Email Marketing for Beginners
Ever wondered how email marketing became so effective?
According to research and studies, the best way to sell a particular product or service is by connecting passionately with your customers after building a level of trust and repute.
What better way to do this than utilizing effective marketing strategies aimed at telling your brand story, giving your brand a voice, dishing out useful contents and at the same time fulfilling a need.
Email marketing ranks as one of the best tactics to get your marketing strategies right. Connect with your customers and generate leads by sending out the right message.
One of the most effective ways of doing this is via email marketing, which helps you connect with your audience to promote your brand and improve sales.
In order to get it right with your email marketing campaign from scratch, here are 5 things you mustn’t disregard.
1. Identify key metrics
Knowing exactly what your customers want and the kind of service you want to render is one of the key steps in ensuring you win with your email marketing campaign.
If you wish to sell your product or create awareness for a new range of products, identifying key metrics and knowing what your goal is, is very essential.
In email marketing, there are three key metrics:
- Open Rate: The percentage of prospects who open an email.
- Response Rate: The percentage of prospects who respond to an email.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of responding prospects who subsequently buy.
Often times, email marketing “experts” focus on Open Rate, because it is seemingly the easiest metric to increase. Only a hand full focus on Conversion Rate because it is extremely difficult to raise and requires the appropriate techniques. However, this rate shouldn’t be overlooked because it is the most important and ensures full ROI.
Therefore, key emphasis should be made on increasing the Conversion Rate of your marketing campaign.
Be sure to give the best value for your product with no irritating surprises. Avoid trick subject lines as they damage your reputation and risk getting your email address blacklisted.
2. Utilize the right tools
The first and most important thing you need to do before sending out emails is to get permission to email your prospects and customers.
It is not advisable to randomly send “cold” emails to people who have not connected with your brand on a personal level.
People who don’t opt in specifically for your email list are not the people that will buy from you. Therefore, sending them anything at all will be a complete waste of money and time.
If you are new to email marketing or not sure of the tools to use in order to get the best out of your email campaigns, there are tools and software developed to make this process seamless and more effective.
- Mailchimp: This is one of the most widely used email marketing tools.
With Mailchimp’s campaign builder, it is easy to find the right templates for any message- whether you’re welcoming new subscribers or notifying customers of a product upgrade.
Mailchimp also allows you to integrate your social media channels to post up regular updates.
- Litmus: Litmus is a highly effective tool used to test and track your email.
You can test your email in traditional web browsers and also on popular mobile devices.
Using litmus offers you the opportunity to render tests and make sure your creative is optimised for any device.
Just like a scientific litmus test is used to ascertain how basic or acidic a chemical substance is, litmus helps you generate a test email to an address so that you can ascertain its responsiveness on desired browsers and devices.
- Drip: Drip is another email marketing automation tool that allows users to create complex automation workflows and conditional statements within email messaging.
Using drip offers a number of useful features such as email personalization, comprehensive data analytics, campaign creation and so much more.
Drip also supports a pair of distinct tools for building emails. This helps create impactful image-driven marketing designs as well as feedback messages that are more targeted and personal to users.
3. Develop an Email marketing structure that works
Generally, the success of any email marketing campaign is dependent on your ability to convey even the most complex message in the best simplest form.
Whether its a simple call to action to buy a product or pay for a service or an invitation to an event, you want to use the clearest terms possible to convey this.
Email marketing types mostly consist of informal emails and transactional emails.
Informal Emails
Informal emails are one-to-many emails that you can send to people to bring them up to speed on the new product that you are selling, latest contents, and so much more.
Also noteworthy is the fact that these kinds of emails should be only sent to people that have opted to receive your emails.
Informal emails include the following:
- Email invitation
- Newsletters
- Holiday reminders
- Discount sales
- Product update email
- Social media posts
- New content announcement email.
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are personal emails that are triggered by a specific action such as signing up for a newsletter, reaching out for a product brief or completing a purchase.
Specialized email marketing software like Mailchimp or Litmus are required in order to set up transactional emails. They include:
- Welcome emails
- Thank you emails
- Confirmation emails
- Lead nurturing emails.
4. Develop an email marketing tactic that works
Creating an effective email marketing campaign requires that you tick the following marketing tactics.
- Personalization
- List segmentation
- Testing and optimization
Research has shown that people would most likely connect to things that they can relate with, hence increased popularity in the use of social media marketing.
We can say the same about email marketing as its importance cannot be overemphasized.
Whether you’re putting together an email marketing strategy for your small business or a major organization, personalization matters a lot.
You can do this by finding out the best ways of getting to know your subscribers better.
You can do this by including polls on insights about a new product. This way, they feel involved and part of the decision making process.
In addition to improved subscribers insights, list segmentation is also key and this can be done by segmenting based on demographics, email engagement, geographical location, website behaviour, etc.
Having an effective email subscribers list ensures that you send more targeted, personalized emails to your subscribers based on their information. For example, segmenting based on a geographic area gives you insights on the group of people to send an invite for an event in a location close to them.
5. Create an effective email list
One of the perks of email marketing is that it helps you connect with your target audience to promote your brand and increase sales. You can tell stories, sell products or services with a well- crafted email.
Nevertheless, it’s never advisable to send “cold” emails to people who know nothing about your products and services.
Creating an email list from the scratch would go a long way in ensuring you get the best out of your email campaigns. What better way to do this than to:
- Create a signup form on your website. When people visit your website for the first time and like what they see, they’ll want a way to stay informed of your brand’s activities. Hence, you can create a form for newsletter signups and install a pop-up menu for first-time visitors.
- Make use of a sign-up sheet. Do you own a retail store or a car rental service? You can provide a place for people to sign up and learn more by creating a sign-up sheet.
- Utilize social media. You can drive sign-ups through social media when you have engaged followership. Tap into the resources of your followers’ strength by sharing your sign up forms on your social media channels.
In order to add more subscribers to an already existing email list:
- Give discount offers on products and services or promo codes for a first time purchase.
- Build an effective landing page using any of the email marketing tools. Landing pages give visitors a clear call to action and drive email signups through the roofs.
If you are having difficulties breaking even with your email marketing campaigns or if you are conversant with email marketing and have learnt quite a few things, we are willing to hear from you and also help you out.
Share with us in the comments below!
