Email Marketing

Among the core digital marketing strategies, email marketing is considered the “dark horse”.

Being one of the oldest digital marketing tactics, some of us think that email marketing isn’t worth investing time and resources.

And if you consider email marketing not as effective as it used to be, you are completely wrong.

According to Hubspot, there are 4 billion daily email users. I hope the number of users is enough to make you understand the number of potential customers you can reach.

If you are not yet convinced let me give you another stat.

77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. And this is mostly because email is considered an indispensable tool when it comes to online marketing.

Nowadays marketers are using social media and email effectively to reach and communicate better with their target audience.

Before diving deep into the benefits and working, let us understand what exactly it means and how to do email marketing.

Email Marketing – Meaning

Email marketing is a potent marketing channel that uses email to advertise the goods or services your company offers. Email marketing is a type of direct marketing as well as digital marketing.

Incorporating it into your marketing automation activities can assist in informing your clients about your most recent products or offers.

Through various forms of marketing emails, it can also be extremely important in your overall marketing strategy for lead generation, brand awareness, relationship building, and consumer engagement in between transactions.

Integrating the promotion mix into these efforts ensures a well-rounded approach, combining different marketing communication methods to enhance the effectiveness of your messages.

Instead of focusing on mass mailings that are one size fits all, modern email marketing instead emphasizes consent, segmentation, and personalization.

Although it may seem time-consuming, marketing automation actually does most of the labor-intensive work for you. In the long run, a successful email marketing approach not only increases sales but also fosters brand community.

Email Marketing – Importance

You may improve sales at a low cost by reaching and connecting with your target audience with a great email marketing approach.

Email marketing solutions make it easier than ever for your business to connect with clients, just as other platforms and media have changed.

Some of the reasons showcasing the importance are:

1. Contact with the Audience

Emails have the power to inform your clients. Customers have the option of checking their email whenever it suits them. They may get the impression that you are thinking of them as a result.

The subject line of this email need only read, “Hello, you’re on our mind, here’s a wonderful offer!” or “Let me give you a quick report on what’s been going on around here lately.”

People who subscribed to your email list have already agreed to receive these messages. Thus, it is likely that they will love receiving these emails, which will increase consumer engagement (as long as you include content that is worthwhile for them to read).

2. Real-Time Reach

46 % of all emails were opened on a mobile device, according to Hubspot. Any marketing strategy should take this into consideration as it is important.

Customers are increasingly accessing all forms of media and information on their mobile devices, including emails. Additionally, compared to other media, well-designed emails have the highest conversion rates on mobile. Hit them immediately!

3. Easily Measurable

The majority of email marketing platforms let you keep track of what occurs after your email campaign is sent out. Delivery, bounce, unsubscribe, click-through, and open rates can all be monitored.

Email campaign software helps you determine which email campaigns to modify or completely eliminate based on how well they are performing. You can easily automate the entire process and turn leads into dollars.

They play a significant role in the overall success of any internet marketing effort. Even if there are a number of research and surveys that offer “ideal” numbers to go for, it all relies on your sector and target market.

You’d best give them the emails if your clients demand them on a daily basis. You will witness a rise in unsubscribe rates if you send too many emails to customers who just desire one a week. Knowing your audience and offering useful information are the two most important factors.

4. Emails are Still a Source of Engagement

An email has been a medium of communication for a very long time—more than 40 years, in fact. As the years have passed, email has quickly risen to the top of our list of preferred methods of communication.

Every one of us has been schooled in some way to respond to emails. Whether it is to comment, forward, delete, click through to another embedded link, purchase something, or sign up.

With emails, we often take action. With this knowledge, you may use email to encourage people to visit your website, call you, or respond to any other call to action. In reality, email marketing was responsible for nearly 25% of sales last year.

5. Cost-Effective

Now is the moment to discuss money.

One thing will never change in the realm of digital marketing, regardless of new approaches or ideas that are introduced over the coming years.

Businesses need to develop strategies that let them get the most out of their marketing spending while still accomplishing their overall objectives.

One of the most affordable digital marketing techniques for reaching and interacting with your target audience is email marketing.

With all the fees involved, using traditional marketing strategies like TV, print, or direct mail advertisements can get rather expensive.

On the other hand, email marketing has relatively little out-of-pocket expense.

You might need to employ support to develop email content depending on your internal resources. Additionally, the majority of organizations pay for email marketing automation services, which reduce the amount of time needed to conduct efficient email marketing.

