It can be challenging to effectively reach your intended audience amidst the abundance of online distractions such as social media, banner ads, video ads, short ads on YouTube, and the dreaded spam emails.
When executed properly, email marketing has the potential to yield significant results. Research from the Digital Advertising Network reveals that email marketing is 40% more impactful compared to social media advertising.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing involves sending marketing materials directly to subscribers’ email addresses, as a permission-based marketing channel.
Ray Tomlinson sent the inaugural email in 1971 on the ARPANET system, marking the first-ever transmission of electronic mail. Gary Thurek, representing Digital Equipment Corp., became the first person to send a marketing email. He distributed a single email to numerous addresses, subsequently proclaiming himself as the originator of unsolicited commercial messages, commonly referred to as spam.
Email marketing has experienced significant advancements since its inception, with both positive and negative effects. With the aid of technology and software, email marketing is now a diversified channel that does not rely on a single email template for everyone.
What Makes Email Marketing So Great?
Email is considered one of the fastest and most effortless methods to connect with individuals globally due to its three fundamental components.
- Accessibility: There are millions, if not billions, of people with an email address, and a large percentage of these people can check their emails on their smartphones. You can reach people with your message almost anywhere and anytime.
- Affordability: With the right tools, email marketing can be very affordable. The volume of mail you can send is incredible for how little money it can cost.
- Ease of Use: Email campaigns are surprisingly easy to set up and run, with some tools even giving you freedom with automated features. You can have people working their way through your EDM steps at their own pace without manually sending them emails.
How to Start Your Email Marketing Campaign in 6 Easy Steps
After familiarizing yourself with all the advantages of having an email campaign, it is now time to initiate your own.
1. Build Your Mailing List
Consistently acquiring email addresses along with obtaining permission from individuals is essential to build an email list.
In order to gather individuals’ information, it is essential to have a form that includes, at the very least, their names and email addresses. In case you want to provide birthday gifts as a token of appreciation, obtaining their birth dates can be helpful. However, if privacy is a concern, it is recommended to opt for merely requesting the birth month.
Offering something in return for their contact information is a clever strategy. Providing a complimentary ebook or granting access to your exclusive YouTube channel enhances the customer’s experience.
Enrolling in our mailing list can be a requirement for entry if you possess a membership.
One option is to organize a competition where participants are required to subscribe to your e-newsletter as a condition of entry.
It is important to remember that you must always provide the choice to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Sending marketing emails without offering an option to opt out is against the law.
2. Select an Email Service Provider (ESP)
However, by collecting email addresses, categorizing them in your contacts list, and sending email newsletters this way, you might be wasting time, lacking efficiency, and overlooking incredible online services.
Below are a few online email service providers to consider:
With Mailchimp’s free plan, you can effortlessly include a maximum of 2,000 contacts and create visually appealing email newsletters. The remarkable reporting feature provides insights on the recipients who are opening and clicking, enabling targeted marketing approaches for enhanced effectiveness.
Over time, it has successfully incorporated numerous software and widgets, resulting in a genuinely robust email marketing platform.
Although there are paid versions that offer additional features, the free version provides an ample amount of bells and whistles.
Mailer Lite is suitable for individuals with limited time or experience who want to quickly set up and initiate mailing campaigns.
Novices find the drag and drop feature highly useful, and there is a wide range of templates to customize. With the free plan, you can have up to 1,000 contacts and send 12,000 emails per month.
To begin, you will need to provide a substantial amount of company information, which may raise concerns about privacy. Lite also provides the option for paid accounts, with costs varying based on the number of subscribers. Annual payments are eligible for discounts.
3. Create a Marketing Plan
To ensure success in any campaign, it is crucial to have a well-thought-out strategy. Establish SMART objectives, familiarize yourself with relevant metrics, determine the criteria for success, and determine your reporting process, among other important considerations.
- Set your audience: Who are you going to be emailing? Who are you targeting to grab details to send your emails to? Knowing your audience can help you build the give-away for their details.
- Segment different groups: Once you have your list and have been emailing for a while, you can tell who engages, who opens the emails, and who clicks through. You can split these people into different groups for different campaigns.
- Decide what kind of content to write: Are you trying to get the people who engage less to click through more? Do you want to reward the most active people on your list? Do you have news to give or a new product or service to market?
Set Goals/KPIs
What choices do you possess if you lack an understanding of what constitutes success, as no marketing campaign holds any value without this knowledge?
- Bring in X new leads.
- Promote a specific product/services
- Increase customer engagement
- Boost brand awareness
4. Design Your Emails
Sending an email that consists solely of text on a plain white background is not desirable as it appears uninteresting and fails to engage the reader.
With the majority of contemporary email software available, you have the ability to incorporate your brand’s colors and imagery, along with the inclusion of HTML links, embedded videos, and various other features.
You can enhance emails with various forms of media. This can be achieved through utilizing the features provided by certain online platforms or seeking the assistance of a graphic designer to create a customized template. Ensure that your email has an appealing appearance while also being user-friendly and engaging.
5. Test the Email Systems
Ensure that everything is functional before sending it out, including any automated processes you have established.
