Guide to Email Marketing

Email marketing has been one of the most effective forms of marketing campaigns since its inception. It is a highly effective strategy often aimed at upselling to individuals who have already purchased one of your products, but it is widely used in other applications. As old or potential customers, we get many emails from brands, and the attractive ones catch our attention, right? Thus, you may want to run a successful email campaign to attract potential customers if you are a business owner.

You can explore the fine details of email marketing and create your email campaign with this complete email marketing guide. In this article, we will explain the importance of email marketing, how it works, and how to run a successful email marketing campaign.

Email Marketing Is Still Alive and Well

What is email marketing? The industry has been growing and evolving since the first email marketing campaign in the late 1970s raked in almost $13 million in sales. Yet, today, email marketing remains the most personal way to advertise directly to your customers. It can be a compelling way to grow your brand and trust your customers. Office workers worldwide religiously check their email milliseconds after the new mail tone plays through their computers. You may think that email marketing is not popular in these times because of the social media and influencer effects. However, we can say that it is still alive and influences customers well. The marketing industry is still growing yearly, with an audience hungry to check their emails. The crucial thing is creating an effective and flexible strategy to catch attention.

The Importance of Email Marketing

According to statistics, 4.6 billion worldwide people use email. In addition, %92 of the digital population has email in the U.S.A, although the number of social media users is 82 percent. These numbers show the importance of email marketing briefly. What happens when you run a successful email campaign? It is a great way to build relationships and develop communication with customers. In this way, it will provide to create brand awareness.

Moreover, it is possible to promote websites, content, and products thanks to email marketing. The best part of email marketing is you have your list, and most people give their emails to receive emails voluntarily. That’s why the conversion rate and ROI (returns on investment) rates are higher than social media.

Email Marketing Glossary

Email marketing terms can be confusing for beginners. That’s why we listed the important email marketing terms for a complete guide.

How to Run An Email Marketing Campaign

After understanding the importance of email marketing and learning its important terms, it is time to run an email marketing campaign! So, if you are unsure about where to start, you can follow the steps.

Carefully Choose Your Target Audience

Your target audience is critical to the success of your email marketing campaign. The main aim is to get your emails to the people they appeal to the most. By doing this, the chance of your campaign’s success increases. The marketing funnel can help target your audience. The factors such as age range, gender, interests, location, etc., should be determined by the features of the audience. Thus, after learning how to target audience with funnel, you can develop your strategies.

Build a Mailing List

There are lots of ways to build your mailing list. Companies often sell mailing lists essential to an email marketing campaign. Building it organically from sales and subscriptions is most valuable in the long term, but it takes much longer to see the desired results. The important strategy is building a mailing list according to your target audience to get unsubscriptions.

Select Your Goals

With any marketing campaign having clear, measurable goals is vital. If you create your goals, the chance the marketing campaign will be successful will significantly increase. Thus, after selecting your goals, the type and content of the email, CTAs, etc., will be determined in line with your goals.

Choose The Type of Email Marketing Campaign

There are many types of email marketing campaigns, and the context of the email will be shaped according to the type. It can be a newsletter sent every week or an announcement of new products or content, and also, you can also re-promote them or remind the products on the cart. Choosing an email campaign’s purpose will help reach your audience more effectively.

Design Your Email Marketing Campaign

The next step is to craft the content of your emails, keeping your goals and target audience in mind while choosing the content. So, by doing this, it helps to keep your content focused on what you wish to achieve. Additionally, an efficient way to continuously improve the return on investment from your email marketing is to employ A/B testing. A/B testing is where you use two different adverts and then compare results to create more successful campaigns in the future. At this stage, some businesses will employ an email marketing service to support them while fine-tuning their strategy.

Schedule Your Emails

Some email types should be sent regularly at the same times; on the other hand, some emails need to be sent on special days. Thus, they should be sent on time to build trust and not lose subscribers. Moreover, your brand will stay in the subscriber’s minds when you send them constantly, and they may wait for your mail.

Analyze the Results, Then Repeat the Steps

Finally, the last step in any marketing campaign should always be to analyze the results and learn what improvements are possible for the next campaign. This way, your email marketing campaigns get more refined and successful each time you run them. A more successful email marketing campaign leads to increased traffic to the promoted web page, increased leads generated, and higher sales or conversions. Thus, after you analyze the results and the implemented improvements, repeat the steps and reap greater rewards.

The Best Ways to Build a Mailing List

A mailing list is a crucial tool of any email marketing campaign as it contains the recipients for your campaign. Unfortunately, if the people you send the email campaigns to are not within your target audience, the likelihood of success is slim to none. However, there are ways to help ensure your mailing list is full of potential customers with a higher chance of wanting your product or service. Below are several strategies for improving your mailing list.

Add Lead-Magnets

Lead magnets are kind of opt-in forms, but they can be in different formats. At the end of the form, you need to offer something. Usually, these offers are free and designed to get new subscribers and reach potential audiences.

