All about Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to market your business, but you need to follow best practices to be successful.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing refers to any activity that involves using email to attract new customers or strengthen relationships with existing ones. It can be considered an extension of direct mail (the traditional mail system), because it utilizes similar principles and techniques, from buying lists and segmentation strategies to sending physical brochures through the mail. In fact, some people consider email marketing and direct mail as two sides of the same coin—and for good reason: Both methods focus on building personal relationships with customers by sharing valuable content via electronic channels instead of printed materials.

There are many tools that can be used for email marketing like MailChimp, Aweber, ConvertKit etc.

The best way to learn about these tools is by reading reviews on their website or by reading articles written by other bloggers who have used these tools themselves!

Email marketing is a great way to market your business, but you need to follow best practices to be successful.

Digital marketing campaigns

A digital marketing campaign involves the execution of a marketing strategy across all the digital channels where consumers engage with a brand, usually for the purpose of improving a company's conversion rate.

To start a campaign, marketers need to understand who their customer is and where to reach them and anticipate what action the customer will take next.

Customers approach brands through an omnichannel lens. So, to effectively reach a customer, marketers should connect digital marketing campaigns across all channels.

Digital marketing campaigns can be less expensive than other marketing campaigns and can engage with customer behaviour in real time.

Companies can use a digital campaign for a variety of uses, from raising brand awareness to telling loyal customers about a new product.

8 types of effective email content:

1. Welcome email or welcome series

The welcome email has become a very common practice for most organizations—and for good reason! This type of email content boasts the highest open and engagement rate. Today’s customers and new subscribers expect to see this type of email appear in their inbox after their first purchase or subscription. Exceed their expectations by sending an outstanding welcome email or welcome email series.

Here are some questions you may not have thought of to get some juices flowing:
•    Are my welcome emails sent based on how they signed up?
For example, sending different messages based on whether they signed up via your website, a social media page, or if they purchased something.
•    When customers buy a specific product from me, what are they interested in seeing next? Can I send them relevant suggestions?
•    Is my welcome series a good mix of content (opportunities for subscribers to learn) and promotions (opportunities for subscribers to purchase)?
•    Is my welcome series focused too much on my company? Can I shift the focus to being more on how my company can help our customers achieve something?

2. Promotional emails

The world of promotional emails is changing as consumers become more wary of this type of email content. The world continues to grow in technology and available information, and consumers are being made more aware of when messages are overly promotional. The task then is to offer a good mix of engaging emails (how-to content, informational content, etc.) and promotions.

One way to accomplish this is to mix in content with your promotions. Make your promotional emails focus on the sell or offer and highlight this focus using your stand-out CTA. Then, maybe beneath the main offer, you can provide additional free content that supplements the offer, using a less eye-grabbing CTA. This gives customers an on-ramp to dip their toes in without pulling the trigger on a purchase, which may give you more opportunity to convert them later.

3. Guides, blogs, and other content marketing 

Blogger outreach, also referred to as Blogger relations is one of the single most important tools to use as part of your marketing campaign. If used correctly, it can also be one of the most successful.

In the digital world, bloggers are becoming more and more influential.

Bloggers allow brands to connect with their audience in a way they have never done before. They can help you expand into social media and get in touch with an audience you didn’t even know you had! As well as drive traffic, trust & SEO juice to your brand.

While blogger outreach is one of the most useful tools for your brand and can be used as a single method to help drive traffic and influence, it’s important to remember that it can also be used as part of a wider marketing campaign. It all depends on your brand, your product, and what you want to achieve.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Campaign

Before you dive in and start outreaching, there are certain questions you need to ask, in order to be successful:

'Why am I doing this?'

This may sound silly, but it’s crucial that you understand what you want to achieve. So many brands will think of a brilliant idea in terms of content, and start to outreach it, without thinking of the audience behind it, or what the benefit to the brand is. Don’t be too quick to ‘get stuck in’ – make sure you do your research!

'What do I want to achieve?'

What is the main reason for this campaign? Do you want to spread awareness of a new product? Are you looking to create an amazing piece of content for bloggers to link back to you? Or is this just a small part of a much larger marketing campaign? Once you can single out the main reason for why you are doing this and what you want to achieve, you will be able to define your goals and objectives.

I think it’s always important to remember that ‘going viral’ with a marketing campaign should never be a goal. All brands are striving for this, however it’s rare. If you set yourself goals that are too high, you will never have measurable success. I’m not saying don’t strive for the best, but don’t belittle your own accomplishments.

'Who is my audience & how will I reach them?'

