The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for 2022

Be it to grow your brand, sell your products, or engaging prospects and customers alike, nothing beats email marketing. Email marketing is one of the popular and effective tools for marketing campaigns. Emails are one of the most accessible forms of communication in business. Globally, there is close to 105 billion emails that are sent every day.

By using email marketing, your services or products can be a flexible, fast, and cost-effective method of reaching out to new customers and retaining existing customers by encouraging repeat website visits. Email marketing allows you to create targeted and personalized messages. In this article, we will discuss email marketing, its benefits, how to get started with email marketing, and the usage of promotional emails that can help you grow your business.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a marketing channel that uses emails to promote your business's product or services. You can use email marketing to make your email list aware of new products and discounts. Email marketing is both a direct form of marketing as well as digital marketing. Email marketing plays a crucial role in your sales strategy. It is used in lead generation, brand awareness, customer engagement, building relationships, customer journey push through different types of email marketing. It is used to make customers aware of your latest items, offers and helps to integrate your marketing automation.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing is easy and simple to set up, and hence it makes it easy for small businesses to access. You can start by adding a newsletter sign-up option to your website and app. You can use this to send newsletters to your sign-up audience. You can direct customers to the newsletter from your social media profile. The biggest advantage of email marketing is price and ease.

A regular newsletter is an easy way to send updates about your company, offers, and upcoming events. Offering customers special deals on their birthday is a good way to convert customers to purchase. This kind of personalization helps business development and maintain a relationship with a customer and increase their loyalty.

What Is Email Marketing And Its Benefits?

Email marketing can help you build good relations with your customers. This can help you improve response rates to your direct marketing campaigns. There are many benefits of email marketing as listed below:

• Email marketing is more cost-effective. The cost of email marketing is much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising and printing fees.
• People who choose to receive communication will be put on a marketing list and would receive information about your product as per their permission
• Having flexible design and choices of design options like text or graphics gives you scope to convey your business branding
• Email marketing is scalable and can be used to reach a larger audience or targeted list
• You can personalize your emails as per different segments of customers as per their different behaviors
• Email marketing needs to easy and sharable so that it can be easily forwarded and you can easily spread via word of mouth or via viral marketing

• Email marketing is key for conversions and increasing sales so that you can send emails about new promotions and nurture the post-transaction customer relationship
• Measure the success of your email marketing and optimize your campaigns based on different text copies and designs to see which is more effective
• You can use free email benchmarking reports to help you evaluate and prioritize improvement opportunities
• You can do A/B testing on call to action buttons, images, message, email copy, etc., to ensure your email content is effective
• Unlike call marketing, email marketing is more convenient for customers. It is easier for them to unsubscribe from or read the email at their convenience
• Email marketing is more environmentally friendly than direct marketing by mail as it does not need to be printed
• Email marketing is convenient and time-saving using automation. You can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on the actions they have taken on the website and also receive welcome instruction emails
• You can connect in real-time with your customers through email marketing. Using automated triggers such as website clicks and activities, purchases, etc. can help you reach the right audience at the right time with the correct offer

How Do You Launch Your Own Email Marketing Campaign?

1. Pick the Right Email Marketing Software

There are many popular online software such as Hubspot, Deskera CRM, Mailchimp, etc., you can use to manage and send your email campaigns to your email subscribers. Look into what kind of software suits your needs. Look into the questions that the software can solve:

• What is your budget? Start small with a cheaper email marketing service
• What kind of emails are you planning to send, and how often?
• How many contacts do you have?
• What is your skill level when it comes to email designing?
• Do you plan to set up automated workflows?

2. Build Your Email List

Most email service providers help you create subscription forms to be embedded on your website. You can create a subscription form and be super clear about what they are signing up for. What kind of content will the subscribers receive via email, and how often? When customers trust you enough to give their email addresses, best not to send unrelated promotional content that can make them unsubscribe.

3. Use your Website to add Opt-in Forms

Always place your email subscription form in visible places where your website visitors can see it and opt to sign up. These include blog posts, the contact page, the homepage, etc. You should share the forms on social media, posts, link in bio, and at the checkout page.

4. Add in Content Upgrades and Lead Magnets

With premium content, you can make your email list grow faster. Create checklists, ebooks, reports, etc., that your user can download for free in exchange for their email address. Discounts and special offers are a great way to attract more customers and provide them with certain benefits when they subscribe to your newsletter.

5. Always have a Welcome Email for New Subscribers

Once your customer signs up to your email list, you have to engage them with a welcome email. A welcome email is an automated email message sent to new customers and subscribers. You can introduce your brand and content to establish your relationships with the subscriber with links to new articles, useful information, and welcome discounts.

