If you're looking for an effective way to reach new customers, email marketing is a great option. Here's everything you need to know.
Four billion people around the world use emails to communicate and receive information.
That's right. Four billion.
One of the reasons that email marketing is such a strong marketing strategy is that you can reach huge numbers effectively and efficiently.
Every business should incorporate email marketing into its marketing plan. It's an excellent way to grow your business, build sales leads, and reinforce your brand. Plus, it has the best return on investment of any marketing strategy.
It's time to begin an email marketing campaign. And if you already have one, there are always more email marketing tips that you can implement into your marketing strategy.
Email marketing shows no signs of slowing down as one of the best ways to attract and keep potential customers. Keep reading our email marketing guide to learn everything you need to know about it.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a type of strategic marketing that focuses on sending emails to subscribers to drive engagement numbers, nurture leads, make sales, or increase brand awareness. It's a sales channel that creates a master list of people signing up to receive your company's communications via email.
An essential part of any business marketing plan, email marketing is a powerful tool a company should include in any successful business plan. It also provides one of the greatest ROIs (returns on investment) in marketing and the most significant number of B2B and B2C leads.
There are billions of users globally, making email marketing an intelligent choice for most businesses.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
The message is loud and clear. Email marketing works.
There are many benefits of this marketing tool. Here are the ones that will positively affect your bottom line.
1. Email Marketing Generates Website Traffic
Email marketing is an effective way to drive internet traffic to your website.
Some ways to drive readers to your website from your marketing emails include incorporating portions of recent blog posts, specific calls-to-action, promotions, or news.
When the client clicks on the links in the email, it will forward them to your website landing pages or to specific information, promotions, products, or services you offer.
Successful targeted website traffic leads to more sales conversions.
2. Email Marketing Drives Sales
Email marketing exposes your clients to your products and services, leading to sales and revenue growth.
You can tailor the emails to specific promotions to generate more sales leads and encourage more client spending. Some of the options include:
- Discounts on products or services
- Free shipping
- Draw attention to specific products
- Upselling (leading the client to another comparable product)
- Cross-selling (encourages shoppers to buy complementary or related products)
3. Email Marketing Increases Brand Awareness
With 99% of email users checking their emails daily, the use of email allows you to spread the word about your brand.
Emails can let people learn about different products, services, promotions, or specific brand information. You can share various information with your subscribers, including resources, informative content, news, brand updates, and special events.
Align the content and design of your emails with unique features of your brand identity to drive strong brand awareness.
4. Email Marketing Allows You to Engage With Your Customers
Email communication gives your business a valuable opportunity to build relationships with the subscribers to your email list. The variety of emails and creative ways to engage with your customers is unlimited.
Creating unique email content excites and interests customers in your brand and products. It also reminds them about your brand and keeps your company at the top of their minds.
5. Email Marketing Directs Traffic to Other Marketing Channels
Email marketing allows your business to integrate all of your marketing channels and other important points of contact, including:
- Social media (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or any other applicable social media applications)
- Your website landing pages
- Blogs
- In-person events
- Review and rate forms
6. Email Marketing Delivers Important Business Data
Gathering and analyzing business data is crucial for every business. Email marketing allows you to incorporate customer data collection and learn more about their shopping behaviors.
You can incorporate tracking analytics and send out customer email surveys and feedback forms to do this. The information collected serves to improve your email quality or to make adjustments to your business details, products, and services.
Why Email Marketing Is Important
There is a lot that email marketing can do for your business. Here are some of the reasons email marketing is an important marketing tool.
Numbers Matter
With 50% of the population using email, it is the most commonly used communication tool globally. The statistics around the use of emails are staggering. Here are some significant numbers:
- There are more than 4 billion active email accounts.
- 99% of users check their email at least once and often multiple times daily.
- Email open rates hover between 15% and 30%, compared to engagement rates between 1% and 5% on social media.
- 60% of email users subscribe to a newsletter to get messages and deals, compared to only 20% on social media.
- In most cases, email marketing has an ROI of over 4000% (for every 1$ spent on email marketing, your return could be higher than 40$).
The increased brand engagement and return on investment make it a great marketing choice for digital marketing campaigns.
Your Email List Is an Asset to Your Business
An email list is considered an asset to your business. Unlike some social media platform lists and subscriber information owned by social media companies, you don't have to share this with anyone.
An extensive list of subscribers who voluntarily and manually register to your list can add tremendous resale value to your business.
ROI, ROI, ROI
With email marketing, the potential return on investment could be close to or over 4000%. That means there is excellent earning potential when compared to what you have to spend on the email marketing campaign.
