Whether you’re just getting started in the electronics industry or you’ve built up a large electronics company, marketing this business can yield even better results. With so many potential ways to market your electronics distribution company, which one is the best?
If you asked many marketers, a large percentage of them would include email marketing somewhere in their list of the most effective marketing methods. Data from Mailgen reports that 89% of marketers use email marketing as their main way of generating leads.
Before you can start generating leads or making sales from emails, you’ll want to learn more about this marketing method. Fortunately, we’ve got everything you need to handle email marketing like the pros.
Here’s everything we’ll cover in this post:
What email marketing is
Why email marketing is beneficial
What to do before you start sending out emails
A list of the most popular email marketing platforms
Tips to help you build a massive email subscriber list
Testing out your first email message
Email marketing mistakes to avoid at all costs
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a way for a person or business to promote its products or services by sending emails. Typically, these emails are sent to a list of subscribers.
It also goes back a lot farther than you might think. Did you know that the first actual email used for marketing purposes was sent back in 1978? As you can see, email marketing has been around almost as long as the internet.
Most people with active email accounts are recipients of marketing emails. You might sign up for emails from a business to get a discount on your next purchase. Other people like receiving emails from companies because they genuinely want to know what their favorite business is up to.
Regardless of why someone receives these emails, it’s impossible to deny the popularity and effectiveness of these electronic messages.
What Are The Benefits of Email Marketing?
With a basic understanding of email marketing, you might not be convinced that this marketing method is worth it. If so, it’s important to learn more about the many benefits of email marketing. Here’s more information about why sending marketing emails is such a great idea.
Having a Great Way to Get Feedback From Customers and Business Partners
Running a business takes a lot of time and focus. As you continue leading or managing your company, it’s impossible to know the details of what’s happening at every level of a large business. Considering that, you need a way to gain feedback from the people and companies you’re working with.
Fortunately, using emails is a great way to get incredibly valuable feedback from your customers. Many businesses achieve this goal by creating and sending over customer satisfaction surveys. If you don’t want to create one of these surveys yourself, there are many ways to find free survey templates with a quick Google search.
If you get positive feedback from your surveys, that’s great. Make sure to keep doing what brings these great results going forward. You can use any negative feedback as inspiration for things to work on in the present.
Making More Sales
Companies that want to market themselves typically do this to make more sales. If you’re making more sales, you’re likely making more money. And, email marketing is a great way to start increasing your company’s sales. By sending out emails, you’re using a convenient way to reach potential and current customers.
After all, we’re all glued to our cell phones and computers these days. When your average customer is checking their email, why not have a message from your company show up in their respective inboxes?
Being Able to Split Up Your Campaigns
As your business continues growing, your customer base should begin growing in diversity. While having a diverse customer base is great, it also means that a one-size-fits-all email marketing campaign isn’t going to be very effective.
Fortunately, you can have a solution to this problem by splitting up your email campaigns. Don’t let the name of this term fool you; splitting up your email subscriber lists is a good thing! It can help your business create a deeper connection with its customers.
You can split up the emails you’re sending based on a wide range of criteria. For instance, some companies will send one email to new customers and another one to returning shoppers.
Gaining More Traffic to Your Website (Rankings Boost)
If you asked most marketers about one of their most important goals, many of them would say gaining more website traffic. With a large amount of traffic, your business can potentially make more sales. Another benefit of having good streams of traffic is that you can boost your company’s search engine rankings.
Major search engines look at many factors when deciding how to rank certain pieces of content over others. One important factor for these search engines is how much traffic other websites receive.
Building Long-Term Relationships With Your Client Base
One of the best things you can do while buying and reselling electronics is to build long-term relationships with its customers. Some of the most popular companies in the world use this strategy, including Apple and Supreme. With that in mind, a great way to start building these strong relationships is by sending your customers emails.
As long as your subscribers remain opted-in to receiving your emails, it’s possible to have life-long relationships with these individuals.
Getting Started With Email Marketing
While email marketing is extremely effective, there are a few steps you’ll need to complete before getting started. After you complete these first few steps, you’ll be ready to start sending out emails.
Come Up With Goals
An important aspect of having success with email marketing is creating goals. These goals will give you benchmarks to meet. Having goals can also make it easier to formulate your first few email campaigns. Plus, having goals and monitoring your company’s progress towards them lets you know how well your business is doing.
