What is email marketing?

What is email marketing?

Email marketing involves sending marketing communications straight to the inboxes of current and potential clients.

Your business may use email marketing to highlight sales, new product or service launches, and successes, as well as offer helpful, non-sales content within your audience.

Even better, you may connect your email marketing approach to your overall marketing plan.

If you employ content marketing, for example, you may send subscribers must-read stuff from your blog or website.

You might also compile a collection of social media postings from satisfied customers.

In a word, email marketing is the practice of making money through sending emails.

There is, however, a catch: You cannot simply send emails to random users.

You need their permission, and they must freely give you their email addresses.

Planning, practice, and patience are required.

We'll go through the first two attributes on this page, but the third is entirely up to you.

How can I get an email marketing campaign up and running?

Are you ready to launch your first or updated email marketing campaign?

Take the following steps, or get our free email marketing checklist:

Get an email marketing platform.

To get started with email marketing, you'll need a platform that allows you to send hundreds (or thousands) of messages in one go.

That means reducing the amount of time you spend on each communication while maintaining quality.

You want to send out outstanding messages to your leads and potential customers, therefore you should have a solution that allows you to do it simply and efficiently.

To begin, you must identify an email marketing platform.

There are hundreds of email marketing platforms on the Internet, many of which promise to be able to help you generate more money than your competitors.

That means the most difficult part of getting started with email marketing might be relying on a provider.

However, 99% of the time, these companies are providing the same essential services.

• Email composition
• Some testing services
• Automation options

Based on your provider, you might find many or few alternatives for these services.

In fact, some service providers don't provide any alternatives at all; you just get what you get!

Create email lists.

Now that you have a platform, you must segment your email marketing campaigns.

Segments are groups of email addresses based on a specific topic.

You may collect email addresses for a segment by generating different segments that are comparable to the information on your site.
 

When someone visits one of those sites, they could opt into the relevant email segment using a form field on your page.

Depending on what you do and what you sell, your company might finish up with a few or hundreds of segments.

However, having them is necessary.

It maintains your marketing structure and allows you to communicate to customers about how you can improve their business.

In the case of a newsletter, it keeps them informed about your industry.

Regardless, you're providing users with information that they want to see.

You risk delivering undesirable information to your subscribers if you do not segment your subscriber list.

That will force people to unsubscribe from you and possibly resent your company since they did not receive the data they desired.

Speaking of information, before someone joins up for these lists, you'll need to compose messages for them.

Make content for your audience.

The ideal email list content is always relevant to the page where people signed up to hear from you.

So, if you have an email segment that includes how to buy, break-in, and keep your emails focused on those themes.

Similarly, if you have an email segment for banking, investing, and fiduciaries, keep your communications focused on financial topics.

In a word, when it comes to developing content for email segments, common sense is your greatest guide.

Some efforts, such as newsletters, necessitate the creation of fresh emails on a regular basis.

This will take some time out of your week, but it is a little price to pay to keep potential clients informed.

Other campaigns, usually for sales-related themes, can be set up in advance in a drip email style.

This means you develop three to five messages, each of which is targeted to draw someone back to your website and convert them into paying customers.

If someone does not answer by the conclusion of this cycle, they are unlikely to convert.

Some businesses choose to remove an email address from their list at that point, while others add them to their mailing list.

Whatever you select, this is not an ideal situation.

However, you may improve it over time through techniques we'll go through later.

But now that you've established your email campaigns, it's time to link them to your site.

Link your campaigns to your content.

This is most likely the quickest part of the total process.

Once your campaigns have been created and messaged, you may link these lists to their appropriate pages on your website.

Then you can sit back and wait for the conversions to come in.

Different email providers use different methods for connecting email campaigns to content.

Your supplier should also give instructions on how to accomplish this so that you can have everything set up as soon as possible.

You have one more step to take after that.

Automate the email process.

Now that everything is in place, it's time to automate the email marketing process.

This is one of several marketing automation strategies.

The goal is that you have everything established for your emails to send automatically based on when someone converts and a few days or weeks later.

This works particularly well for sales or lead emails, such as those seen in a drip campaign.

This is due in part to email automation, which guides your subscribers through the sales funnel without your assistance

When someone enters their email address within your email sales process, they enter the top of the funnel.

That means you should begin by providing them with the basic information they require to make an informed purchase decision.