However, these expenses decrease in comparison to the cost of purchasing advertising space or paying to print and distribute leads and customers’ marketing materials.

Email marketing not only has a low cost but also offers a high return on investment (ROI).

For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average expected return on investment is $42. This data demonstrates how affordable email marketing can be for companies, especially smaller companies with tighter resources.

Overall, email marketing is the ideal digital marketing strategy for companies with limited resources. This is due to email marketing efforts’ low initial and ongoing costs.

6. Targeted Mailing

Let’s now discuss the significance of email marketing for lead nurturing, also known as email lead marketing. The key point is that distinct stages of the purchase cycle exist among your potential consumers.

Some might be in the research and comparison stage, while others might be in the consideration stage, and yet others might be in the ready-to-buy stage. You may decide what kind of content you provide for each step by creating buyer personas.

Businesses can more successfully target these groups by segmenting these clients and adding them to the proper email marketing lists.

Pushing the appropriate content can help customers advance to the next stage of the buying cycle, which they need the information to do. It all comes down to getting these prospects as far down your sales funnel as you can, but as effectively as you can.

7. Better Brand Awareness

Businesses can target these categories more successfully by segmenting these clients into the right email marketing lists. Customers need the information to advance to the next step of the buying cycle, and the correct content may help them do that.

It all comes down to pushing these prospects as effectively and efficiently as you can along your sales funnel. No, social media isn’t the sole medium that promotes a company’s brand.

Knowing a customer’s or potential client’s email address indicates that they have expressed interest in your company. Staying top-of-mind through email marketing allows you to raise interest and brand exposure.

8. On-Time Opportunity

If you use email marketing properly, one of the advantages is that it can help you sell your goods.

Utilize as much customer data and information as you can. More successful than merely sending clients a menu is sending them a special deal on their birthday or informing them that their favorite meal is half off.

You can advertise a Christmas special or an annual sale using this email marketing strategy’s seasonal specials.

Create a sense of urgency for any offer you make since clients are far more inclined to buy when a bargain is about to expire.

How Email Marketing Works?

Now that you are aware of the significance of email marketing and how it differs from other approaches in certain respects, let’s talk about some techniques for achieving the best outcomes.

Here are all the key components for developing a successful email marketing strategy, from establishing campaigns and increasing your email list to using some of the most well-liked email marketing software options.

1. Building an Email List

Building your email list is the first step in launching a successful email marketing campaign.

To effectively target the relevant people with your marketing communications, you must take into account who your target audience is as you expand your email subscriber list.

The truth is that it requires patience, time, and work. It’s best to employ a variety of procedures when gathering email addresses from various sources.

The ideal place to encourage people to subscribe to your emails and grow your email list is on your website. On your “About Us” page and all of your most visited landing pages, include an email sign-up form.

Make sure the email sign-up form isn’t too long and doesn’t include a lot of fields. Many people can simply decide not to join up because they think it will take too much work to complete the form.

Keep your forms brief and straightforward by just including the most crucial fields. In reality, a lot of organizations just restrict it to one field—the email address.

Additionally, you should strategically position call-to-action buttons on your website that ask users to enter their email addresses.

These areas include your sidebar, footer, and headers. You can utilize pop-ups in addition to static call-to-action buttons to request website users’ email addresses.

You can ask clients to sign up for your promotional emails during the checkout process in addition to using your website.

A sign-up button can also be included in a transactional email, such as order and delivery confirmation.

Utilizing lead magnets or gated content is another excellent technique to encourage folks to sign up for your emails.

In essence, this entails providing individuals with worthwhile stuff for nothing in return for their email address. Lead magnets are typically digital items that cost little to nothing to produce.

This ought to be something that your target audience will be interested in, whether it’s an eBook or a resource guide.

It should not only be important but also something that subscribers can readily and immediately access. Even though you wish to add valuable information, composing a mini-dissertation is not the way to do so.

2. List Segmentation

You’ll want to utilize your email subscriber list as efficiently as possible now that you’ve gradually built it up. Here’s where email list segmentation comes into play.

It basically refers to the process of breaking up your email list into smaller groups based on predetermined criteria. By doing this, you’ll be able to email them stuff that’s more relevant to them and tailored.

In fact, it will make it much simpler when it comes time to write the email’s subject line and body. For instance, you might use location as a parameter and send an email to subscribers in that area alerting them about the opening of a new business.

However, it’s simple to go too far. Instead, stick to more general criteria that will enable you to develop targeted, pertinent emails. You can segment your list using interests and gender in addition to location.

