Introduction
Email marketing is a direct digital marketing strategy that uses emails to communicate with a company's target audience. It entails sending promotional or informative content.
An email campaign is a series of marketing actions sent to a large number of people at the same time using email.
It is a coordinated series of individual email messages delivered over a specific period with a defined goal.
Table of Contents
1. Why do you Need Email Marketing?
Email marketing is an important asset for almost any business because of its effectiveness in driving conversions and building brand loyalty.
In the beginning, emails used to have a rather negative connotation because marketers used it to overuse it to get new customers.
Nowadays, email marketing has been proven to be an effective tool when building a relationship with your customers.
If done right, your subscribers will look forward to receiving your next email in their inbox like they anticipate getting a message from a good friend of theirs.
The following paragraphs outline how to start your email marketing efforts and maximize the conversion rates from them.
2. 1st Step: Define your email marketing goals
Depending on your objectives, you will need to create different types of email campaigns, content, and analysis, among others.
The key to creating the right goals for your email marketing strategy is to align your goals with your company's overall marketing objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Email marketing can be used to reach a variety of goals like, for example, increasing new product signups, recruiting new prospects for your sales team, or attracting people to attend your event.
Here are some examples of how some companies utilize email marketing to achieve their marketing objectives:
a. Examples of email marketing campaigns
BuzzFeed
The famous news and entertainment website generates income by selling advertising on their website, thus driving greater visitors is the primary goal of their marketing staff.
With this in mind, BuzzFeed sends out frequent email newsletters including links to stories on their website, with the objective of boosting the number of visitors and income generated each month.
UNICEF
This is a multinational charitable organization that offers humanitarian relief and support to mothers and children all over the world.
Donations are the key to their digital marketing team's success, therefore they utilize email marketing to reach out to their donor base, educate them about UNICEF's humanitarian initiatives, and solicit donations.
SXSW Inc.
This for-profit corporation is based in Austin, Texas. This lean company produces some of the world's most well-known events, including the SXSW film, music, and interactive festivals, which are held each year in Austin, Texas.
Their marketing team's objective is to boost ticket sales and attendance at these events, therefore they employ email marketing to keep subscribers updated when new acts and speakers are added.
3. 2nd Step: Building your email marketing list
If you plan to interact with an audience whose email address you do not yet have, you have to start by gathering them and growing your list from the ground up.
The following paragraphs outline a two-part strategy for developing your email list that professional marketers use to grow their own.
The first part is to offer incentives for customers to join the email list. This can take many forms:
a. Great Content
People are attracted by content that they perceive as valuable to them.
You can combine this by saying that you offer exclusive content that only the followers of your newsletter receive.
By stating that your content is only available to people who subscribe with their emails, you increase the value of your newsletter, blog, or other exclusive content that you don’t upload anywhere else.
With this method, people will perceive your offer as a great deal for them instead of another scam.
In case you import any contacts, make sure you have authorization to email these subscribers.
b. Discounts and other offers
If you are a store that sells products online you can consider giving discounts or other incentives that add tangible value to your customers in case they decide to join your email list.
For example, the online cosmetics company La Mer provides a nice first-purchase discount to new visitors in order to get them to join their email list.
Discounts are such a powerful marketing tool because you incentivize people to buy from you and to sign up for your email list at the same time.
c. Exclusive promotions and early access
Giving your customers exclusive access works best when they are already loyal to you and you want to solidify your relationship with them.
This can be in the form of granting early access to new products and discounts as an incentive to join your email list.
From an e-commerce perspective, an attractive incentive you can include for your customers is to upgrade their shipping when they subscribe to your list.
This will make them feel rewarded because they will appreciate the special treatment compared to non-subscribers.
4. 3rd Step: Select the most effective email marketing type
a. Email Newsletter
An email newsletter is a regularly distributed email campaign that focuses on a single topic of interest.
AirBnB, a Campaign Monitor client, puts out a fantastic email to their network of freelance photographers on a monthly basis.
As you can see, the campaign is sent out on a monthly basis and comprises information centered on a certain theme: photography tips and tales.
A newsletter is the ideal sort of campaign to send if you want to stay in touch with a list of individuals you already know (i.e. existing clients).
