If we look at the history of digital marketing, we see that most of the strategies that used to be effective in the past are not effective these days, which means that with time, the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies changes.
There are not a lot of marketing platforms that have not only maintained their effect in digital marketing but also increased over time and email marketing is one of those few platforms which did not only stay effective over time but also continued to be more beneficial for marketers.
If a platform like an email marketing has stayed effective for many decades, then this means that there is something different in this platform than it is with other platforms.
In this article, I will be breaking down Email marketing, why you should utilize it, and how can you run email marketing campaigns successfully all from a to z.
What is email marketing?
Before we start discussing the benefits, and different strategies of email marketing, let’s discuss what email marketing is?
For its simplest definition, you can take email marketing as a marketing strategy in which you send promotional messages to a certain target through their email.
The type of message that you will be sending out to the target people will depend on what type of action you want from those people to be executed after receiving your email.
Why email marketing is important?
Now as he has discussed what email marketing is, now we should discuss why should put in the efforts for utilizing email marketing and why it is important for you?
Email marketing is very different from other digital marketing platforms such as social media marketing.
In social media marketing, you are not directly engaging with your audience, you are usually sending a message to an audience as a whole.
But in email marketing, it is different because in email marketing you are directly talking with your customers which makes them feel more personal and more effective.
Direct communication is not the only benefit that you will get with email marketing, there are a lot of other differences as well between email marketing and other marketing platforms.
In other marketing platforms, you do not control your reach to your target audience, hence it is controlled by the algorithm of the platform.
For example, let’s say that you make a post on Facebook, now it will depend on how much your post is liked by the Facebook algorithm and that will decide how viral your post goes.
But the story is different from in email marketing as in email marketing, you decide how well your email marketing campaign does depend on how well you can design your emails such as making headlines and other such factors.
Not only has Email marketing been an effective strategy for decades but data shows that in the future, email marketing will be even more effective since more people will be using it in the coming years and then it is being used now.
So thinking that email marketing is obsolete in 2022 due to how popular social media has become is a wrong mindset.
How does Email marketing work?
If we talk about the absolute basics of how email marketing works, then in email marketing all you will be doing is that you will be collecting emails from people who are the targetted audience for your business, then you will be sending promotional emails to those people and from that email campaign, you will be expecting to make conversions.
But if we go a little bit into deep about doing email marketing, it is not as simple as I mentioned above since there are way many steps in doing it practically than understanding its concept.
Different types of emails
Welcoming emails
Welcoming emails are the emails that you will be sending out to your email subscribers just after they have subscribed to your email list.
In welcoming emails, you will usually be welcoming your email subscribers and also introducing your brand and yourself as well.
These are the types of emails that have the highest amount of open rate, and that is why email marketers put so much focus into these welcoming emails.
Try to keep them short and clear.
Newsletter
The newsletter is those emails that you will be sending out to your email subscribers once per week or once per month, it depends on you.
In the newsletter, usually, you will just be presenting high-quality content to your email list, like the current events happening in the niche, some tips and tricks, how-to guides, and so on.
Re-engagement emails
Re-engagement emails are sent out to these email subscribers who have not been showing interest in your emails lately, which means that all the emails that you have sent out to them have not been opened up by them showing no interest.
By re-engagement emails, you will be trying to get the interest back into your emails of these email subscribers who do not engage with your emails.
In re-engagement emails, you will be providing special offers to such email subscribers or you will be sending out surveys to them, and when they will open up those surveys, they will be asked why they are not showing interest in your emails and then from the answer that they give, you can improve your emails and get their interest back.
Email list
Let’s talk about the first step that you will need to start doing email marketing, collecting emails of the targetted audience for your business, or in short term, making an email list.
For doing email marketing, you will need an active email list, by an active email last, I am referring to an email list in which email addresses that are not in use or which do not engage with emails for a long time do not exist.
In an email list, all the people would have first agreed to receive emails from you in their inbox, so to make an email list, you will need to find a way of convincing people to agree to receive marketing emails from you.
Pop-up signup forms
One of the ways of collecting emails and making an email list is to use a pop-up sign-up form on your website.
You may ask what is a pop-up sign up, well it is a pop-up that will appear on the screen of the people who have visited your email and will ask them to provide their email in order to get receive tips in their emails or for something else, it depends on you.
