Email Marketing has been in the digital domain for a long time and many businesses leverage email marketing to connect with their prospects and drive growth to their business.
Email Marketing is done through different email marketing platforms like mailchimp, sendgrid, constant contact etc.
In this article, we will understand email marketing and also understand how to create email marketing campaigns through an email marketing platform.
What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is a channel to promote your product and services through email. Email marketing helps to build relationships with customers and nurture them over a period of time.
Email marketing helps to acquire new customers, nurture leads, build relationships and improve ROI.
Advantages of Email Marketing?
Tells a Story
Email Marketing helps you to tell a story to your prospect about the product or service you are marketing. You can show infographics, videos and carousel images within the email, which helps you to tell a story to your customer.
Personalisation
Email Marketing helps you to send personalise messages to users. Personalisation helps to engage the audience effectively and improves the probability of a conversion. You can also send personalisation emails through users interaction on the website, making the buying journey more relevant and effective.
Cost Effective
One of the greatest advantages of email marketing is it’s cost effective. Compared to your other digital media advertisements including search ads, social ads or display ads, email marketing is cost effective and hence the cost for acquiring a customer is very low.
Targeted Reach
Email marketing has a targeted reach. The list which you use for email could be related specific segments of audiences, which makes the reach more targeted, helping you to drive more value out of it.
Builds Relationship
Email Marketing helps to build relationships with your customers. As it’s a one to one communication, you can stay connected with your customers post acquisition and engage them in the long run.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is one of the important aspects of email marketing. As prospects are at different levels of sales funnel, email marketing helps to nurture them and drive them to the bottom of the funnel.
Different Types of Email Marketing?
Direct Emails
Direct Emails are emails which you send to customers which directly talk about your products and services. Direct emails also talk about offers, coupons and discounts as the objective is sales or lead through the email.
Newsletter Emails
Newsletter emails talk build to engage the audience or build a conversation with the audience. The newsletter email can be about a company update, news, blog, report or a case study.
Newsletter emails keep the audience connected with your brand and build relationships.
Transactional Emails
Transactional Emails are mails which are sent to customers once they have taken any action, eg: booked a flight ticket on the website, registered for an event or downloaded a brochure.
What are the different email marketing platforms?
There are different email marketing platforms you can choose from, below are few of them which I would suggest!
- Mail Chimp
- Constant Contact
- Sendinblue
- Drip
- Get Response
- SendGrid
Different Terminologies Which You Should Know in Email Marketing?
Few important terminologies used in email marketing are as below
Opt-in
Opt-in subscribers are those subscribers who share their information on your website, for eg: if you have a form on the website and the user fills up the form, then it is considered as opt-in database
Double Opt-in
Double Opt-in users are those users who are part of your list, where they have verified their email address, for eg once a user fills in the form or sings up on your website, an email is sent to his email address to verify, and once the user verify the email address, the user is added to the subscriber list
Soft Bounce
Soft bounce is when the email is not delivered to the mailbox due to receiving server being offline or the mailbox is full or email file is too large
Hard Bounce
Hard bounce is when the the email address is not correct or the recipient server has completely blocked the delivery of mail.
Open Rate
Open rate is the percent of people who have opened your mail basis the no of mails sent.
Drip Marketing
Drip marketing is a set of emails sent to subscribers based on their behaviour.
What Do I Need To Start With Email Marketing?
Email List
The first thing you need is an email list. Email list is the list of email id’s to who you would like to send the email.
Email lists can be built by different campaigns on Google ads, Facebook ads, Twitter Ads, SEO, offline events and database vendors.
Email Id
You need a email id to send mails. Make sure you don’t use gmail or yahoo email id’s, you should always use company email id’s.
Email Platform
As you would be mailing to a list of 10K users or more than that. You would need an email platform. Email platform is the same which I have discussed above which includes mailchimp, send grid, constant contact and similar other email marketing platforms
Email Communication Strategy
As we know email marketing helps to build relationships with users, we need to define the email communication strategy to the users, this strategy will include a series of mail to the target audience list for your product or service.
In order to define an email communication strategy, a thorough understanding of the customer has to be done including interest, behaviours and motivations, which will help you to define the email communication strategy.
Email Content
Once you have defined the email communication strategy it’s important to define the content. The content can be informative, engaging and drive action.
You can use different content formats including video, text, image or infographic while sending emails.
Conclusion
For any email campaign to be successful, the strategy has to be defined effectively and there has to be further automation basis users interaction or behaviour. Many email automation platforms also create dynamic lists to segment the audiences and personalise their communication. So get started today and add email marketing as one of the channels for engaging and building relationships with your customer today!
