Email Marketing : What it is and How it Works ?

E-mail marketing is a strong and popular digital marketing strategy nowadays. Most cases, it is the number one strategy that drives sales and conversions. “But how?” you may ask. In today’s blog, we’re going to answer this exact question in detail. 

Let’s find out how businesses use email to not only communicate with customers, but also to sell their products and services. Read on! 

What is Email Marketing ? 

Email marketing is a digital marketing and communication strategy that typically involves sending emails to customers and potential customers informing them of company news or sales of products or services. It’s a top digital media tool that can not only attract and retain customers, but also increase brand loyalty.  “Email” is one of the most effective channels in digital promotion. 

How Email Marketing Works ? 

Let’s take a look through an example : 

A user visits the website of My Travel Guide in search of tips – for example, on how to plan a budget-friendly trip to Europe. They find the information they need and are about to leave the site.

But before he leaves, he sees a pop-up window inviting him to subscribe to receive travel tips and exclusive travel deals. He has to leave his name and email and agree to receive the newsletter.

Now the company can have a dialogue with the client. The subscriber can be sent useful emails, such as a monthly newsletter featuring the best travel destinations, packing tips, or itineraries for various budgets. Periodically, promotional messages can also be sent, such as special discounts on travel packages or early bird deals for flights.

Alternatively, the user can be subscribed to an email series focused on a specific topic. For example, a series titled “The Ultimate Guide to Budget Traveling in Europe” could be sent out over several weeks. This series can include tips on finding cheap flights, affordable accommodations, and budget-friendly activities. It can also contain promotions, such as a discount on a travel consultation service.

Both techniques are called warming techniques by marketers. Regular newsletters and targeted email series help maintain ongoing engagement with the user, building trust and encouraging them to take advantage of the services offered.

Why do you need Email Marketing ?

A well thought out email marketing strategy can achieve many different long and short term goals. Let’s take a look at them : 

1) To Build Long Term Relationships : You can establish enduring relationships with your customers with the aid of email marketing. Advertising is one way to sell, but email marketing is the only way to connect with people on a personal level, let them know what interests and matters to them, and guide them toward the best course of action. If you treat your reader with consideration in every email, you will soon transcend the status of being just another product-selling business.

2) Increase Brand Awareness : Email newsletters are a great way to remind customers about your brand. The more often they see your company’s newsletter in their inbox, the more likely they are to choose you when searching for a product. Remember, promotional campaigns alone won’t help you create the right brand image in your customers’ minds, so combine promotional emails with educational content.

3) Increase Repeat Sales : It is usually more expensive to acquire new clients than to keep existing ones. Users who receive newsletters are more likely to return to the website and make repeat purchases. In a Gigaom survey, email marketing was recognized as the most successful medium for client retention by 56% of participants.

4) To Build Trust : You can do this with the help of email newsletters. Be honest and straightforward – customers appreciate it. Add reviews and testimonials to your emails so that subscribers have proof that your brand is trusted. You can also provide a link to a page on your website that contains customer testimonials. Be sure to add a testimonials section to each product category.

5) High ROI : The UK Data & Marketing Association (DMA) states that every dollar invested in email marketing generates an average of $42-44 in sales. So Email Marketing is 40 times more effective at attracting new customers than Facebook and Twitter. 

6) Increase Traffic : It doesn’t take much effort to achieve this goal. Each email contains links to specific pages of the website, so if you manage to create an attractive subject line and a relevant offer, customers will click on the links. In this way, you can either increase traffic to popular pages or promote those that don’t get much traffic yet.

7) Shorten the Buying Cycle : Helps the user make decisions at every stage. Customers typically take time to decide whether or not to buy a complicated or pricey product that you provide. Potential clients can learn more about you and your organization through letters, which will eventually help them decide in your favor.

