Imagine if you were able to reach out to each and every one of your customers directly in their mailbox, in order to market new products and services, send them new offers, advice, and anything you want. You got the picture? Oh great!
Now picture the same context but this time let’s use your social networks for example. You have no guarantee that they will see your post because the probability that your publication reaches their wall is around 12%!
According to Business2Community, that percentage is due to the fact that there are too many posts, and too little space on Facebook. “50,000,000 businesses post 1.5 times a day to reach just 2%, a small and shrinking percentage of their audience”.
Which channel do you now think is worth the deal?
Congrats I’m sure you guessed right! You just understood how effective newsletters can be.
So below we will look into the reason you need to grow your mailing list, some email marketing statistics, how to give out newsletter based discounts, and tips that will go a long way to boost your mailing list.
Now let’s get to the real stuff!
Why should you grow your newsletter subscribers list?
#1 A Direct channel of communication with your customers is essential to take your business to the next level
Keeping in touch with your clients is mandatory for the growth of your business. That is why you need to get their email addresses. This can only be possible if you have something to offer them in exchange. Giving them a gift in exchange of their e-mails could go a long way to grow your subscribers list.
Let me surprise you a minute. Email is the number one marketing tool in the world, and will always be. You might start to disagree with me, but hold it! Let’s look at this figures.
According to The Social Media Hat and About.com:
- Facebook has 1.55 billion active users
- Instagram has 400 million active monthly users
- Twitter has 320 million active users
- LinkedIn has 100 million active users
- YouTube has 1 billion active users
- Google+ has 540 million active monthly users
- All of these social networks have at least one email address which makes at least 2.5 billion active users.
And that’s just estimation! Just think about it. That’s not all.
1- By the end of 2016, the total of email accounts would have increased to over 4.3 billion accounts (Radical Group)
2- There are 3x more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter combined (Radicati Group)
3- Knowledge workers on average spend 13 of their working hours each week working with their email account (McKinsey)
4- 92% of adults that go online use email, 61% of them use it on an average day, and mostly those with a college degree or an income of <$75.000 according to Pew Research.
5- 90% of business people make more use of email more than they did last year , according to Osterman Research.
6- Email is 40x more successful in acquiring new customers than using either Facebook or Twitter.
7- There are more possibilities for you to get a click-through from an email than from a tweet.
8- Companies that send over 100.000 emails a month see a 94% return on investment says MECLABS
9- Email marketing has proved to be an effective way to grow and maintain relationships with clients even if they are not actively purchasing products says the Nielson Norman Group
Now getting them to signup will be your first headache. You would have to give them a strong reason to leave their email address. So what do you do next?
How to collect these valuable emails? Give them an incentive!
Discounts are a good way to attract customers to respond to a call-to-action, and Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce helps you to assign any type of discount to your subscribers. But right now we are interested in growing your newsletter.
So you would give out discounts to collect emails. In other words “ Give me something and I will give you something too.”
Before you set up your discount you have to know that Woocommerce All Discounts supports three types of discounting systems:
Mailchimp: is the most popular email marketing service giver.
Sendinblue: also gives out email marketing campaign services.
Newsletter: is the main WordPress plugin that manages your mail transactions directly from your website.
Therefore it is up to you to apply the discounting system that works best for you.
So to set up your discount, first of all, go to the settings of the plugin Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce, and set the API parameters of your newsletter’s means:
Then on the new discount creation page, click on Add rules group and select the desired newsletter list:
Finally, select the type of action, define the Percentage or fixed amount to apply, select the product list on which the discount should be applied, publish your discount and you are ready to go.
These settings mean that any customer who has subscribed to the selected newsletter mailing list would benefit from discounts on the products of the selected product list.
But you must make sure the following DO’s are checked!
1- Make sure your visitor CAN and WILL see your opt-in form: Your sign-up form must be clear and visible enough for the user to see your offer. You can either place them on the side bar or get the pop-up styles. Let your “offer message” be compelling enough to make the user give out his email address.
2- Be sure that your emails are not marked as spam: You can use a spam score checker to be sure your emails are not flagged as SPAM. This tool will help measure the HTML, content, and subject of your email and the chances of it making it into your subscriber’s inbox.
For example here are 3 tools you can use to test your emails:
3- Don’t send emails that are not meaningful or well-structured: Email marketing is not a game! Always send well-structured and meaningful content to keep the interest of the user. Even if he is not purchasing from you, the goal is to never let him unsubscribe!
4- Measure and analyze the statistics of your email marketing campaign: Try and identify the days sent, the keywords, and the subjects that gave your emails a high open rate and work on that. Also, remove non-existing mails to avoid repetition.
Conclusion
If you are able to apply the discount that is suitable to your clients, you will gain in loyalty, more subscriptions, and at a low cost. You can determine what you want to offer and to whom all tailored to the vision you have for your Woocommerce shop.