Have a Place for Interested People to Subscribe
Before you can start sending out emails, you’ll need subscribers. For these people to subscribe to your emails, they’ll need to opt-in for them. You’ll typically hear this referred to as a lead magnet. In the past, if you were lucky, you could get opt-ins by simply asking people.
Since email marketing is so popular, you’ll usually need to give something out that entices people to give your business permission to email them. If you own a website that sells electronics, you could consider offering a one-time discount for all new email subscribers.
You don’t have to give out discounts to entice people to sign up for your company’s email list. Another option is to give your readers some type of free downloadable guide. This strategy can get people to agree to receive emails from your business. It also makes your company look knowledgeable and authoritative.
Set Up an Email Schedule
What’s great about utilizing email marketing is that you can send out these messages at any time. With that said, you probably don’t want to be waiting around your computer around the clock to send out these messages. Fortunately, you don’t have to with the help of automated email senders.
With these programs or applications, you can set up the dates and times you want your company’s emails to get sent. The ideal time to send emails depends on where they’re going.
Generally speaking, try to send out your company’s emails during the day. It’s best if these messages get sent out during business hours when most people are working at their jobs. If you send out emails to people throughout the world, it’s a good idea to ensure their messages are sent out at the right times.
This might require a bit of work, but it’s worth it to know that you’re sending emails when members of your target audience are checking their inboxes.
Let’s say that you own a phone flipping business. Since you’re likely going to work with other companies, you wouldn’t want to send out emails in the middle of night!
Fortunately, many automated email senders can send out messages whenever you need them to. If you have lists of international contacts, consider splitting them up by their time zones. By taking these steps, you won’t have to be awake all the time sending out messages manually.
Choosing an Email Marketing Platform
The next step is to find what’s known as an email marketing platform. A quality email marketing platform is your best friend when it comes to creating and maintaining an email list. With that said, there are many email marketing platforms for you to choose from.
While we can’t personally endorse one over the other, we do want to give you a closer look at some of the most popular email marketing platforms.
Mailchimp
If your company is operating within the confines of a tight budget, Mailchimp might be the perfect email marketing platform. This company utilizes a popular forever-free plan that’s great for smaller companies that are just starting out with email marketing.
Mailchimp utilizes a powerful email editor that is fairly easy to use. Plus, it also includes lots of features that make it easier than normal to design great-looking emails. With Mailchimp’s segmenting features, it’s also easy to separate all of your contacts into their own campaign groups.
Another popular feature of Mailchimp is its integration capabilities. This platform can easily integrate with WordPress, Shopify, Magento, and other popular online platforms for electronics wholesalers.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the most well-known email marketing platforms. One reason why this platform remains so popular is that it’s extremely beginner-friendly. Through Constant Contact, you can manage your company’s email lists and contacts. It’s also possible to set up an email marketing calendar to help you organize your messages.
If you want the ultimate package, consider checking out Constant Contact’s Email Plus account. With one of these accounts, you can automate sending out emails, set up drip campaigns, create surveys, and give out customizable coupons for your subscribers.
When you need help, Constant Contact has a live customer support department. Whether you need help through a phone call or email, somebody from this company should be able to help you.
Constant Contact currently offers customers a 60-day free trial. This company’s beginner-level plans start out at $20 per month.
AWeber
If you’re interested in another email marketing platform, you might also consider AWeber. This platform is great for both small and medium companies. AWeber is also able to integrate with other popular platforms like WordPress.
After signing up for one of this company’s programs, you can gain access to a wide range of pre-made email templates. AWeber also lets its customers track the performance of email campaigns, manage lists, set up autoresponders, and much more.
Should any issues arise, you can get the help you’re after by speaking with AWeber’s helpful support team. AWeber also has a large digital library of tutorials and how-to guides to help you out.
For email lists that contain 500 subscribers or less, AWeber offers a free plan with limited features. If you’re looking for something more powerful, AWeber’s paid plans start out at only $19 per month.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a platform that can help your company with both email and SMS marketing. SMS marketing is a way to directly send texts to your customer base. While a little newer than email marketing, SMS marketing is quickly gaining popularity as a great platform for electronics resellers to communicate with their customers.
One of SendinBlue’s biggest benefits is its email editor. This program uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to help you create email messages that look great. Like other platforms, SendinBlue also offers email automation tools. You can also integrate your email campaigns with social media websites like Facebook.
