Emails are a popular and highly effective tool that takes digital marketing by storm. It can turn prospective visitors into potential buyers and push them to keep visiting a site. This makes sure there is growth in sales which is proven to be profitable in the long run. Effective email marketing stands out as the most high-performing digital marketing implementation that can outperform any other form of digital marketing. A survey says e-commerce sites generate 69% more sales from an abandoned cart follow-up email. Thus, email marketing could be an accelerator to outshine competitors. The following stats can help you understand the power of email marketing better:
- By the end of 2023, email marketing revenue is expected to touch $11 billion.
- 71% of the successful email marketing strategies are email automation campaigns.
- 77% of marketers witnessed growth in email engagement in the last 12 months.
- Marketers generate a $42 return from every $1 spent on email marketing.
The success of email marketing significantly depends on the size of your email database and the quality of the emails added. Your email marketing strategy must include effective techniques to build a database that can convert almost every lead to a returning customer.
What is an Email Database?
An email database is a list of names and email addresses of the visitors or users of your website that are expected to become your potential customer base. It is a direct marketing tactic that ensures audience retention and substantial sales and website revenue growth. An email database is dependent on effective email list building through various means. Although marketing campaigns offer a purchase of an email database, they cannot guarantee customer retention in comparison to your business’s direct approach to acquiring an email list.
The primary benefit of an email database is the growth in future communications between a business and its prospective clients, as well as polishing the relationship with existing customers. A CRM or customer relationship management software is needed to store an email database that can be later used to send promotional emails.
The importance of Email Database
Email marketing is one of the most popular digital marketing tools that ensures high conversion rate than other marketing channels. A high conversion rate means the number of potential customers that read your business emails and enquired about a specific service your business offers or even made a purchase.
The number of daily email users is as high as 4 billion, especially smartphone users who choose to receive brand announcements over emails. Therefore, you must create an extensive email database that drives traffic and sales to your website. After a sign-up, your visitors or existing users are all ears for:
- Your upcoming sales
- Deal of the day
- Discount coupons
- New launches
The proven benefits of a quality email database are:
More conversion and better click-through rate (CTR): In email marketing, conversion rate means the percentage of subscribers in your email list that act on or accomplish the goal of the email after reading it. Click-through rate is the percentage of an email list that clicks on a specific hyperlink, ad campaign, image, or call-to-action in an email. Both of them together ascertain the success of a digital marketing campaign. People mostly prefer emails as a form of marketing to any other medium, like social media.
More Opt-ins: Opt-ins means the subscribers who have deliberately opted to receive the products, services, or periodical updates through emails. It refers to a bunch of email recipients that are considered potential customers than the leads attracted by other digital marketing means.
Longer life span: Emails are permanent. It can be continuously sent out for weeks or months, with its shelf-life being longer. Due to other social media platforms’ algorithms, an ad could only be run for a limited period until the credits get exhausted. Even with banner ads, it can be subsided anytime after the advertiser finds the website irrelevant. But emails are promptly read, and action is taken. Even if that’s not the case, emails can be saved for later.
Business retention and repeated visits: The success of email marketing lies in the fact that it is a tool to enhance the business-consumer relationship. With continual delivery of updates and announcements through emails, a customer stays connected with a company. This ensures your content as a business is always relevant for the users of your site. This persistent relationship offers an audience and revenue retention. Without an email list, you’ll get more binge buyers who end up purchasing for one time and then discontinue. But, as you reach out to your potential or existing customers through emails, you remind them to visit your site again, maybe with a new product launch or offer. This ensures your business drives more revenue than usual.
Mobile device support: The use of mobile devices has outmoded other means of consuming media on the internet. The global audience is most adept at reading emails on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Marketing agencies are also coming up with advertisements that are ideal for mobile devices, which attract more leads. Therefore, email marketing becomes more successful with a high conversion rate.
What are the effective ways to drive sales from an Email Database?
There are various ways to put email marketing to work so that it results in more potential customers and generates more revenue. This can be done by:
Online Sale Alert: Emails can be sent out to notify your email database about an upcoming sale on your site. Online shoppers or deal hunters love when an online sale takes place to get the desired item for a lot less than its original price. Emails are a great way to receive interesting sale announcements.
Offers and Giveaways: You can send email notifications for a special offer on products or services. Or, you can announce a giveaway where your email recipients will get benefited by promoting your brand.
Hyperlinking: Hyperlinks ensure your email list have a solid idea of where to go to avail of a special offer to buy a new addition. Hyperlinking means there is a direct redirection and less probability of missing a certain offer period.
Feature Customer Experience/ Testimonials: A great way to drive sales from your email database is to feature your customers in promotional emails. People love seeing your stories getting features on any platform. Also, with honest reviews and testimonials, you can get more reciprocal leads. It is a proven way to increase engagement from organic traffic.
With these tactics, your online business can skyrocket with minimum effort. With a strong email database, it is proven to be successful in lead and revenue generation. Email database building and the right use of automation can change your online business game.
How to build an Email Database?
Now, the question is, how to build an email database? There are various expert-certified ways in which you can grow your email list to a sizable proportion to make a profit. Some of them include:
- Creating a Landing Page
Landing pages are crucial in turning your website visitors into email recipients. Thus, it can be considered a tried and tested method to build your email database organically. Landing pages are those where a visitor stumbles after clicking on your website URL. Thus, these pages get the most visibility from the web traffic. Landing pages are generally used for pages whose sole purpose is to achieve a goal, like selling a product, offering a service, or getting email sign-ups.
