Email marketing remains one of the most effective methods of marketing for SMEs, despite the attention paid to the newer marketing methods of social media.
Studies continually demonstrate email marketing’s high levels of return on investment when compared to other direct marketing tools.
Entrepreneurs, including Papinelle founder Renae James, say they are having more success with email marketing than marketing on social media.
But if your businesses’ marketing emails are not hitting the mark, myths about how email marketing works could be what is holding your business back.
Writing for Inc, Mirasee founder and chief executive Danny Iny has busted three email marketing myths that sabotage sales.
“Your subscribers aren’t dogs, so why train them?” says Iny.
Rather than attempting to train subscribers to open your marketing emails, Iny says the focus should be on telling “a story that gives subscribers a reason to open your emails”.
“Prepare a narrative, delivered over a sequence of emails, that makes them want to open your emails over and over again,” he says.
“If you consistently deliver value through your emails, then your subscribers will keep reading them.”
Actually people hate “bad, irrelevant, useless email”, says Iny.
While many people assume that subscribers don’t want to receive emails from businesses too frequently, Iny says email users do want to hear from people – and brands – that they have a relationship with.
“Cultivate a relationship with your subscribers and email your list as often as you want – as long as each email is a good one – and yours will be the email they read,” he says.
According to Iny, conventional ideas about the sales cycle do not apply to email marketing, with people no longer automatically following a linear process from being prospects, to subscribers, to customers, to evangelical fans of a business.
“In reality, you have to wow your audience, not just after the sale, but also at every step before, during, and after the sale,” he says.
Iny says think of this process as a ladder, which people climb deliberately as they become more invested in your brand.
“You can encourage this movement, by making each email an opportunity for subscribers to invest in you, not only in the form of their time, attention, and energy, but also their hopes, dreams and money,” he says.
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News Editor
Prior to joining SmartCompany, Eloise was news editor at Books+Publishing, the trade press for the Australian book industry. Eloise has degrees in media and communications, marketing and business management, and political science. You can follow her on Twitter at @ellykeating.
