Introduction

Over the past decade, several so-called “experts” within the world of sales and marketing have made the identical, bold declaration:

“Email is dead.”

While there’s no denying that more modern communication channels, like chat, are growing in popularity, that doesn’t mean email goes anywhere. Case in point: If you’re reading this guide, we’re betting you checked (or will check) your email a minimum of once today. And with quite 280 billion consumer and business emails being sent every single day (a figure that’s expected to grow to 333 billion by 2022), it’s clear that companies still see the worth in using email to achieve bent on potential customers.

The only problem with email is that—from a customer experience perspective—it’s, well… awful. give some thought to all the impersonal ads, promotions, and sales pitches that are flooding your own email inbox, and how annoying it’s once you have multiple people from the identical company emailing you at the identical time about various things. The icing on the cake, of course, is once you attempt to unsubscribe but keep receiving unwanted emails anyway.

That’s a terrible experience. But the underlying issue isn’t that email, as a channel, is dead (or dying). The problem is that as marketers and salespeople, we’ve been doing email all wrong. And that’s exactly why we wrote this guide: to supply an alternate to the normal approach and to reimagine email as a channel that drives actual conversations.

In this guide, you’ll uncover a blueprint for building a contemporary, conversational email strategy—one that prioritizes creating an improbable customer experience.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing may be a powerful marketing channel, a sort of marketing moreover as digital marketing, that uses email to push your business’s products or services. It can help make your customers attentive to your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing automation efforts. It also can play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships or keeping customers engaged between purchases through differing types of promoting emails.

The very first email was sent in 1971 by a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson. The message he sent was just a string of numbers and letters, but it absolutely was the start of a replacement era of communication. Tomlinson was also the one that introduced the usage of the “@” symbol in email addresses.

In 1978, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corp named Gary Thuerk used this new method of direct communication to channelize the primary commercial email to let people fathom a brand new product. His email list only had 400 addresses, but the emails he sent resulted in about $13 million in sales.

By the ‘90s, the web had become commercially available to the masses. The way people communicated with each other began to vary dramatically, and marketers discovered that email may be efficient thanks to advertisements. The emergence of promoting emails also ushered within the need for regulatory updates; the U.K.’s Data Protection Act, for instance, was adjusted to want an “opt out” option for all marketing emails.

The Importance of Email Marketing

We’ve covered the most important question, what’s email marketing, but haven’t gotten into why email marketing is so important for your business. Let’s discuss that now. Despite the increase of social media and unsolicited spam email (which is rarely a decent marketing strategy, by the way), email remains the foremost effective thanks to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty.

There are many reasons you ought to make email marketing one in every of your top priorities, but here are the highest 3:

Email is that the communication

Did you recognize that a minimum of 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis? That can’t be said of the other communication.

You own your list

On any social media platform, your account (along with all of your fans and posts) may well be suspended or deleted at any time, for any reason, unexpectedly. However, you own your email list. Nobody can take those leads far from you.

Email just converts better

People that buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers. In fact, email marketing has an ROI (returns on investment) of 4400%. That’s huge! And if you’re wondering if social media converts even better, think again: the common order value of an email is a minimum of 3 times beyond that of social media. Email is solely the simplest thanks to making sales online. Now that you simply know the importance of email marketing, let’s learn the simplest ways to travel about it.

Email Marketing 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 shareable so that it can be easily forwarded and you can easily spread via word of mouth or via viral marketing

How to Build Your Email List?

Now to the fun part: filling your email list with eager prospects that are excited to listen to you.

There are many creative ways to make your email list (and, no, purchasing emails ain’t one). Tactically speaking, list building comes all the way down to two key elements that employ cohesively to grow your subscriber numbers: lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Use lead magnets

Your lead magnet is strictly because it sounds: something that draws prospects to your email list, usually within the style of a free offer. The offer can take a variety of formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away free in exchange for an email address.

There’s only 1 problem: People became hyper protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive an email address without exchanging it for something valuable.

Think about a lead magnet that’s relevant, useful, and makes your prospects’ lives easier.

Create a tasty opt-in form

Your opt-in form is how you get a prospect’s information to feature them to your list. It’s the gate between your future leads and therefore the incredible asset that you just created with them in mind.

Email Marketing Analysis

By diving into your email marketing analytics, you will be able to make better decisions that are guaranteed to positively impact your business’s bottom line, resonate along with your subscribers, readers, and customers, and justify your work to the remainder of your company.

Here are the simplest ways to research the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

A/B test your marketing emails

Not all email lists are created equal. Some audiences prefer personalization et al. will think it’s spammy. Some audiences will like bright, eye-catching CTA buttons, et al. will prefer a more subtle call-to-action.

You’ll never know what variety of people conjure your email list until you test the variables. That’s where A/B testing comes in handy.

A/B testing, or split testing, may be a way to see what style of email performs best together with your audience by analyzing the results of email A against email B.

Set email marketing KPIs

• There are four key metrics to concentrate on when evaluating the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.
• Deliverability measures the speed at which emails reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes.
• Open rate is the percentage of individuals that open your email once it reaches their inbox.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of individuals that click on your CTAs.
• Unsubscribes measures the quantity of individuals who choose your email list once they receive an email from you.

Adjust different email element to enhance results

Many factors impact your KPIs, and visiting takes some experimentation and guesswork to work out which tweaks to your emails will yield the biggest changes.

If you aren’t getting the numbers you would like, try wiggling with these variables to boost your email results.

