Episode #1: 6 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Biz
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Listen to the full episode on iTunes >>
HEY THERE!
Welcome to the very first episode of the Learn To Love Email Podcast!
In this very first episode I let you know who I am, why I started this podcast in the first place and what you can expect from this podcast. I also give you my opinion on 6 reasons why you should be using email marketing to grow your business. Basically, why you should care about my podcast and email marketing in the first place.
Who am I?
My name is Nicole and I've been an Email Marketer for 5 years now. I started my email marketing journey in the corporate world working for an e-commerce company called Well.ca. This is where I first got my hands dirty with Email Marketing and discovered my passion for it. From there, I made way over to the SaaS industry and worked for FreshBooks. This is where I took my Email Marketing skills to the next level and learned the world of email automation.
For those of you who don't know, FreshBooks is a software program that helps small business owners with their accounting. While working for FreshBooks I got to interact with lots of our customers, all of which are entrepreneurs, and get acquainted with the small business owner/entrepreneur community. It didn't take long before I realized that not many small business owners knew how to incorporate email marketing into their business which to me, screamed opportunity.
So back in March of 2016 I started a side hustle, which has now turned into my business today, Learn To Love Email. The whole purpose of starting my business was to put all of my email marketing knowledge to use by helping other small business owners learn to love email marketing and everything it can do for their business.
When I first started my business, I realized small business owners were intimidated by the concept of email marketing and I set out to break down that barrier and teach them that email marketing isn't nearly as scary as they think it is. I found there were lots of super successful online entrepreneurs talking about the importance of building your list but no one was teaching people how to do it. Not the way I wanted to teach it anyways.
Why did I start this podcast?
Cause I don't LOVE writing blogs. I did some video blogging and that was okay but when it comes down to it, I like to talk. A lot. And I REALLY like to talk to other entrepreneurs so starting a podcast seemed like a natural fit.
What can you expect from the Learn To Love Email podcast?
Two of my biggest passions are entrepreneurship + email marketing. I've structured my podcast in a way that allows me to talk about both of those topics. The Learn To Love Email podcast will be a mixture of interviews with other small business owners as well as solo episodes with yours truly.
80% of the shows will be interview style where I'll chat with other female small business owners about their entrepreneurship journey in the first half of the episode as well as how they're using email marketing in their business in the second half of the episode. My goal for these interviews are to leave you feeling not only inspired from an entrepreneurship perspective but to also leave you feeling inspired to take your email marketing to the next level. I'll be interviewing business owners from all different types of industries (e-commerce, coaches, makers, writers, photographers, bloggers, consultants, you name it!) because I really truly believe that email marketing can be incorporated into any type of business model. I hope that you'll get some really great ideas from these episodes on how you can use email marketing to grow your own business.
The other 20% of the episodes will just me little ol' me sharing some of my own entrepreneurial journey with you as well as of course dishing out everything I know about email marketing. These episodes will likely be a little shorter and more focused on a particular facet of email marketing (ie. list building, open rates, opt-in incentives, etc) instead of touching on many different aspects of email marketing like we do in the interviews.
Alright, now on to the good stuff.
6 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Biz
Email Marketing should be an essential tool in every small business owner’s toolkit. It’s the most powerful yet affordable way to connect with your potential customers, deliver value and drive repeat business.
Although there are many different ways to market your small business, email marketing should be at the top of your list. In fact, 56% of online marketers say email marketing is the most effective way of marketing their business.
Here’s 6 reasons why email marketing is the most effective form of marketing for any small business owners:
1. Your emails are more likely to be seen when compared to social media posts.
With all of the Instagram posts, Facebook status updates, Tweets, Snapchats and LinkedIn updates posted on a daily basis, it’s really hard to make sure the messages you send to your customers are actually being seen.
As a matter of fact, if we’re looking at Facebook in particular, only 6% of your fans will actually see your message, let alone engage with it. Compare this to email marketing where the average open rate is 21.73%, almost triple that of Facebook.
2. With Email Marketing, you're in control.
Just when you think you’ve adapted your marketing strategy to the latest Facebook or Instagram algorithm, it changes again. Facebook changed its newsfeed algorithm 11 times in 2016 alone, making it more and more difficult for users messages to be seen by their audience. This is one of the downsides of marketing your business on someone else’s turf.
When it comes to email marketing, you’re 100% in control. You own your subscriber list and you can control what messages are sent to what subscribers, when the messages are sent and how often they’re sent. You don’t need to battle the always changing social media algorithms just to communicate with your customers.
3. Email Marketing has the highest ROI when compared to other online marketing tactics.
When it comes to running a small business, every penny counts. You want to ensure that the money you’re investing into your business will provide you with a return on your investment. The high costs associated with advertising, both online and traditional forms, can leave you feeling defeated as a small business owner.
While email marketing isn’t free, the costs are nowhere near as high as paid advertising and the ROI is like no other form of marketing out there. Email Marketing has an ROI of 3800% (yes, you read that right). That means for every $1 you spend on your email marketing, you’ll make $38 back in revenue.
4. There's no creative limits when it comes to email marketing.
As a business owner trying to market your product or service, there’s nothing worse than trying to get your message across in 140 characters or less, a 10 second video clip or a small square image with no linking capabilities. These are all struggles commonly experienced with social media marketing.
When it comes to email, there’s no creative limits. You can craft the message in whatever way you like, including text, images, video, animated gifs, buttons, colours, you name it! Email Marketing gives you the freedom to deliver your message in whatever way feels most natural to you.
5. With email marketing, you know exactly what works and what doesn't.
Sometimes marketing can be a bit of a guessing game. You think you have an idea of what your customers want to hear and see from you but you don’t always have clear indicators of what’s resonating and what’s not.
One of the best parts about email marketing is the ability to see exactly how a message resonates with your audience from the second you hit that ‘send’ button. Your email marketing software platform shows you who opened your emails, who clicked a link in your email and exactly what links they clicked. You can even track the performance of your email all the way through to the conversion level to see just how many dollars a given email generated.
Having complete visibility into how your subscribers are reacting to the message you’ve just sent them allows you to learn a great deal about what they really like and what they don’t. As a business owner, this information helps guide you on what to do more of and what to do less of. No more guessing games.
6. You can put your email marketing on autopilot.
Once you have a few email campaigns under your belt, you’ll start to see what’s working and what’s not. Email Marketing platforms generally come with a built in automation feature that allows you to take your best performing email campaigns and put them on auto-pilot. Leveraging automation will not only save you time but it also allows you to deliver email communications to your subscribers in a more efficient and timely manner.
Listen to the full episode on iTunes >>
Follow me on Instagram to stay in the loop when new episodes are released! You can find me @learntoloveemail.
See you next time!