Email marketing has been around for decades. However, it has evolved over the years drastically, so today’s email marketing strategies are significantly different from the ones we used in the past.
The days of purchasing email lists and inserting them into our CRM tools are long gone. Opt-in email marketing has become a much better option for companies, regardless of their industry. If you’re in the middle of creating your opt-in email strategy and looking for some helpful tips, you’ve come to the right place.
Here’s everything you need to know about opt-in emails and why they can benefit your brand.
What Is Opt-In Email Marketing
Opt-in email marketing is a marketing strategy that involves sending marketing materials to prospects who agreed to receive your content at their email address. Whether you send promotional materials, email newsletters, or nurturing emails, recipients of these emails have voluntarily subscribed to your email list and know you’ll contact them regularly.
Since customer permission is the foundation of all opt-in email marketing strategies, this type of digital marketing is also known as permission marketing. You can implement opt-in emails in multiple ways, including single, double, and implicit opt-in.
Single Opt-In System
Single opt-in is the most commonly used opt-in marketing method. Customers need to agree explicitly to receive marketing emails. Businesses require individuals to give written consent before they start sending out their promotional emails to them, usually by clicking a checkbox on a site or form.
Double Opt-In System
The double opt-in method is ideal for all businesses that want to ensure every contact voluntarily subscribes to their promotional emails. For double opt-in emails to work, all subscribers receive a follow-up email asking them to confirm their subscription.
This extra step ensures all contacts on an email list are there because they want to be.
Implicit Opt-In System
Contrary to single opt-in and double opt-in, implicit opt-in doesn’t rely on explicit consent. Instead, implicit opt-in occurs when consumers enter their email addresses on sites and forms for other purposes.
Consumers give implied consent upon handing out their email addresses, so companies can use them to send out promotional materials. However, customers don’t explicitly state they want to receive marketing emails.
Why Is Opt-In Email Marketing a Good Business Strategy?
As opt-in email marketing becomes the new standard for email marketing, everyone’s wondering what exactly makes it a good business strategy. Opt-in marketing strategies provide many valuable benefits, but the two most important ones are improved customer relationships and higher engagement. Here’s something more about them.
Improved Customer Relationships
Building a genuine and long-lasting relationship with your customers is essential if you want your business to succeed.
Fostering long-term relationships and trust with customers allows companies to create a special bond with their subscribers, which leads to improved customer relationships. One way to do that is to let customers choose whether they’d like to receive promotional content.
More Engagement
An extensive email list doesn’t mean much if your customers aren’t engaging with your content. When recipients of your emails voluntarily agree to receive your promotional material, they’re more likely to read your messages and see what you have to say or offer.
Your emails are less likely to end up in the spam folder, and your email marketing campaign will have significantly better performance results.
What Are the Benefits of Opt-In Email Marketing?
Higher engagement and improved customer relationships result in countless benefits well-known for opt-in email marketing efforts. From higher ROI to real-time reporting, companies implementing opt-in emails as part of their email marketing strategies can secure all kinds of advantages for themselves.
Higher ROI
Starting a business in today’s highly competitive market isn’t easy, so most starting companies struggle to make ends meet. Return on investment plays a crucial role in how successful a newly-established business will be, and all business owners are interested in increasing their ROI.
Opt-in email marketing is one of the easiest ways to secure higher ROI for your company. Building relationships with customers who want to stay in touch with you will motivate them to purchase your services or products, ultimately leading to more profit.
Recurring Purchases
Few things are as valuable to a business as customer loyalty. Loyal customers always come back to companies they love and trust. Becoming one of these companies can do wonders for your brand since recurring purchases can help your business become more profitable.
With opt-in email marketing, you can motivate more of your customers to make recurring purchases and become loyal members of your customer base.
Satisfied Customers
If your customers are placing recurring purchases, there’s a big chance they’re satisfied with what you’re offering them. Even so, opt-in emails can increase customer satisfaction by showing your visitors you care about them. Making an effort to present your curious customers with your updates and latest offers will certainly make them happier.
Connections
Opt-in emails also play a crucial role when making connections. Affiliate marketing is taking the world by storm, allowing different brands to connect, join forces, and make the most of their marketing campaigns.
For instance, you can include products from other brands in your welcome messages. Not only will that allow you to build connections with other companies, but your affiliates will also have to opt-in to become members of the affiliate program.
Automation
Automation is essential in today’s world run by advanced technology and AI. Since opt-in emails are already automated, for the most part, it’s easy to see how they can help you increase sales automation as well.
These emails act as sales incentives, so they can easily automate many repetitive, manual sales process tasks and allow sales teams to focus on more critical aspects of every sale.
Real-Time Reports
Finally, opt-in email marketing is a great way to receive real-time reports about your marketing campaign’s performance.
Namely, you can easily calculate click-through rates, open rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, earnings per subscriber, time of day emails are opened, and use other metrics that’ll inform you about the latest numbers on your campaign.
Top 8 Content Tips for Opt-In Email Marketing
Now that you know more about opt-in email marketing and what makes it an excellent business strategy, you’re probably wondering about the best way to implement opt-in emails into your digital marketing campaign.
