With a 3,500 percent returns on investment per dollar, a capacity to drive leads nurturing and sustained return traffic, email marketing has positioned itself as one of the most effective digital marketing options for brands when it comes to building result oriented marketing.
According to research; when compared to other popular marketing channels like Social Media, Email Marketing delivers a higher ROI for every dollar spent.
It has also evolved into a popular niched marketing channel for corporate brands like Banks, retail and ecommerce providers and other service niched industries like health tech, insurance etc., making it a must use option for some specific marketing goals.
Whether you’re a brand looking to use strategic emails to drive customer acquisition, a small business owner seeking to nurture your leads or a digital marketer, looking to implement this as part of your client marketing options, email marketing can deliver excellent results if you get it done right.
And in this guide, I’ll be walking you through email marketing and the steps you can take to launch a marketing campaigns that resonates, drives results and delivers on your expected outcomes.
What is Email Marketing?
Table of Contents
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing where a business promotes its products or services to its leads, prospects or customers, using emails. It is regarded as a direct form of marketing as well as one of the major types of digital marketing.
As a popular form of marketing, email marketing has been used by both small and large businesses from the early days of internet marketing and digital technology. Until recently, it used to be much more popular than the other marketing options like social media for example.
Types of Emails
There about four popular types of email marketing approaches viz: Transactional emails, Promotional emails, Retention emails and Newsletters.
Transactional Emails are widely used to create and build client focused relationships that will eventually lead to sales. They are highly focused emails aimed at converting subscribers from leads to actual clients.
Promotional Emails are aimed at promoting a specific product or services to specific users. It provides businesses an opportunity to create valuable content aimed at getting visibility, promoting a product or getting subscribed users exposed to a specific idea or services as intended by the sender.
Retention Emails are meant to keep users sticking with your brand. It’s the kind of mails where you communicate with your subscribed users at specific intervals, to keep them subscribed to your mail, using the kind of content that will deliver on such goals.
Newsletters are used to keep email subscribers updated with a brand and what is happening around it. It can be about things like industry news, blog posts, important content or any kind of update you deem fit to update your users at a regular interval.
As a business, you can use either of these email marketing approaches to send mails across to your target audience, depending on the purpose of the mail or campaign you’re embarking on.
Steps to Create an Email Campaign
There are many steps to start an email campaign. Some of the key things to look out for while creating an email campaign are to know who you’re building for, the kind of content that resonates with them and how to create an email campaign they will easily want to open.
In details, to create a robust marketing campaign that delivers a decent return on investment, you have to start with the steps below…
Step 1: Building Your Foundation
Emails are a lot more personal. They serve as a very direct form of communication and it therefore means that to easily pique the interest of your audience, you have to frame your mails based on a clear foundation that is easily relevant to your audience.
In fact, to evolve a robust email marketing campaign that will deliver on all or most of your expected outcomes, you have to set in place certain measures that will get you started in the right direction, including the following:
Create a Goal
The first step to start an email marketing campaign is to identify and create your goals. Find out the outcomes you intend to achieve with this marketing campaign and how you plan to achieve that.
Identifying your goal before embarking on an email campaign is very crucial as it points you towards your expected outcomes and how you can craft your mails to deliver on that.
It also helps you in identifying a clear audience that could help you to achieve that goal. Even where you already have an audience, understanding your goal can help you to segment them into an email lists that will enable you to achieve even better outcomes.
Identify Your Audience
Effective email marketing is built on a clearly identifiable audience. Without the right audience, you may never achieve your expected outcomes.
So, before you start email marketing, you must take steps to identify the kind of audience you want to attract and keep with your emails.
As soon as you do this, get over and create a buyer persona that fits their demographics, acknowledges their needs, problems and aspirations.
Having this knowledge will influence your emails as per the kind of content you’ll create. It will also affect your email design and this will in turn affect your outcomes.
Choose an Email Marketing Provider
There are a number of email marketing service providers out there. For the popular ones we have a list of service providers like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, Convertkit etc.
Some of these providers offer free services, freemium and others premium services.
You want to select an email marketing service provider that aligns with your needs and budget. Look out for their service features, including automation and analytics options that fit with your needs
Build your Email List
Build your email subscriber list. This is the best way to lay the foundation for a result driven email marketing campaign. Although a good number of people have provided options like buying email lists from vendors etc.
In most cases, these alternatives are always generic and may end up not delivering on expected outcomes or even leading to increased spam blocking. So, to get the best out of your email list, start with building it from the ground up by offering value and incentives like discounts, ebooks, webinars etc., in return for subscriptions.
But before then, keep in mind to build a back log of decent content either from your website or blog that will attract just the right kind of audience. With this you can then use the right opt in options, to get them to sign up.
Step 2: Create & Share Compelling Content
Email marketing thrives on content. Regardless of whatever type of email you want to send, to score the best results from your marketing effort, you must work on creating pieces of email content that’s appealing, useful to your audiences and capable of meeting their needs.
The following are the important steps to take as you go about creating your email content…
Find what your Audience Wants
Even though you already have been able to identify your target audience in step one above, it’s still crucial to identify exactly the kind of content that will appeal to that audience.
Doing this makes it easier for you to be able to create the kind of content that will meet their needs. And when your content is able to meet the needs of your target audience, you’re able to get even better results, based on your goals.
Also, design your mails in a way that will be easy for your users to read it. If you have mostly mobile subscribers, focus on designing mobile friendly mails that are easy to open and read.
So, before hitting your laptop to create the next piece of email, find out the needs of your target audience and how you can get your mails to deliver just the right solution.
Make it Engaging & Value Driven
It’s not enough to find out what your audience wants. To deliver the best results with your email marketing your content must be value driven and engaging.
