You’ve Got Mail!
The email address is the only sure-fire way that a company can get in touch with you. It gives them access to the one on one interaction they need to push their product or service. However, a lot of companies are securing the email, but they are not using that connection wisely. We have all experienced this! You head over to your favorite online store looking for for some shoes and then a couple of days later the site emails you about a deal on hats, something completely unrelated. That is a generic use of
email marketing. The company is effectively keeping in touch with you as a potential returning customer, but they are not catering to you and what you were looking for. Consequently, the email could be considered ineffective and at the shallow end of the spectrum SPAM.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing. It is a commercial email that is sent out to fundraise or sell a product/service to a particular audience.
What Does A Successful Email Marketing Campaign Do?
With an email marketing plan you can:
Generate brand awareness
In fact, when done successfully you can track your exact return on investment, which is the most significant difference between email marketing and its predecessor direct mail marketing.
Once your target opens the email, you can be notified and keep track of who is seeing your message in the form of exact numbers which is virtually impossible to do with any other marketing technique.
Boost new and repeat customers to make a purchase from you by linking to your website in the email
At the heart of email marketing, the purpose is to get new and existing customers to visit your site and give them a reason to do so. You want to make sure you are building a base and
retaining an audience. Keep that in mind when you are thinking of your email marketing campaign.
Build an audience that wants to consume content from you on a consistent basis
Stay at the forefront of your audience’s mind so that when they are ready to make a purchase, they remember you before they even think of anyone else and consequently go to your site first. You do this by ensuring that your campaign in attractive. The layout has to be clean, you should use color in your emails, and most importantly the links need to work!
5 Way to Ensure Your Campaign Sticks
Email Marketing Reaches Mobile Customers
Did you know that 47% of cell phone owners check their email via their cell phone? Now, this is all dependent upon the age range and the subject matter that you are focusing on, but let’s say that
your hair business is targeting women ages 24 to 35 you have a pretty good shot that your emails are going to penetrate with your potential customer base. This is important because your email marketing is now doubling as both a desktop
form of marketing and a mobile form of marketing. Meaning, you should make sure that your email is mobile friendly. The majority of the time when someone is opening their email via their mobile device they are not going to delete it, but they are going to revisit it on their desktop when they are stationary and can focus. In simpler terms: your email will be opened twice, and therefore will penetrate its target! Using email as your form of mobile marketing is better than capturing a number and texting a campaign for three key reasons:
- You can reach a customer on their tablet, phone, or any other mobile device that caters to email.
- You do not have to worry about your customer being charged by their cell phone carrier for any texts.
- Email enables you to use images, special characters, and text effects to capture your customer further.
Make Your Emails Worth Reading!
About 28 Percent of US online shoppers will sign up to a store’s email list so that they can stay informed. Customers want to know what their favorite brands are up to, and this is separate from promotions and coupons. When you have successfully attracted your customer to your brand, they'll want to be updated. They'll want to know when you add in new types of hair, the new features you have on your site like a blog or vlog feature, and even new faces that you have working in your company. And because we know that brands selling a product fair better when delivering content to their customers as well, your email marketing campaign can be the vessel that you use to get your customers their content while selling your bundles.
How To Do This:
Achieve this by using a pop up on your site to offer your customers a reward like free shipping for signing up for your email list. Then when you are sending them the free shipping code update them on the new lashes, you have in stock or the variety of edge control sizes that you offer for travel, personal, or economical use! Using the email tactic in this way gives your customer something to go towards their purchase and lets them know what you are selling! It is important to remember that you need to know who your customer is when speaking to them. Be sure to talk to your customer in their language NOT the hair-industry language. You want your messages to reach them and convert them over to a sale so be mindful not to confuse them. For example, when promoting your hair-extensions, you may want to use a term like “Double Wefted” to convey that your bundles shed less than your competitor's hair. However, your customer may not be familiar with that term! Find a creative way to spell that out for them, using a video or giphy to ensure that they know your sew-in hair extensions are top quality.
Pro Tip: Email marketing can even help you jumpstart numbers on a blog or vlog that you are producing. You can see about a 40% jump in sales by adding video to your email marketing.
Email Coupons Will Drive Sales
Customers are looking to save money. You may think that's a no-brainer but a lot of people forget that when they're trying to sell their product. E-coupons are big business, and that is a way that your hair brand can entice people to want to stay subscribed to your email list. Offer them an e-coupon! If you have some brick-and-mortar location or pop-up shop approaching, give them the ability to print out that coupon and bring it to you to use as well. This way you're able to secure online sales and in-person sales. You may think that this is cutting into your profit, it's not. A lot of bargain hunters won't even consider shopping unless they know that they're going to get a percentage off of their purchase. So, by including a coupon in your email marketing campaign, you are recruiting those people who only shop discount deals, and you're gaining their business.
