Digital Marketing Tips

What is Email Marketing? The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing?
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Email Marketing

With an expanding market projected to reach a revised size of US$2.5 Billion by 2027, email marketing is one of the best forms of marketing available today. Although the concept and email platform have been around for a long time, the marketing industry through email continues to grow and scale.

If you are a business owner, having an email marketing strategy can help you scale and benefit your business in ways you never realized were possible!

What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is a direct digital marketing channel that uses personalized emails to share new products, sales, and update/inform customers. Email marketing is a campaign strategy that builds its success from personalization and automation.

Email is one of the most effective and tenured forms of communication in the information age. Its long standing hold in communication is what makes email marketing one of the most lucrative digital marketing channels. It’s ROI has been reported to be anywhere from $35-45 for every $1 spent. For this reason, email marketing is one of the most sought out and scalable forms of digital marketing.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing comes with many advantages over other marketing channels ands strategies. In this section we briefly go over some of the benefits of campaigning.

Conversion: With email marketing, you have direct communication with your subscribers. This gives you the opportunity to convert subscribers into leads and eventually clients or returning clients. You can inform the reader about discounts, promotions, or even industry related information! This direct channel with the client helps to get their undivided attention.
Brand Awareness :With email campaigns, you can communicate the identity of your brand and business. You are free to use any color scheme, typography, and layout to make readers aware of your brand and communicate your identity.
Customer Loyalty :When it comes to an opt-in email list, each member needs to be treated with respect and appreciation for the fact that they decided to be a part of your list. With email marketing, you can reward and stay in touch with past clients to help sell them on new products or services
Control :With email marketing, you have a direct communication line to the subscribers that will be maintained as long as email exists and is prevalent. This is a sharp contrast from building a network on a platform such as Facebook or Google, where you have to hope the algorithm continues to hold your platform in high regard.
Scalable :With the help of automation, segmentation, and a growing contact list, email marketing is very easy way to scale and build a lucrative sales funnel.

Learn More about Email Marketing Benefits:

Email Marketing Strategies for Success

Organic Email Lists: When you are building your email list, make sure they are all people that gave YOU their email and indicated that they want to be a part of your email list. Purchasing email lists is a bad idea for several reasons:
1. Sending unsolicited emails and storing people’s data in your CRM without consent is illegal per GDPR and CAN-SPAM.
2. People will assume you are spam and you end up on their email blocklist.
3. Most email marketing services will refuse to work with you because purchased lists can harm the deliverability of other users on shared IP addresses.
Double Opt-In: Although it adds an extra step in the funnel, double opt-in is important for customer loyalty and email deliverability. With an opt-in email, your list will be filtered down to only subscribers whose email delivery works, and who are enthusiastic about being a part of your email list.
Personalization: With emails, the more you personalize the message, the better you can expect your conversions to me. Subscribers recognize and appreciate little things such as their name in the subject line and in the email itself.
A/B Testing and Segmentation: With all the different forms of email marketing strategies, segmentation and A/B testing are the way to go to optimize your emails. This gives you the chance to try different strategies with your audience and see what works best.
Optimize your subject line, sender name, and preview text: When building out your email, personalization is important but so is email optimization. You want the subject line to be attention-grabbing and clear, but also not misleading or spammy. With the sender name and preview text, make sure that your name looks legit and reputable, while your preview text gives a tiny bit of valuable information. This will help boost the amount of people that actually read through your emails.
Automate and use Auto-Responders to Scale your Email Campaigns: Automate your email marketing strategy to make your business grow even faster. The simplest form of email automation is auto-responders.
Keep track of the ‘little things’: Keeping your database and subscriber list up to date is very important. In addition, it is also good to track and glance at the metrics of your email campaigns. Here are some metrics you should look out for and try to keep track of:
1. Open Rate: The ratio of the number of people who opened your email divided by the total number of recipients.
2. Click-Through Rate: The ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the total number of recipients.
3. Unsubscribe Rate: The number of people who unsubscribed divided by the total number of recipients. If this number is high, you need to review your email frequency and segmentation.
4. Bounce Rate: The number of emails that failed to deliver divided by the total number of emails sent.

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Types of Marketing Emails

In the email marketing space, there are several different types of emails that serve different purposes. In this section, we are going to introduce you to some of those emails, as well as show an example of each.

Promotional Emails:

Promotional emails are any emails that are used to promote product releases, special offers, your brand, or any other purchasable content such as e-books. Campaigns that use emails such as these should see 3-10 emails per week delivered.

In addition, promotional emails should always have at least one clear CTA: call to action.

Example:

Source: MILLED

Example 2:

Source: MILLED

Informational Emails:

An informational email, or newsletter, shares news related to your business or industry. This can be anything from new case studies, industry tips, product capabilities, or upcoming business milestones.

What makes a newsletter so special is that it is an opportunity to share insights, thoughts, tips and anything else that you feel your readers would value and benefit from. A news letter is also a great way to make announcements to your network about directions your business is taking.

Examples:

Source: The Hustle

Re-Engagement Emails:

Re-Engagement emails are emails meant to reconnect with customers or inactive subscribers. It usually incentivizes some kind of feedback or response from the user.

Example:

Source: Express

See more Examples:

HubSpot

How to Grow Your Email Marketing List

The most time-consuming and difficult part of any email marketing campaign is building a real and engaged list of subscribers. In this section I will walk you through several tactics you can use to help you build your list out, especially when getting started.

Never buy lists: As mentioned earlier, using purchased lists is illegal as well as detrimental for your campaign. These lists never convert well, and lead to you getting into trouble with your ESP (Email Service Providers). Although it takes longer, building your list organically is the only way to succeed in the email marketing space.
Be aware of rules and regulations: A good rule of thumb is to never get too ‘spammy’ with your messaging. Make sure you adhere to any legal requirements and applicable laws in your area when sending automated emails, like the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union for the treatment of personal information.
Use Email to have a conversation with your Subscribers: Not every email you send to your users has to promote or inform. Sometimes you can take a moment to just ask for feedback, check on the customer, or even just stop by to say hello. Messaging such as this reminds your subscribers that they are part of a special group and not a spam list.
Be Conservative with Your First Emails: Gaining access to someone’s email inbox is like having key to their mailbox. Do not take advantage of the situation and leave a bunch of junk mail for them. They will quickly ‘replace the key’ or unsubscribe from your newsletter. When you first get started, only send emails when you know the content is valuable, and the timing is correct. As rep builds with your users, you will be able to create and send email campaigns more often.

Conclusion

Digital Marketing is a space that can feel overwhelming with all the different channels and avenues to reach your customers. Although it may seem antiquated, email marketing is still an alive and booming industry. Using it to supplement your marketing strategy is essential in 2022. Thank you for reading and good luck on your journey!

If Email Marketing seems a bit overwhelming and like not something that you have the time to invest in, look into a Email Marketing Agency! Also, plenty of Digital Marketing Agencies such as us here at Tona Designs, offer email marketing services. So feel free to reach out!

To learn more about Email Marketing, check out some of our sources: