Email marketing is a powerful way to promote your products or services and establish a relationship with your audience. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about email marketing, including how to create an effective email campaign and build an email list, how to segment your audience, and how to measure your results. Let’s get started!
Understanding Email Marketing
Before we dive into the details, let’s start with the basics. What is email marketing, and why is it important? Email marketing is the practice of sending commercial messages to a group of people via email. The goal of email marketing is to build a relationship with your audience and promote your products or services.
Why does Email Marketing work?
Many use email almost daily, which makes it a highly effective marketing strategy when you send emails to prospects and customers. The better email campaigns you make, the more conversion you get, and it can turn one-time buyers into loyal, raving fans.
Email converts better than any other marketing channel; also, people are willing to spend more money when they receive email offers. Mails have a huge ROI return of Investment rate because you get many leads to sell your products or services.
There is no external entity or algorithm you need to consider that impacts how you reach out to your subscribers. It is unlike social media, where your account or post could be suspended or deleted. You can completely automate the email campaign, which makes it a lot easier when you only need to write the content.
With emails, you can build a connection with personalized engagement and boost the brand awareness of your company. If you have new relevant blog content, you can share it with email subscribers. It is also useful to send other valuable information or to promote your product and services.
When to start with Email Marketing?
You need to build a brand before you can select your email marketing strategy. It doesn’t make sense to create an email campaign if you have only a little or zero traffic on your site. It is important to have an already established brand and a website that gets enough traffic.
To start with the email, you need to understand your audience and what their behavior is. What kind of content or page is most visited on your website? If you look into Google Analytics and Search Console, you find a lot of helpful metrics that show what your audience is most interested in.
If you sell products or services, you need a buyer persona, which helps find the content your audience is interested in and which demographics buy behavior they have.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Increased Engagement
Email marketing allows you to directly communicate with your audience, leading to increased engagement. By segmenting your email list and sending targeted messages, you can create a more personalized experience for your subscribers.
Cost-effective
Compared to other marketing channels, email marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your target audience. With email marketing, you can reach a large number of people without breaking the bank.
Measurable Results
Email marketing provides measurable results, allowing you to track your open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. By tracking your results, you can optimize your email marketing strategy to improve your performance.
Creating an Email Marketing Campaign
To create an effective email marketing campaign, you need to start with a clear goal. What do you want to achieve with your campaign? Do you want to drive sales, build brand awareness, or promote a new product? Once you have a goal in mind, you can start planning your campaign.
Step 1: Define Your Audience
The first step in creating an email marketing campaign is to define your audience. Who do you want to reach with your emails? Are you targeting existing customers, new prospects, or a specific demographic?
Step 2: Choose Your Email Type
There are several types of emails you can send as part of your campaign. These include:
- Newsletters: Regular updates on your business or industry
- Promotional Emails: Special offers, sales, or discounts
- Welcome Emails: Greeting new subscribers and introducing your business
- Abandoned Cart Emails: Reminding customers of items left in their cart
- Follow-up Emails: After a purchase or inquiry
Step 3: Create Your Content
Once you have defined your audience and chosen your email type, it’s time to create your content. Your content should be engaging, informative, and relevant to your audience. Consider using personalization, such as addressing recipients by name, to increase engagement.
Step 4: Design Your Emails
Design is an essential part of your email marketing campaign. Your emails should be visually appealing and easy to read on different devices. Consider using a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes.
Step 5: Test and Send Your Emails
Before you send your emails, make sure to test them to ensure they are working correctly. This includes checking for broken links, typos, and formatting issues. Once you have tested your emails, it’s time to send them to your audience.
Segmentation of your audience
Segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into groups based on specific criteria. Segmentation allows you to send targeted messages to different groups of subscribers based on their interests, behaviors, or demographics. This can lead to higher engagement and better results.
Demographic Segmentation
Demographic segmentation divides your audience based on specific characteristics such as age, gender, or location. This can be useful for targeting specific demographics with relevant content.
Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral segmentation divides your audience based on their behavior, such as their past purchases, website visits, or email opens. This can be useful for targeting subscribers with personalized messages based on their interests.
Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segmentation divides your audience based on their personality, values, or attitudes. This can be useful for targeting subscribers with messages that resonate with their beliefs or interests.
How to build an email list?
Before you send an email, you need a good marketing strategy so your emails don´t get lost in spam filters/folders or inboxes.
First of all, you should know your campaign goals, why you want to write emails, what you offer to your audience, and what information they might find valuable.
Of course, it is important to find people to signup for your email list that wants to see your content in their inbox.
