Email Marketing
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to send email messages directly to your email list, a subset of your email list, or a list of email addresses.
The purpose of email marketing is to provide valuable information to potential clients and customers, to promote your business, to get people interested in your business, and to become paying customers.
Email have been around for almost 50years.In 1971,Ray Tomilson sent the first email.Not soon after,in 1978,Gary Theurk sent the first ever email campaign,which resulted in a sale of $13million.Thus ,changing the face of the marketing.There are 3.9 billion email users globally, which is half of the world population today. Half of the world is on email.
Who can use Email Marketing?
There is no one use-case for email marketing. Email is the common marketing medium for all kinds of industries like:
•Finance and Insurance
•Ecommerce
•Marketingn and advertising
•Health care and hospitality
•Education
•Travel and Tourism
•Real Estate
How to do Email Marketing?
•Establish email marketing goals:
•Choose the right email marketing tool:
•Focus on the metrics that matter:
•Work on your email list:
•Create an email marketing campaign:
•Choose the right type of email:
•Set up your email campaign:
Benefits of email marketing:
1. Creating personalized content:
With email marketing, you can customize your campaigns and create targeted content.
To have a successful email marketing strategy, you need to send the right email to the right people at the right time. That's where segmentation and personalization can help.
2. Collecting feedback and surveys:
Keeping a pulse on the customer experience is very valuable if you want customers to continue to interact, engage, and purchase from your brand.
Email marketing can help you do this. For instance, you can send customer satisfaction surveys to obtain customer feedback through email campaigns.
3. Improving sales:
While email marketing is clearly an excellent marketing tool, it can actually improve your sales as well.Email marketing campaigns can feature products or services, encourage customers to purchase after abandoning their cart, or deliver special offers to your customers.
Your email marketing campaigns can easily incorporate messages to encourage a purchase to an audience that's more likely to buy from you because they've opted-in to your messages and updates.Additionally, you can use email marketing to automate part of your sales process, which can help increase sales as well.
4. Communicating with your audience:
As a marketer, it's always important to improve communication with your audience. When your audience feels like they can talk to you, they're more likely to become loyal to your brand.
With email marketing, you can reach more of your audience and easily communicate with brand ambassadors. Plus, these emails keep your audience engaged during every time of the year, whether it's a slow or busy season.
5. Generating traffic to your site:
When you produce great content, how do you disseminate it to your audience? Most likely, you send them an email.With email marketing campaigns, you'll send traffic to your site and improve your SEO. Plus, you'll keep your audience engaged with your brand and your site.
When you're creating an email that links to your content, keep in mind that each email should contain a call to action(CTA) so readers can click through to your site.
6. Sending timely campaigns:
Although traditional marketing campaigns have a time and place, they can take months to plan and organize. Even then, you probably aren't sure if people are going to see your campaign assets at the right time.However, with email marketing, you can create an entire campaign on shorter notice because they don't take as long to plan. Additionally, you can ensure your audience sees the email at the right time.For example, you can make sure you send content at the right time by segmenting your audience.
7. Increasing leads:
In the same vein as improving sales, you can also increase your leads with email marketing. In fact, with the inbound method, email marketing is used to nurture leads and improve conversions.
For example, let's say you downloaded a lead magnet from a site. Then, you start receiving drip emails, and in the end, you decide to book a demo and learn more. You just went from an MQL to an SQL, which improves the marketing teams number of qualified leads to the sales team.
Email marketing campaigns can further qualify leads so your sales team isn't wasting time on bad leads. Plus, if your company does lead scoring you can keep track of whether those leads open your emails or engage by clicking the links in your email.
8. Reaching the right people at the right time:
To have a successful marketing campaign, you have to reach the right customers at the right time. Yes, I'm reiterating this point because it's that important.With email marketing, it's that much easier to reach people because they always check their email. They can check it at any time, on multiple devices, which can improve the success of any marketing campaign.This means you're getting in front of your audience on a regular basis, so you're always top-of-mind.
9. Producing cost-effective campaigns.
While traditional campaigns like direct or print can be costly, email marketing campaigns tend to be more cost-effective.For example, you won't have to pay for any photoshoots, location fees, printers, mailing, or placement. All you need is a copywriter and graphic artist . This can even be one person on your team.
Additionally, email campaigns don't take long to produce. If needed, you can produce an email in one day, which is much more cost-effective than the time it takes to produce a direct or print campaign.Since time and budget constraints always impact marketers, email marketing campaigns can be more efficient, while also generating revenue and leads.