Creating opt-in forms isn’t rocket science, and asking for your customer’s consent to send promotional material is already a significant part of the work done. Nevertheless, other valuable tips and tricks can help you make the most of this email marketing strategy. Here are our top eight pieces of advice.
1. Provide Many Opportunities To Opt-In for Your Emails
Only some customers will voluntarily sign up for your promotional emails; you must ask them to do it. From a customer standpoint, an email subscription isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, even when a customer is loyal to the brand.
Companies need to inform their visitors about their newsletter program and allow them to opt-in to receive emails. However, asking them once isn’t enough sometimes, and you should provide your visitors with several opportunities to opt-in if they change their minds.
For example, you can give the opt-in opportunity to potential customers after visiting your landing page, browsing special offers, and even during checkouts. That way, you won’t miss out on any valuable leads.
2. Give Customers an Incentive To Sign Up
When creating an opt-in email marketing campaign, one of the main questions you should ask yourself is why anyone should sign up for your email list.
If a user is visiting your site for the first time, there’s a high chance they know nothing about your brand. Attracting regular users and converting them into loyal customers isn’t an easy task. That’s why most opt-in email campaigns come with some incentive, and you should consider including one, too.
By presenting the users with an attractive sign-up offer, more of them will be motivated to join your mailing list voluntarily and claim that reward.
3. Use a Lead Magnet
Besides presenting your customers with an incentive, you should also use a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a marketing tool for generating leads. Lead magnets generate leads by rewarding customers with a long-form resource in exchange for their personal information.
Whether you’re offering a freebie, sample, discount, whitepaper, ebook, professional PowerPoint template, or any downloadable asset as a lead magnet, it will give customers a good reason to sign up.
Besides persuading more customers to join your email list, lead magnets also create sales leads.
4. Offer Gated Content
Gated content represents any online content requiring its users to fill out the form before accessing full content. These forms can require only the user’s name and email address or ask for more details, including age, job position, or other information.
As such, gated content is usually premium content that includes reports, articles, customer case studies, industry ebooks, whitepapers, videos, and other forms of online material. If you have access to gated content, you can offer it to customers who fill out a form and provide you with their email addresses.
Your visitors will receive access to exclusive content, and you’ll increase your database, which is an excellent trade-off if you have premium content offers.
5. Segment Your Audience
As you know, after developing your customer persona, not all your customers are at the same stage in their sales funnel.
Some of them signed up to your email list from your landing page, which means there’s a high chance they haven’t even checked out your website yet. Others might sign up from a product page, which signals they’re already browsing. Some might even sign up from the checkout page, indicating they’re already buyers.
Besides being at different sales funnel stages, your subscribers also want various things from you. That’s why it’s crucial to segment your audience and categorize it according to specific criteria. Doing so will make it easier for you to make offers your subscribers can’t refuse.
6. Keep It Interesting
Opt-in email marketing is quickly becoming the go-to email marketing strategy for companies worldwide. Having that in mind, an overly simple email subscription offer won’t catch the attention of your visitors, so it will be pretty easy for them to miss out on an otherwise excellent deal.
Instead, try to opt for a creative, attention-grabbing design that will increase interest among your potential subscribers. You can focus either on the headline or the design itself to create an attractive form your website visitors won’t be able to ignore.
Some brands use photos of their lead magnets to help customers visualize what they’ll get once they sign up. Since a picture’s worth a thousand words, this strategy might be what you need to do to keep your emails interesting.
7. Use Social Proof
Adding social proof is a recipe for success in opt-in email marketing. Why’s that so? Well, people tend to follow the masses, so more subscribers will jump onto the bandwagon if enough people consider you trustworthy and reputable.
That’s precisely where social proof comes in handy because it allows you to use your data to grow your subscriber email list.
There are many ways to include social proof. For instance, you can add the number of people already subscribed to your email list. A line like “Join more than 10,000 subscribers” can go a long way.
Another excellent way to use social proof is to display positive reviews and testimonials from your existing customers. They will undoubtedly motivate more visitors to join your email list.
Whichever method of social proof you go with, ensure you have permission to include such data on your platforms.
8. Use Social Proof
Last but not least, personalization is always a good idea. In fact, it’s the key to making your customers feel relevant and special. There’s no better way to do so than to provide them with exclusive deals and offers.
Even if you know nothing about your potential subscribers but want to make them feel special enough to join your email list, you can randomize your offers and provide different freebies to different website visitors.
Starting your emails by addressing each customer by their first name is also an excellent example of a simple yet effective form of personalization.
An effective proposal should be tailored to each individual client, and it should be presented in a way that highlights the value of your services. However, to give yourself the best possible chance at winning new business, you need to make sure that your proposals are as professional, efficient, and persuasive as possible. As an option, you can also consider using online proposal software that can help you maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Opt-in email marketing is one of the go-to marketing methods for more and more companies and organizations across the planet. By allowing visitors to join the email list, brands can increase customer engagement, generate more leads, and build relationships with clients without damaging their reputation.
If you’re unsure how to gain success with voluntary emails, following the eight tips mentioned in this article will secure the desired results.
