Email marketing is a type of marketing that uses your existing email list to market your products, or services, to customers en masse. This article will explain the email marketing tools, mailing services, and how a marketing email works. Modern-day email marketing has shifted from one size fits all mass mailings, and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization.
You can maintain/expand the email list by providing quality content that matters to your demographic, and generate organic growth while maintaining engagement. A well-written email marketing program can go a long way in your marketing strategy.
How Does Email Marketing Work
To set up an email marketing system, it’s generally advised to use what’s called an ESP.
An email service provider (ESP) is what businesses use to set up and streamline their email marketing process. Simply put, it’s software that manages and sends the emails in bulk. There are many different brands of software, each attuned to what aspect the business thinks would work best with their interests.
ESP is also called an email marketing platform, email marketing tool, email marketing service, or email marketing software. The reason people prefer these, rather than sending the emails individually, is based on factors like limited bandwidth, poor design, convenience, and email deliverability.
Why Email Marketing is Important
Email marketing is an important way of marketing because, it provides companies, with a direct link to their customers, to advertise, sell, update, and keep them engaged. It is also worth noting email marketing campaigns, are far more individualized, than a collective outreach in real life or through social media, and less cheap too, making it an ideal marketing strategy for big businesses and small businesses alike. Email marketing is the current most profitable and cost-efficient direct marketing channel, capable of generating an average return on investment of $42 for every single dollar spent.
The email platform is a true tried and tested marketing platform, since its conception nearly 50 years ago. There are other forms of communication like social media, which is relatively new, but let’s face it: you don’t necessarily log onto your Facebook or Instagram to watch for advertisements. The email inbox is simply more primed, and advantageous, for marketing than any other alternative, and therefore, an essential fast track for marketing programs.
The benefits it can have are:
1. Improving conversion rates (selling your products and services):
This can be done by keeping an engaged audience, sending a sales or promotional email marketing campaign, providing personalized coupons, or following up on abandoned cart email
2. Promoting brand awareness:
Since an email serves as a direct link to the customer, it provides one on one communication. Therefore, showing up o someone’s email inbox, now and then, will improve brand recognition, simply by being aware and staying current in the minds of the subscribers.
3. Customer loyalty:
Building off of the second point, when subscribers finally decide to buy the product/service, they are assured of constant engagement with a good customer relationship management system. Thus, improving retention and enhancing communication.
Email Marketing Objectives:
The ideal design for your email marketing objectives is to focus on the specified goal you want to achieve, for example, promotion of a new product, offering discounts, updating your subscribers, improving outreach to more customers, etc.
Now, with having a clear, and measurable goal in mind, you can take the following steps:
- Offering discounts to your customers on sign up
- Offering new subscribers free shipping for their first order
- Entering subscribers into a raffle for a chance to win a prize
- Regardless, it’s always useful to include sending relevant content and engaging emails centered around the email marketing objective.
What are the types of marketing emails?
Generally, marketing emails can be classified as promotional, informational, or a re-engagement or re-activation email, for potential customers, and subscribers too.
Promotional email marketing campaigns are used to promote special offers, new product releases, gated content like ebooks and webinars, and your brand at large.
Informational emails are of two types:
1. Newsletters: these are the regular weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly newsletters that help provide relevant and meaningful content to maintain engagement with the email subscribers.
2. Announcement: this type of email is the normal way to inform customers of any new company announcements, whether it may be a new product or service, a change to an existing one, etc.
3. Re-engagement or re-activation emails help reconnect with customers or subscribers who haven’t been active lately.
How to Create a Mailing List
A mailing list consists of the total number of addresses a business has, who have opted to receive information and updates from the company through the mail. The inflow of newer email subscriptions is a sign of continued growth.
It’s always best to grow a mailing list organically, as opposed to buying them as off from a list owner or a list broker. It’s recommended so, as a viable strategy, because it’s less likely to end up as spam or blocked, and since they’ve opted for the email service, chances are they’re more likely to become a potential customer.
Growing Your Email List:
Apart from the earlier strategy for creating a mailing list, it’s worth noting that consistent and relevant engagement is key to maintaining it. Another strategy employed for growth is squeeze pages.
A squeeze page is what you see when visiting a home page of a website, designed so in a way to collect an email ID from visitors. They are a crucial aspect of email marketing
You can also grow a mailing list by offering incentives to subscribe like:
- Providing exclusive access to content
- Exclusive notifications
- Discounts
- Loyalty points and referral programs
How to Write a Marketing Email
Every email copy needs to offer value, feature topics that interest your audience, and embody your brand’s standards.
To write a compelling marketing email, try to center the message around the following:
- What does a customer need from me, and how can I fulfill that need?