Pop up sign up forms have been proven to provide great results for making email lists as on average, 3-10% of the people who will see the signup form will provide their email, and depending on the number of visitors that you get on your website, it can provide with you with a huge amount of emails which you can use for your email marketing campaigns.
Lead magnet
sign up forms are not the only way for making an email list, Lead magnet is also another effective way of collecting targeted emails for email marketing.
but what are Lead magnets and how do you use them?
A lead magnet will be an offer that you will present to your visitors, in the offer you will be giving them something which can be useful to them in trade for their email address.
This is one of the most popular strategies for making an email list.
If you are worried about that what kind of lead magnet you should be making in order to collect targeted emails, then do not worry I have got you covered up.
A lead magnet can be anything your targetted audience can be attracted to, it can be an ebook that can provide your targetted audience with the knowledge they want to know about.
IT can also be some kind of tool that you will offer them for free if they provide you with their email, for example, you can provide them a tool such as an SEO analyzer and will ask them to provide their email in return.
If you are thinking about how will you make such a lead magnet where you will be given SEO tools in return for an email, then you can just go to code canon and there buy a script for some dollars, it will not be expensive will cost you from 30-50 dollars depending on the type of tools you want and then you can sue that as a lead magnet.
Hassan who is the founder of H-Educate used this strategy, he made a lead magnet where he was providing an email validation tool to his audience in return for an email, and in this way, he collected more than 10,000 emails.
You can check out his video where he did this case study by clicking here.
If you can neither make a lead magnet where you will have to provide a tool or an e-book, then you can provide them free courses as well.
If you cannot do anything that I mentioned, then still do not worry you can just find PLR ebooks which you can use as a lead magnet,t it will not have copy-right issues and you will also do not need to put in the efforts for making an ebook by yourself.
However, do remember to change some sentences in the ebook so it does not look completely like a copy-paste.
Paid ads
Paid ds is another way of building your email list, you can use paid ads to direct your target audience to your landing page where you will be collecting their emails.
There are various types of ads that you can use for collecting emails such as Facebook ads and google ads.
Even though, your email list will grow quickly once you start utilizing paid ads for growing your email list but there is also a problem with growing your email list with paid ads.
Since you will be spending money on your email last, it will take some time to get profit from that email list since email marketing is long-term marketing where you convert your email list into customers over a period of time by sending them regular emails every month, once a week.
Email service provider
An email list will not be the only thing that you will need while doing email marketing.
You will also need an email management software that will not only manage your email list but will also be used to analyze the results that your email marketing campaigns are providing, it will be very useful to determine whether your marketing campaigns are going in vai or they are producing good results.
Your email marketing software will also help you automate your email marketing by sending automatic responses to the emails of your subscribers.
Different email marketing software.
Unlike making an email list, choosing an email marketing software should not be a difficult choice that’s because there is a lot of really good email marketing software in the industry which are popular as well.
This means that you will need to waste your time looking for good email marketing software.
Most of the features which are a basic need for email marketing such as managing your email list, having features for automatic responses, and providing you with tools for observing your campaigns are all provided in most email marketing tools, even in those which are not at the top.
But then, there are those features that can help you improve your marketing campaigns, such features can help you increase your conversion rate such as making your emails feel more personal to your email list by using their name in the email which makes them feel that the email was specially written for them and they will be paying more attention to the email.
Below, will be mentioning some of the best email marketing tools that you can use to run your email marketing campaigns.
- Constant Contact: Constant contact is taken as one of the best if not the best software for email marketing.
It has more ha 600k customers which means that it has the reliability and those features which attracted such a large audience. It starts for 20 dollars but provides a lot of features ranging from those sued by the beginners all the way up to the ones which are used by email marketing experts.
- Sendinblue: Sendinblue is a little different from other software which is used for managing email marketing as it is a young software launched in 2012 compared to the others which are older than 2 decades now such as Constant Contact and Mailchimp.
That was not the main season for mentioning Sendinblue here, the reason I mentioned Sendinblue is that it is the best platform for beginners since it provides them with a free plan through which they can learn how to use its various features without needing to pay money to it and in the future when they feel the need to upgrade, they can.
Also, Sendinblue has all the features that you will need for simple email marketing campaigns, so you will need to worry about not having enough features.
- Activecompaign: the active campaign is another really good email marketing software having rich features for email marketing that can benefit any type of email marketer.
