice. Brands that care about the community, like Bombas, have dedicated sections on their websites and social media accounts. Use this content in your emails easily.

Cause marketing can help you differentiate your brand, build emotional connections with customers, influence purchase decisions, and generate brand advocacy. After all, a brand is a reflection of the buyer. Creating a multichannel ecosystem of brand advocacy can help people feel good about their purchases.

Lead-generating websites have a lot in common. Something is wrong if you can’t get hot leads and make them worth your time. The only way to grow your brand, increase your revenue, collect customer feedback, and establish yourself as an industry thought leader is to attract leads.

Let us go over everything that can help you get more leads.

A Blog

If you don’t know the value a blog can add to your website in 2021, you’re way back in time.

It is true that a blog is an essential component of any website for interaction and all the other digital blah-blah. In short, a blog shows your visitors the other side of your business. Specifically, the side that values them and includes them in every blog post.

Lead Generation Forms

It all starts and ends with leads. The lead generation form is the only way to attract and contact them.

Leads do like easy contact. You can give it to them via a non-aggressive form that only asks for their email and returns it. Yes, leads love rewards and information that meets their needs.

Mobile-Friendly Support

Google introduced a mobile-friendliness ranking algorithm that favors mobile-friendly sites. But that was 5 years ago. In today’s world, not having a mobile-friendly page means total failure and traffic loss. Do you want that?

Oh, and your search engine rankings will be gone, hiding behind the 10th or 11th page, due to your website’s lack of mobile-friendliness.

CTA

Not only is it in a lead generation form, but it should be on every page of your website. How else will you get your customers’ emails?

Many websites are neat, clean, and responsive – but fail when it comes to writing compelling CTAs. Every page of your website should have unique CTAs that educate visitors on how and why they should interact with your company.

Your website is just an informer without a clear call to action.

Convincing Product (And Landing) Pages

People confuse CTA and convincing page together. The main distinction between CTA and convincing pages is their design.

Surprisingly, design influences how visitors react to your website. If you want to sell products online, you need to test, experiment, and track – but keep your product pages as clean as a water pipe.

That is, every page of your website must be tidy and contain all necessary elements. It should be responsive and load quickly. Only then would it be ‘convincing’ in this sense.

Pop-Up Forms

Pop-ups are definitely a ‘dirty’ word nowadays, as most spammy websites use them aggressively. However, we are not talking about pop-up ads here, but rather pop-up forms.

You’ll notice great placement of forms and calls-to-action on marketing blogs. But there’s a good chance you’ll finish an article (and marketing blogs’ articles can be long). During that time, you will forget about the blog’s top form.

But hey, marketers aren’t stupid, and pop-up forms are their solution. A pop-up form simply reminds you of the call-to-action you missed, encouraging you to click it and eventually leave your email address, thus subscribing.

If you’ve spent any time researching marketing messages, you’re aware of the overwhelming amount of information available. Your message is how the world learns about your service, and you may only have one chance to impress potential clients before they move on.

A marketing message is only as good as its foundation, so before you go down the marketing “quick tip” rabbit hole. The following five steps can help you create compelling marketing messages for your company.

1. Play your role

For every issue your ideal client faces, there are likely hundreds of similar solutions. Your solution may be very similar to another, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be differentiated by your marketing message. Including this theme in all of your messages strengthens your market position.

Like your ideal customer, you may have an idea of your position, but that may not align with how you present yourself in the market. Research will help you find your true place.

Examine what others in your field are offering. Do you stand out or blend in? If your service isn’t unique, how can you stand out in your industry?

Distinguish between existing customers and “ideal” customers. Ask them why they chose your service over another in your niche. Their responses will help you identify areas you can emphasize more in your messages to differentiate your business.

2. Know your market

Knowing who you’re talking to helps you decide what to say. Your offering can help your ideal customers achieve their objectives. You must deeply understand who they are, what they value, and what they require to help them achieve their goals. Your client is trying to climb a mountain; you need to figure out what it is so you can help them get over it.

Create a detailed ideal customer profile to understand your target market. You may have some idea of what motivates your target demographic, but you must first listen to them. Finding your ideal customer and listening to their struggles has never been easier.

First, create your ideal client profile. In this activity, be specific and dig deep. Not only should you identify the customer’s larger goals and pain points, but also their age, location, and educational level.

Once you know who your target market is, you can easily find out where they like to “hang out” to gain more insight. For example, if your client is a working mother with young children, you can follow them on social media and listen to their conversations. Don’t just listen; actively engage to better understand your client’s struggles and how to speak their language.

3. Select your platform and customize

After creating your message, you can modify it to fit your communication platform. Remember, the message is the same on all platforms. If your course will help aspiring restaurateurs run five-star kitchens, take it anywhere.

You’re changing the message’s delivery on each platform. For example, you could write a blog post about the restaurant industry with a call-to-action at the end. This same information could be discussed in a longer video on YouTube, cut down for Instagram, and turned into a tweet. Once you know what to say and who to say it to, you can tailor your message to each channel.

4. Make your marketing message

Once you know who you’re talking to and what your service offers, it should be easier to craft a message that resonates with them. Your message should clearly communicate your offer to your ideal customer.

This step seems simple, but it is where many businesses fail by focusing on the “features” of the offering. Messages should instead focus on the outcome of those features. To make your message more compelling, paint a picture of where your client is now and where they will be once they use your solution.

5. Assess and adjust

Getting your message out there is only the first step. Allow your message to gain traction and track its success across platforms. After a while (and give it time), you’ll start to see what works and what doesn’t. Make small changes to your messages to measure their impact and make them more compelling to your audience.