What is email marketing?
Email marketing is part of a company’s digital marketing strategy, businesses send marketing messages to specific lists of customers and subscribers. Effective email marketing can turn prospects into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal brand advocates. It’s a targeted, simple and effective way to get in front of your customers. Different content can be created to achieve different goals: coupons and email offers can entice customers to your store, emails highlighting blog content can drive them to your website, and customer contact information can help you better understand your audience.
What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is a coordinated set of emails sent over a set period of time with one specific purpose, called a call to action (CTA). Examples of typical email marketing CTAs include white paper download, webinar registration, and purchase.
An email marketing campaign should have a well-written and engaging subject line, targeted content, and a specific CTA that will help you achieve your campaign goal.
Many businesses use email marketing services to create and distribute campaigns. Email marketing services simplify the process of email campaigns and help businesses analyze their results.
How to get started with email marketing?
The following 5 steps can get you started with email marketing:
1. Get a reliable email service provider
The first step to creating an email marketing strategy is to find the provider that best suits your business. There are countless email marketing tools like MailChimp and HubSpot, all with different features. To choose the one that makes the most sense for your business, determine your email marketing goals, some of the opt-in features you need, the size of your audience or contact list, and the overall budget for your marketing program. Your email marketing provider should be flexible and cost-effective. However careful you are with your spending, if you want to excel at email marketing, you need an email service provider.
This will help you take advantage of process automation, such as knowing who is clicking, opening or signing up for your email list.
You also save time by sending a huge number of emails with just one click. Most email marketing services will also provide you with professional email templates for your business.
2. Decided the goal of your email marketing campaign
As you begin setting up your email marketing provider and building your new campaign, consider your overall email marketing and digital marketing goals. Set benchmarks to measure the overall success of your campaign. This means thinking about things like customer acquisition, open rates, and how email marketing builds into your overall strategy. Remember that your email marketing campaigns should be targeted and purposeful. The general goals of email marketing include:
- Welcoming new subscribers and explaining what you do, and the value your business provides so you can start building a business relationship with them.
- Encouraging your subscribers to engage more with your small business by using a webinar or trying to make your first sale.
- Nurturing the relationship of your old clients by providing them with valuable content.
- Re-engaging with subscribers who haven’t been engaging with your brand
- Segmenting your list so that you can send out more targeted content.
You can also set your KPI based on conversion rates, such as click-through-rates.
3. Build a target email list
To have an effective email marketing strategy, you need to have a solid contact list. Good tips to get started include displaying an email newsletter sign-up section on your website, adding an opt-in form as part of the e-commerce section of your website, and adding opt-in forms to order confirmations and other customer surveys. Keep in mind that effective email marketing starts with customers signing up for newsletters. If you send emails to customers who haven’t opted in, you’ll end up in the spam folder. The first thing when building an email list is not buying an email list. You want your subscribers to be people who are willing to read and subscribe to your content.
The best way to build an email list is to have an opt-in button at the top of your website. If you want to motivate your website visitors to sign up, offer a discount on your product or service or a useful ebook.
A challenge that almost all marketers face is dealing with subscribers who stop opening their emails. Therefore, engagement and re-engagement campaigns are becoming more common means of rekindling reader interest in a sender’s business.
The re-engagement email can have several different names:
• Reactivation email
• Win-back e-mail campaign
A re-engagement campaign is a sequence of emails sent to inactive subscribers. The goal of a re-engagement email is to get people to interact with your emails.
Re-engagement emails can include promotions, restate the value of your business, offer readers an opportunity to ask questions, or let them know they can change their email preferences and receive different or fewer messages.
4. Plan and execute your first email campaign
As with planning your overall goals and email list, set your first campaign with goals and metrics to determine its overall success. The main goal of any campaign should be to fit into your overall marketing goals. Focus on template design to create beautiful message type that fits your business. Consider other important aspects such as subject line, open rate, and conversion rate to better plan your overall email marketing efforts. Email marketing is a process that will never be perfected. This is constantly changing and your approach to building an effective strategy should keep this in mind. As you roll out new campaigns, make sure you monitor different aspects of your emails. This includes deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Continue to measure these benchmarks while optimizing your subject line, overall design, and message frequency. As you get better at email marketing, you can fine-tune these aspects to create an effective program.
5. Test and Track
Once your email marketing campaign is planned and executed, the work begins. You need to analyze the results you are getting and stick with what works. You can do A/B testing to see which subject gets more clicks. This will help you improve your email campaign and give you an idea of how to handle the campaign process next time.
Conclusion
The key to success in email campaign marketing is for agencies and marketers to put the customer at the center of their strategy.
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Segment your audience and take the time to understand the needs of and relevant messages for each subcluster
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Less is more. Resist the temptation to bombard customers with messages – once a month is a sensible starting point
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Don’t be afraid to experiment with different send times to see what works best for your audience
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Understand the different types of emails at your disposal and what makes sense to send to various segments within your customer journey
By following these steps, your SMB customers and prospects will be more likely to deal with you as your agency has invested the effort in understanding their needs.