All You Need to Know About Email Marketing
Email marketing helps marketers by delivering the campaigns right into the inbox, by keeping customers engaged, and by acquiring improved ROI.
Email marketing is still effective & powerful marketing channel and your email list is your goldmine waiting to be monetized.
In 2020, the number of global e-mail users amounted to four billion and is set to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025. While roughly 306.4 billion e-mails were estimated to have been sent and received each day in 2020, this figure is expected to increase to over 376.4 billion daily mails by 2025.
Now, let’s start uncovering insightful traits of Email Marketing.
Table of Contents
What is Email Marketing?
A powerful digital marketing strategy that is used to send targeted messages or campaigns through email to a group of prospects or customers is termed email marketing.
Whether a brand wants to connect with the target audience to promote its business or to generate more revenue – email marketing plays a pivotal role.
Email as an effective channel for direct marketing was first sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, and the rest is history, still on this day in 2021 email is ranked as the most efficient marketing channel that delivers the highest ROI as compared to other available marketing tools.
As per Hubspot, email generates $38 for every $1 spent which is an astounding 3,800% ROI and equips marketers with an extensive reach in comparison to other channels available.
Email Marketing Goals
Email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch with current customers and actively exist in their top-of-mind awareness.
And that’s why using emails to merely announce a sale offer or send a newsletter doesn’t emphasize the potential that email marketing holds. As an effective sales driver, marketers can reap the best out of their email list and can see the wonder of heightened business and that’s too economically without spending much.
78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
5 goals that you can achieve with email marketing
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Brand building and awareness
Brand awareness is a marketing term that describes the degree to which potential customers recognize and associate with a product or a brand by its name. Consistently promoting positive and meaningful content through emails to your target audience not only brings awareness but also is a great exercise in brand building.
Brand awareness spread through email is a vital component in driving customers’ decisions and helps marketers while promotions and product launches.
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Lead nurturing
Getting the email addresses of the prospective customers is just the start of the customer journey with your brand, to turn leads into buyers requires lots of effort by marketers.
Thoughtfully created email content engages the target audience and helps in reinforcing the relationships with customers for the present and also for the future. Lead nurturing email campaigns shall always be personalized and valuable that entices the customers to take action.
80% of new leads never translate into sales and companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales.
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Encourage sales and revenue
Any marketing effort is only effective when it drives sales, with a high response rate email marketing is time tested to generate more customers and better revenues at a low cost.
To increase the conversions it’s important that you give answers to a few questions like:
- Are your email campaigns really enticing?
- Is the email content is touching the customer’s pain points?
- Your email content is personalized as per your target audience’s interest & preferences or not?
- Are you sending emails randomly to everyone or to a specific targeted group?
59% of consumers say that email marketing influences their purchasing decisions.
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Website traffic
Email marketing campaigns with the right call to action, working links, and compelling content, significantly drive traffic to your website and leads more subscribers to your business. Email marketing not only drives website traffic but also increases repeat visits from quality leads.
For example, friendly reminders, personalized birthday wishes, seasonal offers sent through email encourage users to reach your business and drive conversions.
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Establish trustworthiness
Authentic and purposefully created emails establish trustworthiness, credibility, and long-lasting relationship with the customers.
While sending emails to your current and potential customers, it’s important that your communication is not completely focused on meeting sales targets and you keep on pushing the same content every time.
Be strategic while designing your emails, educate to nurture your leads, and let the customer decide whether he wants to continue with your brand or not. No lead can turn into sales for the first time its common 80% of sales require five or more follow-ups, so be consistent and build trust first.
Emails can turn customers into loyal supporters and ultimate brand advocates, but for that marketers need to create valuable experiences for them.
Getting started with email marketing
Email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed, share general messages, do promotions, and stay connected.
Compared to other types of digital marketing channels like social media or paid media, email marketing outperforms them and is an inexpensive way to advertise your company and its products or services.
The two biggest advantage of email marketing is minimum pricing and ease of sending.
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Establish your goals
The first step – identify the need for an email. Setting goals can be an effective way to help email campaigns succeed, goals to be achieved shall always be time-bound, specific, and measurable.
For example, by running an email campaign what you want to achieve, the goals can be many like increasing website traffic, growing an email list, driving more click-through on paid ads or simply improving the conversion rates.
