What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a direct marketing tool that lets you target your audience and customers by sending them emails about your new products, specials and company updates. The information you provide should give them valuable information that helps them reach their goals, so it needs to be personalised and highly targeted.
Unlike the mass emails businesses would send out in the past, this contemporary segmented approach may sound time-consuming and labour-intensive, but automation tools can do all the heavy lifting for you. So, email marketing is a long-term strategy that will increase your turnover and develop your brand. The return on investment is generally high if your email marketing campaign is executed well.
Related: How to Write the Perfect Job Offer Letter Email
Types of email marketing
Marketing emails are not one-size-fits-all. There are several different types of marketing emails that you should be aware of:
- Welcome emails: A welcome email is perfect for starting a relationship with a potential new customer. Make a good first impression by giving your email a personal touch without trying to sell your products or services at this stage. A positive customer experience will make potential leads more receptive to your future emails.
- Informational emails: An information email is typically an announcement or a company newsletter with information about your brand and products and the latest news about your organisation. Informational emails like newsletters can be sent out in regular intervals and feature interviews, company milestones, employee profiles or new products.
- Promotional emails: The purpose of promotional emails is to promote a specific product or new release, or your company in general. They often include information about special offers or subscriber-only deals. A promotional email needs to contain a clear call-to-action (CTA), e.g. clicking on a link to use a discount voucher code.
- Transactional emails: A transactional email is a message that asks the recipient to take a certain action. Typical examples are registering for a webinar or confirming their registration by clicking on a link if you have double opt-in enabled. Transactional emails usually have a high click-through rate (CTR).
- Re-engagement emails: A re-engagement email will help you reconnect with subscribers who have not been active recently. Re-establishing a relationship is well worthwhile because
- Storytelling emails: A storytelling email is ideal for telling subscribers stories about your brand and evoking an emotional response in the reader. This can be a powerful tool and lead to increased engagement and interest in your business.
Related: Social Media Recruiting Tips and Strategies
Benefits of email marketing
Email marketing is a useful and highly effective tool for growing your business. Let’s explore some of the benefits it offers:
- Increased conversions: Making your clients and potential clients aware of new products, time-limited campaigns and offers, or reminding them of their abandoned cart will often lead to conversions and drive sales.
- Providing value: By giving your customers information about their industry and how your products or services can help them, you are providing them with value. This will keep your audience engaged and coming back.
- Self-promotion: […] As all your subscribers consented to receiving your emails, this gives you a great platform for self-promotion without feeling like you’re forcing yourself onto unsuspecting readers.
- Customer loyalty: Email marketing done right can help you build a community. You can take your customers along the whole journey – from new lead to conversion to retention – through emails. This creates a sense of loyalty in your customers that is priceless.
- Brand recognition: Popping up in someone’s inbox with content that is positively received can do wonders for your brand. Use marketing emails to boost awareness of your brand and reach a wide range of potential new customers at little cost.
- Generating traffic: Your marketing emails should always include a call-to-action that entices readers to click. This will drive traffic to your web pages and not only improve your SEO results but also boost customer engagement with your brand.
The dos and don’ts of email marketing
Here is an overview of the most important dos and don’ts of email marketing to keep in mind if you want your campaigns to be successful:
Dos
- Think of the recipient: Consider what sort of content you might like to receive if you were the target reader, and write with this in mind to ensure your message will be well received.
- Use double opt-in: This is when a new subscriber is asked to confirm their subscription by clicking on a link in a separate email before they are officially added to your email list; double opt-in not only prevents spam emails and fake sign-ups, but also increases the user’s interest and trust level.
- Use a branded sender name and email address: Your recipients need to see at first glance who is emailing them; the sender’s name and the company name should be part of the official email address so it doesn’t get caught by spam filters and your subscribers are more likely to open and read your email.
- Personalise your emails: Avoid sending out generic mass emails. Readers will quickly catch on and not feel valued as individuals.
- Monitor metrics: Always check how successful (or not) your campaigns are and make corresponding changes. Otherwise, you may be investing time and effort into something that doesn’t work.
Don’ts
- Buy email lists: This will potentially put your email account at risk and damage your brand reputation; plus, many accounts on such lists are likely inactive or fake.
- Forget to proofread: There’s nothing more off-putting than an email riddled with spelling or grammar errors.
- Send too many emails: You don’t want your potential or current customers to think of your messages as spam.
- Forget to include a call to action: The whole point of a marketing email is to create some sort of engagement with your readers, so a CTA is a must.
- Go for the hard sale: Nothing will turn readers away quicker than a pushy email trying to sell something without trying to build a relationship or offer value first.
Related: Grow Your Business
How to increase conversion rates in email marketing
There are a number of tricks you can use to increase the conversion rate of your marketing emails. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
- Provide useful content: Understand your audience’s needs and customise your email content accordingly. Always remember that you have to offer your subscribers value or they won’t read on.
- Use paragraphs: Improve the readability of your emails by using paragraphs. There’s nothing more off-putting for potential readers than being faced with large blocks of text.
- Make the subject line interesting: Use an attention-grabbing subject line to make your subscribers curious, so they are more likely to open those emails.
- Optimise for mobile: Today, many users will open your email on their smartphone or tablet. Make sure you spend a few minutes optimising your emails for mobile phone use to avoid users getting frustrated and deleting your emails.
- Make the subject line interesting: Use an attention-grabbing subject line to arouse an emotional response and make your subscribers curious, so they are more likely to open those emails.
- Make the CTA clear: Always include a direct and unambiguous call to action. Readers are more likely to click on a link if they can clearly understand what benefits it will provide for them.
All of these steps will help you increase the conversion rates from your marketing emails.
How to measure email marketing results
Any campaign stops being useful if you don’t track its metrics to discover how successful it is. Try these steps to measure your email marketing results:
- Check the open rate: How many subscribers actually open and read your emails? This is a crucial figure that you need to review after each campaign to assess reader engagement.
- Analyse your website traffic: Use an analytics tool such as Google Analytics to check your traffic. You can view reports that easily let you identify how much traffic has reached your page from your marketing emails.
- Monitor the bounce rate: The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who click through hand land on your website but leave again right away without doing anything else. If your bounce rate is high, you may want to examine how well your email and website contents are aligned.
- Track your subscriber numbers: Do you find that a large number of subscribers have unsubscribed after certain types of emails? Use this information to see what could have gone wrong and to tailor your content better next time.
How to create an email marketing strategy
Instead of just winging it and sending emails as and when you think of something you want to share, take the time to create a comprehensive email marketing strategy. Here are the steps you can take:
Set goals
Before you take any action, be clear on what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to build rapport with your subscribers? Remind potential customers of their abandoned cart? Promote a new product you want to sell? Your goals will determine what your emails will look like.
Use a template
Gone are the days when you had to create a new email manually from scratch each time. Today, you can get free email marketing templates online or have a professional design one for you that you can then reuse.
Create content
Put yourself in the shoes of your readers and tailor your content to each customer profile and their stage of the buying journey. Your copy needs to be engaging and arouse the reader’s interest so that they follow through with your call to action.
Decide on timing
Do you want to send out a weekly update, a quarterly newsletter, or both? Decide on the best timing for each customer type, and schedule your marketing emails accordingly. Having this schedule allows you to plan your content and take the pressure off down the line, as you won’t need to think about timing decisions during busy periods, for example.
Related: New Employee Welcome Email Examples
Refer back to this guide when you come to creating your next email marketing campaign, and take your business to the next level.
