Why You MUST Capture Your Clients Email Addresses
(And Where To Use Them Effectively)
If you’re one of those people (like me) that keeps hearing and reading that email is dead, bear with me for a few minutes.
Email is not dead. Yes, email marketing has changed and it’s not enough to send a carefully crafted email with your products and services at 7am anymore. There’s just too much noise. Everyone’s doing exactly the same and it’s hard to make your voice heard amongst all cries for attention. So what’s the point of collecting your clients’ email addresses you may ask? Well, let me give you a few pointers.
Newsletters
Are you still with me?
Yes, I know I said everyone’s doing the same, which implies you should be doing something different. The thing is, email marketing in the form of newsletters still works.
Website Email Is Not Dead does a great job of compiling information about email usage worldwide. You can find all sorts of great data there but let me pull your focus to the following statistics:
– 81% of US online shoppers are more likely to make additional purchases, either online or in a store, as a result of emails based on previous shopping behaviors and preferences -Harris Interactive
– 72% of consumers say that email is their favored conduit of communication with companies they do business with -MarketingSherpa
– 61% of consumers say they like to receive promotional emails weekly and 28% want them even more frequently -MarketingSherpa
– 68% of consumers find email to be their #1 preferred channel for receiving commercial messages (CG Selections) and 66% have made a purchase online as direct result of an email marketing message (Direct Marketing Association)
There’s a lot of data that supports the continued use of email marketing in its traditional form. What you should be doing is defining your audiences. It’s not enough to send the same email to a long list of email addresses, some of which you may not even have collected yourself or through any of your brand or business’s channels. You should be reaching out to people who already know your brand or business to increase your chances of being heard by the crowd. It’s infinitely harder to get your message across to people who have never heard of you.
From Mailchimp’s statistics we can see that the Open Rate is of about 23% and that the Click Rate is just under 3%, on average, across industries. Depending on your email list, this may mean a whole lof of potential/returning clients
On to the juicy bits then.
Collecting Your Clients’ Email Addresses
One of the best places to do this (if not the best) is your website. Why? If people sign up for your email list on a platform that talks about your business/brand/services/products/
Here are a couple of ways (and tools) to help you capture those email addresses.
Landing Pages
Well built Landing Pages are, by far, the most effective way to get someone visiting your website, specially when tied in with ads on multiple platforms (I’ll get to that in a bit). These are the pages that will have all of the relevant information about what you want to pass on to a visitor and a clear call to action. In this particular article I’ll focus on getting people to sign up to your email list but the call to action can serve many other purposes.
I won’t go into much detail on them but here are a few tools that can help you with building those landing pages without much effort:
Sign Up Boxes
Whether they rest on a sidebar, sticky bar at the top of your pages, show up as a pop up or slide in box, these are pretty effective ways to getting visitors attention drawn to your ultimate goal. All of the tools above will allow you to do these, in one way or the other.
A/B Testing
Did you know that sometimes, just by changing the color of a button or the wording on your call to action, your conversion rate will increase? You can use the landing page tools to create 2 or more (stick with 2 and take it from there) versions of your pages and see which version works best fulfills your goals. Don’t presume to know what will perform better. Test, test and test again!
Ads Drive Traffic
Now you’ve got those landing pages up and all you need is drive traffic to them. Let me show you how to do it and how it all ties together with capturing email addresses on your website.
Most people are on Facebook and so that platform is perfect to get people’s attention to what you’re trying to say. It’s virtually impossible to develop a Facebook strategy based on organic content alone and even harder to drive traffic to your website that way. This is where Facebook ads and their excellent targeting features come in handy.
Clicks to Website + Website Conversions Ads
Whether or not you have up to date content on your Facebook page, this type of ad will still work. Use this type of goal to drive people to your beautifully made landing pages and then use Facebook Pixel to figure out what’s converting and what’s not. As your conversions grow, the more optimized for that same goal your ads will be and the better results you’ll have.
Lead Ads
Recently, Facebook has introduced this type of ad to its portfolio. It allows you to create a form inside Facebook (for mobile devices only at the moment of writing) and capture whatever information you deem relevant from your audience. These are particularly good as people don’t even need to leave Facebook and still fulfill your goal (of getting their email addresses, remember?).
AdWords
Here’s another great way to drum up the traffic to your shiny new landing pages.
And here’s yet another important piece of information: optimize your landing pages for SEO, around one or two keywords, relevant to the content on your pages. Why? Although these will be presumably temporary pieces of content on your website and virtually impossible to expect them to rank well on search engine results (although not impossible to achieve), the fact that they’re optimized for search engines will mean that the Quality Score of your ads will increase and ultimately increase the chances of that ad to show up in prominent positions in search engines ad placements. Oh yeah, it’ll also mean clicks on your ads will cost you less! Cool, huh?
Don’t forget to track conversions! In AdWords this is also important as when you get about 15 conversions in 30 days (although Google recommends at least 30), you can start optimizing your ads for conversions and so use your budget more effectively.
Emails and Ads
You must’ve been wondering if I’d forgotten about the topic of this article or if I’d just used a misleading title to draw you here. Not at all! This is where it all comes full circle.
Facebook Custom Audiences
Now that you’ve created your landing pages, are driving traffic to them and are capturing those much wanted email addresses, where else can you use them, other than sending out a periodical email?
Enter Custom Audiences. Facebook allows you to take your email list and create an audience for targeting on that platform pharmacy levitra. This means that you can present ads only to people that have shown interest on what you’re saying/selling. If this doesn’t rock your digital marketing world, I don’t know what will.
Facebook Look-a-Like Audiences
As if Custom Audiences weren’t enough, Facebook will allow you to take those audiences and build audiences that are similar to it. This means that your ads can be shown to people who are very similar to the people that are on your list already. See the potential for conversions here?
Google Customer Match
Google got on this train a bit later but fortunately for me and you, still in time for Christmas! With Customer Match, Google allows you to show ads on Search, Gmail and YouTube to people who have signed up for your email list(s).
Google Similar Audiences
Much like Look-a-Like Audiences, this feature will allow you to build audiences that are similar to the ones you’ve built using your email list. These particular audiences are only available for Gmail and Youtube at the moment of writing.
How about that?
So whether you take on all of these tips or decide to pick and choose whatever fits your business better, don’t ever forget on how important it is to capture your clients emails, even if you’re don’t have or don’t plan having an effective email marketing strategy in place.
Need Help?
If for some reason you feel overwhelmed with all this information and need help implementing part or all of it, get in touch with Mammoth Solutions as we’ll be able to integrate a strategy with your business needs.
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