Designing and sending emails to your subscribers is the next stage. The most crucial step in the entire email marketing process is definitely this one. Your return on investment (ROI) will be higher if your emails are more engaging.

However, starting from scratch while writing emails is not the best course of action. To do it requires more time, effort, and money.

The best substitute for it is to either make your own email templates or download them from external websites.

Regardless of the strategy you choose, you need to make sure that your email templates reflect the essence of your company while still being simple for readers to read. Consider paying close attention to elements including payout, font, color, visuals, and calls to action.

3. Email Drip Campaign Creation

If your material falls short of expectations, all your efforts to develop a sizable subscriber list and select a collection of templates will be useless. Your writing is very important.

You can nurture your leads by providing pertinent, helpful material that your subscribers will find interesting. Fair enough, you can’t expect your readers to continue to be active subscribers if you don’t consistently share excellent and reliable content.

Some of the popular Drip Emails are:

1. A Welcome Sequence

A welcome sequence needs to be developed for every brand. This kind of drip campaign is sent to subscribers shortly after they sign up for your mailing list, and you usually start it by sincerely thanking them for doing so.

Basically, you want to take advantage of this as an opportunity to win over new subscribers and convert them into paying clients.

2. Free Benefits

You can choose to distribute your lead magnets over the course of a few emails to create a type of drip campaign, even though many lead magnets are available as one-time digital downloads like a cheat sheet or checklist.

With this strategy, over the course of a few days or perhaps weeks, you’ll send a number of emails containing useful information.

This kind of organization is also appropriate when you’re providing a webinar as a lead magnet. After the event, you may send them a reminder and follow-up email to highlight the main points, along with an email inviting them to sign up.

3. Cart Abandonment Mails

For online stores, abandoned cart recovery emails are essential. Online shops can recover some of those lost purchases with the aid of an automated abandoned cart recovery email series.

To keep your brand in their minds and to remind them of the things still in their basket, you’ll normally send the first email in this campaign within a few hours.

Depending on the response, you can either send a thank-you email for their purchase or a second email with a possible discount coupon to remind clients to finish the transaction.

4. Cross-Selling

It need not be the end of the road once a customer has made a purchase. Additionally, you can design an email drip campaign to promote upselling and cross-selling. You can do this to get repeat business from clients.

4. Email Sequence Planning

You must choose the number of emails you want to send and the gap between each one in order for email drip campaigns to be successful.

The duration of an email series is not governed by any strict guidelines. In essence, you should send exactly enough emails to accomplish your purpose.

Emails for education can be sent once every two days in terms of frequency. You can even send up to four emails in a day if you’re marketing a significant sale. And bonus tip – use short code texting or other SMS methods alongside your email marketing in order to yield the best results.

The key is to strike a balance between those that are purely promotional and those that provide value. Only approximately 20% of your emails should be primarily concerned with closing that deal; the remainder of your emails should provide value.

You should plan your calls to action for the various emails in addition to deciding on the topics for each one.

At least one call-to-action should be included in every email, such as a suggestion to share your most recent blog post, register for a webinar, give your service a review, or make a purchase.

5. Observing and Monitoring Performance

The use of email marketing cannot be set up once and forgotten. To achieve the best outcomes, you should also monitor the effectiveness of your emails. With this information in hand, you may use A/B testing to enhance your email marketing efforts.

You should track a few crucial email metrics including open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate when evaluating your campaigns.

People will always have the option to opt-out of your email list. Fortunately, this will typically be less than 1%. A greater unsubscribe rate indicates that your present strategy is ineffective.

How many of the subscribers actually clicked on a call-to-action button or an image is known as the click-through rate. You can determine whether you’re receiving enough conversions from email by calculating this percentage.

According to Smart Insights, the average click-through rate might be as high as 10%, whereas Campaign Monitor estimates it to be about 3% on average. Therefore, you should make sure that your click-through rate never falls below 3%.

Your open rate is critical, even though both of these rates are significant. We’re devoting a whole section to how you can raise your open rates since we think it’s crucial.

Email open rate, in its simplest form, is the proportion of recipients who actually opened an email after receiving it.

The performance of your email marketing campaigns as a whole and the level of engagement in your emails are both accurately predicted by your open rate.

If your open rate is lower than the industry average, it may be an indication that your content is either subpar, your target audience is not the proper one, or, worse yet, both.

Tips To Improve Open Rates

To put it frankly, if you don’t pay just as much attention to increasing your email open rates, all of your previous efforts will be for nothing.

