HR Mavericks

Eddy’s HR Mavericks Encyclopedia

Email Marketing

Let’s dive into this comprehensive guide to email marketing, where I will be giving you specific information about the history of email marketing, its benefits, and its advantages and disadvantages, including why you need email marketing and the important factors affecting it.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the utilization of emails to promote, advertise and create awareness about products or services. These products or services might be digital or physical. Email marketing is used to develop conversations with customers online and convince them to buy a product or service.Email marketing starts with mailing commercial emails to a list of filtered email contacts who have given their permission to receive emails from you.Email marketing is often used to drive sales and contacts and form an association around your brand, just like a newsletter.

History of Email Marketing

In 1978, Gary Thuerk sent out the first mass email to about 400 potential clients. He claimed that this resulted in approximately $13 million worth of sales for his product. This was the move that highlighted the likely prospects of marketing via mass emails.Over time, email marketing developed into an effective and direct means of communication. However, users began to refer to mass emails as spam. This led to innovations by marketers to develop a way or method of pushing emails without being cut off.Email marketing has allowed marketers to see feedback from real users in time and monitor how effective their campaign is in achieving marketing penetration. Since then, personalized email campaigns have become an absolute necessity for marketing strategies.

Types of Email Marketing

Choosing what type of email marketing to pursue is a valid question marketers find themselves asking when selecting the right format to meet their email marketing goals. There are a few types of marketing emails listed below that you can send to potential clients. This list should help you make an educated decision about picking the most appropriate email type for you and how you can go about it.

Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are sent by organizations to stay foremost in the mind of their clients or recipients. Newsletters are the basic foundation of email marketing strategies because they are great tools for educating customers about your business prospects as well as showcasing your business profiles.

Dedicated Emails

Unlike newsletters, dedicated emails can focus on driving results because it focuses on just one objective and just one goal. They usually contain emails about only one offer. In this sense, they are most frequently used to reach out to a more concise client base.

Welcome Emails

Welcome emails serve as the first step in forming a relationship with your potential clients. When done correctly, this will be a positive experience for your clients. Welcome emails can be a good way to start your marketing metrics.

Transactional Emails

A transactional email is an automated message sent to subscribers based on their actions on your website. It could be order updates, booking, subscription confirmations, and notifications. Transactional emails are essential to a business due to their many benefits, like developing customer trust and boosting customer engagement.

Why Email Marketing Is Important

Email marketing is the most profitable means of modern marketing. Email marketing makes a good return on investment and presents your business with more opportunities to grow. With email marketing, you can create a good relationship with your customers and become more familiar with their needs. Email marketing is seen as a powerful tool to promote a company’s product, brand, or services. These are some of the reasons why email marketing is important:
  • Email marketing is more effective than social media marketing in terms of driving sales. Furthermore, 60% of customers claim they've made a purchase as a result of email marketing, whereas just 12.5% perceive a buy button on social media to be a purchase driver.
  • One of the fastest ways to engage customers is through email marketing. Almost 22% of emails are opened within the first hour after they are sent. That's incredible speed. Over half of the packages had been opened in less than six hours. Email is a reliable technique to get the word out quickly if your messaging is time sensitive.
  • One of the most cost-effective ways to engage customers is through email marketing. Few marketing tactics can equal email in terms of cost-effectiveness. There is no charge to send an email or have someone click on it, unlike sponsored media. Unlike social media, there is no cost to promote your emails and ensure that they reach the majority of your contacts. Unlike SEO, you don't have to wait for sites to rise in the rankings to acquire visitors, which takes time and money. There are no printing or postage expenditures, unlike print media. There is some overhead in planning email campaigns and building contact lists, but these expenditures are far reduced when compared to other marketing strategies.
  • People enjoy receiving emails. When it comes to email marketing, one of the most common concerns we hear from clients is that they don't want to bother their consumers. Sure, you're definitely overdoing it if you're sending three emails every day. However, you might be amazed at how many emails your contacts will tolerate. According to studies, 49% of customers appreciate getting promotional emails on a weekly basis. According to additional research, sending two to three emails each month is the sweet spot. The point is that your audience enjoys hearing from you. And email marketing is a fantastic method to stay in touch.
  • It's simple to personalize email marketing campaigns. When it comes to marketing, personalization is the most crucial component. Someone is more likely to interact with your material if they can relate to it. It's that simple. Personalizing your communications with email marketing is a breeze thanks to merge fields and list segmentation. The average open rate for emails is roughly 20%. When you customize your subject line (for example, by utilizing a merge field to incorporate a contact's name), your open rate increases by 50%. Similarly, segmentation increases click-through by 50%. Best of all, this high degree of customization can be done in a matter of seconds, and it can even be fully automated in some cases.