6. Define the Goal of your Email Marketing Campaign

Your email marketing campaigns need to have a clear goal, and you need to take the time to think about what you have to achieve from your first campaign. You can have goals like:

• Updating customers about company news
• Sharing discounts
• Promoting new product
• More downloads for your new ebook

The goals can either be specific or broad as long as they fit your business goal and your audience.

How do you Create Great Content for your Email Marketing Campaign?

Once you have a clear goal in mind, it will be easier to create your email content. You can take the following steps:

1. Build a Good Responsive-Design Email

Most email marketing services have email editors for producing clean, simple, and hassle-free designs. You can hire an email designer to help you stand out from the crowd with custom templates. You can also use simple drag and drop email editors or existing custom templates. It is best to keep it simple. You can always build upon this later as your skills grow.

2. Save Time with Ready-Made Email Templates

If your email marketing services offer templates, pick one and personalize it to match your brand design, color, and fonts. You can use existing free email templates, which you can later reuse for future email newsletters.

Here is a great resource on designing the perfect email which works on multiple devices.

3. Make your Email Copy

Your email copy needs to offer value to your audience. The topics that you target needs to interest your audience and also needs to tell your brand's tone of voice. To write a good and engaging email copy, you can remember these tips:

• Ask yourself what the audience needs from you. How can you help?
• Imagine yourself from the point of view of a customer
• Show your brand personality
• Tell a good story
• Write to generate curiosity
• Use a conversational tone
• Break up your copy
• Email writing can be approved with time and practice.

4. Optimize Email Conversions, Open Rate, and Clicks

There are a number of ways to boost your email conversion rates. It is important to reinforce trustworthiness and brand recognition by incorporating your brand name. This way, your recipient does not feel like your email is spam. Some ways to go about doing this is by:

• Adding your company and brand name
• Giving a face and name of the sender by incorporating your name
• Addressing the senders name and personalizing the email
• Combining your name and brand name
• Distinct senders to targeted postal codes
• Use the same sender name and email address for all campaigns
• Avoid the no-reply email address as it reduces brand trust
• Structure email such that the audience is intrigued and wants to reach out

5. Write an Intriguing Email Subject Line

The email subject line is the most important element of your email marketing campaign. This one sentence can determine whether your email will be opened or not for reading. Your subject line needs to stand out and build curiosity in a few words. Ways to do this is by

• Limiting yourself to just 50 characters
• Highlighting your offers
• Appealing to customer ambition or emotions
• Your subject line should convey the purpose
• Should convey urgency and curiosity

6. Test your email campaign before sending

Testing your email campaign before hitting send is crucial to avoid typos, incorrect links, formatting errors, etc. Small mistakes like this can easily slip through and can harm your brand image. Getting your team members to proofread and test the email both on mobile and web is crucial. It is always important to also do a final check to the email list.

7. Schedule your campaign to be sent at the right time

Rather than picking a random date and time, it's good to be strategic and choose a time that makes sense for your audience. Most people tend to visit their inbox just once or few times a day. Find a time that is most optimal for your campaign to be successful in increasing open rates.

It is seen that email marketing campaigns tend to perform best when sent on a Tuesday or Thursday morning or afternoons. It is best to test and check data based on your audience's previous engagements.

8. Monitor the Email Campaign Results

Understanding and analyzing email marketing metrics can teach you how to better your campaign performances in the future. Following an analytical dashboard and following metrics can help. Metrics to look at are:

• Open Rate: Open rate is the ratio of the number of people who opened the email divided by the total number of emails sent
• Click-Through Rate: Click-through rate is the number of people who clicked on the link in your email divided by the total number of emails sent
• Unsubscribe Rate: This ratio is the number of people who have unsubscribed divided by the total number of emails sent.
• Bounce Rate: The number of emails that failed to be delivered divided by the total number of emails sent.

What are the Types of Email Marketing?

There are many different types of marketing emails you can send. Let's look at some of the types so that you can make an informed decision about picking the correct email type and how to go about using it.

1. Welcome Emails

As mentioned before, this is the most typical form of email marketing. Welcome emails show better open and click-through rates when they offer a personal touch and introduce your organization without being sales pitchy. Lead is usually unready to do business at first initial contact. Hence, it is important for you to push your leads closer to the buying stage.

The point of a welcome email is to give a good first impression and pave the way for future contact.

Welcome emails are the start of a business partnership. It is the first step in forming a good business relationship. When it is done right, it will be a positive experience and will leave them receptive to future emails. Welcome emails also have higher open rates and click-through rates than other standard marketing emails.

2. Email Newsletter

The email newsletter is the main foundation of the email marketing program because that is a great tool for educating customers and leads about your business, services, and products. All businesses and organizations send email newsletters to stay on top of mind for their recipients.

