What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one type of digital marketing that uses email to reach out to potential customers, increase the brand’s visibility, create trust with customers, and increase marketing strategies.
In the realm of marketing via the Internet, email marketing is generally regarded as an affordable and powerful tool that can increase the engagement of customers and increase sales. This is why it’s often the mainstay of a variety of online advertising strategies developed in the present.
This article will look deeper into the concept of email marketing, discuss the benefits of email marketing, and give suggestions and tools to get to the right place in your marketing strategies.
Marketing via email is when businesses use email marketing to stay in touch with their client base. It is a type of direct marketing that is used to provide information to customers, enhance brand recognition, and advertise particular products and services.
There are many types of marketing emails you can consider incorporating into your marketing strategies via email. A few of the most popular types include:
- Welcome emails
- Newsletters sent via email
- Promotional emails
- Emails to nurture leads or re-engagement messages
- Transactional emails, for example, confirmation emails or password reset notifications
- Survey or feedback emails
- Milestone emails, like for birthdays or anniversaries of customers
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Email is among the most used methods of communication on the internet. It is estimated that 306.4 billion messages were sent out daily in 2020. This number is expected to rise by 376.4 billion before 2025.
The ability to reach a huge number of potential customers with only a single click can make email a cheap digital marketing tool that can have the potential to have a significant impact. One study in 2021 has found that the typical ROI for email marketing is $36 per each $1 invested.
Yet, the return on investment of email marketing may not be the same for all industries. As part of the study, researchers analyzed an average return per dollar in four distinct industries:
- Economic, retail, and consumer items: $45
- Advertising, PR, marketing agency: $42
- Technology and Software: $36
- Media, publishing, events, sports, and entertainment: $32
Whatever the business, it is obvious that email marketing has an opportunity to earn a return that is several times what you invest in the beginning.
Best Practices for Email Marketing and Strategies
An effective email marketing campaign can entice customers from the past, attract new customers and assist you in achieving your goals in marketing. To achieve this you’ll have to design a well-thought-out email marketing campaign that is strategically engaging to customers by providing relevant and timely messages.
When you’re putting together designing your personal email marketing campaign keep these tips in mind:
- Design eye-catching subject lines for emails.
- Make sure you organize your message.
- Keep your design simple.
- Only send emails to people who have opted into your mailing list.
- Plan your email’s timing carefully.
- Make sure you are aware of the tests and keep track of them.
1. Create eye-catching subject lines.
A subject line grabs the reader’s attention and draws readers to the message. Likewise, the message’s content elaborates on your message and encourages the reader to take action.
The large quantity of emails received daily indicates that competition is a lot higher in the inboxes of recipients. A great subject line will help your brand distinguish you from the rest. This is evident by the average rate of open for all branded emails across industries, which is 21.33 percent.
The most compelling subject lines are interesting and pertinent to the readers who read them. There are a variety of methods to enhance your subject lines:
- Make sure to clearly state the promo. (“Get 15 percent off your next purchase”)
- Make a person feel a sense of urgency. (“Hurry! Our 30% off Spring Sale Closes in just 24 hours”)
- Inspire interest. (“Ice skating during the month of June?”)
- Use a specific timeframe to highlight. (“Still Trying to Finish Your Christmas Shopping? We’re Here To Help.”)
- Customize it. (“Jane, Your Subscription has Nearly Ended!”)
2. Make sure you organize your message.
Structure is a key element of writing particularly for marketing emails.
A well-structured content for your message can allow you to quickly communicate the value proposition you are offering to your audience so that you do not to waste your time. According to a study, the time spent by email users looking through branded emails in 2021 was predicted to be 10 seconds. It could be that you have only minutes to communicate your message.
To make the most of this short time you have, ensure the email you send out is organized. The best ways to make your message more effective within the time you spend to communicate with your reader are:
- Include the most important information on the front of your mailer, for example, the promotional offer you would like for them to read.
- Make it scannable, so readers are able to quickly find the information they require.
- Reduce text to the minimum, and include hyperlinks to redirect readers to longer pieces of content, like blog posts that are referenced within the emails.
- Include CTAs including hyperlinks, in your content.
- Be sure to include an explicit CTA in the last paragraph of your email that directs users who have read the entire email.
3. Keep your design simple.
There’s a fine line that separates attention-grabbing and disorienting. On the one side, you need to make a visual style that draws attention. In addition, it is important to ensure that important information is easily communicated and clearly highlighted. Simple designs, therefore are usually better than more complex ones.