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Build your own email list
Though it’s relatively easy to reach your ideal prospects quickly through an email marketing campaign by acquiring a targeted email list from the internet email list providers but buying an email list is a clear violation of the GDPR / CAN-SPAM Act.
In law, it’s stated that email subscribers must opt-in to receive your emails with active consent. There are great benefits of creating your authentic email list, this may take time but the email addresses you have collected will surely generate your business in the long run.
If still, you don’t have subscribers invite people to subscribe with a signup form in your website to collect email addresses or through other means like social media, referrals, events, or even offline media, etc.
By building your email list you will always be assured that you are right into the inboxes of the subscribers and never spam.
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Email list Segmentation
The first step while segmenting your email list shall be defining your target audience, the target audience is the specific group of people that you want to reach and who are most likely to respond positively to your email campaigns.
Segmentation helps marketers deliver the emails to subscribers based on their demographics, geographics, position in the sales funnel, preferences and purchase history, etc. Personalization is a critical component for customer optimization and better engagement can be established with the subscribers by sending more targeted content.
For example, segment inactive subscribers into different groups and target them with special offers or campaigns that can reactivate them and drive more conversions.
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Choose an email campaign type
Have you ever thought about what types of email marketing campaigns should you be actually sending to your customers?
There are numerous email types or email campaigns that you can use to engage your audience to build a better relationship. Few examples are – welcome email, promotional campaign, newsletter, seasonal campaign, product updates, and informational emails.
The right types of email marketing campaigns sent at the right times to specific groups can generate more revenue and customer loyalty.
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Create your first campaign
Start writing a first draft parallel to your goals and objectives. Email copy can include text, images, and videos to engage and convince the subscriber to take action through highlighted CTA.
Email campaigns or newsletters to be sent to your customers can be in HTML or in plain text format. When the email database is small businesses can send email to their subscribers from Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, but as the email subscriber database increases or the need for mass mailing and extended functionality arises businesses need to seek email service providers.
There are a lot of benefits like email designing tools, free email templates, automated scheduling, extensive analysis, etc. everything comes under one package when you use some email service providers. Getting a good email service provider to manage effectively all your email marketing is a great way to further success.
85% of B2B marketers, for example, send email newsletters as part of their content marketing strategy.
Need inspiration? Explore these 13 best email campaign types to get started.
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Make a sending schedule
Timing is the most important thing if you want to achieve results through your campaigns. “Pick a date & time zone” to customize when exactly you want the message to go out and also clarify why you choose that particular date or time, maybe it’s a welcome email right after someone subscribes to you, a Christmas offer to start tomorrow or a black Friday sales.
Whatever email service provider you are choosing you will always get the scheduling feature and surely will make your job easy. It’s more convenient when there are lots of campaigns to manage in less time, automation helps in exempting human errors and saves way more time in comparison to manual actions.
For example, if you have decided to send a campaign email at midnight, you don’t have to stay awake till the time just schedule it to that particular time and the job will be done automatically.
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Measure your results
Three important metrics that need marketer attention and to be tracked are delivery rates, open rates, and click-through rates.
Your email has reached your intended audience inboxes (delivery rate), once your email has reached your client’s inbox, your subscriber has received the email and opened it (open rate), and finally, he clicked on CTA or other provided link to perform intended action (click-through rate).
Collect the data and analyze it for future actions and take the remedial steps if your campaign has not performed well, factors can be many like campaign content, your email list, and time schedule, etc.
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Optimize for all device
Make sure your email campaigns look great to all of your recipients on all of their devices and guarantee a great experience for every subscriber. Make sure you test your email designs or content looking good aesthetically as well from a readability point of view on iPhones, pads, and android smartphones.
Smartphones are the easy computer in the pockets with 24 hours access; most important emails will be read on smartphones only, so optimize your campaigns for all screen sizes.
As per Litmus, 53% of people read email on their mobile devices.
Over 306.4 billion e-mails were estimated to have been sent and received each day in 2022 and that’s a big number. CNBC predicted that nearly three-quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet by 2025.
Conclusion
If you want that your promotional emails to get delivered, opened, and even read, then you need to be more strategic in customer targeting.
Email marketing as a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy can substantially increase your business revenue if created email campaigns connect with your audience that’s too in a personalized way.
Choose your email marketing software wisely considering your email performance and conversion goals, email campaign creation ease, personalization, email automation, and audience-targeting requirements.