- Write a subject line that intrigue the reader
- Try to keep the message concise and use a conversational tone
- Imagine as if you’re typing it out to one person, than addressing a group as a whole
Always end the email with a call-to-action (CTA). A CTA is a marketing term for a design to prompt a quick response or engage in an immediate sale. You can keep a CTA for a product as a link to the ordering site, or if it is a CTA for a service, you can keep it as a form that people might fill out. Regardless of the CTA prompt, a CTA is a must-have in every email copy, to check out a few resources from your site, so that when you do pitch in a real, new product or service, people won’t be thrown off guard.
How to Set Email Marketing Goals
A successful email copy to a subscribing must have lead magnets. A lead magnet is something like a free item or service, which is given for free, as to gather information like contact details. It’s something that people can use right away. Examples include free samples, trial subscriptions, free consultations, etc.
A lead magnet is used for the purposes of better a chance to create sales leads. The more valuable the lead magnet, the better the subscriptions ( then potential sales).
- The general blueprint of a marketing email includes:
- A straightforward subject line within a line or two, describing your offer.
- Outline what the offer is, and why is it worth paying attention to
- Take a crucial few and explain why would it matter to the customer
- Nearing the end, include promo codes or discounts
- As mentioned earlier, include a CTA so people know what exactly to do next ( link to the purchase site, or a review)
It might be worth mentioning to add a “PS” at the end of the mail. Because sometimes, people; would just skim through the message, but the PS would catch their attention and would summarise the entire thing in one go.
Email Marketing Tools
As discussed earlier, ESP are part of professional email marketing, they are also classified as email marketing automation tools. There are plenty of tools, each with its pros and cons. And so, it’s best that a company arrive at one, keeping its own unique needs in mind. The deciding factor are: budget, skill level, required email volume, automated email workflow, etc Examples of automation tools are: Sendinblue, Mailchimp, Mailjet, Drip, and Infusionsoft
Now, regardless of which specific email marketing automation software you use, it’s important to learn how to use the collected data to send tailored emails, for better chances of procuring a sale.
This is where segmentation and personalization come into play. In fact, segmenting your mailing list boosts open rates and click-through rates, while decreasing the unsubscribing rates. Personalization is just as effective when you send a custom-made email specific to the recipient, boosting loyalty, and better chances of procuring a sale, at the same time.
Segmentation is the strategy of separating mail subscribers from a list, not different groups, and marketing to each one exclusively to the separated segments. Whereas, personalization is on a person-to-person basis and markets content exclusively to one person at a time.
The different groups of classification (or segments) are:
- Demographic: this segment refers to “the who”, which regards their age, gender, ethnicity, earned income, level of education, religious affiliation, and profession/role in a company. These are the details that serve as a basis of classification.
- Psychographic: This segment focuses on the customer’s interests and their personalities. This can be a lot harder to identify and might require more time, to identify their lifestyles, hobbies, values, etc. When done right, it serves as an effective marketing strategy that helps connect with the audience at a much, more personal level.
- Geographic segmentation: this refers to “the where”, that is the actual physical location, and is often one of the easiest to point out. By definition, it includes country, region, city, and postal code.
- Behavioral: this refers to “the how”, this is the trickiest, yet most effective method of marketing. Customers are grouped in regard to spending habits, purchasing habits, browsing habits, and loyalty and interactions with the brand. And based on such behavioral data, you can send a much more refined tailored email.
Example:
In segmentation, you might attend to an individual’s need, recommending products people in their situation/age group/location have also bought.
In personalization, you might attend to an individual’s need, based on recommending products based on their individual purchase history alone.
target everyone who has bought an item with an email promoting other relevant products. However, you could personalize this campaign on an individual level by using each contact’s purchase history to share recommendations unique to them.
Which Email Marketing Service Is Best?
Before you email anyone, you need 2 things: their permission, and an email setup.
The same goes for the case of email marketing. A mailing list and an email set up. A professional one fit for a business, to churn out a large number of emails and make proper use of the data, to further improve upon the email marketing methods.
Mailchimp: it’s a very basic and common email marketing software, generally used by people who’re new It’s easy to use and has a simple user interface.
Sendinblue: This software includes SMS as well as email marketing software. It has drag and drop tools to make highly engaging email content. It is also capable of segmenting users and building automated workflow.
Hubspot: They also offer drag and drop editing tools and pre-made templates, and are specifically known for their CRM ( customer relationship management) platform.
Drip: This is a more complex marketing tool, capable of creating conditional statements, and complex email automation workflows
Conclusion:
Email marketing is an exciting and profitable venture to grow and expand your business brand, and foster great customer relationships. It also serves another purpose of yielding sales with just concise and relevant emails, with a strong call to action, all the while educating them and keeping them engaged from being curious to a finalized sale.
Let Internet Entry handle your email marketing campaign and write marketing copies that derive sales. Visit Internet Entry’s service page to know more.