The ultimate guide to email marketing

No matter how flawless your product may be, if nobody knows of it, it's useless. To raise awareness about your product, it's important to market it to the right audience. However, Marketing can be one of the toughest aspects of a business. From figuring out the right medium to finding out the right strategies, it can be hard to pinpoint the specific formula for successful marketing. The most important aspect of marketing is staying on top of emerging trends and keeping up with this fast evolving industry. Conventional marketing methods become redundant pretty fast.

It is important to incorporate the right digital mediums to set the direction towards success. With the advent of the internet, there is a whole new world of digital marketing tools and techniques that are being used to effectively market to new audiences.

According to a recent report published by the Radicati Group, over 2.6 Billion People are now actively using email.

That figure is truly staggering as it reflects one-third of the overall global population using emails as their preferred medium of knowledge and correspondence. The number reflects the true potential embedded within a well crafted email marketing

This leads us to an important question. 

Put simply, email marketing is the utilization of emails to effectively promote different services and products. The practice generally is the umbrella term used to describe a series of strategies used to achieve your different business objectives.

There are multiple dimensions that impact the performance of an email marketing campaign. 

In general, email marketing has gotten a bad name because of unethical marketing practices such as Spam, Phishing, and Pharming, but that does not mean it is no longer effective, With the right strategy you can meet, and exceed just about any of your business objectives.

Here is how you can effectively construct a good email marketing campaign.

Think of email marketing as the process of enhancing the bond between you and your customers. It's extremely important to focus on adding value to the lives of your customers rather than just going forward for the sale. 

Let's walk through the nuts and bolts of an effective email campaign.

The following  elements are all instrumental in making your email campaign successful as they allow you to have a thorough framework to follow. 

Knowing what you want out of the campaign is the first step towards setting up an effective one.

But, just knowing is not enough. It is also extremely important to have quantifiable objectives from your email campaign. These objectives should be trackable to ensure that your progress moving forward is comparable to solid goals. Good objectives can include the Bounce rate, CTR, and conversion rate to have a good expectation. 

The next step is to tabulate the timeline of the campaign, it can't go on forever and you need to abide by your clear definition of what you want when you want it. 

It's extremely important to be clear about your email listings and the message they receive over the course of a certain period. 

You definitely don't want to send an anniversary message to a customer that just recently subscribed to your mailing list. You need to optimize your delivery settings so that all of your messages are catered to each of your unique subscriber categories (or lists).

The importance of effective automation cannot be understated when it comes to email marketing. You cannot do everything manually, especially when your email listings grow at a rapid pace. 

Most email marketing solutions come with automation capabilities that send emails for you. Just write up all the emails, set their sending sequence and you're done!

There's a major difference in the types of emails you send out to your customers, all of them have their own individual purposes. Whether it is a simple welcome email or a proper cart expiry email, every email type serves its own purpose by providing value in its own way. 

Some of the most important email types you should definitely keep in mind are the following.

Transactional emails are the hallmark of every professional company. Whether it is a simple purchase or a booking, you want the customer to have a prompt email with the receipt and financial details. It is important to configure transactional emails for every occasion to represent your brand professionally to your customers.

Here are some instances requiring a transactional email:

There is no need to write all of these emails from scratch, you can follow a template 

Support emails are essential to convey to clients that you are paying attention to their issues and queries. Support emails effectively convey that your company is aware of the issues and is working towards finding a solution. The general purpose of support emails is to provide a high level of customer support. 

Having prompt support is essential to the trust of users. So, it's important to ensure that your support emails are prompt. Investing in ticketing software will make tracking your responses to support emails much easier.

It's important to understand that the email you send to your customers is competing against the hundreds of emails they receive on a daily basis. 

Emails convincing them to buy this, subscribe to that or donate to such and such a cause.

In order for your email to stand out from the noise you need to offer them something really special, take them on a personalised customer journey and give them something of value each step of the way.

A customer journey should be broken down into a sequence of emails and you should increasingly pique their interest with each email received.

You should know your customers better than anyone. Find out what they're craving for and give them some of it in each email. This could include a lesson, a free give away such as an ebook, or an irresistible discount that increases until a purchase is finally made. 

Welcome emails demonstrate that you care about having them on board and give them importance. Welcome emails are a great way to give your customers a general overview of your business. Having a warm, personable tone gets a lot more interactions compared to cold, sales-oriented welcome emails.

Remember! the goal is to develop a journey in which the customer is regularly exposed to your brands and services, pushing that first sale can definitely wait. If you are indeed looking to tie in a sale off the bat, you can attempt to use a well-crafted Coupon to provide value to the customers. 

It is really important to tie in important events into your general email marketing. Whether it is Christmas or New Year, using them to offering value to your customers is a great way to get a really high response rate. This is a great way to use the urgency of the occasion to boost your marketing and sales stats. It is important to remember that the year presents numerous opportunities for you to market your services to your customers. 

Here are some of the most commonly used marketing occasions

These events are a great way to get your customers to interact with your content and tie your company together. You can also take the unconventional approach of going a step further and offering personalized discounts to customers on the basis of their personal events like birthdays, anniversaries and so forth. Those can go a long way in communicating your empathy as a company and convey a great message to your customers. 

Thanks to the increased level of awareness and information available, you can effectively use customer behavior to your advantage and use it to tie your marketing campaigns. Facebook Pixel and general analytics allow you to target customers with specific marketing-oriented profiles that are a great way to show people what they were searching for. Behavioral emails can also utilize heat mapping to observe what the customers were looking at during their visit to your site and use that behavior to send promotions on those products to get sales. 

You can also use behavioral emails to notice when customers add products to their cart but fail to complete the order. These emails are a great way to convert bordering sales because a lot of these missed sales are just last second split decisions and your email can be the major deciding factor in swaying the sale.

At the end of the day, effective email marketing is all about innovation and staying on top of the game. You don’t want to use typical formulae to try and get sales. You have to continuously adapt and personalize your emails to get the best results. It is important to experiment and offer new avenues and most of all, try to make sure it’s a continuous journey rather than a cold sales pitch.

Using creative copywriters and email designers is extremely helpful in boosting your email responses. The right writers can add the magic touch in your headings and text, forcing your readers to interact with the content and move much closer towards making a purchase. 

The right graphic designers can also go a long way in making your email aesthetically interactive and easy to read. The right graphic designer can help convey a professional, friendly tone in your emails to match your brand directions.

It can be hard to afford full-time employees just for email marketing. Taking a chance on freelance writers is a great way to get great value for your campaigns. You can work with veteran freelancers that are both affordable and reliable.