8) To Enhance your Brand Image  : You may provide helpful resources and educate your clientele with the use of email newsletters. All of this contributes to the company’s efforts to project an expert image in the eyes of recipients, which will enhance subscribers’ attitudes about the brand.

Goals of Email Marketing

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase sales
• Build trust
• Increase traffic
• Shorten the buying cycle
• Automate routine tasks

How to set goals in Email Marketing ? 

The most important thing is to understand why you need email marketing. However, setting goals doesn’t end there. Make sure that each goal is:

CLEAR :  Define the campaign’s benefits and target audience

REACHABLE: Make a budget, take abilities and resources into account

TIME-LIMITED : Ensure that every objective has an end date

QUANTIFIABLE : Establish KPIs to monitor the campaign’s progress

How to start Email Marketing?

Use this guidance if you’ve made the decision to include email newsletters in your marketing plan. We’ll walk you through the process of starting your first mailing list and offer practical advice on how to establish a long-lasting rapport with your readers.

1.  Assemble the mailing list

Among the most crucial stages is this one. Your email strategy’s efficacy is influenced by the caliber of your mailing list. Communicating with people who are interested in your brand is the only way you will be successful. In addition to addresses, a mailing list may additionally contain the names, nationality, city of residence, date of subscription, and any other information provided by the subscriber. Using this data, you will then develop campaigns that are relevant and customized.

Obtaining consent from subscribers is the primary guideline to follow when gathering their list. Since these people have not consented to receive emails from you, you should never purchase mailing lists. Their interest in your brand is nonexistent. By classifying your mails as spam, they can harm your sender reputation. So to collect subscribers create a subscription form, place it anywhere on your website, and collect subscribers legitimately.

2. Use segmentation

Make use of segmentation to improve the relevancy of your mailing list in order to improve open rates, clickability, and overall conversion rate. Segmentation in email marketing involves grouping your subscriber base according to factors like gender, interests, customer inquiries, activities, and more. Marketers can send personalized distinct emails to consumers depending on these factors.

Senders of segmented emails are more interested in the brand’s mailings, and their open rates are higher. Send emails based on the activities of your consumers to provide them a personalized experience.

Before segmenting, you should already have a Mailing list created with information from the website’s subscription form before segmenting. The more client data you gather, the more precisely you may segment the address list, in result increasing the newsletter’s relevancy.

3. Create an email campaign

There are multiple steps involved in this phase. Make a plan and list all the emails you want to send this month before anything else. This will enable you to properly track success, prevent bombarding subscribers with emails, maintain consistency in your approach, and make ongoing improvements.

Planning phase of Email Marketing

While planning out the Email Marketing strategy indicate in the plan how frequently newsletters will be sent out. Allowing your subscribers to select how frequently they wish to receive emails from you is preferable. This is a question that you can put directly on the subscription form or use in your mailings.

After that, decide on the type of emails you are going to send over the next month. This is important so that subscribers don’t get drowned in promotional emails. Find the right balance between promotional and non-selling newsletters. It all depends on your niche, but no subscriber wants to receive hot deals and sale reminders every day. Combine them with trigger and  transactional emails.

Trigger emails are sent by marketers in response to user actions, such as:

a user signs up = receives a welcome email or a series of welcome emails;

a user adds a product to the basket without making a purchase = receives an abandoned basket email

a user places an order = receives an order confirmation email and a delivery status message

a user registers for a webinar = receives a registration confirmation email

a user viewed a product on your site = receives a discount on it

a user’s tariff plan has expired = they receive a reminder email

a user has not opened your emails for three months = receives a reactivation email

Almost all of these emails have a high CTR because users initiated sending them themselves, so they expect to receive this or that campaign. 

Transactional emails are also sent to subscribers based on their actions. The difference between any marketing email and a transactional email is that the purpose of the latter is not to convert a user into a customer. Its goal is to keep clients and foster trust. Order confirmation, delivery status, plan upgrade, password reset, and many other emails are examples of transactional emails.

