Every business that must thrive today must be able to tap into the huge benefits of email marketing. As an entrepreneur, you can use email marketing to grow business in Nigeria despite the state of the economy and other active challenges in society.
Your email list is often regarded as your most valuable resource, and with it, you can grow your business traffic and ultimately sell. This is the reason why you cannot afford to neglect email marketing in your digital marketing strategy.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing can be described as a way of promoting your products, building relationships, and connecting with your audience through emails. With a viable strategy in place, you can use email marketing to send relevant information such as promoting products or services that can turn on the interest of your recipients and convert them into buyers.
This is why it is very important that you consider building your email list to connect with people who are readily interested in what you sell.
Steps on how to grow your business with email marketing
To use email marketing to grow your business as a Nigerian entrepreneur, here are some best email marketing practices that will get you started.
1. Identify who your ideal audience is
To get the best of your email marketing efforts, it is very crucial that you serve the right people with the right product or service. You do not want to advertise sugar products to a dominated audience of mature men who are not likely to patronize you and may even find your emails offensive.
Hence, you should consider building the right audience and having a relationship with them to know what exactly they want. To achieve this, personalize your email to show that you are not just after promoting your products or services. You really want them to know that you care about them.
2. Grow your email list
Once, you have been able to understand the kind of audience you should be targeting, then grow your email list. Avoid buying a list. Grow the list with your website or other legit means with the consent of the email users being providers. If you resolve to send unsolicited emails to people, you’ll simply be spamming them, and that can result in damages to your brand. You can consider other options such as;
- Adding opt-in and pop-up forms to your websites. Include a fascinating invite that assures your audience of what they stand to gain from subscribing. You may also want to promise them that they will not get spammed.
- Employ a free lead magnet. A lead magnet is an offer you make to your visitors if they provide their email addresses. This could come in different forms. It could be eBooks, discount offers, or other exclusive deals. Make it irresistible. When they are happy with you, providing their emails is one of the least to worry about.
- Use compelling landing pages. You can simply just start an online campaign that sends visitors to a landing page where they provide personal information including their email addresses.
3. Provide value to your audience
Offering value is the bedrock of your email marketing success. This is the reason why your audience will keep coming back to your website. Find out what exactly your audience wants from you and provide it to them. But then, it is important that you are able to provide exactly what you promise. This will help them build trust in what you do.
For instance, as a fashion brand, aside from sending your potential customers’ relevant promotional emails, you can also leverage more opportunities to offer high value that exceeds letting them know about the latest items or collections your brand has got.
Send regular newsletters with information that rings along with their personal needs with little promotional highlights. You’ll have to offer the kind of value that will constantly make them look forward to your next newsletter. Some subdivisions of email marketing include announce email, social updates, product updates, event invitations, newsletters, and many others.
4. Grab the attention of your readers
You do not want a situation where your emails are not opened at all, not to talk of being read. You must be able to secure your reader’s attention with powerful titles and content among others.
1. Your email title must be appealing and convincing to your readers. Desist from using ambiguous lines in your titles. Make it simple and personal with your reader’s name added to it.
2. Ensure that your content is not misleading or in disagreement with your title. If you use your title as a mere bait to grab the attention of your audience, they will notice this quickly and may opt-out or even unsubscribe from your list.
3. You should consider using your personal email instead of your company’s email. Readers are more likely to relate if the email belongs to an individual as it makes everything else seem personal. In addition, consider personal attribution to your email such as;
“Best Regards,
Gabriel Friday,
Head of Content, Lamplite Lagos Digitals”
Instead of using general attribution such as;
“Best Regards,
The Lamplight Digitals Team.”
5. Channel your email towards every customer
Your list will comprise different classes of audiences. Avoid generalizing your emails to them. Instead, tailor them to every category of your readers. Connect to your audience with the most relevant emails. Don’t send women stuff to your male email subscribers thinking they will share it with their girlfriends or wives. If you keep sending the wrong items to them, they may think your emails are wrongly directed and you’ll very likely lose them quickly.
Use different demographics to categorize your emails. Consider factors such as interests, gender, and age in categorizing them. Some of them may just want to know about your news updates, while others may want to grab your discount offers. You can find out about their interests in the opt-in form you provide.
6. Get your subscribers to convert
You can leverage two major methods of getting your readers to become your customers. You can either use a ‘Call to Action’ or use a ‘Follow up’ approach. State clearly what you want your readers to do in your emails.
Your email campaigns should help you find out what exactly your email audience is doing about what you sent to them. You can always follow them up with relevant supporting emails to make them reconsider your offer if they haven’t.
You can also make them fill survey forms to let you know why they aren’t interested. This extra information will help your future decision in winning them over. Always ensure to follow up your leads. Be personal, promising, and convincing in your approach.
Conclusion
Email Marketing is a very wide topic and will take deep experience to get the best out of your efforts. If you are already halfway, this article may come in handy for you, but for someone who is just starting and need to grow his or her business as quickly as possible, you could leave it to the professionals to handle. There are several reputable email marketing companies in Nigeria for that. You can always contact them.
