Email marketing is a great way to connect and get in touch with your customers. From building your business contact list to learning how to design emails that really stand out, this email marketing guide will teach you the basics of effective email marketing campaigns.
Overview
Email marketing is a great addition to your other digital marketing efforts. Why? It builds customer engagement and loyalty without breaking the chain. And it performs well on mobiles.
In this step by step guide, we’ll discuss how to develop a contact list and speak to different audiences based on their interests. We’ll also cover how email marketing helps you build a positive, lasting relationship with customers.
Like any type of marketing, your first step in email marketing should be to identify your business goals.
Do you want to use email to offer products and services, and bring more visitors directly to your website? Or do you want to add email marketing to drive business results, like increase sales? No matter what your goals are, email is a good place to start by building your contact list of people who’ve expressed an interest in your business.
So how do you meet these people, and get their contact emails? Start by asking them.
Let’s say you own a digital marketing agency. When you chat with customers, offer to send coupons and special offers if they provide you an email address. If you have a website, you can include a contact form and encourage your visitors to subscribe online.
Always have in mind that people must give you permission to send business email, and many countries have laws that require permission.
Great. Now you’ve started creating an email list of people who want your emails. Now let’s think how email marketing can help you achieve your business goals. You don’t want to confuse customers with too much stuff in one email, or too many emails in succession. Start with a friendly introduction. Next, you might send relevant information about your business and the product lines you sell. And you can ask them one or two questions to narrow down their interest a bit more.
Then, when you have information related to your customers you can send them something they might find interesting. Take our example if we know that a group of these customers recently created their own website, we might offer them our most popular SEO services for higher ranking.
Be sure to include useful content and relevant information, like tips for better ranking, or a special discount for SEO services.
Always try to educate your customers about your business, you can use marketing emails, to know more about them as well.
Ask your subscribers if they are interested in receiving updates about your other most related products or services. Then find out how they would like to hear from you.
For example, do they prefer to receive emails weekly or monthly? Keep in mind what you learn in your email contact database for future email campaigns. Find the customers who have been on your contact list for a long time? These regular customers are really important to your business. And it’s a good idea to build a positive, lovely relationship with them. So, how might you go about this?
By making your content useful and interesting, your subscribers will enjoy and appreciate your emails, and you’ll likely remain their go-to choice when they want a product like yours. Finally, you can use email to get reviews and feedback from your customers about their shopping or customer-support experience, and then answer them directly.
By knowing what went right, or what went wrong, you can easily solve their issues, or simply thank them for being a customer. So that’s it. Email marketing is a great way for you to build relationships with both potential and your existing customers.
As you reach your different audiences, you can customise communications, based on their particular interests. By offering useful and relevant content, you can build loyalty over time. A strong customer base will help your business grow.
Features and Benefits of Email Marketing
We’re going to talk about the typical features and benefits of email marketing services. In this email marketing course, we’ll also discuss how these software can give you insights into customer behavior, so you can deliver more personalized content. While there are a variety of options to choose from, most email marketing software share a few common features.
The first is a contact database that stores your customers’ information, like name, mailing address, and other information.
Start building your contact database by adding customer data you already have. Most software services allow you to upload data from outside, a great feature if you have a lot of information to include.
Next, you want to allow people the ability to subscribe or unsubscribe themselves. Most email marketing softwares provides an online contact form that you can add to your website by pasting a simple code. Then website visitors can fill up this form to sign up for your emails. After this data is automatically transferred to your contact database.
Remember: these online sign up forms are usually customisable, so you can ask for the general customer information you want. But, your contact form should be short and easy to complete.
Now you’ve got your database, let’s think about the real and useful emails. Many email templates offer you to create a design that matches your brand. You can reuse your template for similar email marketing campaigns, again and again.
Don’t forget that many people read your emails on their mobiles, so make sure your emails should be mobile-friendly. Many email marketing softwares allow you to preview your email on different devices before you send. Another typical feature to know about is the ability to schedule when your email sends out. You can send the email at a time, or send a later day and time.
An email marketing tool can also track who clicks the links in your email. These links mainly go to pages on your website. You can then track what those people do, after they’re on your site. Like, whether they read a blog, or take a course. As you know more about your customers’ behaviour, you can deliver more personalised content.
Many email marketing tools have a personalisation feature that transfer your relevant content into an email template, based on customers’ behaviour. You can use this feature to target different people by sending specific messages within your database.
By targeting each group with a personalised email, you increase the opportunity that they will not only read your email, but also visit your website. So, as you can see, how email marketing tools can help you run a successful email program much easier.
Create Your First Email Marketing Campaign
So you’ve selected an email marketing service, and you’re ready to get started on your first email campaign.