Just keep in mind that trigger and transactional emails cannot be scheduled, so plan accordingly. If you plan on sending out three emails per week and if a customer browses products on your website, adds them to their basket, places an order, and registers for a webinar, you’re going to send them at least four more emails every week or a total of seven emails per week.

It’s time to get started now that you know which emails and how often you want to send them. 

This brings up another crucial point : The Warm Up Phase 

You must get used to sending emails from this specific IP address if you have never done it before. This means you don’t have a reputation yet, and if you send 5,000 emails to an entire mailing list, you risk becoming a spammer.

Mail providers need to understand that you are a legitimate sender. Only then will your emails make it to the inbox. Thus, building a sender reputation can take 4-8 weeks.

Creating an Email Campaign

We advise you to create an email template that matches the style of your brand. You can then use it every time you send a newsletter.

Now let’s take a look at the most important elements that users use to decide whether or not to open your email. These include your sender name and subject line. This is the first thing subscribers see after receiving your campaign.

1) Sender name and address

First and foremost, we want you to remember not to utilize addresses like “ no*****@AB*.com .” There are a few standards to follow. Such addresses don’t help you establish a connection with your audience; they appear robotic and impersonal.

Use the name of your company in the sender address instead. You can include the name of the staff member in charge of email correspondence with the audience, or the department that sends the emails. This suggests a chance for your clients to communicate with your business.

Consider your sender name carefully since it helps build brand recognition. There are numerous practical choices. Using your company name is the first and safest option. In this manner, your subscribers will be able to quickly identify the sender.

2) Email subject line

Let’s now discuss the subject line, which is the second item users see in their email. It gives users the essential details about the email. The campaign’s content should be reflected in your subject line. In addition to providing information, your aim should be to draw in subscribers and encourage them to read your newsletter.

An example of an educational email subject line is provided below. A podcast is invited for the subscriber to listen to. The reader is already aware of the visitor, their job title, and the topic just from reading the subject line.

3) Content of the Email 

When writing an email, the first thing to keep in mind is to write for your audience, not for yourself. Never tell your readers how great your brand is via email. People are more concerned with finding the simplest answers to their problems than they are with brands. Give them your solution and describe how it takes care of their problems.

Write in a clear, succinct manner in order to accomplish this. Please be mindful of your readers’ time; they have a lot on their plates besides reading your newsletters. The best option is to be brief. Make your writing as readable as you can while adhering to the inverted pyramid paradigm. This implies that you should start the letter with the most crucial information and conclude it with a call to action.

Stick to a single-column design because the average user’s attention span is only eight seconds, so they won’t read your message from A to Z. Use open space around important elements, such as headlines and calls to action. This will help subscribers easily focus on the important things.

Put only one CTA button in every email. What you want subscribers to do after reading your campaign is called a call to action (CTA). Because each of these call to action buttons will draw attention away from your primary message, they may become confused if you employ three in a single campaign. Be forthright in order to craft a compelling call to action. Limit the amount of text you use. It ought to be straightforward and instruct users on what to do next. Make the button stand out from the email’s background so that recipients can quickly identify it.

Allow people to click on the picture. Nearly all users, when reading an email, click on a picture. Send them to the appropriate website page. Since some email clients might not be able to display the photos, you should write alternate text for every image you include. Users will see text that describes them in this way.

Keep in mind that your writing should be comprehensible to both novices and experts in your subject. Thus, avoid using a lot of slang and jargon. It should be clear to all of them what you are discussing.

Make a suitable email footer. Even though it has nothing having to do with your message, you should nevertheless give it careful consideration because it contributes to the development of brand trust. This component, also known as the email signature, includes the following details: a justification for the recipient receiving the email, an unsubscribe link, a link to the control center for newsletter settings, your company’s physical address and logo, copyright information, and social media connections.

Remember that your unsubscribe link ought to be accessible; don’t use a small font or conceal it in the text. The unsubscribe procedure should only require one step and be simple for the user to click. This enhances the caliber of your email list. 