The most important considerations to consider in the design of a marketing email include:
- Utilize three or fewer colors in your email. A palette that is smaller is eye-catching but not too distracting.
- Highlight your logo and brand. The recipient should quickly identify who has sent it to them and where to purchase your product.
- Make sure you emphasize visually CTAs.
- Optimize your message for mobile devices. A lot of people check their emails on smartphones, therefore it’s crucial to ensure that your messages are optimized for their phones.
4. Only email those who opt to be on your list.
It is crucial to only send emails to people who have opted to receive emails. There are many reasons to use this method.
While it is technically possible to buy emails from third-party vendors, this practice is generally not allowed on a variety of marketing platforms.
In some instances, it could be illegal to send marketing messages to people who have decided not to receive these emails. For instance, in the United States, for example, the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Affliction of Non-Solicited Advertising and Marketing Act) is a law from 2003 that prohibits the sending of emails to individuals who have already removed themselves from receiving emails. The law states that “each distinct email that violates the provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act could be susceptible to fines ranging from $43,79.
In addition, sending out unwelcome emails isn’t efficient. While it could appear that sending out as numerous emails as you can assist you in reaching your goals for marketing the reality is that email marketing is the most efficient when it is targeted to an audience that you know. Instead of sending out emails to those who don’t like them – and putting your email at risk of being discarded in the spam folder or increasing the rate of unsubscriptions, it makes sense to promote your service or product to people who have expressed interest.
5. Plan your email’s timing carefully.
In a lot of ways marketing via email is about timing. Sometimes, sending the correct message at the appropriate time is the most effective way to increase engagement with customers and achieve the goals of your email marketing.
As a type of digital marketing Email marketing has the advantage of being able to be automated. Marketing automation lets you automate the sending of emails to specific audiences. Email automation can be used to send out targeted emails at a specific time of the year, for instance, during holidays, or to design an automated email series that you send to potential customers after they complete a certain action, such as signing up for an email newsletter.
Automated nurture sequences keep customers interested by automatically sending relevant emails to maintain the brand’s reputation and help them navigate the marketing process.
6. Make sure you are aware of the tests and keep track of them.
One advantage of digital advertising is that you often receive information about the success of your marketing campaigns. As you design your marketing strategy this information can prove crucial in finding more effective methods of communicating with your intended group of customers.
The email marketing platforms you use let you keep track of vital details, like rates open, click-through rates, and conversion rates. In addition, many of them permit you to conduct A/B tests that compare the effectiveness of two campaigns to discover the characteristics of highly performing emails.
Analyzing your data regularly and conducting tests can assist you in improving the efficiency of your entire email marketing strategy. As you gather information, you can create email templates based on what seems to be effective for your company and improve the efficiency of future campaigns.
Marketing tools and platforms for email marketing.
Marketing professionals who use email typically utilize various software and tools for marketing to increase the efficiency of their teams. While you implement your marketing plan These platforms provide advanced features that assist you in creating individual email campaigns, maintaining your contacts list, sending automated emails, and tracking your marketing campaigns via email.
Common platforms for email marketing include:
- Sendinblue
- Mailchimp
- Omnisend
Whatever your objectives in marketing are, you can utilize these platforms to implement your email marketing plan.
Digital marketers employ a range of terms to explain the process of email marketing. This glossary outlines some of the key terms that you need to be aware of:
- Ratio of Acceptance: This is the percent of messages accepted by the email servers of recipients.
- A bounce rate is the percentage of messages not received by the email recipients’ servers.
- It is the percentage of emails read by recipients. The open rate of an email campaign is among the most important measures of its effectiveness. The higher the rate of opening is, the more effective.
- The subject line is the wording that appears in the recipient’s inbox, explaining the email. Subject lines must be engaging and relevant to the recipients.
- Call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link that connects to a website or download like an article, product page, blog, a scheduling page.
- Ratio of Conversion: amount of people who take action using the CTA when they click an image or purchase something, like when a person clicks on a link to your site.
- The rate at which a click is followed (CTR) is the percentage that recipients click a CTA within an email.
- IP warming is the process of sending a gradually increasing amount of emails to a recipient to identify the IP address of your computer.
- Opt-in/opt-out: To subscribe (opt-in) and unsubscribe (opt-out) on an emailing list.
- Nurture sequences are a series of automated email messages that are delivered when someone signs up to join the email newsletter. Nurture sequences encourage participation throughout the customer journey, and can help move customers further down the funnel of marketing.
A well-planned email marketing campaign could be the basis for future marketing success and your company.