This beginner guide on email marketing will help you understand the basics and steps to create an email marketing campaign. You suggest you go through the guide to have a solid grasp of how to run email marketing for a business.
Being one of the most profitable direct marketing channels, email marketing has helped companies achieve an average ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. Since it will be a key pillar in any digital marketing strategy, one should figure out email marketing from inside and out. Don’t sweat it, that’s why we’re here to help. Let’s get started!
Table of contents
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that involves sending commercial email messages to email subscribers or people that have opted to sign up to your email list and receive email communications. It is one of the primal digital marketing channels that still work profitably.
You can use email marketing to build a community, drive sales, keep customers up-to-date, and more. The two main types of marketing emails you can send are:
• Promotional emails
Email marketing campaigns primarily launched to promote a special offer, product release, webinar, eBook, and more come under promotional emails. These campaigns generally have three to ten emails sent over several weeks. Promotional emails have a definite call to action as the goal is to make the reader take action.
• Informational emails
Informational emails, as the name suggests, are sent to share information with the subscribers. Newsletters are a prime example of how informational emails work. These are used to share news related to your products, services, or overall brand. Newsletters help nurture a consistent connection with your customers.
You can also use newsletters to share insights, tips, and thoughts that the subscribers might be interested in. All you are trying to do is bring value to their lives. Then you have “announcements” that help share new releases, changes in the brand, or something else related to the company.
Email marketing has established itself as one of the most reliable digital marketing channels in recent times. It has taken a giant leap from being a medium of necessary formality to a prime channel of all business-customer communication. Let’s learn other benefits of email marketing, shall we?
Why is email marketing important?
Email marketing is a fantastic combination of accessibility and affordability. The medium is accessible to all age groups, which helps open a wide range of audiences for businesses. After all, not everyone knows how to work their way through the internet. But, most people know how to check their email.
Apart from that, email marketing is ridiculously cost-effective, both from the customer and business point of view. Several email marketing tools are available on the internet with pricing packages that suit all budgets. In other words, email marketing has successfully levelled the playing field that digital marketing is.
The most crucial benefit of launching an email marketing campaign is building an email list that you can own and leverage. Even if other digital marketing channels vanish in thin air tomorrow, a business built on a solid email marketing strategy will never go belly up. That’s the beauty of owning an email list.
Besides these, there are other benefits you should be aware of before you start investing in email marketing:
• Increase brand awareness
The one-to-one communication that email marketing facilitates is extremely valuable. Email lets businesses reach customers directly. If you play your card right, you might help your brand stay on top of your customers’ minds. Since most emails are personalized, it is more impactful than other digital marketing mediums.
• Instils customer loyalty
The best quality of email marketing is that it helps businesses reach out to customers at every stage of the buyer journey. Its ability to build a community through consistent correspondence is mind-blowing. To be frank, subscribers genuinely wait for their newsletters to arrive at a certain time in a week!
• Encourages conversion
Finally, it gets your business what it needs to stay afloat – conversions! Email marketing is a great tool to help drive visitors from potential customers, to purchasets. Businesses often create email marketing campaigns to let their customers know about upcoming sales, discounts, promotions, special offers, and more. You can also use email marketing to reduce cart abandonment and improve your online store’s performance.
How to get started with email marketing?
So, how can you make the most out of email marketing? Well, you will have to create a campaign! Let’s figure out how to create an email marketing strategy from scratch.
1. Know the marketing goals
Before you start, make sure you spend enough time thinking about your marketing and business goals. It will help you align your email marketing goals. You should know what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaigns because that will decide several factors like the type of campaigns, content, target audience, performance metrics, and more.
Find out what you are looking for. You might want to drive more traffic, or increase sales, increase brand awareness, keep the customers up to date, or just build a solid relationship with the subscribers. These goals differ from one brand to another.
So, you should plan well to allow your brand to get the most out of the email marketing campaign. The idea is to create a laser-focused and high-performing email campaign that helps you achieve your marketing goals.
2. Build an email list
The next step to creating an email marketing campaign is building an email list. The list will help you send the campaigns to the right people and meet the set goals. So, how can you build an email list?
You can begin by importing the list of existing customers. Keep in touch with your customers through email by importing their details into the email marketing software. Most software allow users to upload a contact list manually.
If you happen to use a CRM, accounting software, or eCommerce platform, you can sync them with the email marketing tool. Besides that, you can build an email list from scratch by luring customers to share their email information through compelling content, discounts, and other offers.
3. Send the right email campaign
There are several email campaigns that one can choose depending on the set marketing goals. Let’s discuss a few of them to get acquainted with how they help achieve the goals.
• Newsletter
A newsletter is one of the most used email campaigns where the topic of interest is generally the same. Brands create month-long campaigns and develop content mostly around the same topic. Newsletters are mainly used to stay in touch with existing customers.
• Marketing offer
These email marketing campaigns are sent to drive direct responses from the receivers. You can create marketing offers showcasing the latest stock and encourage people to purchase. You can also boost sales by offering discounts or special promotions.
• Announcement
You can even create email marketing campaigns to announce a new product or service. These can even be used to announce updates in an existing line of products. Announcement emails work best when sent to an engaged audience. The idea is to share information and lead by value.
• Event invitation
Is there an event coming up in a few days? Use event invitation email campaigns to generate interest! You should use these to invite subscribers to the event.
4. Structure the first campaign
Here’s what you need to remember when structuring your first campaign – the average attention span of adults is just eight seconds. It means that people aren’t reading the campaigns thoroughly. They scan and look for things of interest.
So, a long, text-heavy email campaign is the last thing you want to create. Structure your email campaign properly to grab people’s attention and boost the click-through rate through the roof.
You can use images and visuals to make the content memorable and stand out. Leverage email personalization to ensure the content is relevant to the audience’s interest. Most importantly, align the campaign’s colors, fonts, and branding with your brand to instil trust.
5. Measure, analyze, optimize
Lastly, you will have to measure the performance of the campaign and conclude the results. Performance metrics like unique opens, bounce rate, open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, spam complaints, shares, and others will help you assess the quality of the campaign.
A high-level overview of the campaigns will allow you to make significant changes and improve the results. You will also have to take help from web analytics tools like Google Analytics to understand how users spend their time navigating around your site once they click through the email.
Keep reading!
Indeed, email marketing is a powerful digital marketing tool to boost sales and revenue for any business. But, it works best when you have people in your team that know what they are doing. In other words, you need email marketing professionals that can take over the job and generate excellent results.
We hope this post helped you understand email marketing from inside and out. Loved this content? Don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!