Benefits Of Email Marketing

Here are my top three reasons for the importance of email marketing and how it can help your business.

Benefit 1: Staying in Contact with Your Audience

Emails have the ability to keep your customers informed. Consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient for them. It can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them. This email can be as simple as saying: “Hi, you’re on our mind, here is a special offer!” or “Here is an update on what has been going on here in recent weeks.” Those that have signed up to your email list have already made a commitment to receive these notes. So they will likely enjoy these emails (as long as you give them something worth reading) and it will boost engagement with your customers.

Benefit 2: Reach Customers in Real-Time

According to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This is significant and should come into play when planning any marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails but all other types of media and information. Not only that, well-designed emails produce higher conversion rates on mobile devices than any other medium. Hit ’em on the go!

Benefit 3: People Engage with Emails

For over 40 years, email has been a form of communication. As the years have gone by, email has become one of our main choices of communication. We have all been groomed to reply to an email in some fashion. Whether it is to reply, to forward, click through to something else embedded within the email, delete, or buy or sign up for something. We tend to do something with the email. Knowing this, you can use email to drive people to your website, to pick up the phone and call, or to pursue any other call to action. In fact, over 25% of sales last year were attributed to email marketing.

Advantages of Email Marketing for Businesses

  • Better brand recognition
  • Statistics of what works best
  • More sales
  • Targeted audience
  • More traffic to your products/services/newsletter
  • Build credibility

Disadvantages of Email Marketing for Businesses

    • Spam. In some cases, such a large number of special and spam email messages bother users.
    • Undelivered messages. There is a high possibility that a few groups from your mailing list are not getting your sends.
  • Planning problems.
  • Size issues.

What To Include in Email Marketing

Email marketing is a segment of internet marketing that can include newsletters with updates on your company or promotions of sales and exclusive deals for subscribers. Many companies also like to send out a weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter keeping customers updated on what’s going on around the company.

Include Simple Things like GIFs or Videos

Including these elements in your email campaigns can make a huge difference for conversions. Human minds are programmed so they can take images faster than texts. so it will be going to engage your audiences towards the end.The most important thing for every email marketing is choosing the right email marketing software. You will find many email marketing software in the market, but you have to decide which one is best for your business.I came up with highly ranked email marketing software so you can get a clear picture of the best email marketing software present in the market. I find that these are the most powerful tools for email marketing. For hybrid email marketing solutions, you can use EasySendy pro for its advanced features.

Include a Sense of Humor

Adding humor to your content is a great way to improve your open rates. People always want unique things, so adding a humorous element to your emails will increase their attention to your work. Start talking about your clients to attract attention because people love hearing about themselves and being treated as valuable and essential. Only you can draw your audience to open the email. Just pick eye-opening killer subject lines. It will increase your open rates.

Send Welcome Emails to Your Customers

This strategy will help you to turn your website visitors into potential subscribers. You can include many things in email marketing. But keep in mind to not create a mess by putting too much into one email. If you are looking for a multi-channel email marketing tool or hybrid email marketing solution, EasySendy Pro is a lifesaver for me. It not only helps with its hybrid marketing solution but also helps drive email campaigns.

Factors That Affect Email Marketing

How Many Emails You Send

If you send a lot of emails to a lot of new subscribers at once, email services like Gmail may think you are a spammer. Spammers usually send a large volume of emails to a large number of subscribers at the same time. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you — even when you have a big email list and ‘play by the rules’ — the following factor is essential.

How Consistently and How Often You Send Your Emails

If you’re sending 200 emails on Monday, and then suddenly you send 200,000 emails on Wednesday, the email service providers may think you bought that email list somewhere and that you may be a spammer. Also, if you send only one email per month and then suddenly start sending emails every day, this may also be a red flag. So you’d better grow your list organically, and send the same volume of emails with the same regularity.

Your Subscribers’ Behavior – The Bounce Rate

This is what you see by the bounce rate — the number of emails that ‘bounced’ back from your subscribers’ inbox. The bounce rate is divided into hard bounce and soft bounce rates:
  • Hard bounces happen when your recipient’s email doesn’t exist.
  • Soft bounces happen when your message cannot be delivered temporarily (e.g. because your recipients’ inbox is full).

Your Open Rates

Your email marketing reputation is affected by the number of opens (open rates). Another important user behavior that affects your deliverability is the unsubscribes and spam complaints. When someone from your subscribers ticks your email as spam, it sends a signal to the email marketing provider (e.g. Gmail) that you might be a spammer.
Another factor affecting your reputation as a sender is the quality of links you include in your emails. If you’re sending newsletters with links to ‘blacklisted’ domains, the email service providers may flag your domain and that may affect your deliverability.

