Email marketing is one of the oldest types of digital marketing, and there’s a reason for that: it works! Businesses may use email to communicate with customers, increase brand awareness, create loyalty to the brand, and nurture prospects into paying customers.
However, while email marketing appears to be an easy channel to utilize, there is an art to using it well. Furthermore, several email providers, such as Google and Yahoo, have changed their policies to ensure that bulk email senders comply with data standards.
There are also numerous artificial intelligence integrations and tools available to assist you with email writing, data extraction, and list segmentation. In this article, we’ll go over the fundamentals of email marketing and provide some terrific examples to help you get started.
What is Email marketing?
Email marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses email to offer items or services to new or existing clients. The DMA’s Consumer Email Tracker 2023 research indicated that subscriber value is rising. In 2021, only 15% of consumers believed their emails were beneficial, a figure that had grown to 32% by 2023. Email has a high dwell duration of 11 seconds, compared to 1.7 seconds for the internet ad impressions and 7.5 seconds for television ads.
Email marketing is an important tool used by both B2C and B2B businesses to increase brand awareness, client loyalty, and conversions.
Why is email marketing important?
Email marketing is one of those that is profitable direct marketing channels, with Statista forecasting that global email revenue would reach $17.9 billion by 2027.
The reason for this growth is that email marketing provides brands with a direct and personalized approach to communicate with their customers. This promotes deep relationships and boosts conversions. Email also provides for customized communications, which enables firms to send relevant messages to certain audiences. It is also an economically feasible and measurable channel for nurturing leads and increasing brand loyalty over time. Let us look at three of the most critical aspects of email marketing for your organization.
1) Data acquisition
One of the primary reasons firms use email is for data collecting.
As the reliance on third-party cookies as a tracking mechanism decreases, obtaining email subscribers is an excellent approach to acquire personal information from people who are interested in your company with their permission. With consumers wishing to secure their information, firms must follow data privacy standards such as GDPR or CCPA. Email collects information using first-party data in an effort to increase brand loyalty and recognition.
2) Inbound Marketing
Email can also assist you recruit potential and leads by providing relevant material. Email is an excellent approach to communicate with prospects who have expressed interest in your company, product, or service. They do this by subscribing to a newsletter.
Because email is used for inbound marketing, your leads are warmer, meaning they have more intent and interest in your brand. It also means a higher return on investment (ROI) and reduced costs because incoming email lists often have fewer users.
3)Personalization
Email allows you to segment and tailor information and messaging based on who you’re communicating with. You can organize lists based on people’s interest in a specific product or service.
• Share a hobby or interest
• Live in the same area
• Be of a certain age and gender.
The more you know about your customers or prospects, the easier it will be to craft a prospecting email that generates responses. Don’t flood your lists, though; instead, be strategic about your frequency and A/B test subject lines and content to discover what resonates.
How to Get Started With Email Marketing
Choose the Right Email
A competent email marketing platform will assist you in meeting the targets you’ve established for your campaigns. It allows you to streamline the process of sending emails and evaluating the success of your marketing campaign. It simplifies the procedure and allows you to keep everything in one location.
When selecting a platform, you should ensure that it is powerful enough to handle the size you require and that you will receive the necessary support. You’ll also need to decide which features are critical to your organization. You can browse evaluations of prominent email marketing platforms to choose one that is suitable for your organization.
Marketing Software
Testing different email marketing is a cost-effective way to determine what works best for your organization. When you test, you’ll look at the results to discover whether content, subject lines, CTAs, and other elements help your organization achieve the objectives you set. Testing will allow you to fine-tune your email campaign and achieve the desired outcomes.
A/B testing is an easy approach to test email marketing messages. A/B testing involves creating various copies of emails and changing specific factors. You then compare the outcomes of each version to see which adjustments are the most beneficial. You may experiment with different subject lines to see which ones generate more email opens. You may also test different links in different groupings to discover which ones are most likely to drive customers to your website.
Build Your Email List
As you create an email list, you are building your target audience. While it may appear to be the easier option, purchasing an email list is not recommended. A purchased email list is likely to waste your time with prospects that aren’t in your target audience. The most effective strategy to grow your email list is organically.
Here are a few methods for naturally building your email list:
• Your company’s email lists
• Software for customer relationship management
• Request fresh emails through social media or your website.
• Gated material and promotional offers.
Make an effort to contact clients on a regular basis to request their emails, so that interested customers can easily provide you with their contact information. You want to make it as simple as possible for clients on your website or social media to sign up for email, such as using a pop-up that provides a discount if the customer enters their email address. Another option is to have the chatbots you have on social media offer to accept emails for promotions.
Set goals
Setting goals entails identifying the purpose behind each email, which can help you keep focused and prevent getting spammy. Your goals should be achievable and assist you in determining how you will evaluate your overall accomplishments, which we will discuss in a later phase. Consider your business’s demands while determining your goals.
For example, if you’ve received a large number of new members as a result of a successful social media campaign, you could launch an email marketing campaign to welcome them and assist them become acquainted with your online platform, product, or subscription service.Setting goals entails identifying the purpose behind each email, which can help you keep focused and prevent getting spammy. Your goals should be achievable and assist you in determining how you will evaluate your overall accomplishments, which we will discuss in a later phase. Consider your business’s demands while determining your goals.
For example, if you’ve received a large number of new members as a result of a successful social media campaign, you could launch an email marketing campaign to welcome them and assist them become acquainted with your online platform, product, or subscription service.
Determine the campaign type
Your email marketing strategy should have one clear call to action for your customers. It should also comprise a coordinated series of targeted emails designed to engage customers over a specific time period.
Determining your campaign type allows you to focus on what will most effectively reach the target you’ve defined. When deciding which form of email marketing campaign to launch, consider both your goals and your target demographic. Make sure the CTA for the clients will assist you achieve your objectives.
Campaign kinds include newsletters, promotions, and announcements.
• Reengagement
• Blog updates
• Autoresponders for welcome and transactional emails
For example, if you believe your target audience wants to experience a feeling of community from your company, a newsletter might be an excellent method to keep them involved and informed.
Monitor Your Result
Measuring your results is the only method to understand how your email campaign worked with respect to your objectives. You can utilize analytics in an email marketing platform to track a variety of variables to assess your success.
Some common domains of analysis are:
• Unique open rate measures the number of clients who open your emails. This is an excellent approach to check how your subject lines perform and whether your emails have significance to the recipients.
• Track your email’s click-through rate to see how many people engage with the links. This might assist you determine the effectiveness of your material.
• Tracks bounce rate and rejections.
• Tracks email server rejections (bounce rate). If you have a high bounce rate, you may have an ineffective email list.
• Track your unsubscribe rate to determine how many people have stopped receiving your emails. It can tell you whether your emails are spam or irrelevant to the receivers.