4) Evaluate effectiveness 

Look at how many people opened your newsletter and clicked on links to the website. Whether there were requests and sales, if any. Receiving statistics on the effectiveness of your efforts on a regular basis is one advantage of digital marketing. This information may be quite helpful as you refine your marketing strategy and look for more effective ways to connect and engage with your target market. 

You can monitor crucial information like your open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate with email marketing solutions. Moreover, a lot of them also let you conduct A/B tests, which contrast the outcomes of two distinct campaigns to determine the traits of emails that perform well.

Your entire email marketing strategy will perform better if you regularly analyze your data and run experiments. Additionally, you can create email templates based on what often works for your company as you gather data, increasing your productivity for subsequent campaigns.

Writing a Marketing Letter Steps

Use the following advice to make your emails as powerful as possible:

• Write headlines that grab attention. The email’s subject line holds the secret to winning over any prospective client. The headline can only contain 20 characters. Make sure it complements the email’s content and is both visually appealing and pertinent. Ensuring that your readers are not let down when they open your email is crucial.

• Produce individualized and pertinent content. Divide up your audience based on factors like region, gender, age, and preferences. You can make sure your subscribers receive the most beneficial information by implementing these strategies.

• Keep it brief. It should take about 11 seconds to read an email. In this manner, the email will be interesting and sufficiently educational.

• Make good use of a CTA button. Keep in mind that it needs to have a clear call to action, like “Yes, I want to subscribe” or “Buy Now”.

How frequently should a brand send letters?

Statistics show that businesses send two to four emails every day on average. So how can you configure the ideal email frequency? Here are a few easy pointers:

• Allow subscribers to select the frequency of their newsletters. On the signup form, you can choose to get emails every day, every week, or every month.

• Count the amount of emails that are opened and unsubscribed. Adapt the mailing frequency based on the information you obtain.

• Examine opportunities for communication with subscribers. While some users find promotional news—such as discounts or offers—interesting, others believe that letters with educational material are more helpful. Let subscribers choose what information interests them on their own. Determine how often to email them based on their response.

• Run A/B experiments. Test the open rate of your emails by sending them at different times to two equal groups of your subscriber list. Adapt your mailing list in light of the information you obtain.

What is A/B experiments ? 

A/B testing, also known as split testing, allows you to evaluate the performance of various iterations of your mailing that have a few minor tweaks made to a single component. Making well-informed decisions regarding your marketing initiatives, as opposed to merely following your gut feeling, is what split testing is all about. Split testing options, which allow you to test each section of the email individually, are offered by the majority of email service providers. Specifically:

• Subject
• Message header
• Date and time of delivery
• Message format (e.g. unformatted text or HTML)
• Text and images
• CTA (call to action)

Email Marketing Automation

With fewer resources, email marketing automation enables marketers to work more productively. It entails giving daily responsibilities to a mailing service, such as processing orders and sending out a sequence of welcome and follow-up emails.

Email marketing automation helps you to save money and time, accomplish more crucial tasks, devote more time to strategy development, boost sales, enhance customer loyalty and retention, and gain a deeper understanding of your audience in order to present them with offers that are relevant to them.

Email Marketing Automation Process Explained

• You create an event that triggers an email to be sent. For example, a purchase.
• You start an email chain. To produce messages that are pertinent, use filters and criteria. For optimal outcomes, you can integrate web push, SMS, and email notifications into a single chain. Send users an email confirming their order, for instance, and notify them by SMS of the status of their delivery. For further personalization, utilize variables from your mailing list.
• It starts an email chain that is event-driven. An event is set off following a user’s purchase, and they receive an email confirming their transaction or thanking them for their purchase.
• Your objective has been fulfilled. Conversion tracking is now possible.