And this is regardless of whether you’re sending a blog post, sharing personal stories or even sales pitches, you have to make it value driven.
It’s possible your subscribers are already receiving a ton of mails from other subscription lists. So to capture their attention, you have to find a way to make yours stand out. It’s just what it is.
Use Captivating Titles
Your headline creates the first impression about your mails. It’s the first thing your subscribers get to see, as soon your mail lands in their inbox.
To get your subscribers to open up your mails, make your headlines stand out. Create curiosity driven headlines that captures their interests. With this, they will be more compelled to open up and read your mails easily.
Categorize your Subscribers
You might have a large bulk of subscribers with different demographics and interests.
Categorizing your subscribers based on their preferences or demographics will lead you to achieve better results as you will be able to create an even more tailor made content for your email marketing. And this will lead to better outcomes.
If you’re just starting out with a fewer email subscribers, the more you send email newsletters on different subject matters, you’ll get to find out what’s working for some and what’s not working for the others.
With this data, you’ll eventually find ways to segment your subscribers effectively.
Step 3: Design Visually Appealing Emails
Again, design matters. A subscriber can close your mail even after opening it because the mail is not delivering the right visual expectations.
Even where you’re delivering consistent value with your mails, to get even better results from subscribers, work on improving the visual appeal of your mails and here are some of the areas to look into:
Optimize for Mobile
Some email marketing services do not come with auto optimized mails. Since most of your mails are going to be viewed using mobile devices, take the extra effort to make the mails appealing to mobile users.
Making your mails easy to read might involve relying less on heavy Images, graphics or videos. It can also involve making the mails sweet, short, straight and well suited for mobile screen view.
Doing this can improve your results in terms of outcomes. You can also run a review to get feedback on what works best for your email subscribers.
Make it Visually Appealing
Personally I’m not a fan of using videos or heavy images in mails. However, just as normal content of any kind, adding some sort of images, Infographics etc. can give more contexts to your mails.
It can also give it a better visual appeal. But, while going for this, be sure you’re not using content that will end up disrupting the user experience especially for mobile users.
Add a Call-to-Action
Your email should have a clear and compelling call to action. This is one of the overall goals of most mails so, you can’t afford to miss out.
As much as possible, use action oriented language to strategically place call to action to guide your subscribers towards taking the right action after reading your email.
If you want to start email marketing and get better results, consider using your CTAs at different strategic positions in your mail. Observe the results for each position to find out what delivers the best results and then stick with that.
Step 4: Setting up Email Automation
Email automation is one of the most popular approaches to email marketing. It gets you to create and send certain kind of mails in advance, whether you’re available or not.
As a small business brand with fewer support staff, that plans to start email marketing successfully, email automization can be very instrumental in getting you to achieve your goals as it has worked for us and most other brands.
The following are some of the automated emails you may want to consider using as part of your email marketing effort. These automation emails will fit in for almost any kind of email campaign, regardless of the goal…
Welcome Email Automation
Welcome emails are some of the most popularly automated mails. You can use your welcome email to introduce a new subscriber to your mail, introduce them to your brand or get them to take specific actions.
It is one of the first points of contact with your subscriber as far as email marketing is concerned. So you have to pay attention to creating a good first impression.
Thank you Email Automation
Thank you emails can be used to reach out to clients after they make a subscription, make purchases or take specific actions after getting in contact with your brand.
Automating a thank you email can also get you the chance to cross sell a product, provide more value for your client or leave a better impression for your brand.
Instructional Emails
Usually, instructional emails are short, concise and straight to the point. They are also always tailor made to meet specific needs, based on your overall goal.
You can make use of instructional emails to direct your subscribers on certain actions to take. For example, confirming an email subscription, online purchase, enquiries etc.
Outside these three, there are a number of other automated email options you can implement in in your email marketing campaign, depending on your goal.
For instance, cross sell automation emails will work very well for websites selling products and services while cart abandonment automation email will work perfectly for ecommerce websites.
PS: Most brands have used email automizations to optimize their workflow, regardless of brand sizes.
Step 5: Measuring Email Marketing Success
One of the key success indicators for an email marketing campaign is being able to reach your goal. And this is important because it gets you to know if a particular strategy is working or not.
To have a better idea on whether you have been able to reach your goal or not, here are some specific key performance indicators you have to look out for.
Measure Important Metrics
Some key metrics will give you insights on your overall performance with your email. And to gauge your performance, you have to look out for them.
These includes performance indicators like open rates, click through rates, conversion and un-subscribe rates. Most email marketing campaign providers give users options to this data.
With the results you get from this data, you can rejig your mails to create even better outcomes.
Try A/B Split Testing
Email split testing is sending out two different versions of an email to find out what works best for an audience, based on the number of click through rates, views etc.
To know what works for your audience, you can use split testing, experiment with different subject lines, content and even call to action options. And then find out what delivers best results.
The insight you generate from this can get you better ideas on how to optimize your mails for even better outcomes.
Engage Data Driven Iterations
The overall goal of measuring your outcomes using your key performance indicators is to understand how to generate an even better result.
With available data from your email marketing analytics dashboard, you can get to iterate, make adjustments where needed and then provide a better value for your audience with your email.
This will definitely improve your outcomes in the long run.
Final Words
Email marketing remains a powerful tool to create meaningful connections that will lead to expected outcomes with brands and their target audiences. Taking the steps to know your audience, create exciting content delivered in mails with compelling headlines, you will get to create mails that deliver on expected outcomes.
While at it, you must keep in mind that creating consistently successful outcomes with email marketing is a work in progress.
As you keep at it, you will gain better insights that gets you equipped to create even better results. And of course you can take steps to learn more about email marketing and how to create effective email results by joining out content marketing course here.
Now, it’s your turn! What are your biggest challenges when it comes to email marketing? Drop your comments below.
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