Best Practices for Email Marketing: Capture Email Addresses on Your Website…Now
One thing about email marketing: It is not a standalone channel. Not by any means. As an email marketing vendor, we at ClickMail continue to teach best practices for email marketing. But if you get too focused on email marketing best practices, you might lose site of the bigger picture, of email’s part in your organization’s overall marketing strategy.
Email can be a complex part of your overall marketing practices and strategy. But you can think of it rather simply as the trifecta of online marketing:
◦ You use search marketing to attract prospects to your website
◦ You use your website to engage those prospects and persuade them to sign up for your emails
◦ Then you use email to deliver content and build a relationship with that prospect, nurturing them along until they become a customer…or strengthening the customer loyalty if they already are
Do everything right, and they’ll be back to your website to buy at a later date. That’s best practices for email marketing.
The flip side of that is this: Your website should be optimized to do everything possible to grow your in-house email list by capturing email addresses for you through signups.
Even if your website isn’t getting a sale right at that moment, at least it should be trying to get you an email address, as part of your email marketing best practices. Typically 70% of website visitors are first-time visitors and 80% of them won’t be back. So strive to get as many of those first-time visitors to raise their hands and say “Yes, I want to hear from you in the future” as you can by convincing them to sign up or subscribe for your emails.
Studies show $43 returned for every $1 spent on email marketing. Studies also show that customers who provide an email address are 20% more likely to buy, and they spend 24% more than those who don’t provide an email address.
What is an email address worth to you? MarketingSherpa calculates it to be $118 LTV (lifetime value). David Daniels and Jeanniey Mullen say it’s more like $180 when one factors in the email-influenced offline behavior.
Is that worth some effort on your part, some time spent optimizing your website to collect as many quality email addresses as possible? Can you make that one of your best practices for email marketing? I sure hope so!
For other email marketing best practices for growing your in-house email list, see the article Do’s and Don’t’s of List Building.
About the Author: Jared LaRock
