In our digital age, businesses use email marketing as a powerful tool to reach their audiences, connect with customers, and achieve goals. For beginners questioning: “What is email marketing, and how does it help?” our guide is here to help.
We will reveal the core of email marketing, its benefits, and 5 steps to do it in the digital landscape. Join us to uncover the secrets and understand why email marketing is a game-changer online.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a direct way for businesses to contact customers and share updates, new products, and sales. Subscribers choose to receive these emails, making them more likely to take action than other marketing methods.
According to the Litmus report from 2021, over 40% of businesses consider email marketing critical for their overall success. Statista predicts that by 2027, the global email marketing market will surge to $17.9 billion. It is a notable increase from its 2020 valuation of $7.5 billion.
Modern email marketing has evolved from generic mass emails to more focused on gaining consent. It targets specific groups and personalizes messages to engage the intended audience better. That means marketers must know what their customers want and build lasting relationships.
There are 4 types of email advertising, including:
- Promotional emails: These are for promoting special deals, new products, and your brand. They include a clear Call-to-Action (CTA) to guide the reader on what to do next. The frequency of these emails depends on your marketing schedule.
- Informational emails: Typically in the form of newsletters, these emails share business updates and valuable content. They are sent regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) to keep subscribers engaged. These are perfect for sharing insights, tips, and crucial announcements.
- Retention emails: This type of email for advertising is for maintaining the engagement of existing customers and encouraging their return. Examples include welcome emails, guides on product use, and messages to reconnect with inactive subscribers.
- Transactional emails: These automated messages respond to customer actions, like confirming orders, saying thanks, resetting passwords, and more. They are crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction and ensuring requested actions.
A good email marketing strategy will boost sales and raise awareness about your brand. But what is the definition of an email marketing strategy?
An email marketing strategy is a thorough plan businesses use to communicate with their intended audience through email effectively. It involves audience segmentation, content creation, scheduling, and performance analysis.
Pro tip: To build strong connections with your customers, consider combining email marketing and SEO. This approach requires you to pay attention to many other factors, such as guest blogging, link building, global SEO, and more.
If you need a cost-effective solution with outstanding results, turn to ROI Digitally. We offer various services, including the tasks mentioned above, making your SEO efforts comprehensive and efficient. By making the right choice, you will have more time to focus on refining your product, expanding your network, and boosting your brand’s visibility.
3 Benefits Of Email Marketing
Knowing the email marketing definition means you have the key to unlocking a powerful tool to engage with your customers. So, let’s delve further and explore its benefits to your business:
- Increase conversions: Email marketing segments your audience based on their characteristics, behaviors, or interests. This way, you can send them more personalized and relevant emails that match their needs and preferences. What you need is compelling content and optimized landing pages.
- Grow brand awareness: With email marketing, you can increase your brand awareness. It helps you achieve this by building your list and maintaining your frequency. Also, this approach can set a unique and recognizable tone and style that reflects your brand personality and values.
- Maintain customer loyalty: Email marketing provides value to your customers that help them solve their problems or achieve their goals. These values include relevant information, tips, resources, or solutions via newsletters, blogs, videos, etc. This process shows your customers that you care about and respect them.
5 Steps To Do An Email Marketing Strategy
After knowing how email for advertising helps your business, you might wonder how to do it effectively. Here are 5 steps to do an email marketing strategy effectively:
Step 1: Set your email marketing goals
Like an SEO process, the first step for an email marketing plan is setting your goals. What do you want to achieve with your campaigns? The goals should align with your overall business objectives and target audience.
To set up suitable objectives, analyze your current situation. Use Google Analytics, Mailchimp, or HubSpot to measure your email marketing metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and more. Also, SWOT or PEST analysis helps with assessing your email marketing environment.
Besides, remember to match your goals with the needs and expectations of your target audience. Utilize buyer personas or customer journey maps to understand your audience, what they want, and how they behave.
Step 2: Build your email marketing list
After knowing what you want to achieve, it’s time to start building your email list. There are several to create an email list when doing email marketing for business, and the proper method depends on your goals.
For example, try importing a list of known contacts. If you want to use email to keep in touch with your current customers, create your email list by adding the details of your existing customers to your chosen tool.
Another way is building a new list from scratch. Do this when you want to reach an audience whose email addresses you don’t have yet. You’ll need to start collecting email addresses and creating your list.
There’s a simple 2-part formula that many successful email marketers follow to grow their email lists: A valuable incentive + easy ways to sign up = a big email list.