You're proving why you're the best choice for the recipient's business in the middle of the funnel. Testimonials, customer reviews, and other persuasive information may be included.

Finally, the bottom of the funnel shows that you are urging the receiver to do the final step toward becoming a client. In sales, this is instructing people on how to purchase a product. For leads, this means notifying them how to contact you to begin a deal.

3. What steps should I take to improve my email marketing strategy?

So you've got your email marketing campaign ready, but how can you improve it?

You may experiment with plenty of ideas to improve your email marketing strategy.

However, make the following two a requirement:

Subject line testing

Your subject lines serve as email headlines.

They should notify the recipient precisely what to expect when they open the message.

If they do, more people will open your emails.

If you don't, more people will delete them, unsubscribe from your lists, or report you as spam.

You may test subject lines by examining the open rate number in your email marketing software.

This will tell you how many people read your email and clicked on the link.

You may compare this to the percentage of people who unsubscribed from your email lists, which is known as your unsubscribe rate.

If you have a high open rate and a small percentage of unsubscribes, you know your email campaign was successful. You may then review what you accomplished and use the same themes in future emails.

If you have a low open rate with a significant number of unsubscribes, you know something went wrong with that email. Examine it closely to see why you may have lost subscribers.

In this scenario, we recommend comparing your subject line to the body of your email. If they don't seem to match, you know you didn't deliver what your recipients expected.

However, subject lines are only the beginning.

Another test you should use if you want to understand all you can about your emails, right down to the smallest detail.

A/B testing

The process of creating identical emails and then improving a single element in each variant is known as A/B testing.

The subject line, an image used in the body content, the colour of a conversion button, or nearly any other aspect in your email might be that element. Because A/B testing is so versatile, it's critical to identify the most important parts of your strategy right away.

We recommend that you put your:

1. Subject headings
2. Demands for action
3. Images
4. Font colours
5. Button colours

A/B testing takes time, and it's only beneficial if you have a large enough audience (typically more than 100) to get accurate results.

If you don't have that many receivers, you can run the same test on various persons over time. 

It will take more time than a single-send A/B test, but you will get consistent results without a large email list.

4. How can email marketing generates a return on investment?

Email generates revenue in one of two ways, regardless of industry.

Product sales

Lead conversion

Product sales occur when someone receives an email from you and makes a purchase as a consequence.

Lead conversion occurs when someone receives an email from you and signs a contract with your company.

Companies employ both of these strategies to grow on a daily basis. We'll begin our examination with product sales.

Product sales

Product sales are the ultimate goal of every retailer or ecommerce business.

The goal is to persuade a subscriber to buy anything from your website via email.

Although it may appear simple, ecommerce email marketing is a surprisingly sophisticated marketing technique.

All of the essentials of a successful email are required, such as a powerful subject line, interesting body text, and relevant graphics.

However, personalised graphics, pictures of a product in use, and much more are required to persuade someone to buy.

Why?

Because, even if a consumer has previously purchased from you, each purchase represents a fresh journey for your customer.

That means you'll have to start from scratch with the majority of your product sales emails.

So, for each product sales email you send, it may not be sufficient simply show off a few photographs and discuss why the product is amazing.

Rather, you may need to guide your clients through all four stages of the purchase process: awareness, consideration, decision, and satisfaction.

You begin by creating awareness by introducing someone to your product.

You then go to consideration and explain why readers require a product you sell.

Then you get to the decision stage, which is when a consumer buys from you.

Then comes the satisfaction. That is when a customer is pleased with their purchase and interactions with your company.

This means that product sales are more difficult than they appear to be in email marketing.

But what about lead conversion?

Conversion of leads

It is more difficult to convert a lead into a paying customer than it is to sell a product.

The customer journey is often lengthier, and you will most likely follow up with the same client several times before they become a paying customer.

These touchstones are part of the awareness-consideration-decision-satisfaction process, but they are not the same as product sales.

In a word, you're persuading someone to sign a contract, which has a distinct significance than purchasing a product.

Your company is selling a promise, which, in the eyes of a customer, might be a risk given the alternative possibilities available.

So it's not the kind of case where someone says, "I can't decide which product to buy, so I'll get both."

Instead, you can be conversing with someone who is thinking, "I hope I'm making the correct decision."

That implies you won't be able to offer your services in a single email; instead, you'll need to send a series of emails depending on the sales process, with the option for your lead to convert at the conclusion.