Now let’s talk about grabbing your customers’ attention with a strong subject line, keeping their attention with short and simple content, and offering links for more information.
So let’s think, you’ve been collecting names, emails and interest of both prospective and loyal customers. And now, you’re ready to create your first email marketing campaign.
But in order to get customers to read your email, you first have to get them to open it. Email marketing is all about making a good first impression. Think about what customers see when they check their inbox. Will your email excite them to open it?
The two things they’ll see when they open up their inbox, are your company name in the “From” field, and the subject line of your email.
Make sure to use a name and email address in your “From” field that clearly indicates your business. People are more excited to open an email, from someone they recognise and trust. The subject line of your email can make or break your email marketing campaign. A compelling subject line will excite people to open it. A poorly crafted subject line might mean your email gets deleted or moved in spam filters.
Keep your subject line concise and relevant (naturally under ten words). Try to include the most valuable and relevant information contained in the email.
Now, you’ve grabbed your customers’ attention, and they’ve opened up your email. Congratulations! That’s half the battle.
At this point, you should keep in mind how busy your customers are, and how many other emails notify them every day. Even if you’ve created the most engaging message possible, they’ll likely just scan it. So keep your content short, simple, and get right to the point.
Your paragraphs should be short—maybe one to three sentences, and get right to the point. You should always link to additional information and relevant articles on your website.
Make your writing as informative and engaging as possible. And use the sweet tone of voice for your audience. You want to have focus across your brand, but emails offer opportunities to be a bit more casual in tone. Links in your email should have calls to action. Encourage your audience to click through, to offers on your website.
Use eye-catching text and design, to highlight important offers and content. There’s one last thing you should remember. And that’s some links at the bottom of the email that allow your audiences to unsubscribe, shift their email preferences, or update their contact information.
Providing an easy way for users to opt out of your email newsletter, is not only counted as good customer service, but it’s also required by law in many countries. So keep in mind: Take the time to create a short, but strong subject line. Write concise content with an entertaining and engaging tone. And last don’t forget to include helpful links that will improve your customer experience, and possibly lead to increased sales.
Measure your success in email marketing
When it comes to measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns, understanding your audience’s behaviour is important.
In this step by step guide we will discuss the benefits associated with understanding email performance, as well as cover some common metrics that can provide insights to help you optimise your future email campaigns.
First, let’s look at why reviewing email metrics can be a powerful addition to your marketing efforts.
Let’s say you own a mobile shop and have created a strong email marketing list made up of interested customers. Utilising the analytics from your email platform, you can find the number of people clicking from your email to your website, or how many take the final decision you’ve set, such as making an online booking using a discount code.
This type of informed decision-making can lead to increased sales, and help you improve any future campaigns for success.
So the benefits of utilising email metrics are clear. But what numbers, or insights, can these individual metrics tell you? Let’s take a look at five common email marketing metrics:
An email campaign Open Rate is simply the ratio of people who’ve opened the email out of the total number of people who received it. This tells you how useful your email subject line is. For example, if a subject line of ‘Tips to Rank No.1 on Google’ receives a higher open rate then an email titled ‘Discounts and Offers on SEO Services’, this shows your audience prefers emails that educate them to rank higher, rather than promotional content.
Once you know how many people opened your email, take a look at the Click Through Rate, or CTR. This shows a top level view of the success of the individual email campaign, and indicates the percentage of people that clicked on links to your website from every email that was opened.
The Click-to-Open Rate indicates the total number of clicks vs emails that were actually opened. This metric gives you a more realistic idea of audience engagement because if they opened your email and clicked on a given link, you clearly did something right!
Next useful insight is Conversion Rate. Say you have a free SEO course coming up that you advertised in your email campaigns. The conversion rate would show the people you sent the email to, compared to the number of people who actually ended up with your goal, like: enrolled in your upcoming event .
Sometimes, when you email, they ‘bounce’ back. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to recipients and were returned. Naturally, there are two kinds of bounces to be aware of:
Soft Bounces: These kinds of bounces are rejected due to a full inbox or size limit restriction on your recipient’s email server.
Hard Bounces: Sometimes your emails are blocked or you are using incorrect email addresses. A breakdown of hard bounces per email campaign can help you save your time and effort by removing wrong email addresses for your next campaign.
Looking at the metrics and the insights will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t. The next step is to make an adjustment for any future campaigns accordingly, whether that be to improve the subject lines, review the type of content published, or clean up your emails list.
We’ve now covered some valuable email metrics that will help you understand useful insights from your email marketing campaigns – use these strategies to set yourself up for success. Next Chapter; Video Marketing