An average business sends 26.8 marketing emails to their contact lists each week. And many of those emails land in your target audience's spam boxes and they get ignored. It's not that potential customers on your contact list aren't interested in your business. They just aren't interested enough in another boring email marketing!
Don’t worry, we have good news! You can still get their attention. Regardless of the rumors, emails or email marketing softwares are not yet demoded and if you know how to exploit it, it will increase your audience exponentially. We will therefore see the basics of email marketing, as well as the strategies, statistical indicators, jargon to know and which members of your team may be qualified to carry out email marketing.
The Role of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a multi-tool. It can be used for branding, engagement, acquisition, retention, sales, activation, referrals or traffic. It is really important to understand why we need to use email marketing. Of course, the main goal of email marketing is both profit and growth, but the specific goal of every email is to take the consumer one step at a time in their journey.
Let's talk about the customer journey.
We should think about the way your customers will follow when they want to learn more about you. First, they start to notice you. Then, they know you and tell people about you. Email marketing is just like that, too. From awareness of your existence, through conversion and all the way to referral, is the desired customer journey, the journey that we all want. Email marketing allows you to help your customer through this journey, if you do it the right way. Email marketing is not so easy. It is more than just sending an email to your entire contact list every time you post a new article or run a new promotion.
Mastering email marketing requires an understanding of the different categories of emails you'll use, how to schedule them and the varied strategies you'll use to engage with your contact list.
Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing (also called e-mailing) is a way to communicate with your customers. This involves sending out email newsletters containing information that inspires the recipient to do something active, like buying a new product/service or reading a new blog post.
Email advertising is one of the most important advertising tools for digital companies and you don’t have to be a big brand with big budgets in order to do it.
Email marketing is one of the most budget-friendly techniques of advertising, making it an attractive tool for new entrepreneurs or small dropshipping businesses with small advertising budgets. Do you think it's only cheap when it's email marketing for small businesses? Well, you are wrong.
The most important rule to remember when it comes to email marketing is to send them to your audience as if they were a close friend, which means personalized emails! This is so important because there are spam laws in email marketing that you need to follow.
The main rules are to keep your emails relevant to your service and why they signed up to your list.
The dangers of not following the rules, like sending too many emails like spam emails, may lead your subscribers to put your emails to the "spam" folder, which may lead your email service provider to ban you from using their service again.
This prohibition may also apply to Gmail, Outlook, etc. If too many people send your emails to the "spam" folder, your future emails may also automatically go there. Here are some strategies you can follow;
Build a Strong Contact List
No matter how strong your email marketing strategy is, if you don't have a contact or subscriber list, you'll never get the rewards. According to the Data and Marketing Association, email marketing offers an amazing ROI, a 4300% return on your marketing investment!
In order to increase that ROI, you need to build a great contact list. Here are three easy starting points.
Start a blog
If you haven’t created blogs yet, start now! Marketers who use blogs to generate leads and signups see 97% more leads on average than those who don't create blogs
Social networks
Make social media your biggest advantage. Optimize your bio by including a link to your newsletter, consider posting an ad to link content and distribute content on your social platforms.
Membership forms
Researchers found that on-click popups performed 1,147% better than exit popups.
Keep Your Message Short and Sweet
Almost half of the recipients say that they receive too many emails. Think of your own inbox. It's a struggle to find the right information that you want to see among the dozens of emails, right?
Some blog posts may have really higher word count but your email readers don't want to read a mini-novel. They want you to cut to the chase.
Do Not Overwhelm Your Contact List
One of the hardest parts of email marketing is how often to send emails to your subscribers. If you over send it, they may unsubscribe or report it as spam; and if you send too little, they may lose interest in your product or service. Most consumers want to receive a promotional email at least once a month, and 15% of consumers said they wouldn't mind receiving one every day. The correct amount is probably somewhere in the middle, but it's up to you to find it.
Create A Dialogue With Your Audience
While a lot of marketers say that their top priority is higher engagement, they also admit that engagement is not an easy task. How do you make sure your contact list is paying attention to your emails? Give them a reason to interact with you after reading your email. For example, you can ask them a question. Human brain is wired to answer when they hear a question.
Choose The Right Automation Platform
Did you know that 75% of email revenue is generated by automated email campaigns. It makes sense, right?
As your contact list gets bigger, you can't be a hamster on an endless wheel of manual emails. You need to automate and personalize your emails if you want to scale. 72% of marketers say email automation has big benefits to their organizational strategy and 78% of marketers say that email marketing automation directly contributes to the revenue.