If you’re just getting started with email marketing, you’ll want to take advantage of SendinBlue’s free plan. This plan allows your company to send emails to up to 300 recipients per day. The only catch is that your emails will have a SendinBlue watermark on them. SendinBlue’s paid plans start out at $25 per month.
How to Start Building Your Email List
Now, we’re getting into the truly exciting part of email marketing, and that’s watching your list of subscribers grow. Instead of being the company with a slow-growing subscriber list, we’ve got several tips to change this situation. Here are several proven strategies to start building up a huge email subscriber list.
Use a Lead Magnet
One of the most powerful tools in your email marketing arsenal is the lead magnet. A lead magnet is a term for something companies use to gain leads. In this case, you would create a lead magnet designed to collect email addresses.
When it comes to what you’ll choose as a lead magnet, you have lots of options. Some companies like to use ebooks or digital books as lead magnets. But, you don’t have to do this. Instead, you might offer people a coupon code or other type of discount to sign up for your email list.
Electronics wholesalers often like to offer discounts for bulk shoppers. Maybe you could five out a discount off of your electronics pallets?
A great way for electronics distributors to gain more leads is by having a price list for them to check out. If you only send this through email, this strategy could be a great way to gain potential subscribers.
Basically, anything that you think your customers would find valuable can make a great lead magnet. You can also test out different magnets to see which ones convert the best.
Gain Email Addresses Through Contests or Giveaways
Another effective way to gain more subscribers is by having contests or giveaways for people to participate in. Before they can obtain an official entry, you ask them to input their email address. If you want to be on the safe side, it’s also good to include a disclaimer that mentions them consenting to receive emails from your business.
Something else that’s great about contests and giveaways is that you don’t have to go broke doing them. Depending on your company’s popularity, even a single giveaway can result in lots of new email sign-ups. To help ensure that your contests gain lots of traction, you might also consider throwing up links to them on your social media pages.
Encourage People to Share Your Emails With Others
Sometimes, the simplest solutions can be the most effective. With that in mind, asking your current subscribers to share your company’s emails can be a good way to grow your email list. If the emails your company sends out provide value, some of your customers probably know people that would also enjoy these messages.
Gain More Email Subscribers From Social Media
Most likely, you’ve created social media pages for your business. With that in mind, these pages can be great ways to gain more email subscribers and grow your lists. You can post a link to your email opt-in page or lead magnet on social media.
Social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube allow you to place prominent links on your social media profile pages. Why not use this space to send interested visitors to a landing page that collects email addresses?
As you get more comfortable and popular on social media websites, you can also use this platform to potentially network and eventually partner with influencers. If you didn’t know, influencers are social media accounts with large followings. When you find an influencer with a similar target audience that your company has, these partnerships can be extremely valuable for your business.
Find the Best Email Messages Through Split Testing
An important aspect of building an email list is sending out the right messages. But how can you understand what messages your readers prefer? Normally, you would have to spend lots of time and effort comparing data over long periods. Fortunately, with the help of split or A/B testing, you can get this information right away.
With split testing, you have a program or application take multiple email messages from your company. Next, random recipients receive different versions of your emails. For example, let’s say that you created email A about your company’s upcoming sale and email B is about buying iPhones in bulk.
When you’re A/B testing, you’ll get to see which email more recipients opened. You can also find out which emails drove more clicks to your website or landing page.
Split testing can take some time to get enough data, but it’s one of your best allies for sending emails that convert readers. When you know you’re sending out the best possible emails, your subscriber list should soon start growing.
Mix Up Your Messages
If you’re somewhat new to email marketing, something that might trip you up is figuring out what to send. It’s not uncommon for this part of the email marketing journey to confuse its fair share of people. Fortunately, you don’t have to overthink this part.
There is an almost endless amount of topics you could use for your company’s emails - here are a few ideas to help you out:
Details about an upcoming promotion or sale
Links to recent news articles about your company
Photos showcasing your company attending an industry event
Recent reviews about your business
Details about new electronics or recent shipments you received
You don’t only have to send new information to your company’s email list. Maybe you’ve had a recent social media or website post that gained a lot of positive feedback. Considering that, you could place a link to one of these posts in a new email.
Testing Your Email Campaigns
It’s now time for the moment of truth, sending out emails to your company’s subscribers. During this time, it’s understandable to feel a little nervous and excited about getting your first email out. However, taking a little extra time to perform these tests can help you potentially avoid lots of mistakes. Make sure to read over these tips before you hit that send button.
