Email Marketing! You’ve heard of it, you’ve come across how effective email marketing has been for some people and now you want to try it out on your business but you don’t know how to begin, especially in Nigeria.

Well, you don’t have to worry anymore. This article will teach you how to effectively use email marketing in Nigeria and by the end of it,  you will learn how to effectively implement it in your business.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer can be considered as email marketing. 

Email marketing is used to solicit sales, business requests, promotional ads and so much more but most importantly it is used to build loyalty, trust and brand awareness across online platforms.

Why Is Email Marketing Important?

Email marketing has a lot of importance. Email marketing:

1. Generates one of the highest ROI activities in business. 
2. Engages and nurtures both potential customers and existing customers to create leads and sales.
3. Can be automated to perform integral tasks. In other words, you can prospect and sell 24/7
4. With Email marketing, you can deliver leads, generate traffic and gain new customers while still keeping the existing ones engrossed in your business and you can do all these on autopilot. 

Email marketing offers more prospects for your business in Nigeria and gives a better return on investment. With email marketing, your business can generate deeper relationships with a broader audience at a smaller cost compared to traditional media.

The most pleasing thing about email marketing is the return on investment. There are no print costs, no postage fees, no advertising rates. Email marketing is as affordable as marketing gets. 

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing brings in $40 for every $1 spent thereby outperforming search, display, and social marketing. That’s 18,000 naira gotten for every 450 spent. Isn’t that amazing?

How Do You Start Your Email Marketing Campaign? 

First thing first, I want you to know that Email marketing is very easy. I repeat very easy and this is something we teach our students at Odigital academy as we make sure they comprehend the idea of email marketing and how easy it is to use Email marketing.

Email marketing consists of numerous moving pieces, but that does not mean it has to be complex. Here is how it breaks down:

1.  Start With a Goal

It can be very tempting to simply sign up for an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor or GetResponse and start sending your first campaign.

But before jumping in head first, it’s worth taking a minute to think about your goals and what you really want to achieve with email, as that will help you dictate the type of campaigns you send, who you target, the content you include, and how you measure success.

Is your goal to drive new signups for your product? New leads for your sales team? More attendees for your event? More donations for your cause? More conversion and sales for your business? 

Email marketing offers one of the most powerful ways of reaching and engaging your audience. It is very useful in achieving a number of different objectives, so it’s worth spending some time thinking about what you want to achieve with it before taking a dive into the ocean of email marketing. 

Knowing what you want to achieve with email before you start sending makes it much easier to identify what to send and who to send it to, which helps you produce a focused,  high-performing email campaign that will accomplish your marketing goals.

2. Start With Your List

 It’s really simple, you can’t send out email marketing campaigns if you have no one to send them to.  Most businesses will have some existing contacts to start an email list but if you don’t have one, it’s no problem. 

Think about the customers and people you already have a relationship with. Maybe it’s that business contact you email with on a regular basis; you could also start out with a few supportive friends and family members. 

Even if you’re creating an email list entirely from scratch, still, don’t get discouraged. Start by putting out a paper sign-up sheet near your register or workstation, adding an online sign-up form to your website, and motivating your social media followers and loyal customers to sign up.  

And whatever you do, don’t be tempted to purchase an email list. It’s a one-way ticket to spam city. Imagine creating that perfect headline and content only for you to end up in spam, you don’t want that. Email marketing in Nigeria or anywhere in the world is all about building and nurturing/ fostering relationships. 

Connecting with a smaller list of quality contacts will be more impactful than blasting out messages to contacts that don’t even know your business.

To grow your email list, you need to entice people with a captivating offer. You need to attract them with something awesome, something that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to create; it could be PDFs, MP3 audio files, a webinar or videos that you can create yourself at minimal or no cost. It can be anything you want, as long as it offers value to your visitors for free. 

And if you want your offer to be highly effective, here are 4 criteria for you to consider:

1. Easily consumed: Offers are only effective when the audience can easily use them, so if you deliver a 200-page manifesto, you won’t gain traction.

2. Actionable: Offers need to provide an actionable tool, skillset, or useful information that your audience can apply.

3. Creates noticeable improvement: People will continue to buy products and services if they work well. Your offer will become successful if it’s as valuable as your products and services.

4. Relevant: If you’ve done your homework about your prospects, you’ll have no trouble coming up with offers that are relevant to your customers. 

3. Create a Campaign

An email marketing campaign is a coordinated set of individualistic email messages that are distributed across a specific period of time with a precise purpose.  There are many email campaigns you as a marketer can choose from to create dynamic content that will appeal to different segments within your audience. There are different types of campaign, we have:

Newsletter: This is an email newsletter that is distributed regularly and is usually about one main topic. You can send this monthly or weekly all depending on your marketing goals. If your goal is to keep in touch with your existing customers, then a newsletter is the right type of campaign to send.  A newsletter helps keep your business and products top of mind which in turn drives people back to your website. Jumia does this, there is always an email to you every week.

