How does email marketing work?

what is email marketing ?

Email marketing has become an essential tool for business ever since the introduction of the Internet to the world, however, some campaigns that make it through to our inboxes are absolute rubbish that we don’t take any notice of. This article seeks to explain what email marketing really is, why companies should use it, and how they should go about doing so.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

-Sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.

-Sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.

Adding advertisements to emails sent by other companies to their customers.

Email Marketing Benefits

The most important benefits of email marketing to any kind of online business are:

It’s a great way to build a community around your brand

It can help you get more leads and make more sales

It’s one of the best ways to get more recurring traffic

It’s a way to minimize some of the risks associated with SEO algorithmic changes. This is particularly important because once you get to a point that you have a big list of active email subscribers; you can worry less about SEO changes that can have a negative impact on your traffic.

So the questions are why and how should one go about email marketing? Well here are a few thoughts on the matter:

Why?

-Cost – Email marketing is CHEAP, there are no two ways about it. Whether you do it yourself, or through an email marketing agency, marketing to hundreds of consumers via email is going to cost you tiddlywinks compared to other channels of advertising.

-Success – Emails can be targeting specifically to the ideal consumer. With this concept in mind, along with email cost-effectiveness, it’s no wonder that email marketing’s ROI often blows other direct marketing strategies out of the water – The trick is that you have to get it right!

-Measurability and Flexibility – With the analytics available today it’s easy to track responses to your emails exactly, in order to work out what parts of your campaign are working and what parts aren’t. With this knowledge, you can then react instantly to modify your campaign strategy if need be.

How?

Dave Chaffey from Marketing Insights offers an experienced view into the success factors of email marketing, using the mnemonic “CRITICAL“:

-Creative – This refers to the overall design of the email (layout/images/colour). Specifically, it is a good idea to ask each customer whether they would like the emails in text or HTML as there is often a great preference for one over the other.

-Relevance – Targeting, targeting, and more targeting. Make your emails relevant and personalized to each recipient if you want that response rate to rise.

-Incentive – Recipients look at emails and think “WIIFM?”, i.e. “What’s in it for me??”. There’s no such thing as a free lunch right? Well… Offer the recipient a “free lunch” for participating and they will be more likely to respond.

-Timing – Don’t send out an email that recipients will receive overnight, let it pop up in their inbox during their working day. This also expands to selecting certain days, months, and even years. Remember – You can test and measure what timing works best for which email.

-Integration – Companies can not just rely on one method of marketing, nor can they rely on several methods of differentiated marketing. Instead, best marketing practices utilise integrated marketing communication (IMC) where all aspects of their promotion work together to create a whole. Email marketing must be including here, therefore your emails must carry the same image and message as your entire operations. Even the timing of the campaign must work in with other aspects of your marketing mix.

-Copy – When considering the copywriting for your email you must consider all aspects of the language, from subject line through to your mail signature. With emails, not all links should be saved for the last sentence, pop them in early to grab that impulsive customer!

-Attributes – Here Dave talks about the email header, with attributes including the subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt, and format. Once again, testing your campaigns can rule out the attributes that customers consider spam and highlighting the attributes that will work best for your business.

-Landing Page – Want those emails to turn into sales conversions? Don’t just hyperlink your customers to your home page; show them exactly where you want them to go and make it quick and easy to complete any forms!

So yes… Email marketing is a vital component in many industries, especially for creating those important customer-firm relationships. Learn to use it well and it will definitely bump up your company’s success.

How does email marketing work?

-Sign up for an email marketing tool

-Create an email marketing strategy

-Build and grow your email list

-Setup automation tasks

-Monitor and improve campaign performance through A/B testing

-Regularly ‘clean up’ your email lists

Sign up for an email marketing tool

Email marketing is a process can be fully automated with the help of a good email marketing tool.

If you try to use your personal account to email hundreds of people and manually keep track of the results won’t work, so your first step is to select which platform to use.