Pro Tip: As tempting as it is to sell, create real content. DON’T send out ads to buy all of the time with click-bait subject lines! You will get unsubscribed quicker than you can blink! No one wants you to sell to them all of the time.
You Can Incorporate Other Marketing Tactics
Integrated
marketing campaigns are very successful when it comes to digital marketing. You should keep email marketing in your marketing toolbox because you can use one email as an opportunity to both, create personalized content for your potential customer and incorporate other marketing techniques at the same time. Private Label Extensions does a great job of combining marketing tactics with email marketing on the days of its FLASH sales! PLE curates an exclusive list of those who want to be notified of the deal early by sending out an email blast to alert them of a coming attraction. Then on the day of the sale, those same people are informed via text when the deal has started! They are successfully capturing emails and guiding
their customer towards their latest promotion. Other types of email marketing examples are thank you emails with a twist and reminder emails.
Thank You Emails
Email your customer thanking them for a previous purchase and then adding in similar product suggestions for a future purchase. For example, if you notice that your customer frequents hair extensions that have a curl pattern to it you can probably guess that they like a wave pattern in their hair. After you've tracked a number of their purchases, you can send them a personalized email with their name. Suggest to them that they purchase a curl pattern that they may have never seen before or have had in their cart for a while but just never went through with.
Reminder Emails
Shopping cart reminders are another marketing tactic that you can use to your advantage via email marketing. Send your customer a reminder that they have something in their car that they forgot to purchase to follow up with them and let them know that you do care about their business. It shows that you know that they were looking at some products that they like enough to consider saving. To go the extra mile, think about taking that time to send them over a quick coupon and ease them into the buying decision.
Email Marketing Is Cheap(ER)
When done correctly email marketing is not only efficient, but it's also relatively inexpensive when compared to other marketing tactics. Through email marketing, you can reach large groups of people for pennies per message. This is especially true for small businesses; if you think about it commercials, radio ads, billboards, and sponsored post on Facebook and IG can run you a lot of money.
Email Marketing VS Radio
For example, for a radio ad, some people may say that you can get that promotion for free. They would be right. A small station with an even smaller listener pool that offers your an overnight ad spot would not charge you anything. You would be hard pressed to find someone that heard the ad so in retrospect you would not lose anything but time. However, you can find a station with a particular demo, maybe a midday show that caters to working women in a medium-sized market and they could charge you about $5,000 for your hair business commercial. They are providing an audience so that price makes sense.
Email Marketing VS Television
A television commercial would also cost you thousands of dollars. After paying for the models, buying out their hair, paying for a camera crew, studio space, and the time slot to air the commercial you may have made out better with the radio ad! This is especially true because a lot of people have ditched television for the likes of streaming so the reach that you have with your commercial maybe limited in relation to the dollars you are spending.
How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?
If you don't have a huge marketing budget, there is no shame in collecting emails, creating a newsletter, and speaking to your customer one on one. That is, for a fraction of the price that one of those other methods would have run you. In fact, A lot of marketers would recommend that you spend the majority of your marketing Budget on an email marketing campaign anywhere from 10 to 16%. However, that percentage does depend on a few factors, including:
- Annual revenue
- How much of that same revenue comes from online sales
- The industry you are in (which because most hair businesses are primarily online, this is significant to your industry)
- The product/service you sell
- Your overall digital marketing goals
That efficiency depends on the quality of your email list. A lot of people, myself included, are guilty of providing an email that they rarely visit or one that is completely fake. If you have collected a significant amount of emails, then you may want to invest in a program that will clean up your email list and eliminate a lot of bounced emails. These programs will charge you based upon the amounts of emails that you have and typically cost about $0.01 per email starting at 10,000 emails. After you have cleaned up your email list, depending on the number of emails that you have, choosing the best email platform for your because this will be where the money goes.
Platforms to Look Into
If you are on a tight budget and you don’t plan on growing your email list too quickly, then Mailchimp is for you! Their plans range from FREE to $199 and their layouts and relatively simple to use. Hubspot is another popular platform. It is pretty big and allows for email scheduling, contact engagement tracking, email workflow automation and much more. Hubspot is excellent for smaller companies with a medium to large budget because it has a new FREE option that enables you to pay as you grow. Meaning, if you have a small email campaign idea now, you can sign up for Hubspot’s free option and as your email list grows and your campaign needs more resources you can upgrade and have all of your complex needs fulfilled as they arise. This is not the case with MailChimp because that program does have its limits.
Impact Your Hair Biz Through Email
Email marketing is a vital component in many industries and can be your biggest advocate when it comes to sales generation and repeat customers. If used correctly your email campaign can promote brand recognition, recoup a return on investment, and
earn a profit! The only thing you have to do is learn your audience and deliver then content that teaches them about your brand while helping them to save money if they choose to buy into it.