With those essential distinctions, a drip campaign for lead conversion differs significantly from a product email campaign.

5. What are some of the benefits of email marketing for businesses?

If you're thinking about the potential benefits of email marketing for your business, you're not alone. Furthermore, before launching a new marketing strategy, it is advisable to conduct research and evaluate the benefits. You want to make the greatest decision for your company, and email marketing is a great option for many.

The following are six email marketing perks that organisations love to take advantage of:

Email marketing may be customized.

Email marketing allows us a great deal of customization.

You may use audience segments to send targeted emails, for example. A retailer of women's bags, for example, may build female audience groups. These segments enable the store to deliver relevant emails, such as those promoting new items, to audience members who are interested.

Companies can also include a subscriber's name to emails. Instead of "Hi," subscribers see "Hi Salma!" which makes the email more personable and eye-catching. To provide a personalised, purchase-driving experience, you may even promote previous goods that consumers visited on your site

You keep track of email marketing.

You can track the performance of your email marketing efforts in the same way that you can track the effectiveness of other digital marketing methods, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Data is important in marketing and advertising since it offers instant feedback on your plan.

Email marketing metrics

You may examine numerous KPIs using your email marketing platform, you can view several metrics, like:

• Rates of opening
• Links visited
• Rates of unsubscription
• Shares on social media and more

Each of these measures can help to inform and steer your team's decision-making.

If your company's open rates are poor, for example, it may consider measures to improve them. You might, for example, spend more time generating appealing topic lines or experimenting with emojis. You have alternatives with email.

Email's tracking tools make it simple to illustrate its outcomes to corporate leaders.

Email marketing may be used to nurture qualified leads.

Email marketing is a well-known lead nurturing approach. This is because you can use the other advantages of email marketing to help with lead nurturing. For example, segmentation allows you to build audiences based on where they are in the purchasing funnel. Personalization, on the other hand, allows you to send highly targeted emails.

With email marketing, you can provide a one-of-a-kind and personalised experience for your leads, guiding them toward conversion. However, keep in mind that lead nurturing might take months or even years in certain circumstances.

Email marketing may help you increase repeat sales.

Email marketing for recurring shoe purchases. Email marketing may also be used to generate recurring purchases, such as in the ecommerce industry.

Your organisation may encourage people to buy from you again by using email drip marketing. If you're launching a new product, you may set up a drip campaign to urge consumers to buy it.

Building brand loyalty may also generate repeat purchases with email marketing.

Creating innovative email campaigns with a distinct voice that is consistent with your business may provide great results. Users might feel attached to your company due to the quality, values, or activities of your products. They will support your firm by recommending you or purchasing your items.

Email marketing could help you develop your business.

Finally, when you employ email marketing, you are adopting a technique that may help your business expand.

Consider the following advantages and goals of email marketing: Developing your business. Whether you're nurturing leads or encouraging repeat purchases, email marketing is a cost-effective way to boost your company's development.

That's a huge advantage for any size business, from startups to midsized enterprises.

6. Is email marketing still a realistic choice in 2022?

Even with all of the benefits of email marketing, it's easy to question its relevance. Is it limited to one age group, for example? Is it only applicable to one business or product, such as ecommerce or retail stores?

There is good news. Email marketing works regardless of your business, product, or target audience.

There is a positive thing. Email marketing works regardless of your business, product, or target audience.
 

Consider the following data to determine why email marketing is still relevant in 2022:

Over 5.5 billion email accounts are in use today. People read emails for 10 to 60 minutes per week. Almost 60% of people claim marketing emails affect their purchasing decisions.

People like email, and despite being one of the older internet marketing tactics, it has remained one of the most effective. Even in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, it continues to provide value.

Begin your email marketing campaign with Brightery.

After reading this page, you should have a better understanding of what email marketing is and how it can help your business develop.

We have expertise in developing efficient email marketing campaigns for our clients at Brightery.

We've established which techniques are most effective, what improvements can be made, and how to adapt to diverse marketplaces to ensure you receive the results you need to develop.

Our top priority is your success. After all, when you collaborate with us, your success is our success.

We've helped hundreds of customers thrive with email marketing in the past, thanks to some of the top marketers and thought leaders in the business.

We'll do it for you now. Are you prepared to launch your email marketing campaign?

Contact us right away to get started on your email marketing campaign!