Add Social Sharing Button to Your Emails
If you don’t put a social sharing button to your emails, your audience won’t be sharing it. So make it easy for them and add a social sharing button. Emails with social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate than those without.
Create The Perfect Subject Line
How do you get your readers to open your post? One way is to practice the “benefit, logic, or threat” method, which is simply to offer an obvious benefit, “common sense” statement, or “can't miss” type content.
Create a Strong Call To Action
If your readers don’t know what you want, they can never learn. Every email needs a loud and clear call to action (CTA). Research shows that a great email CTA can increase your click-through rate by over 370%.
How to Measure Email Marketing?
One of the most important aspects of email marketing is sending the right emails to the right people at the right time. You have to measure your email marketing strategies in order to maximize your efforts.
Here are the most effective performance indicators and email marketing tips that will allow you to manage your email marketing better;
The Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of messages viewed by the recipient compared to the number of emails that have been sent.
Growth Data
You have to know how many new subscribers and unsubscribers you have.
The Click-Through Rate (CTR)
With CTR, you can see the percentage of emails clicks
The Delivery Rate
With the delivery rate, you can see how many emails went to your customers inboxes and how many emails didn’t.
The Complaint Rate
The percentage of emails marked as spam, compared to the number of emails sent.
The Churn Rate
The percentage of emails that leads to unsubscribing, compared to the number of emails sent.
Email Marketing Strategy Examples
There are three main types of emails you can do as an email marketer;
Transactional: Type of emails that offers a service or informs a customer
These emails are sent automatically. The majority of transactional emails are templates offered by the marketing systems you use. Be aware that the average turnover generated by a transactional email is 2 to 5 times higher than a standard email. Here are the 8 subtypes of transactional emails;
Order Confirmation
Order confirmation emails have the biggest open rate. Why? It is because your recipient has just bought something from you and wants more information about their purchase.
Creation of The Account
This email is being sent when the customer creates an account. This type of email is not used frequently. You can make your customers happy by offering them to share their enthusiasm with their friends on social networks.
Purchase Receipts
This email validates the purchase.
Support Requests
Support request follow-up emails give you the opportunity to earn more points from customers. You can ask them about their experience or their joy about the coupon.
Delivery Alerts
Consumers like delivery emails. Delivery emails inform them about their order’s shipping state. This email is a reminder about the purchase and it gives them joy about the upcoming shipment.
Return Confirmation
When you sell a product but you receive a product return request, it’s a nice opportunity to offer them an offer or a coupon. Even if the customer is not happy with the product, they can still be happy with the customer service. Your goal is to not lose the customer.
Unsubscribe Confirmations
This is a standard automatic email. You can make a few adjustments and change it in order to draw attention to your products or services again. What can you bring to these emails to onboard people into your customer journey?
Password Reminders
Usually, password reminder emails don’t send anything but links. You can create an opportunity to make an offer or to talk about a future event?
Relational: Type of emails that engages subscribers and keeps in touch with them
Here are the 8 relationship email types you can use to positively impact your business:
2.1. Reference Request
You can ask for a referral. Relational emails, regardless of the reason for sending, should be “human” first. Their content must be the most important thing.
2.2. Welcome Message
Welcome messages should be sent to all of the new subscribers. This message lets them know about your brand, shows them what to expect and the benefits.
2.3 Competition
Contests create excitement and help to get new subscribers. However, you must make sure that your current subscribers will be the first to know because they are your most engaged fans.
2.4 Newsletters or Blogs
Every time you create a new content, you should send an email to your contact list. These emails can be short and simple, they should tell you about the subject and provide a link to the new content.
2.5 Updates and News
You should update your list about changes about your services or products. This will allow you to generate interest in your brand and prepare your consumers for the future.
2.6 Survey
Thanks to surveys you can learn about your customers interests better. They also help you segment them according to their needs and interests. The email should also guarantee that the time needed will be short by saying some essential words. These words were perfectly chosen:
The word "promise" gives assurance that you will keep your word.
The word "only" emphasizes that the process will not be hard or complicated.
"5 minutes'' is a great duration that adds to the promise without being vague. If you do not give time you may cause worry.
2.7 Announcement of an Event
This type of email is both relational and transactional. In this mail you need to confirm the date, time and all important details about the event.
Promotional: Type of email that creates sales
Each type of email provides a different interaction with your contact list aka subscribers. There are 8 types of promotional emails that you can send to your customers;