Discovering your audience can simultaneously be one of the easiest and most difficult tasks for a brand. If you have no information to start with, then the first port of call is to try and create your brand’s personas. This will allow you to dive into your audience and see who they are, and what they are really about.

Your niche will determine which bloggers you should engage with, and on what platforms (YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Personal blogs, etc). Take a beauty brand for example.  Over the past few years beauty bloggers have exploded on YouTube, with Vloggers dominating the beauty industry and covering over 97% of all beauty content. This would make YouTube the perfect platform for a beauty brand wanting to work with bloggers.

4. Loyalty and rewards

Loyalty and rewards can be expressed in dozens of different ways—especially when you implement automation.
Sending rewards based on purchases is a great start. Hitting certain tiered levels of rewards (spending x amount gets you free shipping, or 10% off, etc.) is a great incentive that your subscribers look for in email.

Another idea for tech-oriented companies is to send loyalty emails based on what parts of your app or service someone used. If you have certain workflows, you want your customers to complete, you can email them with a congratulatory message and reward for their good work (like a discount on an upgraded plan, for example).

5. Testimonials and reviews

Social proof is one of the best ways to close deals and drive sales. And if you can wrap it up into an actual customer story (instead of just a one-off quote), then you can both nurture and engage existing customers as well as inspire new ones to convert.

6. Surveys and net promoter feedback

Asking your customers how you’re doing as a company can be very vulnerable. But it can also give you great insights into your performance, the culture you’re creating with your customer base, and how to continue, stop, or begin processes to engage with your customers.

Surveys can also serve simply as insight into who your customers are, like market research. It’s so easy to assume certain things about who you’re trying to sell to. It’s another thing entirely to see what people have to say when they fill out a well-informed survey. And email is the place to send these invitations for feedback.

7. Behavioural-based emails

Triggered emails, automated emails, transactional emails, behavioural emails—these are all ways to describe an email that is sent by your marketing platform whenever a specific action is taken on your website or app. A very popular behavioural email is a shopping cart abandonment email, which is sent when someone adds an item to their cart but doesn’t finish their purchase.

You can send behavioural emails based on almost any action, so long as you have a way to track your user or customer (like asking them to log in before using your site, service, or store).

In addition to behaviour on your site, you have another behaviour that you’re tracking all the time: email behaviour. You have a massive repository of information showing you email engagement statistics for your entire list (or at least you should, if you have the right email service provider). With all this information, you could set up a variety of emails to re-engage customers that have opened but haven’t clicked through, haven’t opened in a while, or are constantly clicking through but haven’t purchased.

8. Newsletters and product/company announcements

A standard newsletter is super important, especially if you focus on content marketing. But more than anything, these emails should be a consistent touchpoint with your audience.

If there’s one function they serve, it’s to keep your company top-of-mind for your audience, and to remind them of your brand whenever you can. Any sales and engagement on top of that is a big plus, and you should optimize these campaigns to improve engagement. But make sure you’re sending something compelling to keep your readers interested.

Why is email marketing is important for small business?

How can small businesses take advantage of email marketing?

Small businesses are in a unique position to benefit from email marketing, as they have more flexibility in their image. For example, as a small business, you can build trust with local customers much more rapidly than larger corporations, who may not resonate with smaller communities as easily.

One of the most important practices to remember with email marketing today is to be as transparent, honest, and open as possible with your customers. Unsolicited or generic emails are losing ground and falling out of favour, as the modern consumer has come to respond better to more organic approaches.

In that spirit, you should be focusing on getting customers to subscribe to your newsletters, and you can build a powerful and robust emailing list by using the following tips.
Always make it easy for customers to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t try to make it too fancy or add too many steps. Also, be sure to let potential subscribers know what to expect in terms of content before they sign up. Customers who sign up for your newsletter will lost trust in your brand if they find that the content is different from what they were led to expect.

Keep in mind how difficult it is to grow subscribers and how competitive the internet is, with so many firms vying for attention. Take care to produce high-quality, exclusive content in your newsletters that customers can’t expect to find anywhere else.

As a small business with local clout, you can use your regional expertise to promote your brand as an expert in the area. That can be achieved, both efficiently and conservatively, through the strategic use of email marketing. Developing a reputation as a local expert via your email content helps cement stronger customer relationships, which are vital to small businesses.

How to measure email marketing success in small businesses

Measuring the success of email marketing in small business is the key to developing more effective campaigns. Success rates can be measured with several metrics.

You should be keeping track of the number of emails that are marked as spam and emails that are forwarded. You should also compare the number of emails that were deleted before or after opening. These metrics can yield valuable insights that’ll help you plan future newsletters and email marketing campaigns.

