Email Marketing
Execute targeted campaigns seamlessly and nurture your relationship with customers through email.
Table of Contents
Background
Despite the rise of different channels, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to communicate, connect, and nurture your leads. With 99% of users checking their emails daily, the opportunity to promote informative, educational, sales-focused, and persuasive messages no matter what age group you are targeting is endless in email marketing.
What is Email Marketing?
For more than two decades, nothing can replace email marketing as the most powerful channel that develops personalized messaging in reaching your customers wherever they are. We’re now inundated with email marketing that feels like spam. There’s no denying that the impact of a well-crafted message can have us hooked. Email marketing has become a staple for modern marketers in every marketing strategy they craft. They have effectively identified how to build and segment an email list, develop campaigns, and track and optimize the results. All in the context of building a sophisticated and personalized multi-channel digital marketing strategy.
Getting Started with Email Marketing
To begin email marketing, you need to build a list. But not just any list, you need an engaged subscriber list—a list of enthusiastic audiences excited to hear from your company. Although doing this takes more time and work, the payoff will be great on your return on investment.
There are various steps and ways to find an audience who’ll look forward to getting your emails, here are a few that have worked best for most companies:
1. Sign-up forms on the website
Create a form for newsletters or new blog signups and install triggers that will help you gather customer data. That way when people visit your website for the first time and are interested in what they see, they’ll want a way to stay in the loop for future news and updates about your brand.
2. Sign-up forms on social media channels
Another effective way to collect new contacts is to drive signups through your social media channels. Social media is a great channel to promote your content. Utilize that resource and share your signup forms to collect contact information from your engaged followers.
3. Organic and Paid Search
Driving a new audience to a landing page alone can be tough. But if you optimize both organic and paid search in your content marketing program, you may attract more visitors. Using relevant educational content and promotional offers as an incentive can also be magnets to populate your subscriber list.
Types of Emails
Once you have people on your email list, what should you send to your audience? Here are some common email types:
Welcome Email
Start everything with a welcome email. An on-brand welcome message or thank you for subscribing will set you off the right foot. In the next one, it can be a promo offer, video, and more. Some brand’s welcome emails are complex that include more than five or more welcome emails. Just be creative and aim for further engagement.
Newsletter
Newsletters are a great way to keep your subscribers in the loop about almost everything happening in your company and industry. You can use them to promote achievements, industry news, or product launches. Deploying a segmented approach based on location, preferences, purchase behaviors, and more is a great way to structure your newsletters for better engagement.
Drip emails
To keep it more personalized, deploying an activity-specific email will help keep your audience engaged. Drip emails or nurturing emails are sequences you can implement in response to an activity. These emails can be prompted by a user signing up for an email list or even downloading an e-book. They can also be triggered in response to a particular action taken from your channels.
How to build email marketing campaigns
Understand your audience
Every email campaign begins with understanding who you are sending your message to and how you can engage with them effectively based on their preferences and needs. It would help if you segmented users granularly so that you are sharing relevant content and promotions. You can break them down into various factors—demographic, age, location, occupation, behavior, and more. Utilizing real-time data to understand your audience will help you send relevant, valuable, and engaging email messages.
A/B test email templates
To make your organization stand out from the noise, ensure your templates use elements personalized to each user’s needs and interests. Building a variety of templates tailored for different types of emails is highly encouraged for optimized reading across any platform. Ensure you use clear language, compelling subject, and creative assets that can pique the interest of your audience. When it comes to your marketing emails, make sure to track successful sends, opens, and click-through rates to understand which ones are getting the highest levels of engagement.
Keep an eye on email deliverability
It has been an evident challenge for companies that some emails are not making it through to your audience’s inboxes, affecting your email credibility rate. You should send your emails in small batches, beginning with contacts you know who are regularly engaging with your brand. This will allow your audience’s providers to recognize your IP address as a legitimate source. Cleaning your lists regularly is also a must—removing unengaged users, unopened emails, and more—will help you maintain an engaged list.
Types of email marketing services
Today’s marketing world is dominated by technology. Most organizations use email marketing software to create, design, send, and analyze their email marketing activities. Here are a few types commonly used:
Batch-blast email marketing software
Batch-blast tools are a no-brainer. It was the status quo of early email marketing. You simply use your templates or design them using software to specific segments.
Marketing automation software
Today, most email marketing software includes options for marketing automation. Marketing automation tools let you plan out sequenced emails that are configured using workflows in response to a user’s action. For instance, if a user clicks on a specific link in your email, you can follow up with a series of emails or promotional offers triggered around similar topics. Using marketing automation software allows you to carefully segment your list at greater depth in response to the contact‘s behavior. Marketing automation is the best tool to boost engagement quicker and smoother. When considering marketing automation as a solution, ensure that your workflows respond to a specific context of the buyer’s journey.
Email deliverability software
Aside from email marketing tools, email deliverability tools are available which ensures all your activities are delivered one hundred percent. Email deliverability tools are used to validate, clean, improve, and assess your email deliverability performance. If you’re sending millions of emails each month, it’s important to make deliverability a core priority of your email marketing program. Often these tools integrate with other tools and technologies that your company uses which is a great strategy to add to your plates.
Factors that improve email marketing campaigns
Today’s consumers have endless ways to communicate with brands, email marketing is one of the most impactful strategies to connect with your customers. At glance email marketing is straightforward, but what can you do to lift your open rates? Here are a few factors to consider:
Focus on quality
Best-in-class design and content will put you in a great spot. Emails are strong representations of your brand. Providing engaging content and design will help spur actions in your marketing initiatives.
Integration is key to a smooth sailing campaign
Your email marketing platform should integrate with other tools you use in your marketing technology stack. Consolidating all of your data in one platform can help you craft highly personalized emails that your customers will love.
Optimize for mobile
Our smartphones and mobile phones are now becoming an everyday need. So make sure that your email content and design are mobile-friendly. Call-to-action buttons and texts should be noticeable and easy to scroll through.
Multi-channel messaging
Consider a multi-channel marketing strategy that will enable you to build a personalized buyer’s journey. Moving across multiple platforms— email, web, mobile SMS, and direct mail—should be considered in every campaign you create. Each user’s path is different. It’s best to personalize each path as it will allow you to communicate with them based on their preferences, timings, and channels, making it much easier for you to divert conversions.
Wrap Up
Email marketing remains a strong channel for digital marketing. Paying attention to best practices is great, but don’t feel caged and feel free to iterate your own. Every brand is different, finding a winning cadence in communicating and converting your target audience is a must.