How to run Email Marketing and send updates to your Community of Investors, Influencers, Users…

We are now surfing in the vast sea of data in this information age. Did you know that a study by Radicati Group back in 2018, there are 3.8 billion email users before the start of 2019, over 100 million more than the previous year? In other words, over half of the entire planet uses email right now. I can say that email remains the most efficient means of business communication.

What is email?

Email or ‘electronic mail’. Similar to a letter, a specific address is needed to receive an email, and that address is unique to each user. Some people use internet-based applications and some use programs on their computer to access and store emails.

Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily the Internet. Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today’s email systems are now a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers should have been online simultaneously; they need to connect briefly, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Why email is important for marketing?

An email marketing campaign is a process of sending from a business to one or more customers or prospects. A successful email marketing campaign will get the recipients to take action, engage with your business, and help you to get more leads and sales. According to Adestra, consumers prefer email for communicating with the brands they’re connected with.

Email is also the dominant communication tool for professionals. Nearly 95% of professionals use email, making it ideal for business to business communication. Below are some of the reasons why:

It is affordable.

Email marketing allows companies and businesses to reach a large number of consumers and potential clients for less than a penny per message. It’s easy, effective, and inexpensive.

Email marketing services such as MailChimp allows you to send up to 12,000 emails a month for free. They also offer larger monthly plans for growing businesses with up to 600,000 subscribers and high volume sender plans for anything over that. SendGrid costs $0.00085 cents per message at their Pro Marketing Email level. Another email marketing company, Vertical Response, offers free email marketing up to 4,000 emails per month and 1,000 email contacts. They also offer subscription services for higher-volume senders.

A good medium for customer acquisition and retention.

Research from ExactTarget reports that the majority of consumers check their email first thing, before anything else online.

Additionally, these email-first individuals tend to be more task-oriented online than the people who start their day on Facebook or Twitter. In other words, they will probably approach online interactions with the goal of finding deals, promotions, or new product information.

When asked how often they use email vs social media, consumers clearly prefer an email with 91% saying that they use email at least once per day.

Increase brand awareness

Nope, social media isn’t the only platform that helps a company’s brand awareness. Possessing a customer or prospect’s email address means one thing: they showed a level of interest in your business. Email marketing enables you to increase that interest level of brand awareness by staying top of mind.

This doesn’t mean to send four daily emails to every customer. That’s a great way to get customers to hate you… Instead, try some email marketing that promotes your activeness in the local community. Too often companies try to sell, sell, sell their products via email marketing, and completely ignore the brand awareness factor. By doing so, they’re also prohibiting the ultimate possibility of building customer trust and adding a sense of personality to their brand.

How to influence the community using this?

1. Know and establish your goals

It is important to know first what you are aiming to achieve. Without goals, you lack focus and direction. Goal setting not only allows you to take control of how you will construct your campaign; it also provides you with a benchmark for determining whether you are succeeding. Setting SMART goals will help you in the long run.

2. Know your product and audience

Before we go outside and know our target audience, we should know our product first.

We can ask something like:

a. What can it do?

b. What did you think about the project?

c. Why did you like them?

d. What specific features of the product impressed you?

e. What problems do you see in the project?

Knowing and figuring out its uses, advantages, disadvantages, and weakness will help you create your own marketing style.

By identifying the target audience, you make a power move to your business prosperity. Before starting an advertising campaign, you should clearly imagine who these people are. Who will use your product? Lots of businessmen make a mistake considering their product to be desirable to all. By and large, this is not true.

To make your product sell, you should narrow the buyers’ circle down. That is why you have to identify the target audience. If this group is too large, divide it into sections. Focus on it to make them purchase the merchandise.

Why is this important? When you know the target group, you don’t have to seek for it. Therefore, you don’t need to waste money on an advertising campaign.

3. Choose your campaign

There are various types of email campaigns that you can use. It can be separated to these four (4) common types:

- Newsletter: a regularly distributed email campaign that is generally about one main topic of interest;

- Marketing Offer: essentially any campaign you send with the goal of driving a direct response;

- Announcement: an email sent to your subscribers announcing a new product, feature, or service; and

- Event Invitation: a campaign designed to increase awareness of your event and encourage people to attend.

4. Build your email list

Every year, your email marketing database degrades by about 22.5%. Chances are, your contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another, opt-out of your email communication, or abandon that old AOL address they only use to fill out forms on websites. Database decay is a fact of marketing life. Even if you improve your unsubscribe rates, you can’t stop people from changing their email addresses.

In order to keep this alive, you have to create a remarkable email content if you want people to stay subscribed and forward your emails to their own network. If it’s entertaining enough, they’ll always anticipate your emails. You can also promote using social media to market your project. Having a blog can also attract attention to those outside the Facebook or Twitter Zone.

Having experts or agencies like Crowdcreate to market your product and grow your influence is much better since we specialize in managing and helping you grow your community across different platforms. Our management, growth and PR strategies will help you in leading a successful crowdfunding campaign.

5. Measure the results

Finally, sending your email is just the first step in making email showcasing progress. To really nail it, you must collect data to improve future campaigns.

You have to test everything: from the number of recipients to how many of them opened your email. Even when did they opened it is a valuable information. You have to gather data regarding your email’s open rate, click through rate, unsubscribed rate, conversion rate and other things that might help you study and analyze your email. With these data, you can layout your next marketing move.

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We have worked with some of the largest crowdfunding ICOs and startups including BitClave, ANKER, and Tencent. We’ve raised over $106.4 million dollars across 45+ projects since 2014; we are a veteran team and one of the original crowdfunding agencies. Check us out here (https://www.crowdcreate.us).