Email marketing is more effective than social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing.
The question posed is why technology that is decades old is still one of the most effective marketing strategies. The reasoning behind this is that with all the new channels being created, the old channels are being forgotten.
What is Email Marketing
Email marketing is a direct marketing channel that allows businesses to share new products, sales, and updates with customers who are on their contact list. Its high ROI makes it crucial to most businesses’ overall inbound strategy.
Modern email marketing no longer sends out mass emails to everyone in a database, instead it focuses on getting permission from recipients, then dividing them into groups, and finally tailoring messages to each individual.
How Does Email Marketing Work
Email marketing is effective because it is often automated and easy to use.
In its basic form, an effective email marketing campaign requires three essential elements:
1. An Email List
To succeed in email marketing, you’ll need an email list of contacts who have indicated they’re interested in hearing from your brand.
If you want to build an email list, one of the easiest ways is to create an offer, like a coupon, in exchange for email addresses from your target audience.
2. An Email Service Provider
An email service provider helps you manage your email list and design and execute automated email marketing campaigns.
An ESP, or email service provider, lets you automatically target specific behaviors with pre-set actions. This way, you can personalize each interaction, making it more likely to result in engagement or conversion.
3. Clearly Defined Goals
You can use email marketing to achieve many business goals. For example, you can use email marketing to:
- drive sales
- boost brand awareness
- generate and nurture leads
- keep customers engaged
- increase customer loyalty and lifetime value
To have an effective email marketing campaign, your email list, ESP and goals have to match. Afterwards, you can start working.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Email is an important tool for communicating with customers and managing your business.
Email marketing helps you achieve three key objectives:
1. Conversions (selling your products and services)
Launching a sale or promotion? Try using these email marketing techniques to further boost conversions:
- Personalized coupons or special offers for subscribers’ birthdays/anniversaries, in welcome emails, and as a way to re-engage your audience.
- Abandoned cart emails triggered whenever a visitor adds an item in their cart but doesn’t check.
2. Brand awareness
Sending emails to potential customers can help keep your brand relevant in their minds. A personalized marketing email is more effective than a social media post, because you can’t be sure if anyone has actually seen your message on social media. One of the benefits of email marketing is that it’s scalable, meaning you can send a lot of emails without it costing a lot of money.
3. Customer loyalty
Email plays a role in customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer journey, from lead-nurturing to conversion, onboarding, and retention. In addition, email marketing is a necessary tool to use alongside sales CRM systems to streamline communication.
Email is an incredibly powerful tool for building relationships and community. Our guide to building relationships with email will show you how.
Types of marketing emails
There are three types of marketing emails: promotional, informational, and ones that serve a specific purpose in the buyer journey.
Promotional emails
Email marketing campaigns are used to promote special offers, new product releases, gated content like eBooks and webinars, and your brand at large. A campaign could consist of a series of emails sent over several days or weeks, often 3-10 in total.
CTAs should be included in every promotional email as they represent the specific action you want the reader to take, weather it’s visiting a page on your website or using a coupon to make a purchase.
Informational emails
Newsletters
Newsletters are a type of email that shares business news with subscribers. This can include new milestones, product capabilities, or case studies. Newsletters are typically sent at regular intervals like weekly or monthly. They help keep subscribers engaged with the business.
Announcements
Email is a great way to keep your customers updated on company announcements, new product releases, changes to the service, etc. Email is usually the best channel for important messages. If there is a problem with your website, shipping delays, or an outage in your system/software, updating your contacts via email is the best way to maintain communication. Email is secure, instant, and can match the formal tone of even the most important announcements.
Re-engagement emails
Re-engagement emails are important in marketing because they help reconnect with customers or subscribers who have been inactive recently.
How to Do Email Marketing
An email service provider (ESP) is a company that provides email services to businesses. Businesses use ESPs to send marketing emails.
An email service provider helps you to send and manage email marketing campaigns effectively.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are not designed to send mass emails, which can get flagged by spam filters and result in your account being disabled. Email Service Providers (ESPs) have the necessary infrastructure to ensure good email deliverability rates. For email marketing success, get a dedicated email marketing service.
How to Automate Your Email Marketing
There are some steps to automating your email marketing that are universal no matter which ESP you use.
Define Your Segments
Email marketing campaigns are more effective when you segment your subscribers into groups. This allows you to create more personalized campaigns that are better suited to their interests.
Design an Efficient Workflow
After creating segments for your email list, design a workflow for the campaign. This is a series of emails that serves the main objective of the campaign.
Determine the Right Triggers
After you have designed your workflow, you need to determine what will trigger the next email in the sequence. Triggers can include things such as customers opening your email, clicking on a link, or not opening it at all within a certain time frame.
How to get email lists for marketing
In order to send email campaigns, you need to have a list of subscribers who have chosen to opt-in to receiving them.
Add signup forms to your website and other places.
Your email subscription form should be in a place where people will see it easily. Good places to put it are on your blog posts, homepage, and contact page. You could also make a pop-up form on your website, but make sure it doesn’t stop people from using your site. If it’s annoying, people won’t want to sign up.
Use lead magnets
Gated content, such as eBooks, reports, checklists, or infographics, is a great way to grow your contact list. In exchange for joining your newsletter list, visitors get valuable content. It’s a win-win! For more ideas and inspiration, check out these content marketing hacks!
