As a small business owner, the thought of managing multiple marketing channels is daunting and might even feel like a waste of time. If you’ve taken the first step in your marketing journey – such as optimising your website for SEO or curating your content for social media – introducing email marketing to the mix can help improve the success of those channels with a low investment of time and money.
Customers who have visited your website (thanks to your SEO efforts) and those who follow you on social media can be considered to be somewhere in the middle of your marketing sales funnel. They are aware of your brand and have taken some steps towards conversion, but are not quite there yet.
Sometimes customers like these need a push to move from the awareness stage to the consideration or conversion stage. Email marketing can be that push that gets them over the line. Here’s how.
Gain valuable first-party data.
First-party data is any information you collect directly from your customers. Also sometimes known as 1P data, this information is valuable because it is highly accurate, and because it allows you to identify trends in your customer base, segment your audiences, and gain better insights about the wants, needs and preferences of your customers.
Email marketing can be an excellent way of accruing first-party data.
For example, imagine posting a promotional deal across your social media channels. This deal might offer customers a discount on their next purchase in return for them signing up to an email newsletter. This sign-up form can include a number of basic details such as their demographic, the kinds of products/services they’re most interested in and how they found out about the brand.
This step would take a customer from the awareness stage into the consideration stage and gain the valuable first-party data that you can use for future marketing campaigns and personalised emails.
Similarly, this strategy can (and does) work equally well when website visitors are shown a pop-up asking for their name and email in return for a discount or deal.
RELATED: No more third-party cookies: What this means for your online marketing.
Generate traffic to your website.
Every email you send should include at least one link to your website. Whether it’s your home page, a product page or another one of your landing pages, you should be making it easy for your audience to take that next step and visit your site.
This can naturally help conversions if you’re looking to increase sales or meet other goals, but another area it can affect is your search engine optimisation (SEO).
This is because website traffic is one of the many factors that Google takes into account when determining your page ranking. There are hundreds of factors that Google considers when determining which website should rank in their search results and one of the key determinants is your website traffic. That is, how many users visit your website.
Therefore, if your website sees a lot of direct traffic from your email newsletters, Google takes that as a signal that your website is popular and useful. When someone searches for a keyword or phrase (such as ‘florist in Melbourne’), Google automatically finds and ranks the many websites mentioning florists in Melbourne into the results page, often placing more value on websites that have a lot of traffic.
So, every time you achieve a click-through to your site, your email marketing is working double-time to improve your SEO. As a result, you’re improving your chance of being listed on the first page of Google’s search results when customers search for keywords relevant to your business, which is essential for attracting new customers to your website.
RELATED: Email marketing tips to improve your open and click-through rates.
Cement your brand personality.
Your brand personality is the impression your audience has of your company as a whole. Are you serious and professional, quirky and fun, environmentally-minded, cheap and cheerful or local and family-run?
Whatever it is, your brand personality is how your audience tells you apart in a crowded market. And it’s also something that you’ll need to work on consistently to make sure your audience knows exactly who you are and what you stand for.
This means that you need to build a strategy around communicating your brand personality through every medium you have, from your social media posts to your website fonts and colours, to the tone of the copy in your email newsletters.
By ensuring each email you send aligns with your brand personality, the more likely it is your email marketing strategy will further help to cement your brand.
Minimise abandoned shopping carts.
Every day, online shoppers load up their ‘carts’ (or baskets) with items they want and then click out of the window before finalising their purchase. Unfortunately for Australian retailers, Aussies are some of the worst in the world when it comes to cart abandonment, with one study showing that 76.4% of shoppers leave before making the purchase.
This obviously represents a major potential loss for retailers, and especially for small businesses where every sale counts.
Getting a customer to that final stage where they place items in their cart is the result of strong marketing strategies – from discovering you as a brand, to exploring your products, to making that decision to add items to the cart.
With email marketing, you can set up your software to automatically send an email out to customers who have abandoned their carts. This email could remind them that their items are waiting for them, or even offer a small discount to help seal the deal.
Considering this, your email marketing strategy could be the decisive factor that pulls some of those customers back to complete the sale and ensure all of the marketing work that went into getting them there in the first place didn’t go to waste.
Do you want to understand your customers better? Trying to figure out how to give your followers the friendly push to make a purchase? Automate your email marketing and take control over your eDM campaigns with Thryv. Get started with a free trial today and see how it can help strengthen your marketing efforts.