- An Email Subscription Widget for your homepage
Your website’s homepage is where you are going to get most of the traffic. A homepage is like the cover of a magazine, where you get an overview of what the site is all about. Adding an email subscription widget on the homepage ensures maximum successful sign-ups than any other area on the website. You can add an alluring offer, like a free email course or tips, to offer your potential email database an incentive for signing up.
- Add a Contact form
If your website offers a specific page for a contact form, make sure you add a checkbox that your potential email subscribers can tick off to receive future emails containing attractive offers or newsletters containing updates. As someone is already filling in a contact form, they are most likely interested in receiving emails from you.
- Having a static sign-up form
The benefits of a static form lie in its adhesive feature. Unlike sidebar sign-up widgets, these don’t go away while scrolling. Instead, these static forms follow you as your scroll down to the bottom of a page. That continuously reminds you to sign up for newsletters without creating any hindrance in the reading. Chances are you’ve seen a lot of static (“sticky”) sign-up forms on most blogs you visit.
- Offer free trial plans
If your business provides a certain service, you can ask your customers to leave their email IDs for a free trial period. Generally, services are subscription-based. When you offer subscription slabs, you can keep a limited-time free trial offer for your email database. These offers are proven to gain you more email subscribers in less time.
- Grab emails during the checkout process
Owning an ecommerce store helps in building an email list better. Ecommerce sites often get the chance to receive email addresses from customers during checkout. Generally, the customer of an online store is more engaging than any other. They are always curious to hear about special deals, discounts, upcoming sales, and product updates. Thus, it becomes a highly profitable tactic.
Adding a checkbox for receiving customer permission is important in these cases. Also, you can take the help of email automation that will keep your customers updated on the checkout and delivery process. Some email service providers also offer abandoned cart email, which benefits business owners.
- Offer discount coupon codes to email subscribers
Who doesn’t like a free discount? Well, the attraction of discounts and offers is unavoidable. Your customers can never leave an opportunity to save some extra cash. You can use pop-ups to offer your email subscribers a discount or coupon code. This may look like bribery, but it is ethical. Also, this method is most popular for its efficacy and success rate.
- Offer Freebies
Another great way to build an email database is to offer freebies in exchange for an email newsletter sign-up. This is a popular way to get email subscribers for different niche sites. You can offer free printables (like worksheets, planner pages, calendar pages, to-do lists, and more), email courses, and so on. If you are an ecommerce store, you can offer free shipping in exchange for emails.
- Play with your email signature
If you are a professional or a business and need to send out emails frequently, then this is a great strategy you can follow. You can add a link to your recent blog post, podcast, course, or product in the email signature to drive more contacts in your email database. This might convert the leads that are already in contact with you.
- Surveys help too
Surveys can be a potential lead magnet for your website as it not only builds your email database but also helps you understand your audience’s preferences better. You can ask people to take a survey for your website. Keep it brief and fun to make it more interesting than tiring to your audience. Additionally, adding the survey to a blog post ensures more organic traffic.
- Take the help of Quora
Quora is a high-ranking platform that works effectively to gain and retain email subscribers. Generally, the questions on Quora rank higher in search engines, providing the answerer a chance to get visibility. A great quality, precise answer is what people seek in Quora. You can answer a question that is relevant to one of your blog posts. By referring to that blog post in your answer, you can drive a lot of traffic or sale.
- Think of hosting a Webinar
If your website provides services or tutorials, think of hosting webinars. Webinars can help you successfully build an email list that stays. You can retain existing subscribers along with gaining new ones, which reflects on your website traffic. As the webinar requires email sign-ups to attend, it helps you grow your email list.
- A Giveaway
Giveaways are one of the most effective ways to extend your list of email subscribers. Make sure you choose the right product for the giveaway. Research well and choose something that is relevant to the users and goes well with your niche. The most promising gifts for every niche would be an iPhone or an Amazon or eBay gift card. You can also give away a popular book or an antivirus software.
If you are running short on budget, consider partnering with another blogger or company which will give you mutual benefit. By cross-promoting your giveaways, you can double the number of potential email subscribers.
- Offer a resource library
Resource libraries are very popular, especially on websites that focus on technical stuff and tutorials. A resource library is an inventory where you stock up on any resources in your niche that you might want to share with your email subscribers. In order to access a resource library, one might need to subscribe to your email newsletters. Also, let your audience know that you offer your email subscribers access to an extensive resource library. The beauty of resource libraries is that they are a one-stop solution for every resource you need regarding a particular niche.
- Exclusive Deals for Email Subscribers
Occasional exclusive offers for email subscribers and promoting them online positively impact your email list. The offers could be a special discount not available on the website or a free e-book you cannot get elsewhere. These exclusive deals attract more emails and help you meet your goals. Clearly state that these offers are exclusive for your users if they join your newsletter.
- Ask for Referrals
Referrals are a great way to build an email database. Your subscribers have the ability to get more subscribers as referrals. Run a contest where the highest referring subscriber gets a prize, or you can offer your existing subscribers some incentive for a successful referral.
Conclusion
With the changing social media algorithms and declining click-through rates, email marketing is the most promising and prospective way to drive traffic to your site, providing a high conversion rate. However, you must know the right strategies to build an email database without spamming your email subscribers’ inboxes. The tips mentioned above have been proven to succeed with high-volume traffic and are also certified by professional marketers.