Email marketing Platforms and Tools 

To increase team productivity, email marketers typically employ a variety of email marketing platforms and technologies. These platforms offer sophisticated capabilities that can assist you in creating personalized emails, maintaining your contact list, sending automated emails, and tracking your email marketing campaigns as you put your marketing plan into practice. 

Some common email marketing platforms are : 

• Sendinblue
• Mailchimp 
• Omnisend
• Get Response
• Constant Contact
• Active Campaign

You can utilize these platforms to implement your email marketing plan, regardless of your marketing objectives. 

Some Email Marketing Tips : 

The benefits of email marketing cannot be overemphasized. To get good and long-lasting results, it is important to follow the best practices of marketing mailings.

1) Use transparent methods to build your email database

Black marketers gather their email address databases from various sources – LinkedIn, event attendee lists, other address databases, sometimes personal contacts. This is a poor email marketing strategy that frequently results in recipients deleting your emails right away. Infractions of data privacy laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) may also result from it. Before you launch your email marketing efforts, you must get the approval of your subscribers to receive your emails.

2) Follow the GDPR regulations

GDPR is a data protection regulation. It is in force in the European Union. It requires websites to tell users that they are managing their personal information. Marketers should use a two-step subscription form so that users confirm their desire to subscribe twice. You should also review your privacy policy – get consent to collect customers’ personal data, explain how you store and share it, and make sure no third parties will have access to it.

3) You should make unsubscribing simple

If readers no longer find your material or company interesting, they ought to be able to unsubscribe from your newsletter. Best practices for email marketing state that you should make it simple to unsubscribe by prominently placing an unsubscribe button or link. If you make readers sign up for your newsletters without their will, they’ll probably stop receiving your emails. 

4) Preserve the privacy of subscribers

Potential consumers and clients entrust you with their email addresses and occasionally other personal information when they sign up for your newsletters. Giving or selling their emails to third parties without their permission is unethical.

5) Segment your email lists 

As you are creating your email list, put each new subscriber or customer into the proper categories. Customers might be categorized based on their geography, hobbies, or other factors that are significant to both your company and the customers. Your mailings will be less successful if your list is improperly segmented, resulting in subscribers receiving irrelevant emails. 

6) Send a welcome letter

Write a letter of welcome to each new subscriber. Welcome letters serve as an introduction to your company’s features, style, messaging, character, and values to potential clients. Inform them of the topic and frequency of your upcoming newsletters, as well as your availability for queries and suggestions for pertinent and helpful resources. 

7) Try to wake up dormant subscribers 

Some subscribers stop being active over time. The reasons may be anything from a lost interest in your product or service to a change of email address. Periodically purge inactive subscribers from your list to keep it current. By doing this, you can keep your email deliverability, clickability, and open rates high. However, attempt to engage your list of inactive subscribers one last time before removing them. Send them a targeted mailing and inquire whether they would still like to receive information from you. 

8) Optimize for mobile devices

Mobile devices are where most people view emails. You’re also losing out on a great chance if your marketing initiatives aren’t mobile-friendly. Keep mobile users in mind when you plan your mailings. Ensure that the photos in your newsletters load quickly and are compatible with mobile devices. If your newsletters contain videos, post them to a website like Vimeo or YouTube and provide links to your readers. And here are some additional suggestions that you should think about for improving your marketing campaigns: 

• Make use of large fonts to improve readability on mobile devices.
• To fit on mobile displays, keep photos and other media assets no wider than 600 pixels.
• To ensure that message topics are fully read, keep them brief.
• Buttons with CTA (calls to action) should be big enough for easy finding and clicking.

9) Preview on all device sizes

Remember that clients view your emails on a range of hardware and browsers. Make sure your marketing emails are functioning and appearing as intended by testing them. If you don’t test your emails on various devices and browsers, you can discover that your emails have broken links or excessively huge graphics. Send yourself a test email to check how it appears. 

