What Is Email Marketing And How To Do Guide With Strategy

Get an in-depth understanding of what is Email Marketing an Email Marketing Strategy in this tutorial along with its advantages, types, etc.:

Email marketing is the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads and turning them into your customers. It also comes in extremely handy if you want to update your customers with your new products, discounts, offers, and other services. It is only apparent that it should be the key pillar of your digital marketing strategy.

What is Email Marketing?

In simple words, Email marketing is sending your email subscribers a commercial email to inform them about a new product you are launching, a product that’s back in your stock, of new offers and discounts, etc. It is used to drive sales, create brand awareness, build relationships, and build a community around your brands.

Email Marketing

Before you begin, here are some tips for you:

• Always ask for email addresses.
• Never send an unsolicited email.
• Keep a record of all the registrations.
• Always keep an option of opting out of or unsubscribing emails.
• Show your privacy policies.
• Keep the emailing list secure.

You should take a good email marketing course before indulging in this powerful digital marketing tool.

How To Do Email Marketing

Starting your marketing campaign is simple but time-consuming.

Enlisted below are a few points to be considered:

#1) Curate List

That’s where you should start. To whom will you send these marketing emails? And who should you send them to? Email marketing is only helpful if you send them to the right people on your list.

#2) Pick An Email Service Provider

With the help of the right email service provider, you can:

• Segment your audience.
• Organize your mailing list.
• Distribute email campaigns to the target audience.

A good service provider will integrate with the other marketing tools you have and help you turn everything on autopilot so that you can grow your leads efficiently. Some of the popular email service providers are Aweber, Brevo, Convertkit, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, etc.

Aweber provides email marketing solutions for small businesses. Using its email automation capabilities you can send emails based on audience behavior.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the best bulk email service for beginners. This platform makes use of machine learning-powered send-time optimization.

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers email marketing, ads, landing pages, and CRM.

Constant Contact is an online marketing platform with a website builder, social media ads, Google ads, Email Marketing Automation, and Lead-generation Landing Pages.

For details on the top email service providers please read >>  Popular Email Marketing Services

#3) Grow Your Emailing List

Usually, companies put an opt-in form on their website and hope that people will sign up. But often, that doesn’t work. So, the idea is to give them something free in exchange for signing in. It shouldn’t cost you anything and can be something digital like a PDF, an MP3, an ebook, a coupon, free samples or trials, or whatever works best with your products and services. The possibilities are endless.

Make sure whatever you are giving can be used easily. It must be relevant to your brand and the user, and it should be available immediately.

#4) Create An Opt-in Form

To create an opt-in form, you will need:

• An enticing headline that describes the benefit of what are you offering.
• A brief, clear, and to-the-point description of what they will get.
• A lucrative image of the gift.
• The form should be simple, containing the name and email address.
• A compelling subscription button pops out and grabs the attention of the user.
• Put your opt-in form in a place that grabs attention and is easy to access.

Suggested Reading => Do You Know What is Inbound Marketing

#5) Segment Your List

Segmentation is where you break your subscribers into smaller groups depending on specific criteria. It will help you create more relevant and personalized emails. Thus, you will send emails to those interested in the offer, resulting in a higher conversion rate.

You can segment your emailing list based on:

• New subscribers
• Preferences- who wants only sale notifications vs who wants to hear everything you have to say?
• Interests
• Location of the subscriber
• Rewards- Something for the more engaged subscribers
• Inactive subscribers
• Gifts they opted for
• Window shoppers- Who add things to the cart but haven’t checked it out yet.

And so on.

Objective Of Email Marketing

Your well-thought-out email marketing strategy can help you reach many goals- long-term and short-term. Here is what it aims to achieve:

#1) Increase Brand Awareness

Your email campaign will remind your clients about your brand and seeing relevant emails from you will register your brand on their minds. So, when they look for a product, they most likely will choose you. You can combine your sales email with educational ones to create the right brand image.

#2) Boost Sales

That’s something on the top of the list of every marketer. If you have created a credible brand, your clients will buy your products right off your emails. All you have to do is inform them about your offers, deals, or upcoming sales.

#3) Credibility Building

Emails are a good way of earning credibility for your brand if you haven’t yet had that. Customers appreciate an honest and straightforward approach. So, add some reviews and testimonials as proof for them to see or give them a link to your website’s review page.

#4) Create Traffic

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Every email contains several links to the pages of your website. So, if you create a catchy headline and a relevant offer, your customers will click on the links that will take them to your website. This will surely drive traffic to your website.

