You are seriously thinking that time has come to take care of the online marketing of your business, especially for what concerns the sending of promotional emails and newsletters and you are looking on the Internet for the information necessary to implement effective campaigns .
I agree with you. Learning how to do email marketing has become essential. You need to capture the attention of new potential customers and retain the existing ones.
However, it is important to plan carefully the implementation of these promotional messages. You have to be sure that users do not put your mail in the spam folder, but find contents and information you want to communicate interesting and useful.
Your goal is to stimulate the reader to visit your site or purchase products and services you are promoting.
If you’re a bit confused about where to start, that’s totally normal. Email marketing is a vast discipline.
It’s easy for beginners to get lost in a sea of tools, techniques, and terminology.
I decided to help you and I created this beginner’s guide to email marketing. What are you waiting for? Make yourself comfortable and continue reading the next paragraphs.
This beginner’s guide will explain exactly what email marketing is and the way it works. By the end, you’ll have a solid grasp of the fundamentals along with the know-how to launch a great email marketing strategy for your business.
“I want to do a business with a company that treats emailing me as a privilege, not a transaction.”
Andrea Mignolo
What is email marketing?
Before learning how to carry out email marketing campaigns and knowing the procedures, it is necessary to understand the definition of email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the strategies used in an organization’s digital marketing planning and consists of sending emails to potential customers to promote new services or offer discounts. In addition, the main objective of email marketing is to increase the sales of the organization and keep all potential clients or frequent clients informed.
Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in the ’70s. In 1978, Gary Thuerk, a Marketing Manager, sent the first promotional mail to a list of addresses. The email was sent to only a few hundred people, but that was enough for Thuerk to be the “father of spam“.
You can use email marketing to drive your sales, educate your audience, nurture leads, and build a community around your brand, such as with a newsletter.
Modern email marketing has moved out from all-purpose bulk mailings and rather puts attention on consent, segmentation, and customization. This might sound long, however marketing automation will do the work for you.
Does email marketing work in 2022?
Maybe you can think that email is a old form of digital communication, but email still reigns supreme when it comes to usage. Sure, there are new methods of communicating with your audience and customers, like social media, live chat and many others.
However, with over 4 billion of users and 306 billions e-mail daily, email is still the king of marketing channels. Email marketing is also the most profitable direct marketing channel, generating a ROI of $35.41 for every dollar spent.
Based on Mailchimp benchmarks, the average email open rate for all industries analyzed is 21.33%.
In addition, with email marketing you own your contact base and you don’t have to be scared about algorithm changes nor a new policy of social media platforms. Think about it: if your social media platform will close your space, you’d lose all your followers.
There are hundreds of advantages of email marketing to inform customers and generate more sales, but not all organizations see beyond this. On the other hand, true visionaries take full advantage of all the benefits that this strategy offers, and some of these advantages are:
1. Save time and money
These two factors are the most important for any company, and email marketing is proof that you can increase sales by sending the right emails to the right people. In addition, it is much cheaper to pay for an excellent email marketing plan than to have to spend a lot of money every month for advertising campaigns that may not be very productive.
2. Build a relationship with customers
It is vitally important to have satisfied customers:
- listen to their opinions about the organization’s products
- offer them new products for their loyalty
- notify them about the most important sales of the month.
This is possible by having a correct email marketing strategy and an updated email address database.
3. Increase business reputation
All emails sent by significant companies like Amazon or Samsung are taken seriously, and customers read the entire email. These companies. They also know how to use email marketing and have built trust with all consumers who receive all kinds of advertisements in their inboxes.
In addition, it is essential to know that the number of emails sent per month is not important. The quality of information sent in these emails is important.
4. Obtaining relevant data
Email marketing can allow the impact or results of all advertising campaigns that the organization has active. The tools let you monitor demographic data relevant to the company’s marketing.
If you don’t know what data you can get, here are some:
- Age
- Sex
- Country of origin
- How the person found out about the organization.
- Income level
- The number of products that the person purchases from the brand annually.
- What are the digital platforms you use the most?
That’s why email should be a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy. Do not use email marketing is like leaving money on the table.
How to start Email Marketing: what do I need?
Let’s keep it simple: there are three main things you need to run your email marketing campaign.
1. Well defined goals and a communication strategy
In email marketing, the main goal is to provide clear value to the recipient through content and information.
You can use email marketing to achieve many other business goals.
For example, you can send various type of emails:
- newsletter
- brand awareness
- lead nurturing
- transactional
- educational
- promotional
Email used strategically can make the difference between an average marketing campaign and an extremely successful one.
The role email plays in today’s marketing campaigns is a very important one. It’s part of a bigger puzzle that when put together correctly is a win, win in the marketing world.
Email, a strong mobile-friendly website, a regular content-rich blog and social media presence are all instrumental pieces of this constantly changing digital puzzle.
