Benefits and Process of Email Marketing is the most profitable and cost-effective direct channel, generating an average return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent. For this reason alone, email should be a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy. Not doing any email marketing is like leaving money laying out on the table.
But if you’re a bit confused about where to start, that’s totally normal. Email is a vast discipline. It’s easy for beginners to get lost in a sea of tools, techniques, and terminology.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a direct marketing channel that lets businesses share new products, sales, and updates with customers on their contact list. Its high return on investment (ROI) makes it crucial to most businesses’ overall inbound strategy.
Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization. This may sound time-consuming, but marketing automation handles most of the heavy lifting for you. In the long run, a well-designed email marketing strategy not only drives sales, but helps build a community around your brand.
Types of marketing emails
Marketing emails can be promotional, informational, or serve a specific purpose in the buyer journey.
Promotional emails
Benefits and Process of 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 3-10 emails sent over several days or weeks.
Promotional emails have a clear call-to-action — CTA, for short. The CTA represents the specific action you want the reader to take, whether it’s visiting a page on your website or using a coupon to make a purchase.
During crucial periods like Black Friday, you may be sending multiple promotional emails in the same 24-hour period. During slower periods in the marketing calendar, there may be a few weeks between your promotional campaigns.
Informational emails
Newsletters: A newsletter, as the name suggests, shares news related to your business. Think: new milestones reached, new product capabilities, or featuring valuable content like case studies. Sent at regular intervals — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly — newsletters help maintain consistent touch points with your email subscribers.
Simply put, a newsletter is an opportunity to share insights, thoughts, tips — whatever brings the most value to your audience.
Check out our post to learn more about how to create a newsletter.
Announcements: Email is the perfect way to inform customers of company announcements, new product releases, changes to the service, etc.
More often than not, email is the go-to channel for important messages. If there’s a glitch on your website, shipping delays, or an outage in your system/software, updating your contacts via email is the best way to maintain communication. It’s secure, instant, and can match the formal tone of even the most important announcements.
Re-engagement emails
Another important type of marketing email is the re-engagement email. As the name suggests, re-engagement emails help reconnect with customers or subscribers who haven’t been active lately.
Why Email Marketing Is Important
channels, especially considering the reach and conversion rate associated with email marketing. This is part of what makes email marketing so ideal for small businesses.Finally, what makes email marketing so powerful and lucrative is that it gives you direct, individual access to your audience’s inboxes.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
From order confirmations to newsletters, emails are an essential part of the growth and management of your business.
1. Conversions (selling your products and services)
Launching a sale or promotion? You can send your subscribers an benefits and Process of email marketing campaign to drive sales. In addition, 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 out.
2. Brand awareness
What’s great about email is that it lets you reach someone directly. It’s one-to-one communication at its best. And people don’t just let anyone into their inbox these days. It’s a curated space reserved for favorite brands and publications.
Showing up in someone’s email inbox will help your brand stay current in the minds of subscribers. A personalized marketing email is more impactful than a social media post where you can’t be sure if someone has actually seen your message.
One of the major benefits of email marketing is its scalability. This means that emails can be sent to a large number of recipients while remaining cost-effective (compared to other marketing channels).
3. Customer loyalty
Email drives customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer journey: lead-nurturing, conversion, onboarding, retention. As well, email marketing is necessary tool to use alongside sales CRM systems to streamline communication.It’s truly a powerful way to build a community, as discussed in our guide to building relationships with email.
How to Do Email Marketing
Businesses use what’s known as email service providers (ESP) to send marketing emails.
An email service provider is a software that sends and manages email marketing campaigns.
It’s also referred to as an email marketing platform, email marketing tool, email marketing service, or email marketing software.
Technically, it’s possible. (We even explain how in our guide to sending mass email with Gmail.) Beware, though. You’re likely to run into problems with limited email bandwidth, design, and more importantly, email deliverability. Here’s why:
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. are designed for personal use — not for email blasts. Although they’re free to use, they’re not free bulk email senders. So when a mass email is sent from an ISP, it’s easily flagged by spam filters and your account can be disabled for suspicious activity.