Use an email marketing report template

Your data does no good if you can’t report it in an organized fashion.

An email marketing report could be a spreadsheet where you’ll be able to record your ends up in one place to assist you create inferences from your KPIs and take action to enhance them.

How to reach Email Marketing?

Now that you just know the advantages of email marketing, let’s discuss a number of the ways to induce the simplest results.

Build Your Email List

The first step in running a successful email marketing campaign is to create your email list. this can facilitate your target the proper people together with your marketing communications.

Your website is the best place to urge people to sign-up for your emails and build your email list. Optimise your website for conversions using A/B testing and other CRO techniques. These don’t just aim to induce sales conversions but also optimise your site for building an email list.

Place call-to-action buttons at strategic locations on your website that prompt your website visitors to supply their email information. Add an email sign-up form on your “about us” page and every one of your most-visited landing pages.

Another good way to induce people to sign-up for your emails is to use lead magnets or gated content. This essentially means giving people something they value in exchange for divulging their contact details. This might be anything from an ebook to a resource guide, but must be something relevant to your audience.

Also, make sure that your email sign-up forms are short and don’t have too many fields. plenty of individuals might just leave without signing up simply because it’s like an excessive amount of effort to fill the shape. So, keep your forms short and straightforward and keep important fields only. Lots of companies actually just limit it to at least one field, which is the email address.

Use Email Templates

The next step is to truly design and send emails to your subscribers. This can be probably the foremost important part of the complete email marketing process. The more engaging your emails are, the lower the ROI that you simply will get.

However, creating emails from scratch isn’t the best way to get things done. It takes longer, effort, and money to try and do that. The simplest alternative thereto is to either create your own email templates or get them from third-party websites.

There are lots of web sites that provide free email templates that you just can simply customise and use. you’ll be able to find templates for various types of emails that you just might need to send to your subscribers as a business.

Use the following tips to induce High Open Rates

Here are some techniques to urge higher open rates for your emails:

• Send emails in late mornings or early afternoons to urge better open rates.
• This is because people’s inboxes are usually crowded within the mornings and your email will just get buried in a very crowded email.
• Emails delivered within the afternoon when inboxes aren’t as crowded usually get higher open rates.
• Use catchy subject lines that immediately grab attention.
• Use action words and powerful verbs that encourage people to require action.
• Avoid using promotional words like “free” or “deal” or anything which may trigger the spam filter and tag your email as promotional.
• Add variety or stat that adds credibility to your subject line and generates curiosity.
• Add an emoji to your subject lines to create it light and inventive, a high quality that folks usually tend to love.
• Personalise your email subject lines, if possible, to right away grab your target’s attention.
• Ensure that the content of your email has relevance to the folks that you’re sending it to, otherwise, they’ll mark you as spam.
• Keep your email subject lines short and easy to confirm that they’re easy to read even on mobile devices.
• Add a minimum of one call-to-action in your emails and ensure that it’s clearly visible.
• Add visuals to your emails to make them more interesting.

Use Email Marketing Platforms For Email Automation and More

After all is alleged and done, you have got to know that running an email marketing campaign for tens of thousands of subscribers isn’t a straightforward job. It takes time and energy to manage the entire process. Therefore, it’s an honest idea to use an email marketing platform to assist you manage the method better. Most of those platforms provide email automation features that enable you to send bulk emails automatically. Here are a number of the most effective email marketing tools that you just can use.

This is the foremost popular email marketing platform trusted by brands and marketers worldwide. it’s an all-in-one platform which will facilitate you manage all aspects of your email marketing campaign. It has email templates that you simply can use to form different forms of business emails. Its Content Studio could be a designer tool that helps you create engaging emails from scratch or using their templates. Moreover, you’ll store your own branded images and other visual elements to confirm that your emails follow all brand guidelines.

It also includes a brilliant email automation feature that you simply can use to send bulk emails at the proper times to the proper people. For instance, when a user first signs up for your emails, you’ll be able to send an automatic welcome email using this tool. MailChimp also has built-in analytics that has useful insights into your campaign’s performance and ways to enhance it.

This is a strong email marketing platform that comes equipped with many useful features. you’ll be able to build and save your email lists, design engaging emails, send automated emails, and plenty more using this tool. It also provides email templates and style tools that you simply can use to customize your emails. Moreover, it comes with a built-in analytics tool that may facilitate your identify areas of improvement and optimise your future campaigns. AWeber also encompasses a smart designer tool that may facilitate your create customised email templates. you’ll use these later and avoid creating emails from scratch.

This is a tool that mixes sales, email marketing, and SMS marketing. you’ll integrate different business functions with email marketing and run sophisticated email campaigns. It has a simple-to-use, drag-and-drop builder that makes it fun to style your emails. It’s also excellent for running drip email campaigns due to its campaign booster feature. This sends the identical email to a subscriber again if they didn’t open it the primary time. This helps you get higher open rates.

This tool doesn’t just facilitate managing your campaign but also builds your email lists. you’ll create optimised email sign-up forms to urge your website visitors to divulge their email information.

Conclusion

Email marketing may be a traditional marketing technique that’s still relevant in today’s marketing landscape. And, it’s one among the foremost cost-effective marketing techniques that may facilitate your get more conversions for fewer. Use this post as your relevance to understand the fundamentals of email marketing and the way to urge started with it. If you haven’t tried using it yet, start investing in email marketing right away.

What are you waiting for? Start your email marketing campaign right away.