It will keep your company and items at the forefront of people's minds and bring them back to your website.
b. Promotional Material
A marketing offer email is simply any campaign you send with the objective of eliciting a direct reaction.
This can take several forms, including:
A promotion showing some of the most recent inventory and urging people to buy it.
A campaign that offers a discount or special promotion on your products or services.
Pizza Hut did this quite well when they added a green "Order Now" button as a call-to-action in their ad that offers one of their goods at a discounted price.
It has a product or discount offer as well as a straightforward call to action for consumers to visit your website and make a purchase.
c. Announcements
An announcement campaign is an email sent to your subscribers that announces the launch of a new product, feature, or service.
If you want to keep an engaged audience up to date on your latest goods or features, this type of email is ideal.
While the primary objective is to share information, the email may also have the added benefit of attracting visitors back to your store or website where they may make a purchase.
d. Event Invitations
An event invitation email is a campaign meant to raise awareness of your event and to drive people to attend.
As previously said, the sort of email campaign you send is totally determined by your email goals. If you want to drive direct sales, send marketing offers and announcement campaigns.
However, in case you just want to keep your existing clients up to speed on the newest projects, products, or advancements at your firm, send a regular newsletter.
5. 4th Step: The ideal Email Campaign structure
a. You should avoid text-heavy content
To best capture and hold your readers, you should start with a short headline that highlights the main message of your email.
Next, support your main text body with information and images to persuade the reader of the benefits of clicking through.
Round your email off with a clear call to action button that goes straight to the point and can’t be missed.
b. Personalize your messages to your customer's needs
Most professional marketers segment their email lists into smaller groups to better target similar audiences with customized content.
Some common email categorizations can be:
Geographic location: If your business includes a local store, you can target customers who are living a certain distance away from your store while ignoring users who live outside of a certain radius.
Demographics: When you want to customize your campaign to a specific combination of age and gender ranges.
Market: This categorization is useful when you target your users based on the interests they have. You can tailor the message to content that focuses more on certain product types that users bought recently or showed higher interest in.
Past activity: Use this category to segment your subscribers according to past open rates and click-through behavior.
Customer data: You can use this setting to target VIP customers or customers who risk getting lost because they haven’t made a purchase within a specific time period.
c. Optimal timing for your upload schedule
Develop an editorial calendar with a clear strategy in mind. This way you will avoid sending out your emails randomly and you will be able to attribute your results to specific campaigns.
Some audiences can be very spam-sensitive, which means they get easily annoyed when you send them too many messages within a short period of time.
The opposite is also true when you don’t post frequently enough which could lead to your audience becoming increasingly disconnected from your brand.
The optimal solution would be to let your customers decide when they sign up, how often they would like to receive promotional material or other content.
More often than not, a weekly posting schedule is the most convenient for the majority of people.
Regarding the content of your emails, a rule of thumb is that 80% should provide your subscribers with valuable content and 20% can be promotional material.
6. 5th Step: Measuring your Results
Using your website analytics tool or a dedicated email marketing tool will help you to track a number of key metrics that you should pay attention to:
Open rate: This is the percentage of total subscribers who opened your email.
Click-Through Rate: The percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email.
Number of bounces: The total number of email addresses that were not successfully delivered to your subscribers
Number of emails not opened: The total number of unique subscribers who didn’t open your email.
Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of people who left your email list after the latest email.
Spam complaints: This lets you know how many people marked your campaign as Spam.
These metrics give you insights into the behavior of your subscribers from the moment they decide to interact with your message.
Combining the above-mentioned metrics with data from your website analytics tool gives you valuable information about who is following through to your website from your email campaign or how many leads you have generated.
Once you have gathered enough data from a number of email campaigns, you can test out different subject lines to improve your open rates.
One of the most effective ways to do that is to do A/B testing to see which words perform the best in your subject line.
Conclusion
Email marketing can be a powerful driver of sales & revenue for your business if you carefully test and optimize your email campaign.
It is a great way to engage with your customers by providing useful content that they like to read.
Mainly because almost everyone uses email addresses, marketers have a lot to gain by targeting new and old customers and tailoring the content of the campaigns to the specific customer segment.