After all, what good are emails if no one reads them? Here are some tips to increase your emails’ open rates:

1. Using Engaging and Attractive Subject Lines

47% of people simply evaluate emails based on their subject lines, according to OptinMonster. Due to this, even though they are considerably shorter than the body of your email message, you shouldn’t rush through them.

Effective subject lines arouse interest. They employ powerful verbs and action words to persuade their audience to act.

While it may be tempting, it’s occasionally preferable to avoid using openly promotional words like “discount” or “free” as these words may cause the spam filter to be triggered.

Some actionable tips are:

  • Include a statistic in your subject line to increase credibility and suspense.
  • Make your subject lines fun and inventive by including an emoji; people typically find this quality appealing.
  • If you can, personalize your email subject lines to get your target’s attention right away.
  • By providing notices that bargains will soon expire, you can evoke a sense of urgency or scarcity. When the majority of your subscribers are members of Gen Z or millennials, this is very beneficial.

2. Appropriate Timing

Your open rate can be significantly impacted by the time you send your emails. You should do some A/B tests to find the ideal time to send your emails. But it will take some time.

You can consult information gathered by Campaign Monitor, Omnisend, and Klaviyo in the interim. The ideal days to send emails are Tuesdays or Thursdays, depending on the email marketing KPIs you’re trying to track.

Generally speaking, the best time to send marketing emails in terms of timing is when your subscribers will be taking a break.

One of the greatest times, according to Omnisend and HubSpot, is around 1 p.m. Omnisend has also mentioned 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. as ideal times.

3. Eliminate Inactive Subscribers

Building your subscriber list was one of our earliest suggestions, as you may remember. Therefore, what we’re suggesting now is likely to cause you a lot of confusion.

However, you may lessen the likelihood that your emails will be marked as spam by eliminating inactive subscribers from your subscriber list. After all, what use are they to you if they haven’t opened one of your emails in a while? None is the answer.

Inactive subscribers are often removed by marketers after a maximum of 15 months of inactivity, according to a Litmus analysis. In general, an inactive subscriber is one who hasn’t opened an email in at least the last six months.

Sending your subscribers a quick email every so often to confirm that their information is still accurate is a good practice because it can be sad to lose members that you’ve worked hard to add to your list.

Because they have updated their email address, you wouldn’t want to miss out on a subscriber who is still interested in your business.

4. Customized

Personalized messages and subject lines are far more effective. When you are actually writing to tens of thousands of subscribers, it can be difficult.

Consider that you are writing a letter to a buddy to make it simpler. This will enable you to produce material that is more relatable and less impersonal. Speaking of which, you need to know who your customers are in the first place in order to generate subject lines that will entice them to read on.

What are the problems they face? They value what, exactly? What gets them excited? A subject line in an email that promises to address their most pressing problems will almost certainly be opened.

5. Mobile Device Optimization

7 out of 10 mobile email consumers trash a poorly structured email in under three seconds, according to Email Monday. You must make sure that your emails are simple to read and appealing to mobile consumers as they are the most popular device for opening promotional emails.

Some actionable tips to optimize are:

  • Shorten your subject lines (in fact, irrespective of the device, shorter subject lines just perform better).
  • Avoid using small fonts on mobile devices because they can be more difficult to read.
  • Use smaller graphics to ensure the email loads quickly.
  • Include at least one call-to-action in each of your emails that is large enough to be easily tapped and is both plainly visible. Avoid placing several CTAs too close to one another if you intend to use them because this makes it simple for users to click the erroneous button.

Email Marketing Tools To Use

1. Active Campaign

By concentrating on developing a world-class product that offers a variety of solutions for B2C, B2B, and e-commerce enterprises from all over the world, ActiveCampaign has established itself as a top marketing automation tool.

With machine learning and predictive tools, it is by far the most sophisticated email marketing platform on our list, allowing marketers to operate more effectively and provide higher ROI.

ActiveCampaign, which is frequently credited with developing visual marketing automation, is remarkably easy and simpler to use than some of the other products on our list.

Additionally, ActiveCampaign has above-average delivery rates (>99%), interacts with more than 870 third-party applications, and takes extraordinary security and compliance steps.

In order to handle your sales, live chat, and of course, email campaigns, ActiveCampaign, an all-in-one marketing platform, has a built-in CRM system. Compared to several of the products on this list, ActiveCampaign is more reasonable and has a fair price.

The Customer Success Commitment from ActiveCampaign, which includes 22 assurances from their support team and free implementation and migration, was just announced.