10. Providing more value to your audience:
One of the main goals of any business is to provide value for your audience so they keep coming back.Email marketing is a great place to cultivate loyal customers because you can add value even when customers aren't making a purchase.
Additionally, since customers or prospects opted-in, you can use email marketing to provide more resources to contacts who are interested in what you have to say.If you continuously provide value for your audience, more people will pay attention and you'll produce a higher ROI.
11. Having a forum for self-promotion:
Sometimes it can be awkward to self-promote in places where prospects haven't necessarily opted-in to receive updates about your business. However, self-promotion is one of the best ways to attain customers. If you can't promote yourself and sell your company, no one will buy from you.
With email marketing campaigns, you'll always have an avenue to promote yourself, especially since customers opted-in. You can send emails about new products, features and benefits, or new content. Since customers want to hear from you, this self-promotion isn't unwanted or disruptive.
12. Owning your media and contact lists:
Email marketing is one of the top ways to reach your audience. Plus, it can also improve sales and leads. Since this is still the place where people want to receive information, let's just say that email marketing isn't dead.
5 Reasons Email Marketing Is Important for Your Business
Email marketing can serve many purposes, and it’s a highly effective marketing strategy. Here are some of the benefits of email marketing for small businesses:
1. People use email every day :
There are 5.6 billion active email accounts in the world, and 99% of consumers check their email every day. In a time when it’s hard to guarantee 99% for anything, this is a pretty incredible stat!
Plus, not only do most consumers check their emails every day, but the average person checks their emails 20 times per day!
2. Email marketing reaches consumers directly:
When you send an email marketing message, you’re getting directly to your customers through their inboxes, which we already know they’re checking daily. This gives you a one-to-one connection with your customers that’s hard to find in digital marketing, making it a great and effective way to reach people.
3. Email marketing can drive users to take an action:
You can use email marketing to promote a special or deal you’re running, encourage consumers to sign up for your newsletter, nurture leads, or even drive them to visit your business. The best email marketing campaigns are built around specific goals that encourage customers to take action.
4. Email marketing keeps your business top of mind:
In addition to using email marketing to drive your audience to take an action, you can also send educational information that presents you as a leader in your industry. This positions your business as a resource and can help you stay top of mind with your audience, leading them to contact you when they need a business in your industry.
5. Email marketing is easily tracked:
One complaint many marketers and business owners have with various marketing strategies is the inability to track and measure succesas. With email marketing, however, you don’t have that problem.
You can see a number of important and helpful metrics, including:
Open rate: The number of people who opened your email out of the number of people who received it. A good open rate for a marketing email is around 20%, but it varies by industry.
How to set up email campaigns?
Identify the objective for the email:
For every email campaign, you ought to know what you are trying to achieve. As mentioned before, you cannot try to accomplish multiple things with one email. Decide whether you want recipients to sign up, or subscribe, or download an ebook.
Pick the correct segment/list:
Before you start writing, you need to know which segment/list you are sending the email to. This will help you set the right tonality when you start creating the email campaign.
Decide who is sending the email:
In today’s world, nobody likes to receive communication which feels like talking to a machine. You want the recipients’ to feel like they are talking to a human being. It’s always better to have a person sending an email instead of a company. Decide who the email will be from: the marketing head, the CEO, or someone else.
Draft a subject line:
It’s a very influential part of an email. Your subject line is a deal-breaker. In terms of whether one would open your email or not. A recipient can mark you as spam or delete the email before even opening it, on the basis of the subject line itself. So, choose your words wisely.
Design the email campaign:
Design a beautiful email from scratch, or choose from a plethora of templates, and keep it short and crisp. Ensure that the email copy is in line with the subject line. Provide value with every email, personalize where required, add visuals, and add a CTA.
Preview the email:
Now it's time to see how your email will look for different devices. Most email service providers let you preview your email. This is the time you ensure that the email is responsive and mobile-optimized.
Test your email:
Send yourself or your colleague a test email to confirm what the email looks like. Gmail has spam policies in place, which would either strip most of the styles from the email, or hide the images, or just straight up send it to spam. It’s imperative you test your emails.
Find the best time to send:
It’s critical that you optimize your email open rate by experimenting with timings. For instance, Tuesdays are the best day to send the email in a week, and morning is the best time. Of course, this differs for region-to-region.
Schedule your email:
Your email is ready, and you are good to go. Now just schedule your email as per the time you decided for your recipients’ time zone, and you’re done.
Revise tactics with data:
Of course, you wouldn’t crack the perfect email campaign for your audience (and industry) in one go. Keep tracking email metrics, and experimenting with your email designs.
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