How to define an email marketing strategy
To define your email marketing strategy, think about what you want to achieve with your first campaign. Here are some common goals for email marketing beginners:
- Promoting a new product
- Sharing a discount with loyal customers
- Getting more downloads for your latest eBook
- Updating subscribers with company news
Your email content should have a clear and specific goal that fits in with your business and your audience. Having a goal will make it easier to create your email content.
Best Email Marketing Strategies
The following are some great email marketing strategies.
Use the Right List Building Strategies
Your email marketing campaigns will be more successful if your email list is high quality. You can build such a list by using list-building strategies that will appeal to your target audience. For example, a case study promoted on LinkedIn might be effective in help a B2B brand build a list of engaged subscribers, but wouldn’t be as successful if a B2C brand used it.
Practice Good Email List Hygiene
Another important email marketing strategy is keeping your email list clean. This means removing inactive subscribers and email addresses that are no longer in use. This will help you maintain a good sender reputation. Keeping your database up to date will also improve email deliverability and engagement rates.
Keep Your List Warm
If you want to keep your subscribers engaged, it’s a good idea to send them emails on a regular basis. However, if you only email them occasionally, they might forget who you are, which could lead to low conversion rates.
If you have some subscribers who haven’t been active recently, you can try running a re-engagement campaign.
Focus on One Objective
Each campaign and email should focus on one objective. Trying to accomplish multiple objectives with one email confuses your audience and decreases your conversion rates.
Define and Track the Right KPIs
When email marketing, it is important to not only send emails to subscribers, but also to track the performance of the campaign. To do this accurately, you must define and track the correct key performance indicators.
Never Buy Email Lists
Building an email list takes time, especially when you first start. It may be tempting to buy a list of email addresses, but don’t do it!
Buying a list will put your business at risk because:
- Sending unsolicited emails and storing people’s data in your CRM without consent is illegal per GDPR and CAN-SPAM.
- People are more likely to mark unsolicited emails as spam, damaging your email sender reputation and potentially ending you up on an email blocklist.
- Most email marketing services will refuse to work with you because purchased lists can harm the deliverability of other users on shared IP addresses.
Use Double Opt-in
There are two different types of opt-in for email marketing:
- Single opt-in is when the subscriber is added to the email list once the signup form is submitted.
- Double opt-in is when you send a confirmation email with a link to each new subscriber. The subscriber must click the link to complete the subscription. Without this verification, they won’t receive emails from you.
Double opt-in prevents email addresses with typos from bouncing.
Segment your Mailing List
The practice of list segmentation involves dividing a list of subscribers into smaller groups with shared characteristics. The goal of this strategy is to send more personalized and relevant emails to subscribers.
Typically, groups of people on a contact list are divided based on information about them such as age and location, as well as information related to their customer history, such as how likely they are to make a purchase. Having a sales CRM that works with your email marketing tool can come in handy for this.
Personalization
Personalizing your emails is key to developing relationships with potential and current customers.
There are some easy ways you can make your email stand out more to recipients, which may include increasing opening and click-through rates, as well as conversions.
- Use subscribers’ first names in the email subject line and content.
- Consider time zones when scheduling campaigns to maximize the chances of your email being read. Where are the bulk of your subscribers located?
- Segment contacts so that messaging is targeted and relevant.
- Use behavior-triggered emails based on how customers interact with your product/service.
Optimize your Email Subject Line, Sender Name, and Preview Text
A good email subject line is key to a successful email marketing campaign.
Sender name
The best way to reinforce trustworthiness and brand recognition is to incorporate your brand name into the sender name. There are several ways to go about this:
- Your company/brand/newsletter name on its own
- A combination of brand name and your first name
- A distinct sender name to differentiate specific types of email content
Preheader/preview text
The preview text that appears on mobile devices after the email subject line is called the email preheader.
The text that comes after the subject line in an email is called the preheader. It can be very useful in providing context for the subject line, and can increase the email’s open rate significantly.
A/B test your Email Marketing Content
A/B testing can help you improve your campaigns’ open rates and click-through rates.
It is important to test different email subject lines, content formats and CTAs to see which ones result in the best engagement. Once you have this information, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Optimize Email Deliverability
- Make sure the email subject line doesn’t come across as spammy or overly promotional. If a contact decides your email is spam before even opening it, your deliverability rate is likely to suffer.
- Keep your subscriber database up to date by removing unengaged contacts and inactive addresses.
- Only send to opt-in subscribers. Send emails to someone who’s never heard of you and it’s likely they’ll report you as spam. This will harm your future deliverability.
- Always include an unsubscribe link. Under the GDPR (Europe’s data protection regulation), an individual has the right to dictate how their data is being used. The act of unsubscribing falls fully within those rights so this option should always be available.
Keep Track of Email Marketing Metrics
- Open rate: The ratio of the number of people who opened your email divided by the total number of recipients.
- Click-through rate: The ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the total number of recipients.
- Unsubscribe rate: The number of people who unsubscribed divided by the total number of recipients. If this number is high, you need to review your email frequency and segmentation.
- Bounce rate: The number of emails that failed to deliver divided by the total number of emails sent.
Email Marketing Conclusion
Email marketing can be very successful for marketers who are willing to learn how to do it correctly. It does not need to be too difficult.