An email marketing platform will help you:

-Create an email list

-Add users to your list using a number of methods

-Send emails to your audience

-Provide you with reports on how many people open your emails and interact with them (click a link in the email)

-Provide you with different options to segment your audience based on specified criteria

-Create retargeting audiences on Facebook based on your email list

-Automate various email marketing tasks such as sending a welcome email to your subscribers or different emails based on their actions

-Make sales directly from an email message

-Create email funnels to redirect users to pages/products/actions you want them to take

Create an email marketing strategy

As with any type of digital marketing campaign, the first thing to do is to create a strategy.

Having an email marketing strategy in place before running any campaigns will help you to:

-Decide how email marketing will be used in conjunction with the other online marketing campaigns you’ll be running.

-Decide which email marketing platform to use and figure out your monthly costs.

-Decide on the strategies to use to grow your email list

-Decide when to use automation and what kind of messages to send and when

-Have the right reporting mechanisms in place to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns

-Build and grow your email list 

For email marketing to work, you need to have a BIG list of active subscribers so the most important task in your strategy should be how to grow your email list.

As mentioned above, it’s not only a matter of adding random people to your list but people who manually registered to receive your emails.

Growing and maintaining an email list is tricky but with the right approach and tools, it can a valuable asset for your business.

The best ways to increase your email subscribers are:

Publish great content on your site – if your content is not what users want, whatever technique you use, it won’t help you get more subscribers.

If, on the other hand, your content provides value to users, your email list will grow faster.

Give them incentives – Free eBooks, trial offers, and other ‘gifts’ are great incentives to offer to users in return for their email address.

Setup automation tasks

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that it’s a process that can be fully automated.

When we refer to email marketing automation, we mean sending targeted emails to your users based on the actions they take when they receive your emails or actions they perform on your site.

The most common email automation tasks are:

Welcome emails – Sending a welcome email to users as soon as they subscribe to your list

Email campaigns – Sending them a series of emails (replicating a sales funnel)

Abandon cart emails – Sending emails to website visitors that added a product to their shopping cart but did not checkout

Cross-selling / Upselling – Suggest products to customers based on their purchase history

Review/Feedback forms – requesting feedback/reviews from customers X days after they made a purchase

Monitor and improve campaign performance through A/B testing

Besides having the right type of people subscribed to your list, to run successful email marketing campaigns, you need to do a lot of A/B testing.

A/B testing will help you find out what kind of email messages can potentially generate higher user engagement and more conversions.

Things to test with A/B testing include:

-The length of the email subject titles

-The format of the emails (HTML, text, with or without images)

-The length of the email body

-The frequency of sending emails

-The level of promotional messages within the email

-Placement of your signup forms

-The message used in your signup forms

-The ‘offers’ used as incentives for email signup

-The authentication method used to verify the validity of emails (no authentication, double-opt-in)

To perform any kind of A/B testing (not just emails), you need to monitor the right metrics and eliminate any factors that can influence the results of your testing.

Regularly ‘clean up’ your email lists

As a beginner to email marketing, you need to understand three things:

A large percentage of your email subscribers will be inactive – It is normal to have a lot of inactive subscribers to your list. The average email open rate for an email campaign is around 20% and this means that a large majority of the people on your list will not read your messages.

Having a big list is not always the best approach – Sending emails that get opened by a small percentage of recipients will mark your emails as spam. This means your reach will gradually decrease. On the other hand, emails that get opened by the majority of recipients, help the overall performance of the campaign.

Big lists will cost you a lot of money to maintain – As your email list grows, so does the monthly expense. When you reach 10,000 subscribers you may have to pay more than $150 per month to have a subscription with a good email marketing tool.

One of the ways to minimize your costs and increase the healthiness of your list is to occasionally perform a list cleanup and remove inactive subscribers from your list.

Users that registered to your list but do not open your campaigns are not useful for your business goals and it’s better to remove them. Remember that it’s better to have a smaller list but with active subscribers than a big list of inactive subscribers.

Why is email marketing important?

