Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations.
This beginner’s guide will explain exactly what is email marketing and how it works. By the end, you’ll have a solid grasp of the basics along with the know-how to launch email marketing for your business.
Email marketing is the most profitable direct marketing channel, generating an average return of 42 $ on 1 $ spent
Email should be a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy. To not do any email marketing is like leaving money on the table.
But if you’re a bit confused about where to begin, that’s totally normal. Email’s 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 when you send a commercial email message to your ‘email subscribers’ — contacts who have signed up to your email list and given express permission to receive email communications from you.
Email marketing is used to inform, drive sales, and build a community around your brand (e.g. with a newsletter).
Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
From order confirmations to newsletters, emails are an essential aspect of the growth and management of your business.
Email marketing will help fulfill 3 key objectives:
1. Conversions (selling your products and services)
Launching a sale or promotion? You can send an email marketing campaign to your subscribers to drive sales.
Other email marketing techniques known to increase conversion rates include:
- Emailing a discount or special offer (birthday/anniversary emails, welcome emails, reengagement emails)
- Abandoned cart emails (triggered whenever a visitor abandons a cart at your online store)
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 besides, 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 top of mind. 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 for a relatively low cost (compared to other marketing channels).
3. Customer loyalty
Email drives customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer journey: lead-nurturing, conversion, onboarding, retention.
It’s a powerful tool for building a community, You can create newsletter content so good that subscribers will be waiting for it to arrive each week. Keep reading and we’ll tell you how.
Why email marketing is important
Accessibility
Email is accessible to all age groups. It opens the door to a wide range of audiences — even the least digitally-savvy among us.
We might live in the digital age but not everyone is that comfortable using the internet. However, most people do know how to check their email. This makes it the most mainstream form of marketing.
Affordability
Email marketing is extremely cost-effective. Most email marketing tools offer pricing packages to suit all budgets. In reality, the barrier to entry has never been so low.
How does email marketing work? Introducing ESPs
Businesses use what’s known as an Email Service Provider (ESP) to send marketing emails.
An Email Service Provider is 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.
How to start email marketing: what do I need?
Keeping it simple, there’s two main things you need to run email marketing campaigns.
1. Email marketing software
As we’ve just explained, a dedicated email marketing provider is the way to go. Sending marketing emails through an ISP will only put your brand and email sender reputation at risk.
2. An email list
This list contains the email addresses of interested subscribers who have opted-in to receive email communications from you.
Yes, that’s right — opt-in. Because here’s the thing about email contacts:
Everyone on that email list needs to have given their express permission to be there.
What does that mean?
It means they agreed to receive emails from you when they entered their email address into an email signup form on your blog, website, landing pages, social media, or anywhere else. In email terms, this process is referred to as ‘opting in’ (‘opting out’ would be an unsubscribe).
Permission-based marketing is essential to conform with data protection laws and safeguard the integrity of your brand. After all, nobody likes a spammer.
Still with us up until now? Great, because here’s where it gets exciting — learning how to launch an email marketing strategy, starting with your first email campaign.
1. Choose the right email marketing software
The first step is finding an ESP to send and manage your email campaigns and email subscribers.
Popular email tools include Sendinblue, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Convertkit, Mailjet, Mailerlite, and HubSpot — to name a few.
With hundreds of ESPs on the market, it’s hard to know which one is right for your business. And it’s easy to get sucked in by shiny bells and whistles you probably don’t need (not yet, anyway).
Evaluate your needs. Distinguish between must-have features and nice-to-have features. Make a list.
2. Build your email list
Can’t send email campaigns without anyone to send them to. Time to start building a list of engaged, opt-in subscribers.
Most ESPs let you create subscription forms to be embedded on your website.
3. Set up a welcome email for new subscribers
When someone signs up to your email list, you’ve got their attention. Now’s the time to engage them even further with a welcome email.
A welcome email is an automated message sent to new customers and subscribers. The idea is to introduce your brand and any content that’ll establish your relationship with the subscriber — a welcome discount, link to latest articles, useful information, etc.
4. Define the goal of your email marketing campaign
Now that you’ve started building your email list, it’s time to think about what you want to achieve from this first campaign.
Every email marketing campaign needs to have a clear goal.
Examples of common goals include:
- Promoting a new product
- Sharing a discount with loyal customers
- Getting more downloads for your latest ebook
- Updating subscribers on some important piece company news
Your goals can either be hyper-specific or broad — as long as they fit with your business and your audience.
With a clear goal in mind it’ll be easier to create your email content. Which brings us to the next step:
5. Build a responsive-design email
You might be wondering, do I need to hire an email designer?
If you’re bootstrapped and on a budget, then no. You don’t need one. To make things easy, most email marketing services have some form of Drag & Drop email editor. These are great for producing clean, simple, hassle-free designs.
Of course, that’s not to diminish the value of having a dedicated email designer, especially for ecommerce. An email designer will help you stand out from the crowd with custom templates. It’s definitely something to consider down the line — or even now if you have the means.
Anyway, if you’re going full-on DIY email marketing, just play around with your ESP’s editor until you’re satisfied with the end result.
And remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Don’t get hung up on creating a fancy design for the first email newsletter. Keep it simple. You can always build upon this later on as your skills grow.
Of course, one way to go faster is with customizable email templates.
Save time with ready-made email templates
6. Craft your email copy
You know your goal, you know your target audience, now let’s fill that template with words.
Your email copy needs to offer value and speak to topics that interest your audience. You also need to nail down the tone of voice.
- Ask yourself: What does my audience need from me? How can I help?
- Imagine you’re writing to one person
- Show your personality
- Tell a story
- Write to instill curiosity (starting with the email subject line — more on that below)
- Use a conversational tone, i.e. write the way you speak
- Break up the copy with short paragraphs and use bullet points where possible
7. Test your email campaign before sending
Always send a test email before officially hitting send. Small mistakes can easily slip through the cracks and harm your brand image.
Keep your eyes peeled for:
- Typos
- Forgotten or incorrect links
- Text formatting errors
8. Schedule your campaign for the right time
Rather than choosing a random day and time, be strategic. Choose a time that makes sense for your audience, based on what you know about them.
Most people tend to only visit their inbox a few times each day. Find a time that’ll put you top of the inbox when subscribers are checking their emails. This is sure to increase your open rates.
Email marketing campaigns tend to perform better when sent on Tuesday or Thursday in the mornings around 10:00 AM or in the afternoons around 2:00 PM.
Comments
Post a Comment