- Subscribe to your service and see if your free offer works.
- Set a test list with five or so emails with different browsers or different email software systems.
- Send the emails and then read them to find spelling or grammatical errors you may have missed.
- See if the emails work on mobile devices as well.
6. Implement Email Automation
After resolving all the bugs and ensuring its functionality, proceed to automate it. Automate the welcome email, the gift, and the multi-step EDM campaign. By doing so, you will no longer need to closely oversee email marketing, allowing you to focus on more productive and profitable aspects of your business.
How do you make an email campaign more effective?
Although the advantages of having a powerful email marketing strategy are apparent, the struggle to capture attention in a crowded inbox is constant. The abundance of messages makes it challenging to differentiate oneself.
Imagine yourself as the reader. You probably have a multitude of distractions such as 32 open tabs, a constantly ringing phone, several notifications, and a very short attention span as you quickly glance through your emails. Considering this, it becomes evident that devoting 2 hours to crafting a clever subject line doesn’t guarantee success. No matter how amazing your content may be, if it’s not effectively presented, it can be easily dismissed, as Ariana Grande famously said, “thank you, next!”
Follow the email marketing tips below to enhance the likelihood of capturing your audience’s attention and improving your chances of winning.
Make sure your message is clear
It is crucial to emphasize the significance of concentrating your message. Attempting to include too many messages in a single email can lead to confusion for the recipient. If you need to convey multiple messages, it is advisable to separate them into several emails, ensuring each one is concise and brief. While attention-grabbing subject lines are important, it is essential to ensure that the email content is consistent so as not to give the impression of click-baiting.
Get personal
Nowadays, using the salutation “Dear Sir/ Madam” is no longer sufficient. Customers now expect personalized communication, so avoid turning them away by using a general approach. We’re not suggesting that you need to know their favorite ice cream flavor (just so you know, mine is cookie dough), but addressing them by their first name is a good starting point. Furthermore, divide your audience into different groups based on key characteristics, such as whether they are customers or the specific product/s they have purchased. By breaking down your subscribers into smaller segments, you will be able to send more customized and relevant emails. Additionally, segmentation also brings about a positive impact on open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Include hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are beneficial for both readers, who can easily access additional content, and marketers, who can track their performance. By employing UTM tracking for email landing pages and hyperlinks, marketers can gain valuable insights into their customers’ journey and the specific content that piques their interest.
Have a reply address
Not having a friendly no-reply@domain.com address not only fails to promote customer engagement, but also indicates that the email is a generic mass message and diminishes any attempts to personalize it. Additionally, no-reply email addresses are more prone to being marked as spam, resulting in a lower chance of your email reaching the intended audience’s inbox.
Design to attract
To ensure flawless design and laser-focused content, consider the following guidelines:
- Invest in an email builder: We get it, you’re a marketer, not a graphic designer. But what if we told you that a comprehensive email builder can allow you to be both? Builders come with pre-built intuitive templates, so you don’t have to sweat if you you’re lacking technical knowledge or graphic design experience.
- Skip to the good bit: Put the most important information first for people who are short on time (that’s why we suggested putting a number of CTAs too). Furthermore, don’t forget to use headings and bullet points to break the content up into scannable bite-sized sections.
- Create mobile-first content: Research shows that mobile is preferred nearly 2:1 over webmail, so if you’re not ensuring your emails are user-friendly, you’re losing out. Send sample mails and open them on your phone to be certain.
- Pick a palette: Keep it simple and choose around one or two brand colours so that your design looks clean. Speaking of brand imagery, don’t forget to feature your logo somewhere on the email so that audiences know this is official communication. We’d recommend including this in the header section.
- Blank space is good: Don’t feel like you have to cram as much information into the email as possible. Blank space is good as it allows your reader to focus on what’s important, and they’ll become less distracted from your message as a result.
- Make the form simple: When it comes to forms, only ask your audience to fill in critical fields. If you’re keen to capture more information about them, look into progressive profiling rather than asking for all their information at once.
Find out the best time to send marketing emails
People frequently ask us, “what is the optimal time to share on social media?”, and the response also applies to email.
The fact is, there is no universally optimal time to send a marketing email.
Determining the optimal time to post relies on the activity of your particular target audience. While industry averages can serve as a starting point, it is crucial to conduct A/B testing with your email timing in order to identify your specific audience’s most receptive moments. Reliable email marketing platforms will furnish you with such data, transitioning us to the subsequent point!
Use email marketing software
By adopting the practices of the majority of marketing professionals and investing in email marketing software, also known as an email marketing platform, you can significantly simplify your life. Email marketing tools have a wide range of applications, but they are primarily used to automate email workflows, conduct A/B testing of messages, handle subscribers, and enhance reporting. Although numerous vendors offer email marketing platforms, we particularly endorse the ones listed below.
- Mailchimp
- Hubspot
- Marketo
- Klaviyo
- Drip
Conclusion
With the growing prevalence of email in people’s daily routines, checking them as frequently or even more often than instant messaging, it is only logical for marketing to utilize this platform, particularly due to its high return on investment.
You and your business can benefit from email marketing with the right approach.