Email service providers (ESPs), on the other hand, have the necessary infrastructure in place to ensure good email deliverability rates — i.e., the ability to land emails in your subscribers’ inboxes. If you want to set yourself up for email marketing success from day one, get yourself a dedicated email marketing service.
Add signup forms to your website and other places
Create an email signup form to make subscription as easy as possible. Then place your email subscription form in highly visible places where people will definitely see it.
Typical subscription form hotspots include blog posts, the homepage, and contact page. Creating a pop-up form on your website can be a good idea, too. Just make sure not to disrupt the user experience too much. Pop-ups that prevent visitors from using your site can be big deterrents! (Think of your signup form placement like your call-to-action placement.)
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 on with company news
Your goals can be specific or broad — as long as they fit with your business and your audience. In either case, having a clear, measurable goal will make it easier to create your email content.
How to write your email copy
To write persuasive, engaging email copy, keep these tips in mind:
- Ask yourself, “What does my audience need from me? How can I help?”
- Imagine you’re writing to one person.
- Show your brand personality.
- Tell a story.
- Write to instill curiosity, starting with the email subject line — more on that below.
- Use a conversational tone and write the way you speak.
- Break up the copy with short paragraphs and use bullet points where possible.
- Use the name of a real person for the email signatur instead of a faceless brand logo.
10 Strategies for Email Marketing Success
1. Never buy email lists
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.
2. Use double opt-i
- 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.
3. Segment your mailing list
List segmentation is the process of dividing your list of subscribers into smaller sub-lists with common traits. The idea behind this technique is to engage subscribers with more relevant, targeted emails.
Typically, contact lists are segmented by demographic information like age and location as well as customer information like lead score and purchase history. (This is where having a sales CRM that works with your email marketing tool comes in handy.)
4. Personalization
People generally appreciate when brands add personal touches and pay attention to small details. When it comes to making us feel valued and understood as a customer, a little effort goes a long way.Email personalization is essential to building relationships with prospects and customers.Here are some simple email personalization ideas to help increase your open, click through, and conversion rates.
- Use subscribers’ first names in the email subject line and content.
- Consider time zones when scheduling campaigns to maximise 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 behaviour-triggered emails based on how customers interact with your product/service.
5. Optimize your email subject line, sender name, and preview text
Email subject line
Introducing one of the most important elements of your email marketing campaign: the email subject line.These few words could determine whether your email is read or not. And with so much competition in the inbox these days, they need to stand out.
Aim to create intrigue or a desire to open in just a few words.
- Keep the subject line to 50 characters.
- Highlight your most interesting offer.
- Appeal to your subscribers’ emotions and ambitions..
6. A/B test your email marketing content
Test different email subject line formulas, content formats, and CTAs. See which ones get the best engagement and adjust your strategy accordingly.
7. Optimize email deliverability
Even more than subject lines, calls to action, and copy, email marketing success hinges on reliable email deliverability.
While deliverability often depends on technical factors, there are plenty of non-technical ways to help your email newsletters reach the inbox.Here are some deliverability best practices:
- 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.
8. Clean your email list regularly
Keep your database up to date for optimal email deliverability and higher engagement rates.
Got subscribers who’ve dropped off the radar? If someone hasn’t engaged with your emails in at least six months, send a reactivation campaign or even ask for a second opt-in. See if you can get them interested again.no one likes losing subscribers, but email list cleaning is better for your deliverability in the long term.Another important point: Make it easy to unsubscribe with a clearly visible unsubscribe button. If people can’t find the way out, they’re more likely to mark you as spam.
9. Keep track of email marketing metrics
Analyzing key email marketing metrics will teach you how to improve your strategy for future campaigns. Most ESPs have an analytics dashboard with at least the following real-time 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.
- Soft bounces are due to temporary issues like the recipient’s inbox being full.
- Hard bounces, on the other hand, are due to permanent issues, like an inactive email address.
10. Scale with autoresponders and email automation
Once you’ve got the hang of things, automate your email marketing strategy to make your business grow even faster.
The welcome email is the most common autoresponder example and most email marketing services have an autoresponder function. Armed with the right email automation software, you can go one step further and set up complex email automation sequences using if/then/else logic. This kind of email series is highly effective for lead nurturing and lead scoring.
