Email Marketing

At its most basic level, email marketing is the use of email to promote your business. It is used to cultivate relationships with potential customers, keep current customers informed and updated on your brand, offer coupons to encourage customer loyalty, and more!

It is a direct form of marketing, similar to marketing through snail mail, but email marketing is much more efficient for your wallet and for the environment since it’s totally paperless!

Some people think email marketing is outdated, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Email marketing has been utilized since shortly after the birth of the Internet. It has evolved considerably since then and is still an incredibly useful marketing tool. In fact, many entrepreneurs argue that email marketing is more important now than ever before.

94% of Internet users use email. Therefore, marketing through email allows you to reach a great deal of Internet users even if they are not on social media. Furthermore, a survey found that an astounding 75% of adult online users say email marketing is actually their preferred marketing method!

If you’re not already utilizing email marketing, it is definitely something you should consider in order to reach a wider audience and strengthen your brand’s relationship with current customers.

Another benefit of email marketing is that it’s incredibly easy to track your ROI. Everything is trackable with the use of email marketing software so you can determine who is opening your emails, who is clicking onto your site through your emails, and more.

Plus, the ROI is usually very high because you don’t have to put ad money behind emails to get them to the correct audience like you do with most other forms of advertising. They are already targeted towards the ideal consumer because you are only sending emails to people who have given you permission via providing you with their email address. This makes email marketing one of the cheapest possible marketing tactics.

No, never! But if you need the "why", let me tell you. People on a purchased list didn't choose to hear from you or your company. The goal of your marketing efforts should be to find the right prospects and customers. If you buy a list, you are taking that decision away from your prospects. Suddenly, they receive this message from you (or their spam folder, most likely), but have no idea what it's about, who you are, how you got their information, and now you're on their bad side. So just don't do it, ok?

"To get the right message to the right person at the right time you first need to get the right data to the right database at the right time." ~ John Caldwell

The success of your email marketing efforts will only be successful if you start with the right list. Your email marketing list should consist of past, current, and prospective customers. Your efforts should be focused on reaching an engaged audience that is interested in what your organization has to offer. If you’re pushing information out to people who aren’t interested, you are wasting your time and building a bad email marketing reputation.

In order to grow this list, make sure you have opportunities to opt-in throughout your website and blog.

Subject lines should be striking so much so to generate a response of opening the email. It’s the first thing that your subscribers notice. It’s your gateway to further communication.

So, make it personalized, short and have a message that matters to the audience. You have only 3-4 seconds to create an impact and let anyone decide to open an email.

You can ask questions or create urgency by stating a deadline.

Sending an email once a month helps to create your presence in someone’s mind. Twice or thrice a month develops a connect and doesn’t create a nuisance. But, when you send emails four times a month it creates consistency.

When you send offer emails you can send two emails and then send the third one as a final reminder. But, sending more than three emails just to mention the offer creates a nuisance ultimately losing a subscriber as he/she might mark you as spam. Here, in desperation to get a sale, you’ve lost an opportunity.

Email frequency varies from industry to industry and you need to keep testing in order to know what works best for your brand.

Email open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email. If someone doesn’t open your email, there are zero chances of engaging with your content and brand.

On an average, 10-15 percent of email open rates work well for the sender. But, it all depends on your industry and your target audience.

It’s true that open rate alone isn’t indicative of the success of your email marketing campaign. Its what people do after opening your email is what really matters.

Curious to know how your email campaign performed? Track these few things:

Click through rate:

Click through rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked on the links in your email. The total number of clicks divided by the number of emails sent, multiplied by 100. This gives you an understanding of how your email campaign performed.

Conversion rate:

This reflect that percentage of people who opened your email, read it and responded as per the desired action. You can calculate it as follows:

The number of recipients who completed the required action/ total number of emails delivered multiplied by 100.

Bounce rate:

When we see “your email has bounced”, it means that your email never actually got to your intended recipient.

Divide the total number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent, and multiply it with hundred. This is your bounce rate.

There are various ways in which you can manage bounces so that your email gets the desired response.

If the email subject line is irrelevant to the customers, they will ignore it a couple of times. But, if this keeps repeating they get bugged and unsubscribe from your emails.

So, send relevant emails that benefit the customer. Don’t send emails that focus only on sales, offers, and discounts frequently. Send information about your company and offerings so as to connect with the customers. You can also inform them about the recent trends in your industry.