What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a great way to reach out to your customers and build relationships with them. It’s also an effective way to promote products, services, or events that will help you grow your business.
Email marketing has been around since the early days of the internet, but it’s still one of the most effective ways for companies to communicate with their customers today. Here are some reasons why:
- Email is personal – When someone receives an email from a company they’ve done business with before (or even if they haven’t), it feels like an invitation into their world rather than just another advertisement in their inboxes. You can use this opportunity as an opportunity for customer service by answering questions directly through email or providing helpful information about your products/services via email blasts instead of having customers call into customer service lines all day long!
- Easy to maintain and inexpensive – Tools like Mailchimp are easy to use and budget-friendly ways to communicate messaging to a large list of customers in a relatively quick period of time. You’re able to plan and schedule a series of emails to execute your marketing strategy.
- Enhance customer loyalty – Customers appreciate receiving regular communications and personalized promotions from brands that they love. You can use email to update your customers on the latest product and service updates, include direct links to your website and contact information, leading to repeat sales and improved customer relationships.
How to Develop an Email Marketing Strategy
Developing an email marketing strategy is not as simple as it seems. In order to create a successful campaign, you need to have a clear understanding of what your goals are and who your target audience is.
Here are some tips on how to develop an effective email marketing strategy:
- Set goals for the campaign: Before you begin developing content and design, it’s important that you set realistic goals for your campaign in order to measure its success later on. For example, if one of your goals is increasing sales by 20% over the next six months then that means there will be certain benchmarks (e.g., number of emails sent per month) that need to be met before reaching this target number. These benchmarks should also include metrics such as open rates so that when they fall below expectations at any point during execution (or after), there’s time left over within each month where adjustments can still be made without disrupting overall performance too much!
Best Practices for Email Marketing
- Write compelling subject lines.
- Personalize emails.
- Test emails, and then test them again!
Analyzing Email Performance
Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. It’s easy to use, cost-effective and can be used to reach your customers on their own time and in their own space.
As with any marketing strategy, you will want to track the performance of your emails so that you can make adjustments as needed. There are several metrics that can help you measure success:
- Open rates – this shows how many people opened an email over a certain period of time (e.g., 30 days). You should aim for at least 20% open rates if possible; anything higher than 50% is great!
- Clickthrough rate – this measures how many times someone clicked on a link within an email vs simply reading it without taking action (i.e., clicking). The higher the better here too! A good benchmark would be 2-3%.
Example of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Let’s take a look at an example of a successful email marketing campaign.
- Company background: A large company that provides services to businesses and individuals, including financial planning and investment advice.
- Strategy: The company wanted to increase its revenue by encouraging customers to use its online resources more often. It also wanted to improve customer retention by providing more value through its website content, which would make people want to come back again and again rather than just one-time visits or sales pitches for products/services they didn’t need at the moment.
- Results: The company achieved these goals by creating an email campaign titled “The Ultimate Guide To Investing,” which was sent out weekly over several months’ time (about 15 emails). Each one contained tips about topics like how much money should be invested in stocks vs bonds vs cash-equivalents like treasury bills; how much risk you should take on when investing based on your age bracket; what types of investments make sense for people who don’t have enough money saved up yet but want something more than just savings accounts where interest rates are low because banks know those accounts won’t earn them much profit anyway so why bother trying hard with them?
Tools for Email Marketing
Email automation tools: These are software programs that allow you to create, send and track emails. You can use them to create an automated sequence of emails that are sent out automatically based on a set of rules that you define.
Email marketing platforms: These are online services that offer a variety of tools for managing your email campaigns and analyzing their performance. They provide everything from campaign creation to analytics reporting, plus advanced segmentation capabilities so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right time (and vice versa).
Email testing tools: These allow you to test different versions of an email message before sending it out into the wild–a crucial step in making sure your messages resonate with recipients so they’re not immediately deleted as spam!
Segmenting Your Email List
Email marketing is a powerful tool, but it can be even more effective when you segment your email list. Segmentation means dividing up your contacts into different groups based on their demographic information and buying habits.
There are three main types of email segmentation:
- Demographic segmentation–dividing customers into groups based on age, gender and location. For example, if you’re selling baby clothes online then you might want to send different messages to parents in different age groups (e.g., parents with babies under one year old vs those with toddlers). You could also target mothers who live in specific regions or states by sending them ads for local events like baby showers or playgroups where they can meet other moms like themselves!
- Geographic segmentation–dividing customers into groups based on the city, state/province, and/or country they live in. You can target groups of customers who as a region tend to display a positive response to your product or service. Factors like north vs south, urban vs rural environments, warm vs cold climates, etc. may play a factor in the regions that you choose to market to. Geographic segmentation could also make sending regional holiday or region-specific sales promotional emails to specific audiences (e.g., sending 4th of July emails to American customers and Canada Day emails to Canadians).
- Psychographic segmentation–dividing customers into groups based on their values, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, interests, and behaviors, often segmenting based on both demographic and behavioral data points. For example, if you’re selling shoes online, the messaging that you would want to provide for a woman who works in an office and buys loafers (e.g., messaging around workwear, looking professional, comfort, etc.) would vary dramatically from a man who plays basketball and buys basketball sneakers (e.g., messaging around liking sports, basketball, being active, etc.).
Email Automation
Email automation is a great way to keep your customers engaged. It’s especially effective if you have an email list with thousands of people on it, but even if you don’t, there are still ways to use this strategy effectively.
There are three main types of automated emails: welcome messages, triggered based on user behavior, and timed-based emails.
Email Personalization
Email personalization is a great way to increase engagement and help you get your message across. When you send an email, include the recipient’s name in the subject line. This will make them feel more connected with your brand and encourage them to open your emails.
You can also use dynamic content that changes based on their behavior or preferences, such as sending different offers based on whether they’ve purchased from you before or not. You can also use customer data like purchase history or demographics (like age range) when sending out emails so that each person gets relevant information tailored specifically for them!
Conclusion
Email marketing is an effective tool for increasing revenue. Use the best practices outlined in this blog and you’ll be on your way to building a successful email marketing strategy.
- Use the right tools and strategies. Email marketing tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact and Aweber are great for managing your email lists but they don’t do anything unless you use them correctly! You need to know how to create compelling subject lines, write engaging copy that converts leads into sales, set up automated campaigns so that they run themselves (or at least most of themselves), etc…