#5) Cutting Long Sales Cycle Short

People usually take a long time to make the buying decision for a service or a complex product. An email containing step-by-step guides, a checklist, or something similar that is relevant to your product or service will help the customer realize the benefits of using your product. That will also help them in making a quick decision, thus reducing the long sales cycle.

#6) Automated Tasks

You can send some emails automatically in response to certain actions from your clients. It could be a welcome and onboarding email, confirmation of registration, order confirmation, reactivation email, password reset email, etc. It will help you cut the cost and you can focus on more important things.

Different Types Of Marketing Emails

There are different types of marketing emails you can use for various purposes. Here is a list of them along with ways to use these emails:

#1) Welcome Emails

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Nurturing is an important key to converting your leads into buyers. Welcome email acts as a bridge on that road. Use a little personal touch to introduce your organization minus the sales pitch.

This is you trying to build a relationship with a prospective buyer, so don’t introduce any new products or services in your welcome mail. Work on creating a good first impression, illustrate your knowledge, gifts, and expertise in the industry, and make a way for future contact.

#2) Email Newsletter

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Email newsletters will keep you on the top of the minds of the recipients. These emails are a great tool for educating your customers about the prospects of your business. You can also use it for showcasing the passion projects of your company, employee profiles, etc.

You must set a goal for your newsletter- what do you want to achieve from it? It could be nurturing your existing contacts, being the first name they think of when they think of a product or service in your industry, attracting new customers, etc. The possibilities are endless. Defining the goal will make it easy for you to track your progress.

#3) Dedicated Email

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As the name suggests, dedicated emails contain information about a single offer. For example, you can send out emails to your target audience to invite them to a sale that will be happening on a certain day or tell them about a new product you have released.

Dedicated emails are often used to reach out to the entire email list in the database. However, sometimes, you might just want to target a segment based on the different interests and behaviors of your subscribers.

#4) Promotional Emails

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Promotional emails are usually a series of emails that are full of useful content and have a coherent purpose of nurturing leads. These emails are multifaceted and can be designed to promote various things like blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and other marketing materials or offers like discounts, sales, etc.

You can also use promotional emails to keep your customers informed about what is happening with your company. The goal here is to gradually absorb them into your sales cycle and turn them into loyal customers. You can even automate these emails to save time and manual labor.

#5) Transactional Email

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These are the kinds of emails that are triggered by specific actions your contacts take to enable them to complete the action. A thank you email with login details for a website or a webinar is a type of transactional email.

The emails where the customers are asked to click on a link to confirm the registration are called double opt-in emails. Emails of order confirmation, shipment information, and other details related to a recent purchase you have made are also part of transactional emails.

Suggested Reading =>> Transactional Email API Service providers

#6) Brand Story Email

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Nothing is as powerful as storytelling to get someone’s attention. Brand story emails use storytelling to put your point across to your prospects and customers by exploiting their emotional responses. To make a great connection between your customers and your brand, slide in the personal story behind your brand in their inbox. Or, you can share a video of your company.

#7) Re-engagement Emails

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Often, most people in your subscribed client list get dormant or unresponsive. Re-engagement emails are meant to re-establish communication and goodwill with them. Request feedback from them, it will remind them of your brand. And if they respond, you not only get feedback, but you also get to re-establish contact with them.

#8) Review Request Emails

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Today, in the digital era, people rely heavily on reviews to judge a company, a product, or a service. Reviews are vital for building credibility and boosting your rank in Google search. You can request your most happy customers to write a review through review request emails. You can add some incentives to it like a gift card or discount offer.

The trick is to pick the right email for a certain situation. You can learn more about them and how to draft them by taking an email marketing course. The right kind of email can generate a lot of sales for you.

Advantages Of Email Marketing

Email marketing strategies offer you many advantages. Some of them are listed below:

• It offers a fantastic return on investment. You spend less and get a lot more.
• You can see its impact instantly.
• It offers a global reach.
• Subscribers can forward it easily to friends and family.
• Most software allows you to track click-through rates, open rates, conversion rates, unsubscriptions, etc. So, you can easily find out what are you doing right or wrong.
• It’s easy to start an email marketing campaign.
• It takes advantage of impulse buying and hence drives revenue.
• You can deliver targeted messages for more benefit.
• It reaches the audience who are already engaged in your brand.
• Costs little and returns more.