10) Don’t buy email databases

Although purchasing email address databases might seem like a good idea, it’s not. Actually, the only people you should send marketing newsletters to are those who actually want to receive them. Verify that you have authorization from all prospective clients and consumers to send newsletters before you do. Either a subscription form on your website or other lead generating strategies might be used to get these addresses. 

11)  Warm up the new IP address

A fresh IP address must be warmed up before sending emails from it. To prove to the email provider that you are a real sender, you must progressively increase the quantity of emails you send. ISPs believe that a sender is engaging in spamming when they observe a large number of emails being sent from a new IP address. The emails wind up in spam as a result.

Gradually increase the quantity of emails sent and target the most interested consumers in order to improve the sender’s reputation and mailings’ deliverability. Warming up typically takes 4 to 8 weeks. After that, your deliverability will increase and ISPs will see you as a trustworthy sender.

12) Check the email for spam before you send it

Establish a policy of checking all emails for spam before sending them.if the subject line contains too many exclamation points or spammy terms, the deliverability of your newsletter will be very low. Thus, at the very end of developing an email campaign, make sure the email is free of spam.

13) Track the success of email marketing

It is a waste of time to send emails without considering how successful they are. You must be aware of the strategies that yield the best results and how well your approach is performing. Watch your KPIs so you can evaluate your efficacy. Deliverability of emails, open rates, CTRs, bounce rates, unsubscribes, conversion rates. 

14)  Regularly clean your mailing list

An effective email campaign starts with a high-quality mailing list. First things first: gathering user addresses. After that, you ought to periodically assess the caliber of your list. Find out if your subscribers are engaged by looking at how they are responding to your emails. Eliminate their addresses from your list if they don’t respond to your newsletters for three to six months and reactivation emails don’t work. Expressing sympathy to individuals who are uninterested in your business serves no use. By doing this, you can keep up your strong deliverability rate and sender reputation because email 

15) Set up email sending automation

Brands can save money and time by implementing automation for more crucial operations. You can send automatic emails in response to user behaviors on your website using different services. Assign a newsletter service to handle ordering, reactivating dormant clients, welcome new users, and other tasks. Make events that will cause emails to be sent automatically. Send pertinent campaigns by utilizing conditions and filters. Monitor conversions and enhance your processes. 

Email Marketing Dictionary 

Digital marketers use a variety of terms to describe the email marketing process. Here is a glossary of some important concepts you should be familiar with: 

• Subject line: The email’s description that appears in the recipient’s inbox. Subject lines have to grab readers’ attention and be pertinent to them 

• Call-to-action (CTA): A link or button that connects to a download or website, such as a product page, blog post, or scheduling page
• Conversion rate: The percentage of receivers who act on a call to action (CTA) by clicking on a link or making a purchase, such visiting your website through a link
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click on a CTA in an email
• Acceptance rate: The amount of emails that the email servers of the recipients receive
• Bounce rate: The amount of messages not received by recipients’ email servers

• Open rate: The proportion of emails that receivers actually open. One of the most important measures for assessing the performance of an email 
• Opt-in/opt-out: To either subscribe (opt-in) or unsubscribe (opt-out) from an email list 
• IP warming: Process of establishing your IP address by progressively sending a recipient an increasing number of emails
• Nurture sequences: When someone joins your email list, a series of programmed emails are delivered to them. In addition to encouraging interaction throughout the customer journey, nurture sequences assist in moving customers up the marketing funnel. 

Keep Gaining Knowledge with Digipeak

Future marketing success could result from a well-run email marketing strategy. Your strategies will continue to be impactful and effective if you keep learning and changing with the times. Keep up with the most recent trends, experiment with various strategies, and adjust your tactics in light of data-driven insights. 

Your email marketing activities can foster consumer relationships, increase engagement, and produce remarkable outcomes if you put in the necessary time and imagination. Never forget that every email you send out is a chance to engage your readers and advance your long-term success. Continue advancing, and you’ll see a boom in email marketing!

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