The lead magnets can be;

• E-books
• Whitepapers
• Infographics
• Templates
• Webinars
• Checklists

Promoting An Online Contest

By far, the best way to grow your mailing list organically is to promote an online contest for people who provide you with their details, including email addresses. So, this method gives you an audience of potential customers with a clear interest in your product or service. 

Using Social Networks

Using social media platforms to promote a newsletter or new offer requiring an email address to enter is another brilliant way to grow your mailing list naturally. You can create an opt-in form and add your bio or posts. If you can offer a newsletter for sending new content every week, you can announce it in your stories or posts.

Adding An Engagement Section

Adding an engagement section for your social media, website, and emails. Allowing customers to send their ideas directly to you not only grows your mailing list but also may provide you with new product ideas to use in the future, provided firsthand by your customers. They are giving you instant demand for the new product.

Reasons to Avoid Buying a Mailing List

While buying a mailing list can give you access to a vast audience for the email marketing campaign. There is a very low probability that any of those included are interested in your product or service. Due to the fact that companies gather email addresses from everywhere they can find. Many of these addresses will only be for signing up to sites they have no interest in after viewing the content they were after. Therefore, it is much better to have a small, actively interested mailing list rather than an extensive list full of people who have no inclination to give you business. Buying mailing lists is also an unnecessary expense.

What benefit is it to you to pay for a mailing list that will be unresponsive to your email marketing campaigns? Your ideal mailing list will consist of real people interested in your product or service and also requesting to receive your marketing emails. 

Email Marketing Services

Email marketing services provide customers with extra support, tools, and knowledge to build effective email marketing campaigns. As a bonus, many offer analysis of the results after the completion of the campaign. This can be extremely helpful to businesses just starting to use email marketing and learning as they go. These companies also help you devise an effective email strategy, giving your email marketing campaign the highest chance of success.

What to Include in Your Marketing Emails

There are several sections to include within each email. They are;

• The copy is the main body of the email, and you should write it using the same voice and tone each time. You should mention only one topic in each email.
• Eye-catching images must be compatible across all devices and relevant to the email or product.
• Your call-to-action (CTA). In other words, the action you want the email readers to complete.
• The emails should not be too formal. Instead, it should feel like an email to an old acquaintance and include familiar tones while remaining personable.
• An enticing subject line to convince people to open the email in the first place.
• Finally, you should consider the timing. After multiple email marketing campaigns, you can narrow down which time of day and which day of the week get the most responses.
• Also, ensure that all emails are optimized for viewing on mobile phones. It is important to optimize for mobile because most people can now check their emails from their mobile phones.

If your email campaigns contain all of the above, then you are well on your way to very effective email advertising. 

Email Regulations You Should Follow

On the other hand, there are two primary regulations to follow at all times. The first has been around for many years and is CAN-SPAM. CAN-SPAM essentially protects individuals’ rights to only receive emails that they have requested. CAN-SPAM only applies to commercial emails for business use. To remain compliant, you must include the following with each email. The company name and address, have ‘unsubscribe’ links visible in the email and use subject lines that accurately reflect the body of the email. Also finally, use real email addresses in the ‘from’ and ‘reply to’ fields of the email. The other set of regulations that must be followed with email marketing is a relatively new set of laws. They are GDPR and were implemented to help protect users’ data. You can comply with GDPR by doing the following;

• Only collect data relevant and necessary for your business.
• Delete any contact data upon request.
• Only keep data for justifiable reasons.
• Reply to users’ requests to view their data promptly.
• Keep comprehensive records demonstrating your GDPR compliance.

How to Track E-Mail Marketing Campaign Results

There are a few ways to track the success of your email marketing campaigns. First, you should measure the following from your email marketing campaign:

• The click-through rate should be calculated because that is the percentage of people who clicked on the links contained within your email.
• The bounce rate is the percentage of your emails that never reached the intended recipient. Ideally, this percentage should be as low as possible.
• Perhaps the most important to track is the conversion rate which shows you the percentage of recipients who completed the action given to them in the email.

Various third parties will present you with these percentages if you don’t want to calculate them yourself.

Conclusion: Email Marketing

Overall, we have discussed and presented you with a guide to email marketing. So, there are many ways to ensure that your email marketing strategy only becomes more efficient with time. It is quoted by the industry that there is a degradation of around 22% per year in a business’s mailing list. It is imperative for business email marketing to constantly update the mailing list and email marketing strategies to maintain effectiveness. Remember that email marketing regulations are strictly enforced, and it is not advisable to break those regulations. So, good luck with your email marketing campaigns. I wish you much success. Hopefully, you have enjoyed reading this article and learned how email marketing works and how to implement it yourself. Don’t forget to write your email marketing tips to us! Thank you for reading this guide on email marketing.