E-mail marketing

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW AND HOW YOU CAN START

E-mail marketing is an essential part of digital marketing that should be adopted by every business using digital marketing trends.

Furthermore, email marketing has been in existence for a long time and has been a crucial ingredient to the success of entities who partake in digital marketing. E-mail marketing has a record of high success for digital marketers who know how to implement it.

In this blog post, I am going show you what Email marketing is, how you can start implementing it as well as different ways it will benefit your business and nevertheless a practical e-book to help you get started.

E-mail Marketing Defined

E-mail marketing is a system where-by organizations or entities practicing digital marketing send out messages to their email lists promoting their goods or services.

E-mail marketing cuts across only promotions but can also be educative or informative, but most of these e-mails have a goal set, which is the subscriber buying their product or services in which still falls back to promotion of their goods and services.

All the informative and educative part is just a strategy of email marketing itself to make sales.

For E-mail marketing to be successful, you have to consider building an email list, what type of campaign to send(e-mails) and most importantly having a goal set before starting email marketing as well as measuring the result of the campaign based on the goals.

An email marketing campaign goal might be a successful invitation to a webinar , Blog post and so on like that, having a goal in mind would let you measure your email marketing campaign better and will point you to the next action to take.

Action to take before starting E-mail Marketing

1. Build E-mail list

Building an e-mail list has to do with gathering the e-mail contact/ addresses of your prospective clients or customers which are regarded as LEADS in a digital marketing term. This has been done mostly by different experts till today through a system called LEAD GENERATION, which is can be done through Social Media Platforms, internet ads, and the most crucial, a sign-up form and a landing page.

A landing page is a part of a website or a stand-alone web-page that is re-directed to, using those systems I stated above (to generate leads) in other to convince a visitor to submit his email address.

This landing page requires a website or some particular software that builds personalized web pages with or without a domain name, such as Get-response.

A landing page can be used to convince a visitor to submit his e-mail address which requires a specific system called lead Generation which is fully explained here.

Furthermore, an e-mail list can also be built by buying them on the internet which is not advisable. Building an e-mail list should be well-practiced even for blog and website owners, for the ones who are not doing so are reducing their chances of success towards getting more customers.

2. Email Campaigns

The campaign is a basic part of E-mail Marketing. E-mail Campaign is the mail/message content sent to subscribers on a mailing list while campaigns in E-mail Marketing is the text, picture or video contents contained in the message which is usually to satisfy a specific purpose.

A campaign can be sent out to alert subscribers on a list to notify them of a new post on a blog, tell them about a product in your store and the likes.

3. Set A Goal

Goal setting – is basically referred to, as the aim of setting out on a marketing campaign, it will be very easy to measure the success of a campaign when goals are set because it will navigate through the next course of action and give you an insight of how your campaign is doing amongst others, campaign goal can be measured in email marketing through the following criteria:-

Open rate: The goal of an email campaign in its early stages can be open rates. As the name implies, open rates are the number of times email campaign messages are opened by each and every subscriber.

So the number of times each and every subscriber on your email list opens a message is considered as open rates. Open rates can be used to measure how well subscribers react to your mails and vividly how much they opened it to read.

Click-Through Rate: Click-through rate is considered as the number of time subscribers who receive and open e-mails click on your link in the e-mail message.

Click-through rates: might be a goal of an E-mail campaign i.e. the success is measured by the number of times people open your mail and click on a link to take them to your website. In click-through rate, other actions can be used to determine the success of a campaign such as:

Sales Rate: Amount of sales made from the campaign click-through rate

Sign up Rate: Rate at which subscribers sign-up to a particular event online/offline e.g Webinar/conference.

Email Marketing Campaign can also be measured through the following

Bounce rate– Bounce rate is the rate at which email marketing campaign messages do not reach the subscriber it is being sent to.

It is also the rate at which message did not reach subscriber inbox or rate at which mails bounce off subscriber inbox which can be caused by several factors. Here, some messages sent may not reach subscriber inbox which can be managed through different ways but the point is that bounce rate can also be used to measure Email campaign.

In other to better optimize an email campaign not to bounce, one way is by using Never Bounce.

Never bounce is an email cleaning software that drastically reduces bounce rate by by cleaning up and verifying your email list, with over 125,000 happy customers.

Spam Rate: Spam is a term used to address something evasive or unwanted

In email marketing, when messages are being marked or reported as spam, they are been sent to a particular folder which will not easily be noticed by the subscriber which would adversely affect the performance of the email marketing campaign.

Unsubscribe rate; this is rate email campaign receivers opt-out of receiving emails from the sender. It is the rate at which receivers unsubscribe from your email marketing campaign receivers list which could be caused by numbers of factors and if not measured and managed could negatively affect the performance of a campaign

Now as seen above measuring email marketing performance is a big deal because it helps in navigating towards the next course action toward optimizing a campaign to perform better.