1. Stay in contact with your audience

Emails have the ability to keep your customers informed. Consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient for them. It can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them. This email can be as simple as saying: “Hi, you’re on our mind, here is a special offer!” or “Here is an update on what has been going on here in recent weeks.” Those that have signed up to your email list have already made a commitment to receive these notes. So they will likely enjoy these emails (as long as you give them something worth reading) and it will boost engagement with your customers.

2. Reach customers in real-time

According to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This is significant and should come into play when planning any marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails but all other types of media and information. Not only that, well-designed emails produce higher conversion rates on mobile than any other medium. Hit ’em on the go!

3. People engage with emails

For a long time now, over 40 years actually, email has been a form of communication. As the years have gone by, email has fast become one of our main choices of communication. We have all been groomed to reply to an email in some fashion. Whether it is to reply, to forward, click through to something else embedded within the email, delete, or to buy something, or to sign up. We tend to do something with the email. Knowing this, you can use email to drive people to your website, to pick up the phone and call or any other call to action. In fact, over 25 percent of sales last year were attributed to email marketing.

4. Email marketing is easy to measure

Most email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, and open rates. This gives you a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working, which ones to tweak or which ones to get rid of altogether. These metrics should not be ignored. They are an important part of your internet marketing campaign as a whole. While there are various studies and surveys that present “optimal” numbers to aim for, it all depends on your industry and target audience. If your customers not only want but expect daily emails, you better provide them. However, sending too many emails to consumers who don’t want more than one a week will see your unsubscribe rate increase. It’s all about knowing your customers and providing valuable content.

5. It’s affordable

Yes, we know you were waiting for us to address this one. You can reach a large number of consumers for less than pennies per message. The cost per (possible) conversion is so low with email marketing, I cannot believe every company does not participate, or engage more often.

6. Allows for targeted messaging

Now let’s talk about the importance of email marketing when it comes to lead nurturing – sometimes referred to as email lead marketing. The main idea here is that your potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Some may be in the consideration stage, while others may be at the research and compare stage, and even others in the ready-to-purchase stage. Creating buyer personas can help you determine what kind of content to create for each step.

Segmenting these customers into appropriate email marketing lists helps businesses target these groups more effectively. Customers need information to move them to the next buying cycle stage; pushing the right content can do just that. It’s all about moving these prospects down your sales funnel – not as quickly as possible, but as efficiently as possible.

7. Increase brand awareness

Nope, social media isn’t the only platform that helps a company’s brand awareness. Possessing a customer or prospect’s email address means one thing: they showed a level of interest in your business. Email marketing gives you the ability to increase that interest level, that brand awareness, by staying top of mind.

This doesn’t mean to send four daily emails to every single customer. That’s actually a great way to get customers to hate you… Instead, try some email marketing that promotes your activeness in the local community. Too many times companies try to sell, sell, sell their products via email marketing, and completely ignore the brand awareness factor. By doing so, they’re also prohibiting the ultimate possibility of building customer trust and adding a sense of personality to their brand.

8. It’s timely

Yes, one of the benefits of email marketing can be to sell your products, if you approach it in the correct fashion. It’s important to use all the customer data and information you can. Sending customers a special offer on their birthday, or letting them know their favorite dish is half off is much more effective than simply sending them a menu.

This email marketing strategy also can incorporate seasonal offers, allowing you to promote a holiday special or an annual sale. Be sure to create a sense of urgency for any offer – customers are much more likely to purchase when a deal is ending soon.

9. Everyone (almost) uses email

A Hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email. That alone should be enough to convince you to explore the tool. Unless your industry accounts for the remaining 9% (hint: it doesn’t), email presents an incredible opportunity to reach customers. Not only can you provide them with discounts, specials, new products, and more, they can share and forward those emails to anyone they’d like. A good email marketing strategy is to encourage customers to share offers as much as possible. Remember brand awareness?

Email is especially huge in the B2B world as it accounts for the most prominent form of communication for 73% of businesses.