One of the most effective things you can do to improve the efficacy of your email marketing is ensure that your newsletters are designed to display well on mobile phones. The easiest way to do this is to use a reliable email service provider that features responsive templates that can automatically optimize emails for mobile devices.

66% of emails are viewed on mobile devices.

Does it really matter?

Email marketing matters to small businesses and can launch you ahead of your competitors. It can open new markets, bring in new customer bases, and help build strong, long-term customer relationships.

These advantages are essential, especially to small businesses. With email marketing, you can deliver engaging newsletter content directly to your customer base.

Types of Emails:

Email marketing is a great way to market your business, but you need to follow best practices to be successful.

There are many types of emails:
•    Transactional - these are automated messages that are sent when a customer takes certain actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading an eBook.
•    Promotional - these are used for selling products and services (usually on an ongoing basis). These can also be triggered by events like the anniversary of a sale or last purchase from another customer who purchased from you in the past few months.

Elements of an email campaign

Here are the basic elements of an email campaign:
•    Subject Line: The first thing smartphone users see is your subject line, so it's important to make it count. A compelling subject line will draw readers in, while a lackluster one won't.
•    From Address: It's also important to ensure that the address in your email appears legitimate and trustworthy. If a reader has any doubts about whether they should trust you, they probably won't open or read your emails at all!
•    Body: The body of your message should be concise and clear without being overly wordy. Remember that most people don't have time to read long emails on their phones; they want quick information delivered directly to them in bite-sized bits!

Is email marketing still effective?

Email has been a part of the marketer’s toolkit for over two decades. Throughout the years, it’s evolved and grown in popularity. The way email is used, the type of technology surrounding it, and the results it brings have all developed steadily over time. Email has gone from a curious invention to a marketing mainstay. Still, some believe newer technology has killed email marketing.

But those people couldn’t be more wrong.

We know email marketing still works in terms of providing returns, but so do a lot of marketing tactics. Just because they work doesn’t mean a company must automatically use them. Does email marketing still matter?

The benefit of email marketing is the return it provides roughly $44 for every $1 spent. With so many platforms and email builders out there to help things along, marketers working on their own or in dedicated departments can still drive great results.

The results aren’t dependent on location either. Globally, roughly one-third of marketers say email marketing is their best tool for generating ROI. With so many individuals and organizations across all industries benefiting from email marketing, it is safe to say it still matters, now more than ever.

Does email marketing increase sales?

Not only is email marketing one of the most cost-effective tools to increase revenue, but it’s practical in every industry. Increasing email revenue can significantly improve ROI:
•    Consumers spend 138% more because of email marketing, when compared to consumers who don’t receive email offers.
•    ROI for email is 28.5%, which is almost four times more than for direct mail marketing.
With the ability to increase revenue and improve your ROI, learning how to increase email revenue makes practical sense for any marketing beginner.

Email marketing is only effective when it drives sales. With a few email marketing best practices, even beginners can learn how to increase email revenue, not just improve open and click rates.

Email marketing and SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the almost-science of ensuring that your content, whether it's marketing, articles, or an e-commerce website, appear as high up as possible when your target audience performs web search operations on popular web search engines, typically Google. Trying to get your website or content to land as high up on that first search results page should be top of mind when you're crafting any marketing collateral, and that includes an email marketing campaign. The right keywords can potentially help distribute your content in search engines or sell your product.

While it may not appear as though there is a direct connection between an email marketing message and optimizing your placement in search results, as long as you're placing your email content on your website or linking to it, you can build that bridge.

Here are 8 Ways to Combine Email Marketing & SEO Efforts to Boost Your Results:
1.    Lower bounce rates
2.    Discover the intent behind the query
3.    Repurpose newsletter content
4.    Use automated sequences to generate traffic
5.    Improve social media engagement
6.    Use CTAs (Call-to-action)
7.    Deliver personalized content
8.    Ask for reviews

Here are 10 Well-known Brands that use email marketing effectively

1.    Drift
Straight and straightforward email.
2.    PayPal
Clever and relatable email.
3.    BuzzFeed
Emails containing punchy subject lines and preview texts.
4.    Litmus
Emails that contain interactable animation.
5.    Kate Spade
Emails that allow customers to offer feedback.
6.    Cook Smarts
Emails that offer something that adds value.
7.    Boden
Adding a sense of urgency.
8.    Bonobos
Extending a helping hand and offering advice.
9.    Uber
Clear and simple email templates.
10.    Airbnb
Welcome emails that are pro-active and encourages interactions.

Email marketing is a great way to market your business, but you need to follow best practices to be successful. You'll want to make sure that your emails are sent regularly and in the right format, that they're personalized with the recipient's name, and that they contain compelling content.