Newsletters are great not only for marketing to prospects but also for nurturing your leads. As you work on your newsletter layout, content creation, you have to be sure of your goal and your call to action.

The email newsletter is similar to newspapers. It can be used for daily or weekend communication. If your readers enjoy the content, they will remain subscribed to your newsletter, or else your bounce rate will increase. Building your email subscriber enables them to recognize your brand and your products.

Newsletter gives you the freedom to include different types of content all in one email. It can have multiple links that can lead the audience back to your website, blog post, video, or other content. You can also A/B test with newsletters to understand your customer behavior better.

3. Dedicated Emails

Dedicated emails are also known as stand-alone emails, contain information about just one offer. Dedicated emails help you set up the context to introduce the main call to action. Dedicated emails are generally used to reach out to your entire email database.

You can target your targeted audience or whole with a new whitepaper or invite them to attend an industry event that you are hosting. Unlike newsletters, dedicated emails focus on driving results for one call to action because there is just one message and goal.

Dedicated emails are easy to build and will generally grab some of the information already on the landing page. Since dedicated emails focus on only one main message and call to action, it is easy to track the progress. It is easy to measure the email CTR, landing page views, conversions, and long-term ROI.

4. Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing emails are usually an inbound marketing tactic. It is about understanding the nuances of your lead's needs and timing. It is important to define your buyer's persona so that you can target audiences effectively. Lead nurturing is more advantages than just an individual email blast. For example, promotional emails can be very multifaceted.

They are designed to promote a number of things, from marketing materials such as blog posts, webinars, ebooks, or discounted services. Lead nurturing is used to inform your customers about what is happening in your organization.

The purpose of lead nurturing emails is to guide your leads through the sales cycle and down the funnel to purchase and eventually loyal customers. Be sure to send out different types of promotional emails to suit your user's needs based on where they are in the sales pipeline or marketing funnel stages.

You can set up automated email systems to suit their needs and cutting down on time and labor needs. The best thing about lead nurturing emails is that they can be automated, specific as per the audience you target, the segment, and interest. Lead nurturing is the best for high return on low investment.

5. Sponsorship Emails

Sponsorship emails along with display ads can be used to reach a different sector of the audience and gain new leads. Sponsorship email campaigns are the one component of a paid media strategy. This includes pay-per-click (PPC), display advertising, mobile advertising, affiliate advertising, etc.

Sponsorship emails usually a type of paid marketing campaign that entails you paying up to include your copy in another vendors or credible partner's newsletter. Sponsorship emails are more advantageous than other email marketing as it is highly targeted. They can be measured to get results of visits, leads, sales to determine your return on the cost you paid.

6. Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are the messages that are triggered by a specific action your contacts have taken. Transactional email is when a customer fills out a form and receives a transactional or thank you email, which gives you login information to join.

Transactional emails are also messages that you receive from e-commerce sites that confirm your order and give you shipment information and details of your recent purchase.

7. Re-Engagement Emails

Re-engagement emails are usually sent to your client list that has been inactive to re-establish contact and goodwill. Turning an inactive subscriber back into a customer is 5 times cheaper than acquiring a brand new customer. One way of re-engaging your inactive customers is by asking them to actively participate in feedback and improving your processes.

8. Brand Story Emails

Telling your customers and prospects about your brand and its history helps in fuelling success by spreading brand awareness. Storytelling is a great tool to get your history and point across to customers and prospects. It is good to start with your unique selling proposition. Storytelling emails tell your brand story that can trigger an emotional response with your subscribers and can help drive customer loyalty and purchase decisions.

9. Review Request Emails

Requesting reviews of your business on review sites can build credibility and can help boost the results of your search engine. A good place to start is by requesting reviews from your top and most happy customers. You can include an incentive, like a chance to win a gift card for the customer to provide for an honest review. Reviews help create new and unique content about your company that is keyword rich and can help improve your ranking on search engines.

Key Takeaways

In this article, other than understanding the benefits of email marketing and the steps we can take to start and launch an email campaign, we learn the basic needs of a business to always have a good email marketing system set up.

• Email marketing is both a direct form of marketing as well as digital marketing
• Email marketing is used in lead generation, brand awareness, customer engagement, and building relationships with your customers
• The cost of email marketing is much lower than many other forms of marketing
• Email marketing is scalable and can be used to reach a larger audience or targeted list
• Emails marketing can target different segments of customers as per their different behaviors
• Email marketing is convenient and time-saving using automation
• There are many kinds of email marketing that can be used for different purposes
• Metrics for email marketing are easy and simple to measure
• Using CRM platforms can make email marketing automated and can save a lot of time and effort

Email marketing actually delivers huge returns if it's done right. You should be willing to learn from your mistakes. There is no formula for boosting email marketing and automation. At the end of the day, it's all about what works best for you and your company's voice, brand and style.

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