10 Steps In Email Marketing Strategy

Your email campaign needs to be perfect for it to work. Here’s how you can create a fruitful email marketing strategy:

#1) Picking the right software

There are many popular email tools available in the market that make it hard to pick the right one for your business. Consider these few things to narrow down the list:

• Make a list of features you must have and would like to have.
• Fix a budget and don’t go overboard.
• Check the pricing of the service providers and see what are they offering at that price.
• What will be your email volume? How many emails and how often are you planning to send?
• How many opt-in email lists do you already have?
• If you don’t know how to design a marketing email, you will need an email marketing template. And if you want to code the emails, you would want an HTML editor.
• If you want automated emails, look for the service providers who offer more than just basic autoresponders.

Considering these factors will help you pick the right service provider for your marketing emails.

#2) Build an Email list

For your email marketing strategy to work, you will need an email list. And you will need subscribers. Most email service providers allow you to create subscription forms that you can embed on your website.

When you are creating a subscription form be clear about the kind of email content, they will be receiving and how often. Never send unrelated emails and don’t send them any more frequently than you promised. And if you are promising a gift, deliver it.

#3) A Welcome Email for new subscribers

You have their attention the moment they sign up for your emails. Now, it falls on you to keep them engaged. The first step is to step up a catchy welcome email. The idea of a welcome mail is to introduce your brand to the new subscribers and establish a relationship with them.

You can introduce a welcome discount, useful information about your products and brands, provide a link to your latest article, etc.

#4) Set a goal for your campaign

It is important to know what you are looking to achieve from your first email campaign.

Do you want to:

• Introduce a new product?
• Share a discount with your new and loyal customers.
• Update your subscribers on vital company news.
• Getting more downloads?

Your goals can be specific or broad, but they must fit in with your audience and business. If you have a clear idea about what your goals are, it will be easy to create the content for the best email campaign.

#5) Create the email with a responsive design

That’s one other point where picking the right and best email service provider is important because they come with a drag-and-drop email editor. With the help of these editors, you can create a simple and clean design hassle-free.

However, if you can manage the budget and want to stand out from the crowd, hiring a dedicated email designer will be a good option. They can create a custom email marketing template for you.

#6) Draft your email

Your email must offer value and speak on the topics of your audience’s interest. For writing a persuasive and engaging email copy, consider these few things:

• What does your audience need from you?
• Write for one person
• Your email should reflect your personality
• Tell a story
• Create curiosity with words
• Converse with your audience
• Use short paragraphs and bullets wherever possible.
• Don’t sign your email with your brand name, use the name of a real person instead.

#7) Optimize your email conversation, clicks, and opening rate

You can optimize and boost the open rate of your emails in various ways.

Name And Address of the Sender Should be Recognizable

No one pays attention to spam or something they don’t trust. So, you can do a few things to reinforce trust and recognition for your brand.

These are:

• You can use the name of your company or brand.
• You can use your first name along with the name of your brand.
• Or, you can use the sender’s name to specify the type of mail content.
• Try not to use no-reply email addresses so your customers can reach out to you with questions. This will encourage engagement from your audience and will boost communication.

Intriguing Email Subject Line

The subject line is one of the most important elements of your marketing campaign. That one sentence can determine if your audience will open the email or not. So, make it stand out. Limit your subject line to 50 characters and highlight your most interesting offer. Try to appeal to the emotions and ambitions of your subscribers.

#8) Optimize your preview text

The preview text of the email is the text snippet that appears after the subject line of your email on certain devices or email clients. It adds valuable context to your subject line, thus boosting your open rate significantly.

Your preview text should instill curiosity, just enough to make the reader open your email. If you don’t create a preview text, your service provider will pull the first line of your email text.

#9) Test your email before sending

Before hitting send, check your email thoroughly for mistakes that might harm your goodwill and brand image. Check for typing mistakes, incorrect or forgotten links, formatting errors, etc. Get it to proofread and checked for both mobile and desktop.

Use the preview feature, if available, for testing your email on different screen sizes and email clients. Double-check your email list. And when you are satisfied with everything, hit send.

#10) Timing is vital

Don’t choose a random day to send your emails, instead strategically time them to make sense for your readers. To make sure they open your email, time them so that they are at the top of their inbox since most people check their inbox only a few times a day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Don’t forget your emails after sending them off. Keep monitoring the results. Most service providers provide an analytic dashboard, always keep an eye on it. It will give you an idea of where you need to improve and what you must keep doing. And stay dedicated to your email campaign, it can do you a lot of good.