Marketing Offer: This campaign is sent with the goal of getting a direct response. This campaign is usually associated with driving sales. You could present a product or discount offer and includes a direct call to action for people to click-through to your website and make a purchase.

Announcement: This campaign is sent to your subscribers announcing a new product, feature, or service. The announcement email is perfect if you want to keep your audience up-to-date on your latest products or features. 

While the sharing of information is the main goal, the email may have the additional advantage of bringing people back to your store or website where they can make a purchase.

As mentioned before, the type of email campaign you send depends completely on your goals with email.

If you’re looking to drive sales then sending marketing offer and announcement campaigns are going to return the best results, however, if you are simply looking to keep your existing customers up-to-date on your latest projects, products, or developments at your business, then sending a newsletter will be more effective in achieving that.

If you are having difficulties creating campaigns, you can always turn to us for aid and we at Odigital academy will help put you through.

4. Create Good Contents

This tends to be one of the scariest and complex steps for business owners. It’s understandable, not everyone is Chinua Achebe but if you want to succeed with email marketing then you have to know how to write well. I don’t mean write well in terms of grammatical proficiency, that is also good but that’s not what I mean, I mean write in a way that your customers will benefit from what they just read.

Practice this, pretend you are having a face-to-face conversation with someone and writing down exactly what you would like to say to them. Kinda like an informal letter.

It also helps to have a repeatable process and break down your message into three significant sections:

• What are you offering? — Headline
• How will it help the reader? — Message body
• What should they do next? — Call to action

This three-step formula helps you stay focused so you can create and write effective messages fast.

Also, pay attention to your headline, it is very vital.  Your email headline is one of the most crucial lines of text in your whole email. 

Why? 

Because your subscribers see your headline even before they open your email message. 

Make a good impression and people won’t be able to resist opening. Write something plain and they might skip over your message without thinking it twice. 

So what good is it if you have great content but a sloppy headline? First impression counts in email marketing.

Your headline should be short and snappy — around 40 characters. You can gain attention by asking a compelling question, including a deadline for urgency, or just teasing your message.

5. Preview and test before you send

Like I said before, first impression matters, you don’t want to send an email to over 200 people with a typo in the headline. Always crosscheck before sending. It’s very easy to slip up once in a while, you can forget to add in an important link or make an embarrassing spelling mistake right in the headline, unfortunately, there’s no Back button with email.

So always remember to send yourself or a staff member a Test Email before sending it out to your entire list before you become a meme or get featured on fail army.

Also, practice taking time to edit. What I mean by this is, instead of writing and editing at the same time, just write first till you are done, then take a 30 minute or an hour break and come back to just editing it only. You will be surprised at the number of errors you committed. 

You can also use editing software like Grammarly to help you edit your content to a professional standard. 

6. Track your results

How will you know which strategy, headline, content, campaign worked best if you don’t track your results? Don’t be deceived — email marketing doesn’t end with the send button. You want to track your open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates, etc. and work to improve over time.

If you want to see results from your email marketing, you need a strong understanding of how each email performs so you can make improvements and learn more about your customers and subscribers. 

Just by spending a few minutes in your email reports, you can get valuable information like who opened your email, who clicked on your links, and what information was the most interesting to your audiences. 

Tools like Google analytics can help you to track your email results.

In conclusion, Email Marketing is very essential to the growth of any business, you need to incorporate it into your strategy for success.

Email marketing is a targeted, shareable, reliable, measurable, and cost-effective tool that is ignored by many. It doesn’t matter if you are in Nigeria, America or Europe, the same principle works, though you might tweak it a bit to suit your environment but it works.

There are not many forms of marketing as simple to share as email marketing. With the simple click of the forward button, subscribers can share their deals, offers, and news with their friends. 

Subscribers who share your emails are acting as brand advocates, therefore, when a subscriber shares your email with friends and family, your brand gains more exposure and credibility. 

Email Marketing increases brand awareness and allows you to sell more than once to the same customers. With strategic planning, smart design, and targeted content, your business will consistently build value. By doing so, you stay top-of-mind with your audience.

Then, when a customer needs products or services, your business stands a much better chance of turning those leads into clients and clients into loyal and returning customers. 

We teach this and a lot more at Odigital academy. We ensure once you enroll with us, we will make you professional enough to use email marketing. So if you really want to take this further and explore the opportunities that await you in email marketing, then give us a call.