Without a doubt, email marketing can do wonders for your business. So, if you are quite new to it, you will need a guide to email marketing to know how it all plays out.
But first, let us explain why email marketing is important.
Importance of Email Marketing
Email marketing harnesses the power email to create meaningful relationships with your audience.
This also allows you to capture important information from your audience by letting them subscribe to your email list. That way, you can send exclusive content and easily build rapport with them.
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When done right, email marketing will not just let you build a relationship with your audience. You can also use email to compel to make a transaction with you. Hence, email marketing can be a viable stream of income for your business.
Mind you, there are tons of tips and guides online that lets you learn how email marketing can generate a return on investment.
Types of Emails
Now that you know why you need email marketing for your business, it is time to get familiar with various types of emails:
1. Marketing Emails
These are either promotional or informational emails sent out to users who asked you to keep them updated.
Marketing emails are usually sent in the form of newsletters, announcements, sales promotions, follow-ups, press releases, surveys, and so on. Check out these email copywriting tips in order to write high-converting email copy.
2. Transaction Emails
Transactional emails are usually automated and sent out based on site visitors’ activities. Examples of these are order tracking, welcome messages, received payments, registration confirmation, and so on.
If you have sent a transactional email to a user and they have at least completed one action, then they will likely want to engage with you again.
Usually, these are considered as trusted emails and have higher open rates because they provide a lot of opportunities for engagement and cross-selling.
3. Operational Emails
This kind of email provides important data about your business. Examples of these are maintenance plans, holiday closures, changes to the availability of your services, and so on.
While you might think that operational emails don’t have much impact on your sales, you still have to be consistent on it for trust and engagement purposes.
There’s likely a hidden value in these messages. Although most of them tend to be informative, they help improve your sales and the value of your image.
Let’s say your site will be down for maintenance, informing your subscribers about it and describing the updates you will perform is a great way to remind them of the kind of value that you provide.
Strategies for Email Marketing
As mentioned earlier, email marketing can bring in ROI for your business as long as it is done properly. That said, we have listed down eight tactics that can help you build a successful email marketing campaign:
1. Know Your Audience
According to Kevin Urrutia of VoyMedia Marketing Agency NYC, having a deep understanding of your target audience is one of the important things that you have to take into consideration before you start sending emails.
Ask yourself these questions:
- How and when do they prefer to be communicated to?
- Is there a specific language or slang that would resonate with them more?
- What kind of action or activities make them stand out from the rest of the population?
2. Personalize Your Emails
Nowadays, neither blast nor batch emails will not work and would lead to high conversion or engagement rates.
Personalization is not a new concept but it is still picking up traction, which makes it increasingly important.
3. Think Quality Over Frequency
Email marketing is an excellent tool for communicating digitally. But you should also prioritize quality over quantity.
For instance, sending too many emails to your subscribers cannot help you achieve your desired results. Worse, they will unsubscribe the moment they feel overwhelmed with the emails that you send.
Worst, they might even mark you as spam.
4. Make it Easy to Unsubscribe
Although on the surface, you look like you are providing clients with an easy way to opt-out, if users want you to remove your name from their list and they could not easily do so, they will flag you as spam.
This can pose problems for you later on.
5. Find the Perfect Time
Knowing what’s the perfect time to send your emails is no easy feat. But although there is no silver bullet answer to that, having an audience insight could come in handy.
For instance, you can try sending out emails during “off times.” For example, in the afternoon when people are less likely to open their inbox because they are busy having lunch. You can also try sending emails in the evening when everyone’s having dinner or they are fast asleep.
Sending emails on top of the hour increases the chances that your email will be delayed, and will not reach your recipient as you originally intended it.
6. Make Emails Mobile-Friendly
What is the first thing that most people do in the morning? Well, most of them reach for their phones.
In relation to this, do you know that 66% of email opens happen in phones and tablets? If your email is not optimized for these devices, then you could be missing out on a higher open rate.
7. Keep it Out of Spam Folder
If you send out poorly constructed emails and are flagged by users as spam, then your emails are less likely to see the light of day.
Poorly formatted emails will hurt you in the long run. Also, note that every spam filter works differently.
An email might pass through one filter and then flagged and caught up in another. To learn more about this, check out MailChimp‘s guide for a comprehensive explanation of how those filters work.
8. Always be Testing
Do not send out anything if you are not sure that it is working properly.
Double-check your emails and see if you want them to look the way you want them to be before you send them out.
View them first on Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook, and different mobile devices before you decide to finalize your drafts.
Over to You
Email marketing can be a powerful tool to drive more sales and revenue to your business. It also has proven itself to have a greater reach and ROI than any marketing channel out there.
So, follow the tips we have outlined in this guide so that you can easily get your hands on email marketing.