If your visitors land on your website and blog post and read your content, you place a free offer (lead magnet) at the end of your post to collect an email address. Lead magnets are different digital materials like PDFs, MP3s, or videos that you can create yourself with zero or minimal cost. It can be anything you want, but it must provide value to your audiences for free.
Other examples of lead magnets are:
- ebooks
- cheat sheets and resources with valuable tips
- white papers or case studies
- courses or webinars
- Free trials or samples
- Free templates
- Free quote or consultation
- Quizzes or a self-assessment
- coupon
- product and service updates and new releases
There are many ways you can get people to sign up for your newsletter when. You need to make it clear what they get so they are willing to give their email address.
Lead magnets have to be easily consumed, so no 300-page pdf or five-hour-long videos. It should be a tool skillset or useful information that your audience can apply. Even better if your lead magnet is as valuable as a product or service you offer. It needs to be relevant to your audience and solves problems in your niche. The free offer should be sent to the people right after they sign up for your newsletter.
If you created or found a lead magnet, you need to build an opt-in form to collect the email address on your website.
- Make an attractive design that fits with your brand and website. But also stand out from the page to make your readers excited to sign up.
- The text should be relevant to your lead magnet, and the information needs to be truthful and trustworthy.
- Keep the form as simple as possible. Only collect essential information like first name and email address. Use a headline that clearly describes the benefit of the lead magnet.
- Ensure that everything works before the form goes live. Look if you have a thank, you page that your offer is delivered, and you provide an overall good user experience, so people sign up for your newsletter.
- Your opt-in forms also have to meet data protection like the EU´s GDPR legal requirement.
Opt-in Form Example:
How to use Email for Marketing?
With an opt-in form and a lead magnet, you can collect email addresses for your list. But you need to decide what you want to send users after that. Do you use a weekly newsletter or product announcements? Or share a blog post per email?
You can use many different types of email campaigns that are relevant to your audience. Decide what type fits your digital marketing goals. You create various opt-in forms for different email campaigns.
For instance, one for product offers and updates and another one for blog posts and valuable information. Let the user choose what email they want to receive from your company. This can be done by placing an opt-in form as an example on your blog post pages and a second one on your product offer page, where you give a coupon in return for an email address.
Plan how often you want to contact your list and inform your audience. Consistency builds trust with your readers, so make sure you have scheduled so they don´t forget your business.
Email Marking strategy requires a lot of consideration, from what time you send your email to which devices emails could be opened.
What are the components of a successful email?
- Copy: The text in the body of your email needs to be consistent with your own voice and stick to one topic.
- Start with the first name and/or greeting
- Use region-specific information if it makes sense
- Sent relevant content to the subgroup of readers
- Integrate events like region-specific holidays or birthdays it suits
- End your email with a personal signature from the writer
- Place a relevant call to action that is useful to the reader
- Check for grammar and spelling errors
- Images: Choose relevant and eye-catching pictures that are optimized for all devices.
- CTA: Email should have a call to action that leads to related offers and stand out from the rest of the mail. Think in advance about how you effectively pitch your CTA.
- Timing: You need to consider where your audience is from to find a good day and time when to send an email.
- Responsive: Everything in your email should be optimized for all types of devices.
- Personalization: Make sure to address the reader in a friendly and familiar tone.
- Subject Line: Probably the most important thing in an email because it is the first thing readers see before they open the mail. So you need to use clear, actionable, and easy-to-understand language which is personalized and aligned with the text of your email.
Break up your email list into subcategories to meet certain interests, characteristics, and preferences. You can part your list into geographical locations, lifestyle stages, industry, engagement with your brand, language, job title, or anything where it makes sense.
Each person that signs up for your list is at a different level of readiness. To reach the goal that subscribers convert into a customer, you need to build trust and develop a relationship with them, not lose them. While long-time readers want more problem-solving advice and useful offers and updates. New subscribers may need more information about your product or services
You can part your email list into different segments if you create various Optin forms and lead magnets to attract a specific group of people. So you can make your emails as exclusive as possible to each subgroup.
Using email marketing automation
You need to automate the process of sending emails to each specific segment so people receive relevant and targeted emails. You can use different types of email marketing software and automation to do this:
Autoresponders are useful when users signup for an email list and download an ebook, for example. You can set up a series of emails that get sent out automatically after the download. Make sure you send useful and interesting emails to your subscriber, and even better if you build up to a certain conclusion or lead with a series of five emails, for instance.
