Email marketing

What is email marketing?

Before we get into the details, understand what email marketing is – it’s an important part of strategic marketing for your business and is used to deliver information to customers on your email list.

Email marketing can help you achieve several key goals. It can attract new customers because people new to your brand can also submit their email address in a form without committing to purchase a product or service.

Direct digital marketing channels are vital to your business, helping you build relationships with existing customers and keep them in mind between purchases. It can also be great for customer education and showing why your brand is the best choice for them, or to increase potential and existing customers of your brand. Luckily, email marketing can do all of these things relatively cheaply because it’s a very effective way to reach a large audience.

How to use email marketing effectively

With these results in mind, you’ll want to reach the top of your game. Follow these steps to develop an effective email marketing strategy.

Know who is your audience

If you want to contact your customers via email, the first step is to understand who they are. Understanding your customers is important because it allows you to create relevant content for your emails.

What are the demographics of your ideal customer? Consider factors such as age, location, gender, occupation and interests. The better you understand your customers and who is most likely to be interested in your products or services, the more successful your email marketing campaigns will be.

For example, if your business sells pet treats, you could narrow your target to people who live alone and are interested in pets. Also, pay attention to which groups are least likely to be interested in your product.

Narrow your focus and make sure you’re not targeting people who don’t want to hear from you. If they are most likely to buy your product, then they are the best audience for your email marketing.

Make sure the target group.

Make sure the target group means finding the purpose behind every email, which can help you stay focused and avoid becoming spam. Your goals should be actionable and help you decide how to evaluate your overall results, which we’ll cover in a later step. Determine your goals by considering your business needs.

For example, if you’ve attracted a lot of new members through a successful social media campaign, you might want to run an email marketing campaign aimed at welcoming them and helping them get used to your website, product or subscription service.

Choose an email marketing platform

A good email marketing platform will help you achieve the goals set by your marketing campaign. It enables you to streamline the process of sending emails and making your daily marketing campaigns effective. It makes the process very easy and allows you to keep everything in one place.

When it comes to a platform, you want to make sure it’s powerful enough to scale at the scale you want, with the level of support you need to choose. You also need to determine which features are important to your business. Find out which platform is right for this type of business by reading our top email reviews about your marketing platform.

Determine the type of campaign

Your email marketing campaign should provide your customers with a specific call to action (CTA). It also includes a consistent and coordinated set of support emails designed to engage customers over time.

It’s important to determine your campaign type so you can focus on the content that will most engage your audience. When deciding on the type of email marketing campaign to launch, consider your goals and audience. Make sure your customer’s call-to-action is in language that helps you achieve your goals.

Some activity types include:

Newsletter
Promotional or announcement
Reengagement
Content or blog updates
Autoresponders like welcome emails, transactional emails, and more

For example, if you think your audience wants to spread a sense of community in your business, a newsletter could be a great way to keep them engaged and informed.

Build an email list

When you build an email list, you are gathering your target audience. While this may seem like the easier approach to take, it’s important not to buy an email list. Purchasing email lists can waste your time with potential customers who are not part of your audience. The best way to build an email list is to use an organic approach.

Here are some of the things you can use to build your email list organically:

Your company’s existing email list
Customer Relationship Management Software
Request new emails via social media or your website
Gated content and promotional offers

Make sure to contact your customers frequently to ask for their emails so that interested customers can easily provide you with their contact information. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers on your website or social media to opt in to emails, such as a pop-up offering a discount. Another approach might be to have a chatbot on social media accept emails for promotions.

Always make sure the emails on your list are from customers who have opted in to receive communications from you. If they haven’t opted in, don’t put them on your list.

Segment your list

Segment your email list by separating your customers into different groups. Creating these segments will allow you to customize the emails that you send, making it more likely that your customers will open and engage with your messages.

When you’re segmenting your email list, think about potential differences between your customers and how you can customize responses to them. Here are some potential email segments you could create with examples of how they could be useful:

If you’re creating a newsletter about outreach efforts, you may want to distribute different newsletters depending on the locale of the people you’re emailing.
You can customize the content and subject lines of your emails to appeal to different age groups.
Past purchases. If you have customers who have purchased certain products on your website, you can send them promotions specifically for similar products.
Buyer behavior. You can send more promotions to customers who respond well to them.
Expressed interests. If you ask your customers about their interests (in an intake quiz, for example), you can send them custom product recommendations.
Email engagement. If you have certain customers who engage very frequently with your emails, you can send them more regular emails without risking them unsubscribing.

These segments should all fall within the goal of your email campaign to make it more efficient. Differentiating your customers can make all the difference for your campaign.

Find an Interesting Subject

If you want your recipients to actually read the emails you create, your subject line must be attractive. Having dynamic subject lines (different subject lines for different segments or personalized subject lines for individuals) will make your emails more effective.

Many email marketing platforms will provide you with templates to make the process of creating emails easier.

Measure your results

Some common areas of analysis include:

Unique open rate, which tracks how many different customers are opening your emails. This is a good way to see how your subject lines are doing and whether your emails are relevant to the recipients.
Click-through rate, which tracks how many people are clicking on links in your emails. This can help you measure the effectiveness of your content.
Bounce rate, which tracks rejections from email servers. If you have a high bounce rate, you may have an unproductive email list.\
Unsubscribe rate, which tracks how many people have unsubscribed to your emails. It can let you know if your emails are spammy or irrelevant to the recipients.

There are many different metrics you can pay attention to. When you’re choosing which analyses to perform, think about which metrics most closely align with your goals.

At last but not least

Getting started with email marketing,Here’s a quick review of the steps to email marketing:

Define your audience. Identify the various demographics of your ideal customers.
Set goals. What is the purpose of your email campaign?
Choose an email marketing platform. It helps you streamline everything from creating email lists, sending emails, and evaluating analytics.
Determine the type of marketing campaign. How will your emails be coordinated? What is the customer’s CTA?
Build an email list. Do this organically and make sure everyone opts in.
Segment your list. For further customization, create unique emails for segmented groups in your email list.
Create your email. This content will determine whether or not a customer engages further with your business.
Test your email. Create variations of email elements to see which ones work best.
Measure your results. Use analytics to see if you achieved your goals and how to improve.

And don’t forget to obey the law. Be transparent and make it easy to unsubscribe.