Other than the basic features, Active campaign is also known for the advanced features that it provides for automation in email marketing campaigns which will help you to automate your responses for your email list subscribers and can also improve your conversion rate as well.
Even though learning to use Activecompaign might be a little bit difficult for beginners but it is definitely worth it, It starts from 15$.
Your goals.
As I mentioned earlier, email marketing is not limited to goals such as getting sales and conversions, it can be used for a lot of other purposes as well which turn out to be very effective for your business.
Let’s discuss the different goals that you can execute with email marketing
sales
Driving sales to a product is the most common and the biggest talk for a business when doing email marketing.
Generally, the average conversion rate this is seen in email marketing is really good but that does not mean that from the first email marketing campaign, you will start seeing those conversion rates for your products because there are a lot of factors that affect it.
One of the biggest factors which decide the conversion rate and the success of your email marketing campaign is how relevant your email list is to your product, that is why it is very important to build a list of people who can easily relate to our product and t for those who are not even familiar with such products.
The method that you use for collecting emails affects the quality of your email a lot, for example, if you have collected emails from your website from a person who was reading an article cats, but then you send him an email in which you are marketing a product-related dog, will this work?
No, because even though you collected the email from your website visitors and all the content on your website is connected with one another but that does not mean that people can relate to all the topics of your website, so that is why it is better to make different lists for a different niche.
Other than having a very precise and targeted list, how you present your product also matters a lot.
Growing brand name
Other than sales, growing the name of your business and brand is another important goal that is often done using email marketing.
Growing brand name or making awareness of your brand can be done by utilizing various email marketing strategies such as welcoming emails.
Welcoming emails are one the most important emails that you will be sending to your email subscribers, as they will make the very first and very important of you to your email subscribers.
Using welcoming emails, you can build a special image of your brand in the eyes of your email subscribers, other than welcoming emails sending quality content and personalized emails also work very well in making a strong and special image of your brand.
Customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is achieved by making a relationship with customers which is often executed with the help of email marketing.
When your customers will be loyal to you, it will mean that they will stay with your brand and with your brand for a long time which will be very profitable for your business.
You can often do this by providing them with special offers which will give them un common discounts on your products and this will make the feel special and more loyal to you.
How to do email marketing effectively
So as we discussed all the basics parts of email marketing like how to build an email list, choosing an ESP, and also your goals, now is the time to talk about how you will be doing email marketing with great results.
Manage your email list
Managing your email list is one of the most important things to do after you have built an email list.
That is because, in your email list, there will be email subscribers which will be from different niches most of the time.
So, use the information that you know about your email subscribers, and then out of your email list, divide it into different sections each for its own purpose.
The people that you want to turn into customers, make ad different email list of those people separating them from the main email list.
For the people, for that, you want to recognize your brand strongly, make a different email list for those people.
People whom you want to stay with your product after they have bought it, make a different email list of those people by separating them from the main list.
In this way, you will be making different email campaigns for the different email lists, for example, if you do not do it, how will you be able to send a single email which targets all three types of people, the ones who have bought your product, the ones who have not bought your product and the ones whom you want to make familiar with your brand, it is not possible or if it is, it will bring in poor results.
Keep your email list fresh
Once someone has subscribed to your email, it does not mean that they will always remain an active email subscriber and you will not need to look bad at managing such email addresses, because once you have made an email list, there will be a lot of email addresses which will not be active and will just make your email list of less quality.
SO that is why it is very important that you remove such email addresses which are not active so that your email list can start fresh and you can clearly see how your campaigns are going.
If you do not remove such email addresses, they will be bulk for your email service provider, and also you will not be able to clearly analyze the results of your campaigns because then, the stats will not be correct since there will be a lot of inactive email addresses which will affect the stats.
Plan your emails
After you he managed your email list and made different parts of it each for specific email subscribers and each with specific goals, now it is the time that you start planning out your email campaigns.
You will be planning the different emails that you will be sending out to these email lists in order to execute the goal that you want from the certain list.
Since you will have different email lists for different purposes, you will also need to make different email campaigns for each list.
Don’t send emails irregularly
Once you have started sending emails, try to send them in a regular form so that your email subscribers will know on what day your emails will be coming into their inbox, if you keep sending emails irregularly, without planning, the open rate of your emails will drop as your email subscribers will never know when your emails are coming and they will end up not seeing them.