It’s common for email marketing that the size of the mailing list is relatively large and a dedicated email marketing platform (ESP, Email Service Providers) is used rather than your own personal email client.
2. Email service providers
An email service platform (ESP), also known as an email marketing platform, is a software that make it easier for people to build email lists and send emails.
As email marketing has become a more popular marketing channel, more ESP have developed new differentiated services:
- help you to automate actions triggered by your target audience’s behaviors
- enable you to personalize each interaction with your audience
- automate some tasks to improve engagement and conversion rates
Popular ESP include ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, Mailjet, GetResponse, HubSpot – to name a few.
You cannot use Gmail, Outlook or your business mail to send email marketing campaigns.
Technically speaking, it is possible, but:
- Despite providing access to your email, they do not provide the right tools to manage lists, segment the audience, automate tasks, monitor the open rate e so on.
- They are designed for personal use. So when a mass email is sent, it is easily flagged by spam filters and your account can be disabled for suspicious activity.
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3. An email address list
This list should contain the email addresses of interested subscribers who have opted-in to receive communications from you. This is a database of email contacts who have expressed interest in receiving promotional emails from you.
Everyone on your email list must have given their explicit permission to be there.
What does explicit permission mean?
It means they entered their email address into an email signup form on your social media, website, landing pages, or anywhere else and they agreed to receive emails from you.
In email marketing this is called “opt-in”. The opposite action “Opting out” is when they unsuscribe from your list.
Permission is essential to be compliance with data protection laws and safeguard the integrity of your brand.
There are a lot of ways to build an email list. One of the easiest is to create a downloadable asset your target audience is interested in or provide a free email course.
There’s value in owning your contact base and communicating with them regularly through emails and newsletters. To avoid the need to depend on other service providers, it’s important to put the effort and time into building your own contact base and keeping it healthy.
Tips to get you started with your email campaign
To execute an efficient email marketing campaign, your list, Email service provider, and goals must be aligned. Then, you will be able to work.
The first step is to segment your email list consistent with subscriber demographics or actions.
By then, create a series of emails designed to get audience to do something (what you defined as your goal).
Finally, use your ESP to send emails and monitor the campaign automatically.
The most successful marketing emails are not sent on a whim, but are instead part of a larger, calculated strategy.
Whether you are launching the first email marketing campaign for your brand or looking to revamp an existing email marketing strategy, the first step is determining your intention.
Why are you sending out an email? (Tip: it’s not because “everyone is sending emails”— think about why YOU want to send an email.)
To determine your email marketing intention, answer this question for yourself: what do you hope to achieve through your email marketing campaign? Your intended goal will determine which type of marketing email you should send.
Probably you will need to plan a sequence of various type of emails to reach your goal.
1. Choose the email service provider
Before you can start with a email marketing campaign, you need an audience to send emails to, so it’s time to build a list of engaged subscribers.
There are a lot of valid ESPs, you have to choose the best for you.
At the beginning probably you do not have all the information needed to make an informed choice.
In my opinion, at the beginning you can try the following ESPs:
- ActiveCampaign – you can have 14-day free trial. ActiveCampaign offers powerful automation. Pricing and plans to fit your business’ budget and marketing needs, starting from 9$/month
- MailChimp – the free version includes up to 2,000 contacts, with 10,000 sends per month and a daily limit of 2,000.
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2. Create your mailing list
Before you can start with a email marketing campaign, you need an audience to send emails to, so it’s time to build a list of engaged subscribers.
Since email marketing is about sending emails to potential clients or frequent clients, it is necessary to know their email addresses and register them in the same database.
However, we recommend separating people in the database based on the essential demographic data to your overall marketing strategy.
Your company must obtain all emails in the database organically, legally, and voluntarily. It is possible to use blogs, frequent customers, or social media advertising campaigns to get a complete database, which could offer a lot of interesting data from your public.
It is essential to know that you cannot do email marketing without the authorization of the people who will receive the emails.
In addition, they have legal protection by local laws like CAN-Spam Act (USA) or the GDPR (UE).
Subscription form
Both ActiveCampaign and MailChimp, give you the tools – plugin or HTML code – to create subscription forms to embed on your blog, social media, website or on your e-commerce.
When creating a subscription form, you must be clear about what kind of email content will subscribers receive and how often.
Remember: People trust you enough to give their email address in the first place, don’t abuse that trust.
How do you get started building your list?
Add the form and simply asking people to subscribe.
Place your email subscription form in highly visible places where people will definitely see it. Typical subscription form hotspots include blog posts, the homepage, and contact page.
Creating a pop-up form on your website can be a good idea, too. Just make sure not to disrupt the user experience too much. Pop-ups that prevent visitors from using your site can be big deterrents!
Boost your mailing list
The best way to make a mailing list grow faster is give excellent content.
Content like course by mail, ebooks, reports, checklists, or how-to are great ways to grow your contact list. Visitors get valuable content in exchange for joining your newsletter list. It’s a win-win!
