How to leverage email marketing to drive sales
If you think emails are outdated and overrated, think again. Ever since the world’s first email was sent into the ether in the 1970s, the number of users has grown yearly. Today, inboxes are brimming with potential and every marketing strategy should incorporate emails. Read more and find out how do you leverage email marketing to meet your business goals with 3 simple steps.
Scott Rigdon is a senior marketing copywriter with over two decades of experience helping brands across tech, financial services, manufacturing, and other sectors. He has helped B2B businesses from start-ups to major brands reach their goals through creative copywriting and strategic, conceptual thinking. Find out more on his LinkedIn profile.
How to leverage email marketing to drive sales
Picture this—an email notification appears on your phone from a graphic design agency you ordered marketing collateral from last year about a new service.
The catchy subject and preview text lure you in instantly with promises of transforming your company’s brand image and helping you boost market share.
When you finish reading the email, you’re filled with confidence and tap the button at the bottom to learn more about the new service. You end up subscribing to the service. Sounds ideal, doesn’t it?
This is an example of how email marketing can be used to drive sales in a business—but it requires careful strategizing.
The secret? Segment your subscriber list properly, write copy that speaks to the target audience, and test your strategies before analyzing results to make continuous improvements.
If you’re keen to know more, join us as we unpack each of these steps to leveraging email marketing in a way that’ll help you boost sales at your business in no time.
Step 1: Segment subscribers properly
The first step to driving sales through email marketing is to take a close look at your subscriber list and cross-check their activity against your financial reports.
Ask yourself—where do your subscribers live? What kind of lifestyles do they enjoy? What are their budgets and spending habits?
The answers to these questions determine how you can go about dividing your subscriber list into mailing segments.
״The key to successful subscriber segmentation is to group subscribers with common personalities, lifestyles, budgets, and behaviors in order to tailor your marketing efforts to each segment.”
For instance, suppose you own an online luxury pet boutique and one of your segments consists of fashionable 40-something-year-old women who are interested in customized dog products and enjoy talking to company reps on the phone about bespoke options.
In this scenario, it’s worth writing subject text along the lines of “Woof wear: The ultimate in dogue” and opting for an outbound call center software solution to capitalize on the segment’s preferences.
Segmenting subscribers properly helps with creating emails that deliver value to each segment. This idea is to strengthen your product’s position as being integral to each segment’s lifestyle so they feel compelled to make a purchase.
Step 2: Tailor email copy to the target audience
After segmenting your subscriber list, you’ll want to craft engaging and effective emails that capture each segment’s attention. This is a vital step whether you’re a B2B company seeking to build relationships with vendors or a B2C company interested in organic web traffic.
The best way to do this is by remembering that your emails serve three key purposes:
- Get the audience member to open the email
- Get them to read it
- Click through and make a purchase using the call to action at the end
A great way to fulfill the first purpose of your email is by using exciting and catchy language to create an email subject and preview text that immediately piques the audience’s interest.
The primary purpose of the subject and preview text is to get subscribers to open your email. Once they do so, it’s vital to use concise and exciting copy along with attractive visuals and a strong call to action to drive engagement and sales conversions.
Remember—your subscribers’ inboxes are likely to be crowded, so personalization is the key to making your emails stand out.
Tailoring the subject, preview, and email text to uniquely appeal to each segment is a great way to show subscribers you understand them so you can earn their trust and strengthen relationships with them.
Step 3: Test and analyze strategies
The final step to achieving better sales by leveraging email marketing involves testing, analysis, and continuous improvement. One of the most popular marketing email testing methods is A/B testing.
This method involves creating two versions of the email subject and preview text to send to a small portion of the subscriber segment to see which one maximizes open rates.
The more successful version is then sent to the rest of the segment to drive open rates, click-through rates, and sales conversions.
“Tracking the results of A/B tests over time helps businesses learn what kind of language, phrasing, and content resonates with their audience.”
Another way to leverage email marketing to drive sales is through Google Analytics (GA). GA tracks open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates by picking up on something called a UTM parameter attached to each email.
These metrics help with improving email marketing campaign efficacy and conducting effective financial planning because they allow businesses to experiment with various strategies and see which ones drive sales revenue.
The key to doing this successfully is to modify the visual and text content of your emails to complement and fulfill each subscriber segment’s behavior and preferences.
Summary
Email marketing is a powerful tool for driving sales if it’s done correctly. The three steps we’ve outlined in this article are the minimum that’s required to increase revenue by leveraging email marketing.
Once you’ve got a good grasp of the steps outlined in this article, it’s important to pair your email marketing efforts with other ways of driving your company’s profitability like setting up automated vendor payments and running promotions.
This will ensure you have a multipronged strategy to drive sales not just today but in the long term as well.
*The purpose of this page is solely to provide information and should not be considered as financial advice.
**Melio does not provide legal, tax or accounting advice; you should consult a professional advisor before making any financial decisions.