Email marketing increases revenues, drives traffic to your website, increases brand awareness, and improves sales conversations. You get all this at a fraction of the cost of the following most effective marketing tool—SEO.
It Is a Direct Communication Channel
Email marketing allows a direct communication channel between your business and subscribers. A good-sized email list is excellent for direct communication with your subscribers without paying additional campaign or advertising fees to use social media networks and depends on their algorithms.
Emails are also easily personalized and can initiate a friendlier conversation with potential clients.
Your Subscribers Choose You
Social media marketing is also an effective (and necessary) marketing strategy. But unlike social media that may push your ads the way their algorithms dictate, with email marketing, your subscribers are actively choosing your business. They are choosing to open the door to receiving your content.
Your subscribers are potential clients who expect content and updates they can use and appreciate. Giving them great content will generate value and revenue for your business.
It's a Great Selling Tool
The goal of all businesses is to increase sales. Because email marketing offers a more personalized approach and targeted content, it is a successful strategy for turning leads into sales.
One of the reasons for this is the ability to incorporate effective conversion funnels into email marketing. The conversion tunnel (or sales funnel) involves leading the customer to a product, service, or promotion using a series of effective email communications.
It Can Be Automated
One of the best aspects of email marketing is that it can be fully automated.
Email marketing tools or software set up automated workflows that trigger additional emails based on specific customer actions. For example, when a client signs up for your newsletter, you can automatically deliver a welcome email. You can also send automated content to different customer target groups.
Automation saves you time and effort but also gives the framework to send the correct email to customers at the right time, minimizing human error and delays.
It Accurately Measures Email Performance
When using email marketing software, you can measure every variable accurately. Measuring and analyzing data allows you to improve it when necessary.
When you run an email campaign, you know how many people open your emails, how many people click on a link, how many people make a purchase, and the precise actions any particular user took,
Knowing this data allows you to measure the success of each email campaign emailed to your subscribers. It will enable you to learn from each campaign and make changes in the future if needed.
It's a Great Survey Tool
To grow a successful business, you must constantly improve your products and online presence. To do this, you need feedback from users.
Your subscribers are the best people to provide you with valuable insights and information. Emails are great for surveying your community and getting answers to help you create better content, products, and services.
It Increases the Value of Your Business
An email list has value. You can increase the value of your business by having an extensive, targeted email list.
Companies with constantly growing email lists and reasonable conversion rates are worth substantially more regarding company valuations.
How Email Marketing Works
Email marketing develops communication pathways with your subscribers in a way that benefits your business.
Here's how it works.
1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy
Set goals for your business, then decide which marketing campaigns you will run. Decide how you will use your email marketing with your other marketing campaigns.
When discussing an email marketing strategy, you will need to consider the following:
- Which marketing platform will you use to grow your list?
- How and when will you use email automation?
- What kind of messages do you want to send, and how often will you send them?
- Ensure the proper data reporting framework is in place to measure the success of your email campaigns effectively.
2. Sign Up for an Email Marketing Platform
Email marketing platforms are software systems that allow you to create and build an email list. Here are some of the functions of an effective marketing platform.
- Adds users to your list
- Sends out scheduled emails to subscribers
- Provides data about customer preferences and habits
- Allows you to interact with the clients on your list
- Provides options for segmenting your audience based on specific criteria
- Creates retargeting audiences to other social media platforms
- Automates email marketing tasks
- Creates email funnels to redirect users to pages, products, or actions you want them to take
3. Grow Your Email List
You need a significantly sized list of active subscribers for an effective email marketing plan. One of the most critical factors in your strategy is how to grow your email list.
Here are some ways to entice these potential clients to register for your email communications.
Publish great content on your site: To accrue more email subscribers, provide them with valuable, helpful content about your business.
Give them incentives: Offer free ebooks, trial offers, coupons, or other "gifts" to be used as incentives to offer users in return for them registering for your emails.
Make the process easy: Position sign-up buttons in places that are easy for users to spot. Make it visible both on desktop and mobile devices. User experience will make a difference between customers choosing to sign up or not.
4. Set Up Automation Tasks
Automation means sending targeted emails based on user actions upon receiving your emails or their activities on your site. Automation set-up saves time and allows for precise and timely emails.
The most common email automation tasks are:
Welcome emails: Send a welcome email to users upon subscribing to your email list.
Email campaigns: Send a series of emails with a specific sales strategy.
Abandoned cart or unfinished action: Send emails to visitors that added something to their cart but still need to check out.
Cross-selling/upselling: Suggest items or promotions to customers based on their purchase history.
Review and feedback forms: Request feedback/reviews from customers as a specified time elapses after purchase.
