How to Use Data to Grow Small Businesses

Blog post: When it comes to digital marketing, email traffic is one of the most valuable sources of overall traffic to your website. Why? Because it comes from preexisting leads and customers. But it is worth noting that not every link in your emails goes to this traffic, and in order to make sure it appears under this channel grouping, you need to integrate your email marketing software with Google Analytics or manually tag your links with UTM parameters. That’s just one tip for ensuring that your email traffic is benefitting your small business - in this blog post, we’re going to explore several more. Let’s get started!

 

Why is Email Traffic Important?

 

As mentioned above, traffic from email campaigns is one of the most valuable kinds of traffic you can receive, because it comes from existing leads and/or customers. Think about it: they wouldn’t receive any emails from you if they did not subscribe to your email list. And people who are subbed behave differently from cold traffic, because they are further along in the buyer’s journey. In other words, they are more invested in your company, and know more about it than people who are hearing about you for the first time.

 

How Do I Use Email Traffic?

 

Email traffic is a great benchmark to tell you how engaged your current leads and/or customers are with your small business. It is also a good indicator of what messaging works within your email marketing. If you are tracking different types of marketing emails properly, you can see how they perform in your GoogleAnalytics account. As you probably already know, there are two different metrics to study for email marketing: open rate and click-through rate, or CRM.Both can be valuable depending on your goals for your small business.

 

What are Some Tips For IncreasingEmail Traffic?

 

While this is not an exhaustive list of ways you can increase your email traffic, it is fairly comprehensive. Here are our top recommendations:

 

●     Continue to build your email list. This one seems obvious, but many people do not think of it. Did you know that email lists decay naturally at a rate of about ~22.5% a year? This means a contact in your email list will be useless in four years. This can happen for many reasons, including changes in email address or your content simply becoming irrelevant to some subscribers.This is why it is critical to continuously generate new leads and revive your email list.

●     Do not rely on newsletter signups. Email marketing is hardly limited to newsletters, and they are the worst kind of lead generation tactic. They do not add any value to your readers, and most businesses only use them to send discounts or promotions. Try creating a marketing offer instead, and distribute it on social media to reach a wider audience.

●     Implement a lead management strategy. This will allow you to segment your email list and personalize the messaging that reaches each portion. This makes sure the content that reaches each segment is always relevant and not annoying. Creating a lead nurturing campaign for each segment may also be helpful.

●     Add links to your email. Not everyone does this, and if you don’t, you are missing out. It is also crucial to make sure any links you add to your emails are working before they are sent out to leads and/or customers.

●     Don’t forget your UTM tags! This was mentioned at the beginning of this post, but it is just as important now as it was then. Adding the properUTM tags in the links in your email ensures that clicks will be tracked under email traffic.

●     Include links to your articles or blog posts in your email signature.Making sure that all of your teams’ email signatures include the same copy and link to a certain page can greatly increase traffic.

●     Link to your articles or blog posts in email conversations. You are no doubt using email every day to talk to customers, vendors, and more. If your small business is truly creating helpful content, then it should be no problem to link it in your regular communications.

 

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