Send a Test Email to Yourself
When you’re getting ready to test out an email campaign, one of the first steps to take is to send this message to yourself. By sending your first email to yourself, you can closely check it out to ensure that everything looks good.
As you look over this email, make sure to check out the title, message, and details about your company. If you include pictures in your emails, it’s also important to ensure that these all load properly. You want everything to look professional and free from errors.
Once everything in your email looks the way it should, you can proceed to the next step.
Test How Emails Look in Various Clients
If you send a test email to yourself that looks good, you can pat yourself on the back. But, before you send out your first official email to your company’s subscribers, you’ll want to see how this message looks in other clients and browsers.
As you know, your customers likely use a wide range of email clients. If someone checks their email accounts on an iPhone, they’ll likely use Apple’s email system. People who are checking their email on a computer might use Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.
This testing process might sound complicated, but it’s not. All you need is to have a free email account on the previously mentioned platforms. Next, you’ll send a test email to these accounts. If everything looks how it should, you have an email that’s ready to get sent out.
Send a Test Email to Friends or Family for Potentially Valuable Feedback
In life, it can be good to get a second opinion about things. With that in mind, you might want to get some opinions about what’s good and bad in the emails you’re wanting to send out. Fortunately, you can get the opinions you’re looking for by sending out a test email to people you know.
Chances are, you’ll receive some valuable feedback that you can use to improve your emails before they go out.
What NOT to Do - Avoid These Email Marketing Mistakes
While learning about email marketing, it’s also a good idea to know potential mistakes you can make with this type of advertising. By learning this information, you can avoid some of the most common mistakes that often cause people to click the unsubscribe link.
“Spamming” the Inbox of Your Readers
When it comes to email marketing, something most people wonder about is how often they should be sending out emails. This important aspect of email marketing can mean the difference between a campaign going well or ending in disaster.
Unfortunately, there’s no golden rule regarding the optimal number of times to send out emails each week. Instead of focusing on a set number, you’ll avoid spamming your subscribers by making sure everything you send has value. If you’re sending out quality information, your subscribers will never feel bombarded by your company’s emails.
Try sending out at least a few emails per week to your subscribers. If it feels like you’re sending low-quality emails to meet an imaginary quota, you’re probably sending too much. Also, keep a close eye on your amount of subscribers. The number one reason people opt out of email lists is that they believe they’re receiving too many emails, don’t be that company.
Making Emails the Length of a Small Book
Something that’s great about email marketing is that it’s convenient for recipients. In a matter of moments, someone can open up an email and learn more about a company. Because of this, it’s imperative to make your emails as short and sweet as possible.
Chances are, the people you’re sending emails to already have their inboxes cluttered with messages from other companies. You’ll stay on the good side of your customers by keeping your emails to the point.
While writing content for your emails, stick with the most important points. What are a few main points that you want every reader to take away from your email? Include this information in the email you’re sending, and save the details for a linked post on your blog or landing page.
Sending the Same Type of Message Over and Over
There are several reasons why people opt out of email lists. One of the most common reasons why this happens is because people get tired of receiving the same message. I’m sure you can think back to a time when you became annoyed at receiving constant emails about sales from a certain business.
If you don’t want people opting out of your company’s messages, make sure to mix them up. There’s nothing wrong with sending out a few emails to remind subscribers about one of your upcoming sales. However, also make sure you’re sending emails about your business and its products.
Mixing up the emails you send to your subscribers helps keep things fresh. It’s also a good way to ensure that people will be reading over your title lines and possibly opening your emails.
Not Sending Out Emails Often Enough
As mentioned earlier, one of the important parts of email marketing is building long-term relationships with those who receive your messages. However, you’ll find it difficult to have these relationships if you’re not staying somewhat fresh in your customer’s minds. Of course, this doesn’t mean bombarding your subscribers with emails every hour or even every day.
Instead, try to send out a quality message once every few days or so. This way, you’re not pestering your customers every time they open their inboxes. But you’re staying memorable in most of their minds.
In closing, email marketing can be an extremely valuable way to buy and sell more electronics. With that said, it’s easy to assume that email marketing is complicated. However, advancements in technology now make it more accessible than ever to start creating and sending emails. Soon, you should begin to see why so many marketing professionals choose emails as a great way to connect with people and companies.