How Do I Start Email Marketing?

You can start email marketing for free by having a strategy and a system in place that will take your potential buyers from prospect to customers.

Step 1: Strategize

The first thing you start with is your strategy. What are you trying to accomplish with your email marketing? What are your goals? By what date would you like to achieve these goals? Of course, it should be a timeframe within reason.When you execute your strategy, it’s best to have a targeted market to promote your services or products to. Marketing your business to everyone won’t work. It would be a big waste of time and money because not everyone wants to buy what you’re selling.Your mission is to sell your products/services to those who are looking to buy from you. So, start with figuring out who your targeted market is. You find this out by doing research. Break down your targeted demographics by income, neighborhood, gender, race, age, and the like.

Step 2: Set Up Your Emailing System

The next step is to set up your emailing system to capture the information of your prospects. What you’re going to use is something called an auto-responder mailing system.It’s basically an opt-in form generated by a code that you can place on your website and social media platforms and has people fill in their information so you can contact them at a later time. The reason for this is that 95% of people who visit your website or come across your product online are not going to buy from you.Don’t let this discourage you as a business owner. This type of behavior is normal for prospects. In order to be confident that you’ll get future sales from these prospects is to understand the buyer's journey.When setting up your email opt-in form you want to choose a setup option called double opt-in. This is where someone fills out your form and is immediately sent an email to confirm their subscription. Confirming their subscription simply means that they’re agreeing to receive information from you in the future.This is essential because if you have someone opt into your emailing list and they don’t agree for you to send them information in the future, they will see it as spam and can now complain about it to the company providing you with the emailing services. The company will probably warn you about this the first time, but some companies are very strict and will cut you from using their services the first time something like this is reported.

Step 3: Set Up Your Ad Content

As a full-functioning business, it should already be a given that you have a website with content on it. Assuming that you have already done this, I will move on to the stage setting up your ad content.Your ad content is essentially the content you put in your ad. It’s the information that tells the viewer who you are, what your company is about and how the prospect can benefit from purchasing your product/services. Short and concise ads work depending on what platform you use to advertise.Long-form ads work best on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin. Short-form ads work well on Google ads, Youtube, Bing ads, and banner ads on relevant content websites.Your ad content should have a captivating title, a description that hooks prospects in, and a call to action, whether a link to your website or your company number to call.

Step 4: Provide a Free Lead Magnet

A free lead magnet is offered on your website or landing page in exchange for the prospect’s information. For example, a lead magnet could be a free e-book on marketing strategies.A company or entrepreneur will visit your site through an ad you posted online because it stated that they would get a free ebook that outlined effective marketing strategies. They will fill out their information (name and email) on the opt-in form you provided in order to receive the free ebook.They get what they want, which is the free information in the e-book, and you get what you want, which is the prospects’ contact information. Their contact information is what you’re going to use to contact and educate them about the services/products that are offered within your field.Keep in mind that the objective of the email messages is NOT to sell them on your products/services but to educate them. Educate them on the product or services they seek so you can be seen as a reputable authority on the subject. Never try to sell them on anything because they will become annoyed. No one likes a salesperson.What you have to do is inform and refer them to your content, and your content should do the rest for you.

Step 5: Follow Up

In marketing we say that the gold is in the follow-up. As I mentioned before, 95% of your prospects will NOT purchase what you have to sell. So the gold (money) is when you follow up through email marketing. You inform, educate and sell through rapport. There is no other way to do it.Email marketing for free will give you all the tools you need to build your email list. What you do after that is totally reliant on you and your ability to persuade your prospects to buy your products over your competitors’ products.

Sample Newsletter Email Template

From: Roqqu <no-reply@roqqu.com>Date: Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 8:09 AMTo: Sydney Jonathan <doctorgenesis01@gmail.com>Hey Sydney,It is that time of the year to take things slow. Slow down, breathe in nature’s sweet fragrance. Enjoy the chirping of the birds and the serene moments with family and friends. May the magical feeling of Christmas surround you and your loved ones.Merry Christmas! From all of us at Roqqu

Tools For Email Marketing

Here is a list of the top four marketing tools from my knowledge so that you can do a little research on your own and find out what fits you best.

Tool 1: Active Campaign

Active Campaign is a very popular and well-known tool on the marketing platform and is best for small businesses & enterprises.

Tool 2: Sendinblue

Sendinblue is the best emailing tool for transactional emails.

Tool 3: Autopilot

Autopilot is another well-known name in the marketing platform and is best for marketing automation.

Tool 4: Drip

The last tool I recommend is Drip. This tool is best for small- to medium-size e-commerce businesses.
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