The Complete Guide to Email Marketing
But while email marketing may seem easy, reaching success with it needs a well-planned plan and careful execution. That’s why we’ve built the ultimate email marketing guide for newbies to help you fine-tune your approach and gain a solid ROI. This guide covers everything from creating effective email campaigns to segmenting your email list and measuring your success. So whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, read on to learn how to master the art of email marketing.
Email marketing has been around for a long time, and for a good reason – it’s a simple yet effective way to connect with your audience and generate leads. More than 70% of global marketers consider email marketing to be an excellent marketing channel. And with a potential ROI of up to $44 for every dollar spent, it’s no wonder businesses of all sizes are turning to email marketing as a way to grow their customer base and boost revenue.
What is email marketing?
To promote your business to customers on your email list, it’s important to understand email marketing. It’s a crucial component of your marketing plan that involves sending promotional messages and newsletters to your subscribers’ email addresses.
Email marketing is a way of using email messages to communicate with an audience as part of digital marketing. These messages can be used to promote products or services, but they can also be used to educate and inform recipients about topics that engage them.
Email marketing is using email as a sales channel. To do this, you need a large email list of people who have willingly subscribed to receive your messages. Buying email lists, even if they include emails of people related to your niche, is not allowed.
Why do you need email marketing?
Email marketing is essential for any blog or business. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Creating a respected and influential brand takes time, and email marketing is a long-term growth strategy that can help you achieve that goal.
- If you want to bypass a significant financial investment, you will need patience and dedication to build up your business over time.
- To build a loyal customer base without spending a lot of money, start by creating a large email list of people who are interested in your business.
- An extensive email list can also help you increase the number of returning visitors to your site and build a supportive community of customers.
Email is becoming increasingly important for communication, not just for retention marketing but also as a broad means of communication. Although some may think that people mostly use texting and social media messaging, email usage continues to grow. Statista reports that there are currently 4.2 billion people using email around the world, and this is projected to grow to almost 4.6 billion by 2025. In the United States, there are currently 246 million email users.
Major benefits of email marketing
Using email to promote your business can be very effective. There are many advantages, but we will talk about the top six that can increase your profits directly.
1. Increase brand awareness
Using email can help you promote your brand, products, and services by sending useful resources, educational content, news, updates, and more to people who have signed up to receive your emails. It’s also important to make sure your emails match your brand’s style and personality to help people recognize and remember your brand.
2. Generate website traffic
Email can help you bring more people to your website. You can send previews of recent articles and encourage interested subscribers to read the full versions of your blog. You can also include buttons in your emails that take subscribers to your landing pages and sales pages to learn more about your products.
3. Drive sales and revenue
Email can be useful to show customers your products and services and try different ways to promote them and make more money. For instance, you can give discounts and free shipping to encourage people to buy. You can also share collections and roundups that highlight particular products. And you can suggest additional products or upgrades to increase the value of each order.
4. Boost other marketing channels
Email can help you link your marketing activities and direct people to other ways of interacting with your business, like social media, blogs, landing pages, and events. For example, you can request new customers to post a review on your Facebook page or launch an Instagram challenge and invite your email subscribers to take part.
5. Keep customers engaged
Email gives you space to try out different types of messages. You can get creative with your email campaigns and try new things to keep customers interested and excited about your brand. This also helps your business stay memorable to your customers.
6. Gain valuable business data
Email helps you gather data about your customers and their behavior. You can do this by using analytics to track email performance or by asking them to fill out surveys or feedback forms. This data can enhance your emails, business, products, and services.
You can use email marketing tools to create automated workflows that send emails when customers take certain actions. For example, you can send a welcome email as soon as someone signs up for your newsletter.
Automation saves you time and makes sure the right person gets the right email at the right time. This reduces errors and delays caused by human mistakes.
Let’s explore some details about effective strategies to increase the number of subscribers on your email list.
Create an email marketing plan
Don’t worry if you’re not sure what to do for your email marketing. Running a business can be challenging, and we understand you’re busy. To help, we’ve put together some tips to help you create a plan for your email marketing that works. We’re sure that the time you spend on this will be worth it in the end.
Define your audience
Define your audience
Defining your audience means deciding on the exact group of people you want to reach through your email marketing. This needs studying data like age, gender, location, income, education, and interests to gain insights into their habits and choices. When you know your audience well, you can create personalized and meaningful emails to them, resulting in higher engagement and more sales. Understanding your audience also lets you customize your email marketing tactics to meet their needs, which can lead to a thriving email campaign.
Signup sources
Knowing how and where your subscribers sign up for your email list can provide valuable insights into your marketing strategy. If you’re an e-commerce business, this data can help you communicate with your customers more effectively and tailor your marketing efforts.
For instance, if most of your signups come from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, then you can focus on engaging with potential customers on these platforms. You can also create segments to target people who signed up via a specific method, such as an integration or a hosted form. To track signups from a specific page on your website, add a hidden field to your embedded form and place it on multiple pages.
Segments and groups
Divide your email list into groups of customers with similar characteristics. This helps you create personalized emails that your customers are more likely to open and read.
When creating these groups, consider what makes your customers different and tailor your emails to match. Here are some groups you can create and how they can be useful:
- Location: Send different emails based on where your customers live.
- Age: Customize your email content and subject lines to appeal to different age groups.
- Past purchases: Send promotions for similar products to customers who bought from you before.
- Buying habits: Send more promotions to customers who respond well to them.
- Interests: Send custom product recommendations to customers based on their interests.
- Engagement: Send more frequent emails to customers who engage with your emails often.
Make sure that these groups align with your email campaign’s goal to make it more efficient. Customizing your emails based on your customers can make a big difference in the success of your campaign.
Decide what to write
Now that you know who you’re emailing think about what you want to say. Your emails should have a sense and speak to your subscribers. You can include different types of content in your emails, such as upcoming events, recaps of past events, popular social media posts, news coverage, product information, and holiday shopping guides.
Before creating content from scratch, consider using content you already have, like famous social media posts or articles about your company. Also, think about creating specific content for certain groups of subscribers to reward them for their interests.
For example, Gingiber, a nursery art company, uses pre-built segments to reward its most engaged subscribers.
How to get email marketing lists?
An email is a useful tool for companies that want to build a list of people who are interested in their updates. Here are some ways they can do this:
- Use clear and direct calls to action (CTAs) on their website or landing pages to encourage people to sign up for email updates.
- Let their social media followers know they have an email list for special offers or exclusive content.
- Offer free downloadable items such as an ebook or whitepaper to entice people to sign up.
- Use pop-ups or forms on their website to ask people for their email addresses.
- Hold a competition with a prize that people will want to win in exchange for providing their personal information.
- Advertise a special offer, such as a discount or two-for-one deal, to encourage people to join the email list.
- Offer a subscription to their blog for people who want to receive the latest content.
- Give existing customers a referral incentive, such as a discount on their next purchase, if they refer a friend to sign up for the email list.
- Ask people to opt-in to email as part of a feedback or testimonial form.
- Host a webinar or podcast with high-value content and ask people to provide their information when signing up.
- Create a newsletter to keep people up-to-date on new developments, discounts, or competitions.
- Lastly, ask people for their email addresses and tell them about the benefits of subscribing to the email list.