5. Use A/B Testing
A/B testing involves comparing two versions of something to determine which version performs better. A/B testing helps you determine which email messages generate high user engagement and lead to a higher conversion rate.
Some factors you can test with A/B testing are different formats, length of texts, various promotional messages, email frequency, form placement, and form messages, among others.
To perform effective A/B testing, you must monitor the right metrics and eliminate any factors influencing your testing results. Some of the factors that are important to watch include the following:
- The number of new subscribers per day
- The exact method they used to subscribe to the list
- Email open and click-through rates (how many people opened a specific email campaign and how many people clicked a link in the email)
- The number of people who visited your website from a link in the email
- How many conversions did you get from an email (and from which specific email campaign)
Do Regular "Clean-ups"
It's essential to do regular "clean-ups" to your subscriber list. Here are three crucial reasons why.
1. A large percentage of your email subscribers will be inactive.
It is normal to have some subscribers who are "inactive." There will always be some subscribers who will never open the emails they receive from your business. With the average email open rate hovering around 20%, most people will not open your emails.
2. A big list is not always better.
Emails opened by a small percentage of recipients will often be marked as spam, which will decrease your customer reach. Emails that get opened by the majority of recipients help the campaign's performance. Quality goes hand in hand with quantity.
3. Big lists cost more money to maintain.
As your list grows, your monthly expenses grow too. When you reach over 10,000 subscribers, you will pay more to subscribe to good email marketing software.
A smaller list with active subscribers is better than a big list of inactive subscribers.
Types of Marketing Emails
Now that you understand what email marketing is and why you should use it let's delve into some of the different types of marketing emails. Here are some of the email types most commonly used.
Welcome Emails
When prospective customers initially sign up for your email communications, you send welcome emails. Typically, these clients are not ready to do business with your company—yet—but they are intrigued by the possibility. Only 25% of leads are ready to purchase something upon subscribing.
It is essential to send a welcome email to offer a friendly, personal introduction to your business without slamming them with sales pitches from the star. It paves the way for positive future contact with the customer.
Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are a tool for businesses to stay on top of subscribers' minds. They are used to educating current and future customers about your business, products, and upcoming projects.
Great for keeping your company at the top of the minds of your potential customers, email newsletters will drive traffic to your website and even encourage your subscribers to share quality content.
Standalone Emails
These standalone emails, also known as dedicated emails, include information about a single offer, product, or promotion your business is offering. Standalone emails emphasize and set up one main call to action, delivering one single message or goal.
Transactional Emails
Triggered by your subscribers' actions, transactional emails help them complete their actions. Some examples of transactional emails are a thank you, a separate sign-up email, reminders, order confirmations, or shipment details.
Lead Nurturing Emails
Lead nurturing involves understanding your potential customers and staying in contact with them throughout the sales funnel process. It helps build and maintain a beneficial relationship with your potential client and guides them gently towards making a purchase.
Lead nurturing emails kick in once a customer has taken action—adding something to their cart, subscribing to a promotional list, taking advantage of a sale, setting up a meeting, or any other activity.
Re-Engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails allow you to reconnect with the portion of your subscriber list that has been inactive.
These re-engagement emails might include a customer feedback form, a store discount, a "we miss you" email, or new updates and changes to your business. Re-engagement emails entice your subscriber to take action or at least take an interest in your company once again.
Brand Story Emails
Storytelling, or brand stories, works to engage with people and elicit emotional responses. That's why brand story emails effectively drive traffic to your site, which converts to sales.
Use email to present your story to your subscribers and potential clients. You can include emails about why your business is unique, its history, employees, a new website or blog—anything that may trigger an emotional response from your customers.
Video Emails
When you compare how people retain information: people remember 95% of a video message and only 10% when reading text, so occasionally sending video emails is a winning strategy, increasing purchase intent by 82%. A well-produced video email engages your subscribers and leads them to interact in some way with your business, such as purchasing something or clicking to learn more about your company or a specific product.
Review Request Emails
From a marketing perspective, reviews make your business stand out. A review request email encourages subscribers to post reviews and comments about your products and business.
You can send a review form once a customer has visited your site or made a purchase. The email copy is critical as many clients will avoid these emails. Use a friendly tone, keep it positive, and offer a reward (such as a discount on a future purchase) if possible.
Email Marketing for the Win
Now that you've read the marketing guide about how email marketing works and the benefits and different types of email marketing, it's time to move forward with getting emails to work for your business!
Let our team at Binary Glyph take your business to the next level. We offer effective email strategies and will help you build your email list and grow your brand through well-designed, effective, and expertly targeted emails. If you are ready to grow your business and keep your customers returning for more, contact us today!