As a business owner, managing your customers and leads feels like a never-ending cycle. We get it. It’s a constant battle of turning leads into new customers and then turning those customers into returning customers, while also trying to keep your loyal customers around. One of the best ways to manage both leads and customers is through email campaigns.
When it comes to email campaigns, particularlyGmail’s promotional capabilities, you’re able to generate traffic you never have experienced before and ultimately help your brand grow. While this may sound too good to be true, we swear that isn’t the case.
Before diving into how you can utilize Gmail’s promotion feature for your business’s emails, let’s first highlight the importance of email traffic.
Why is email traffic important?
Email traffic turns into website traffic which turns into sales. When you generate traffic from an email campaign, you are doing one of the best things you can do for your business. The recipients of your emails are those individuals who have either expressed interest in your business (and added themselves to your email list) or are existing customers. That means that these leads are warm and are for people that are already invested in your company. With these types of email recipients, you can cater your emails to highlight special promotions that may catch their attention or gauge how engaged they are with your brand.
Email traffic is easy to track and with the data, you can analyze your email performance, the open rate, and whether the email recipient opens the link you want them to click on.
So, now that you know why email traffic is crucial to your brand, let’s dive into the steps you’ll want to take to ensure you useGmail’s promotion feature for your business’s emails in the most effective way possible, which will ultimately help generate more email traffic to your website.
How can you effectively use Gmail’s promotion feature for your business’s emails?
1.) Before sending a Gmail promotional email, buildout your recipient list
Email addresses become out of date fast. What may have been an accurate email address one month may no longer be accurate due to someone changing jobs, changing email addresses, unsubscribing to emails, or some other reason. That means that you’ll want to regularly be generating new email addresses to add to your recipient list so that even if there is a regular drop-off, your promotional emails can still reach a vast audience.
2.) When sending out promotional emails to your leads, do more than newsletters
When you think about sending out promotional emails, your mind likely goes to newsletters first. While newsletters may seem like a safe bet, going through all that newsletter text isn’t valuable to your leads.A better option would be to either create marketing offers that are sent via email to your leads or develop a lead management strategy. Using a strategy like this will allow you to segment your list of email recipients so you can ensure they are receiving a personalized message that will resonate with them the most. While this may sound like more work for whoever oversees your marketing, it’s worth the extra time.
3.) Ensure your promotional email is relevant to your audience
Now that you’ve segmented your audience into different cohorts, you can customize your promotional messaging to each cohort. If you ever aren’t sure what cohort a potential lead may fall into, you can always send a segmented email to those individuals asking them which cohort they identify with the most (and you can let them know you are doing this to only send them relevant content). Once all your leads are categorized, then you can create a lead nurturing campaign for each cohort segment.
4.) Add UTM codes to your promotional emails
If you forget to add UTM tags to your“call-to-action” links in your promotional email, you’ll have no way of knowing that visitors to your website are the result of your emails. When you use Gmail for your promotional emails, you can use Google Analytics to embed your UTM tags into your emails, and then Google Analytics will manage all your links and ensure they are properly tagged. If you want to create your tags for your email that’s fine as well – Google also has a “URL Campaign Builder” which you can use to create links that are tagged, which you can then copy over.
5.) In addition to the UTM codes, add links throughout your email
The point of your promotional email is to engage new leads and foster relationships with existing clients. People often skim emails or get bored with lengthy emails filled with content, so keep it exciting to the reader. Ensure you are adding links throughout your email to direct your reader to either different images, to different pages on your website, to articles your company recently published, or something else. You can also include links within your email signature, below your name. You’ll notice that many businesses link back to their website, press page, or recent article, in their email signatures, and that is a Gmail promotional strategy you can use too.
As you dove into each of these steps, you likely noticed that everything relies on having an accurate, and substantial, email recipient list. Without this, your Gmail promotional emails will not reach as large of an audience as you hope.
Orbitly is a platform that can help you with building your recipients though. With Orbitly, you can find email addresses in seconds and uncover information on your contact that would be instrumental in segmenting your messaging.
Give Orbitly a try (for free) to test out the platform for yourself and learn more!