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue provides a variety of nurturing features, such as its easy signup form options, landing page builder, and intuitive and responsive email editor, to help you easily convert leads into customers.

One of the top email platform options today, Sendinblue is a brilliant all-in-one digital marketing solution that also provides extensive reporting and a tonne of customizable templates.

With Sendinblue, you can easily develop an email marketing strategy, manage SMS and site chat messages, connect with Facebook ad management, and keep track of everything with ease thanks to a built-in CRM.

Sendinblue is a great approach to draw in and retarget all of your leads because all of your digital marketing efforts are concentrated in one location. In addition, you won’t have to pay more money as your list gets bigger because you can send emails to an unlimited number of recipients.

Additionally, Sendinblue’s pre-built developer recipes will make it simple for you to send transactional or bulk emails, as well as a number of other useful choices for developers if you’re interested in customized HTML emails.

3. Omnisend

Omnisend, which was created to assist e-commerce firms in personalizing their marketing, is swiftly rising to the top among online shop platforms.

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities and generate sales automatically, they provide a full marketing automation toolkit encompassing email, SMS, push notifications, integration with Google Ads, Facebook Lead Ads, and 70+ apps.

Omnisend has created cutting-edge email templates that are intended to encourage repeat business by concentrating solely on e-commerce.

The features like “Wheel of Fortune” offers, birthday discounts, and cart reminders all make it clear that the team behind Omnisend is well-versed in e-commerce best practices.

After establishing a connection with your eCommerce platform, Omnisend provides a variety of pre-built email and SMS sequences that are based on it.

4. ClickFunnels

If you can get past the heavily info-packed image of ClickFunnels, you’ll discover a powerful tool for creating sales and marketing funnels.

The idea behind ClickFunnels is that you can utilize it to nurture your audience via courses, membership sites, information goods, webinars, and more even though email marketing is a major component of their platform.

All of this is centralized by ClickFunnels under one roof, saving you from having to purchase and integrate four or five distinct solutions.

ClickFunnels is a special choice to take into consideration if converting your leads necessitates extensive instruction or numerous touch points via courses and information offerings.

5. Mailchimp

The majority of businesses and marketers throughout the world rely on this email marketing platform. It is a platform that offers all the features you need to run your email marketing campaign.

While its Content Studio is a designer tool that helps you to build interesting emails from scratch, it also includes email templates that you can use to produce various types of business emails.

Additionally, to make sure that your emails adhere to all brand rules, you can save your own branded photos and other visual components.

You can utilize its fantastic email automation capability to send mass emails at the appropriate times to the appropriate recipients.

Additionally, Mailchimp includes built-in analytics that offers helpful information about the effectiveness of your campaign and suggestions for improvement.

It also offers A/B testing, which will let you compare various content and subject lines. With this knowledge at your fingertips, improving the effectiveness of your efforts is considerably simpler.

Final Thoughts

Although there are numerous guidelines for sending marketing emails, the most crucial one is to treat your readers like real people.

If you keep this fundamental principle in the forefront of every autoresponder, lead magnet, and subject line, you can accomplish all of your email marketing objectives.

With the assistance of an email service provider, you can get your work done as well.

And if you wish to learn and understand the working of email in the world of marketing, you can take up this online email marketing course.

FAQs

1. What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a marketing medium and process that helps businesses engage with their customers, nurture leads, and eventually drive conversions through carefully composed and drafted emails.

2. What are the 4 types of Email Marketing?

The four types to market an email are:

  • Email Newsletters
  • Acquisition Emails
  • Retention Emails
  • Promotional Emails

3. What are the types of Email Marketing Campaigns?

Some of the campaigns are:

  • Welcome Email Series.
  • Standard Promotional Campaign.
  • Seasonal Campaign.
  • Triggered Email Series.
  • Post-Purchase Drip.
  • Connect-Via-Social Campaign.
  • Newsletter.
  • Cart Abandonment Emails Campaign.

4. What are some free Email Marketing tools?

Yes, there are some reliable email marketing tools that you may use without paying. These consist of ConvertKit, AWeber, MailerLite, and Mailchimp. All of these email marketing platforms have a free plan of some kind, but there are restrictions on how many contacts you can add.

Abhishek Mahendra
A spirited creative writer and marketer with more than 3 years of experience in creating engaging and informative content, he is passionate about digital marketing and keeps himself updated with the necessary information. He is well-versed in writing articles, white papers, case studies, and website content. Being a sports enthusiast, he also presents informative content in the sports domain.

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