Types of email marketing campaigns

1. Welcome E-mail

As its name implies it used to welcome a new E-mail campaign subscriber. This normally triggered by a site visitor successfully submitting his email to the lead capture/sign up form. It is used to notify the subscriber that he has successfully submitted his email.

2. Promotional E-mail

This email campaign is being set out to promote or increase the awareness of a particular product or service. It might be about the sale, launching of a product/service. Promotional email is the commonest type of email campaign out there because everyone has this type of email in his/her inbox, so it is what everyone that has a mail knows well and what they are being used for.

3. Seasonal campaign

This is can be categorized under promotional campaigns. it is the type of email you receive during special holidays or seasons such as Christmas, valentine day, mother’s day and the likes. These are mediums used to wish you well as well as to promote special offers.

Note: This is a common tradition among companies today.

4. Triggered/Automated Email series

As its name implies this email comes in when a subscribe takes a particular action on the mail or on a website, for example, buying a product on a website might automatically trigger a thank you email, or clicking on a link in an email, abandoning a cart without making purchase is on as well and series of other actions.

The real reason behind all these is reaching out to the subscriber and reminding him/her of the activity left of or taken or thanking/showing appreciation for action taken which might be in form of gift or appreciation.

5. Newsletter Campaign

Newsletter is a periodic email campaign a company sends out to reach out to their prospective customers and subscribers, newsletter are also used to warm up a subscriber about the product or services, it might also be in form of new development about the company product or services.

The point of newsletters is just to make a customer remember the company, newsletters can be sent out twice a month or on a weekly basis. It is always good for your business that your customers hear from you at least once In a week.

BENEFITS AND WHY OF E-MAIL MARKETING

1. Targeted and personalized content

With email marketing, one can target his customers with personalized content such as addressing a person with his/her first name. You can send personalized email messages based on the subscriber location or attitude to email sent previously such as open rate and the click through rate which are more flexible unlike any other form of digital marketing out there today.

2. Build credibility

E-mail can be used to build credibility overtime because it is a consistent system of marketing that can be used to build credibility and trust between the sender and the subscriber, for instance, imagine receiving an e-mail constantly and explaining to you the benefit of having a particular product or service.

3. Boost sales

E-mail marketing can be used to boost sales of any organization practicing it because it is a persistent form of marketing that can be used to convince suscribers in to buying customers.

It is also the best form when it comes to alerting customers of irresistible sales deals and so on.

4. Stronger customer relationships

Relationship between a customer and a seller naturally becomes stronger when the seller consistently sends valuable email educating or informing him/her about something. Also sending out a thank you or how to message after a purchase might also go a long way and prompt other purchases.

5. Saves your time and budget

E-mail marketing unlike any other requires less budget to carry out and even gives good result unlike any other form promotion that charges based on click and actions.

However, email marketing only charges for sends which is more cost effective unlike any other, E-mail Marketing saves time because it requires less time in other to carry out. With E-mail marketing one can spend less time studying whether to pause or resume a campaign.

6. Promote traffic to your website

E-mail is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website or blog with the help of the click through rate.

7. Establish authority

E-mail marketing can help build an authority on a particular topic or niche. E-mail marketing in the long run will show how well the sender knows or have experience about a niche he/she is in. This can command a strong authority and recognition for such sender in that particular niche or topic.

8. Easily measured

Email campaign are easily measured unlike any other digital marketing campaign. With bounce rate, spam rate, you can easily figure out the campaign performance and also with open rate and click through rate, you can easily measure the level of engagement of the campaign.

E-mail Marketing Do's and Don'ts

Everything in life has it own do’s and don’t, well e-mail marketing is not an exception of those things, to be successful with email marketing and make the best of it one has to follow these rules

Do not buy an email list. Learn to build yours with lead capture and sign up forms here

Do not wait before you send your new subscribers email, send as soon as they are still warm

Do not send your list the same messages all through try and segment them based on their preferred time zones etc

Learn to send personalized messages to your list because it increases open rate by addressing a subscriber with his first name other than a general pronoun.

Do not send one-off message to your subscriber try to create a series of triggered messages to keep warm and in time will turn them to paying customers

Always measure the performance of every campaign to improve it.

Final Words

Implementing e-mail marketing in your business starting today can be a complete game-changer for you because it is going to level up your ROI in a short time and that at low cost compared to any other form of digital marketing

Want to start email marketing for your business today ?, check out this free e-book where I explained how you can send out your first email campaign with a beginner-friendly software.

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E-MAIL MARKETING