Make a strategy for sending out emails, make a plan by using various data on the internet about when people open their emails, because, on certain days, people open an email more often than on other days so in this way you can plan out your strategy for sending emails
Make a good subject line
When your email subscribers see your email, the first thing that they will see will be the subject line of your email and it will be this subject line that will decide how effective your email will be.
Because your email subscribers will decide whether they will be opening your email or not after seeing your subject line, so invest time in writing an interesting subject line for your email that can get the attention of your email subscribers.
Personalize your subject line
In order to make our subject effective and attractive to your email subscribers, you should utilize personalized subject lines.
In personalized subject lines, you will be trying to make the subject line personal to your email subscribers such as by using their first name in your subject line.
When you will use their first name in the subject line, it will make them feel like the email is specially written to them and not sent to a large number of people at once.
It will encourage them to open the email as it will make them feel like there is something special in the email for them.
Include benefits
Including benefits that your email subscribers can gain from your email in the subject line is another really good action that you can take in order to make your subject lines more attractive and also improve the open rate of your email marketing campaigns.
If you are wondering what kind of benefits you should include in your subject line, then I can give you an example.
Subject lines such as Here is how you can get more traffic to your website is a really good example, because, in such subject lines, you are directly telling your subscriber in the subject lie that by opening g this email, they will get to know how they can obtain the benefit written in the subject line and if the benefit is good enough, they will definitely open your email.
Preview text
Preview text will be the text which will be appearing below the subject line of your email, you can take preview text as some kind of extension to the subject line of your email which will provide the information to your emails subscriber about what type of email you have sent them.
So the second biggest factor will be deciding the open rate of your email campaign after the subject line will be the preview text, so similarly subject line, do not ignore preview text, take some time to write an interesting preview text it can also boost our open rate.
Observe the statistics
Once you have sent your email campaigns with the required actions that you want your email subscribers to take, ow it is the time that you look at the results and the stats of your email marketing campaign that you just run and then decide whether your email marketing campaign was successful or not.
Just open up your email marketing software that you have chosen for your email marketing and from where you start your email campaign, it will show the stats of your marketing campaign that you sent by email, it will show you various different factors such as open rate.
Open rate is the number of people who have opened your email divided by the whole number of email addresses to whom you sent the email and after it will be multiplied by 100.
Your ESP will also show your CTR or click-through rate which will be the number of people who have clicked on a link inside your email divided by the total number of people who received your email and then multiplied by 100
Your ESP will also show you the conversion rate which will be the number of people who took the required activities such as buying a product divided by the total number of people who received the email and then multiplied by 100.
You might ask how will you know if your campaign was successful or a failure, well you can compare the results of your email marketing campaign with the average email marketing stats in your industry.
FOr example, the average open rate in email marketing is about 21% so if you are getting a lower open rate for our emails, this means that you should be getting better results and there is something you did wrong.
The same goes for CTR which is near 3% on average in email marketing, so if your CTR is above 3%, it means you are doing great but if it is lower, it means that you need to improve certain things in your marketing campaigns.
But the most important of them all is did the email marketing campaign provide you with the number of conversions that you were looking for? well if it did then it was successful if it did not then learn what you’re doing wrong.
deliverability issues
Once you have clicked the button to send emails to the targeted email list, it does not mean that all the email addresses received the email in their inbox that you have sent out to them.
Sometimes, your emails might also land in the spam folder due to some specific characteristics of your email or other small issues which can cause problems with delivering the emails to email addresses inbox, so that is why it is always best to check if all the emails shave been delivered to the inbox or not.
To do so, you will need some tools you will be used to verify whether the emails were delivered or not.
- Mailgenius: It is a free tool that will help you in testing your email marketing campaigns whether or not your emails were able to get into the inbox folder or they were put in the spam folder, it is a free tool for which you will not need to pay anything you can go and check it out.
Conclusion
Email marketing is still one of the best strategies to achieve your desired goals in digital marketing, with an ROI of 3800%, you cannot make a wrong choice with email marketing.
Though it might feel hard to start in the beginning when collecting emails for your email list but you will get there with time, and once you have built up a good email list based on targetted addresses, then you can start sending out emails to that email list and start getting closer to your emails.
In this article, I have broken down all the steps in great detail from making an email list to sending emails, getting better open rates, and also observing the results.