Some incentives to encourage people to join your email list are engaging content, first-time discounts, free or faster shipping, etc. By coupling a valuable incentive with easy ways to subscribe, growing your audience for email advertising campaigns is never easier.
Some incentives to encourage people to join your email list are engaging content, first-time discounts, free or faster shipping, etc. By coupling a valuable incentive with easy ways to subscribe, growing your audience for email advertising campaigns is never easier.
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Step 3: Choose the email campaign type
Marketers choose from different types of email campaigns to send to their subscribers. This decision depends on the goals you set in Step 1. Here are some common campaign types and how they help you with your email marketing goals:
| Campaign Type | Description | Benefits |
| Newsletter | A regularly sent email covering a single topic of interest. | Keep in touch with existing customers, maintain product awareness, and direct traffic to the website. |
| Marketing Offer | A campaign aiming to drive a direct response, like purchases or special promotions. | Promote products, encourage sales, and offer discounts to incentivize purchases. |
| Announcement | Email sent to inform subscribers about new products, features, or services. | Keep an engaged audience informed about the latest offerings, potentially drive sales. |
| Event Invitation | Campaign to raise awareness of an event and encourage attendance. | Create excitement, engage the audience, and boost event attendance. |
With each specific goal and audience, these different email campaigns play a vital role when using email for advertising.
Step 4: Begin your first email marketing campaign
The fourth step is to create your first email marketing campaign. It involves designing, writing, sending, and testing your emails. Follow this process to start your first campaign:
1. Choose a platform
Choosing your email marketing platform means selecting the tool or service you want to use to create and manage your campaigns. There are many options, such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, or Constant Contact, to help you do this task.
2. Write your email copy
Studies reveal that, on average, adults have an attention span of just 8 seconds. With such a brief focus period, people aren’t meticulously reading your email campaigns. Instead, they’re scanning for points of interest.
Therefore, lengthy, text-heavy emails might not be the most effective approach. Instead, structure your emails to grab readers’ interest and encourage them to dive into your content.
3. Design your email template
Now, it’s time to create and customize the layout and style of your emails. The most common options are Canva, BEE, or Stripo to help you design the template. Also, you can use tools such as Litmus or Email on Acid to test and preview your template on different devices and browsers.
4. Send your emails
Finally, you must send emails to your subscribers at the right time and frequency. We suggest you plan your emails carefully and follow a schedule. This way, you won’t send too many emails at once or leave long gaps without any.
Besides, how often you send emails matters a lot. If you send too many, people get tired of them and unsubscribe. But if you send too few, they might forget about you. So, it’s all about finding the right balance.
Step 5: Measure your campaign results
Here comes the final step to doing email marketing for business. Measuring the results means tracking and analyzing the performance of your campaigns. It helps you know your strategy’s effectiveness and detect which factors need to improve.
To measure your campaign results, you need to:
- Define your metrics: Choose metrics that align with your email marketing goals. You can use open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, or revenue per email.
- Use a tool to track metrics: Use a tool or service that helps you collect and display data from your campaigns. Consider Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Constant Contact to help you track and measure those metrics.
- Analyze and optimize your results: You must evaluate and improve your email marketing strategy from the data and insights above. Optimizely or VWO will help you conduct A/B or multivariate testing to optimize your email marketing elements.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you make money by email marketing?
You can make money by email marketing by using it to promote your products or services, generate leads, and increase sales. Email campaigns will urge your audience to take action and buy from you. Further, marketing by email allows you to upsell or cross-sell your existing customers.
What is the meaning of email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that sends emails to prospects and customers. It allows you to communicate with your audience, promote your products, and boost sales.
What are the 4 types of email marketing?
The four types of email marketing are:
- Promotional emails promote deals, new products, and your brand with clear next steps. Send as needed.
- Informational emails share updates and helpful content regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly).
- Retention emails keep existing customers engaged and encourage their return with emails like welcome messages, product guides, etc.
- Transactional emails are automated messages confirming actions, ensuring customer satisfaction, and confirming requests.
Conclusion
“What is email marketing?” is a common question for those looking to understand how businesses use emails to reach their audience effectively. We hope our guidelines have answered all your questions.
Email marketing is a great way to grow your business in 2023. Following the 5 steps we shared above, you can build a successful email marketing strategy and achieve your goals. So, why wait? Start your email campaigns today.
Co-Founder & General Manager @ ROI Digitally
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