If you have an e-commerce, discounts and special offers are a good strategy to get people onto your list, too.
- Provide value in exchange for emails
- Remind people to suscribe
How to define an email marketing strategy?
Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln
Planning accurately is essential for the success of your email campaigns.
When an organization wants to increase product promotion, it is normal not to know where to start or manage an email marketing campaign. It is important to remember that we must plan any strategy before applying it.
Also, every movement must have an objective that is in tune with the goals of the general marketing strategies of the organization.
Taking the above into account, this is why we will now explain the main steps that every email marketing strategy must have and how not to fail when trying for the first time.
1. Set the goal of your email marketing
Every tool, strategy, or action must have a reason, and email marketing must have a specific goal that it must achieve. If you still do not have a clear idea of the particular objective, you must answer yes or no to the following premises:
- Educate people about your brand
- Increase sales of your brand
- Inform customers or potential customers with the latest that the company has to offer
- Download new guides or materials that may help
- Increase organization visibility and generate recommendations
- strengthen the loyalty of your customers
Maybe you want to achieve all of these objectives simultaneously, but unfortunately, it cannot. Email marketing campaigns must be short, concise, and precise with what you want to achieve, which means having a beginning and an end.
In addition, to accomplish each of the above goals, it is necessary to implement different tools, audience segmentation, and formats simultaneously.
2. Plan your strategy
After having all the emails from the public and knowing the desired objectives with this email marketing plan, it is necessary to carry out the official planning to have a roadmap on the table and stick to the project. On the other hand, content planning is required for each day that emails are sent because the content of these emails must be interesting for their recipient.
In this planning, you must establish the following:
- Frequency and number of messages to be sent per month.
- Structure and content of the message.
- Types of templates depending on the kind of message.
- Database update periods.
- Set a frequency of analysis and monitoring of the email marketing campaign.
- Types of messages depend on the segmentation of the public in the database.
- Set the desired results of the email marketing campaign. These expected results must be realistic given the money and time invested.
3. Choose the best tools to manage your digital marketing
The most challenging step in the entire email marketing strategy is getting the email address of the people you are interested in and their consent to receive emails from your company.
That is why you should choose the best tools for email marketing. Please, do not think about sending them manually one by one. This is impossible since you will have thousands of emails to send per day.
If you’ve been searching the internet all day and can’t find the best tools for your email marketing campaign, here are some options you should investigate:
- Answer the public: This tool analyzes the keywords that users want to know when talking about a specific topic. It can help the writing of the emails and make them more attractive.
- ActiveCampaign: This tool specializes in email marketing and offers various tools built into its platform. From mass mailing to segmentation of email data.
- Google Analytics: It is the favorite tool par excellence and allows you to know each of your website’s most important parameters and metrics. It will enable you to measure the impact of the email marketing campaign.
- Email tracking: This tool allows you to know the main metrics that are of interest in email marketing.
4. Analyze the results and monitor the campaign
This step can be one of the most critical steps in email marketing. This is because it shows if your planning has worked as expected or needs improvement. On the other hand, monitoring the results of any advertising action is the basis for all future enhancements.
In the case of email marketing, it is enough to use email tracking to monitor how users react to emails and what their actions are after seeing them. The main metrics that email tracking platforms can monitor are:
- Email opening rate: this parameter allows you to know how many people open your emails.
- Click rate: This is the percentage of people who click on the message body, where there may be hyperlinks.
- Bounce rate: It is the parameter that indicates the percentage of messages that could not be delivered due to problems. In a nutshell, it shows when an email address is misspelled.
- Rate of abuse reports: this one indicates how many people marked your emails as SPAM and reported them for abuse.
However, there are many analytical platforms for email marketing that offer much more complete reports. For example, the company “Salesforce” provides tools to monitor your company’s email marketing and tools to improve it.
Email Marketing: key takeaways
It is always advisable to go to a professional in digital marketing because we want to earn money and not lose it by doing wrong marketing.
However, there is always a first time for everything. In addition, it is possible to start email marketing correctly without wasting time or money.
Here are some tips for you to take into account when planning and to manage your email marketing campaign:
- Personalize the emails according to the interests of each person and their full name.
- Emails cannot be very long, as the public likes direct and precise information.
- It is important to send emails in long time intervals to not fall as SPAM or be reported for abuse.
- The email’s subject should be eye-catching, and they can understand the whole email without having to open it. If you want to offer discounts, you must put the keyword “rebates” in the subject of the email.
- Emails should be segmented based on audience demographics in the updated database.
- NEVER do email marketing to people who have not given their consent to receive these emails.
- Find a way to automate almost 100% of the email marketing process to reduce costs and maximize time.
- The amount of content does not matter, but the value of the content offered to the client. In addition, it is necessary to remember that the value of the content will vary depending on the person.
- Determine the types of emails you need and which ones you can apply.
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