You decide when you want to send the email weekly, monthly… The good thing once you set up the process and check if everything works without spelling or grammar errors, you don´t need to look after it daily anymore.
Workflows are even better than autoresponders because they send email actions based on certain criteria you set. There are two key components of workflows:
- Enrollment criteria: the action that a user qualifies for the workflow. For instance, if a subscriber opens a certain email or downloads a specific ebook.
- Goal: The emails are based on the reader’s actions, and what emails are sent depends on the behavior of the user.
The tools are smart enough to know if you opened an email or note and sent an automated series of emails to what the subscriber will find useful. The automation process can even adapt to the lifecycle of one prospect and send it at a specific time.
To keep your email automation successful, you need to monitor and improve your email campaigns. This can be done if you look into certain metrics like the open rates of emails, the click-through rates of links, and the unsubscribe rate. If you track the performance and make improvements, you can get the best results.
Conclusion
Email marketing is about providing visitors with useful and valuable content and products. With the right lead magnet, you can get subscribers for your different email list segments. So you can use email automatically with relevant and quality information.
If you write a polite and respectful, and valuable email, you can reach your marketing goals. Make sure you provide the knowledge of what people asked for.
To get the most out of your email marketing campaign, you need to select fitting email service providers. The platform needs to have integrated autoresponders and workflows that are easy to use and give you the tool to build forms, landing pages, and CTAs.
Also, good tracking analytics are needed to improve and split-test your emails. There are many Marketing tools that are specified to help create effective email marketing campaigns.
FAQs
Q: What is email marketing?
A: Email marketing is a type of digital marketing where businesses send marketing messages to their customers using email as a means of communication.
Q: Why is email marketing important?
A: Email marketing is important because it provides businesses with a cost-effective way to reach their customers. It allows businesses to build relationships, increase ROI, and communicate important information to their subscribers.
Q: How does email marketing work?
A: Email marketing involves building an email list of subscribers who have opted-in to receive marketing messages from your business. You then create and send emails to this list of subscribers using an email marketing service or email marketing tool.
Q: How do I get started with email marketing?
A: To get started with email marketing, you first need to choose an email marketing platform. From there, you need to build your email list, create your email content, and send your email campaigns.
Q: What type of emails can I send with email marketing?
A: There are many types of emails you can send with email marketing, including welcome emails, email newsletters, marketing emails, and email series.
Q: How do I build my email list?
A: To build your email list, you can offer incentives such as freebies or discounts in exchange for email addresses. You can also collect email addresses from forms on your website, social media, or events.
Q: How do I grow my email list?
A: You can grow your email list by promoting your email list through social media, optimizing your website opt-in forms, and offering valuable content in your emails to encourage subscribers to share with others.
Q: What should be in my first marketing email?
A: Your first marketing email should introduce yourself or your business and provide value to the subscriber. You can offer a freebie or a discount and include a clear call to action to encourage subscribers to take action.
Q: How do I choose the best email marketing service for my business?
A: When choosing an email marketing service, you should consider factors such as pricing, ease of use, features, and customer support. Some popular options include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and AWeber.
Q: How do I send effective marketing emails?
A: To send effective marketing emails, you should personalize your emails, segment your audience, use attention-grabbing subject lines, provide valuable content, and use a clear call-to-action.
Q: How often should I send emails to my subscribers?
A: The frequency of your email sends depends on your audience and your content. Generally, it’s best to send emails regularly, such as once a week or twice a month.
Q: What is a good open rate for email marketing?
A: The average email open rate is around 20%, which can vary depending on your industry and audience.
Q: How can I improve my email open rates?
A: To improve your email open rates, you can try different subject lines, use personalization, and send emails at the right time for your audience. Segmenting your email list can also help improve open rates by ensuring your messages are relevant to your subscribers.
Q: What types of emails should I send?
A: There are several types of emails you can send, including newsletters, promotional emails, welcome emails, and abandoned cart emails. The type of email you send will depend on your goals and audience.
Q: How can I measure the success of my email marketing campaigns?
A: To measure the success of your email marketing campaigns, you can track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. You can also track revenue generated from your email campaigns.
Q: How can I avoid my emails being marked as spam?
A: To avoid your emails being marked as spam, get permission from your subscribers before adding them to your email list. Use a clear subject line, avoid spammy words and phrases, and include an unsubscribe link in every email.
Q: Can I buy email lists?
A: Buying email lists is not recommended, as it can result in low engagement rates, high unsubscribe rates, and damage to your brand reputation. It’s better to focus on building your own email list through organic methods.
Email Campaign Checklist:
