Marketers and online businesses nowadays have access to an astounding amount of digital marketing tools. In 2021, it was reported that most online companies used 43 various types of marketing, including SEO, SMM, SEM, video marketing, mobile analytics, and many more.
Marketing channels come and go according to their performance, but the one that has stayed over the years is email marketing. Email marketing is one of the few marketing channels that consistently perform well year after year. The explanation is simple: Email has consistently provided online businesses with the highest return on investment (ROI).
Email marketing offers an ROI of $38 on every dollar spent on the campaign. Despite the abundance of marketing techniques at your disposal, email marketing is still your best bet for expanding your target audiences. This is why learning what email marketing is, why it’s important, their type, and how to get started with it can help you boost your sales and retain your customers.
What is Email Marketing?
Email communications as part of a marketing plan to accomplish particular business objectives. You can use emails to increase customer engagement via newsletters, increase your revenue, attract new customers, build brand awareness, and reward loyal customers.
Email marketing places a strong emphasis on communication and awareness with current customers. Emails can be used in outreach campaigns to attract potential clients. The most successful email marketing campaigns can be divided to appeal to several personas for various goals. For instance, you can use one campaign to welcome new customers and use another to promote a clearance sale for your loyal customers.
What Are the Types of Email Marketing Campaigns?
Here are some types of email marketing campaigns that cater to various business goals:
- Newsletters: Newsletters are a good way to keep customers interested in your products or services. They often include an introduction, a description, links, and images that inform customers about new products and services.
- Welcoming Emails: These emails are often sent to new customers when they register online, but they can also be used to generate sales, follow up with leads, or spread brand awareness.
- Birthday or Anniversary Messages: This email campaign increases customer loyalty and retention. This kind of campaign celebrates important events for the brand or the customer and includes a special promotion or discount code.
- Special Offers: This email campaign aims to reach out to customers in sales, particularly those who have purchased similar items or have not completed their purchases yet. Promotional codes and discounts may also be included in these emails.
What Are Some Benefits of Email Marketing In?
Here are some major ways in which an online business can benefit from using email marketing.
- Boosts customer enthusiasm: When executed properly, a newsletter is an affordable, quick, and easy way to inform and excite customers about new product launches or promotions.
- Increases customer loyalty: You can reach out to customers and website visitors more often to help retain them by using email.
- Improved outreach: Compared to social media updates, where customers might skip announcements and simply scroll up their news feeds, email marketing has a higher chance of being viewed.
- Cost-effective and easily maintainable: In addition to being cost-effective, email marketing is relatively easier and cheaper to maintain. Using email marketing services like Mail Chimp or Active Campaign simplifies the process and allows for more automation.
How To Create An Email Marketing Campaign From Scratch?
Here are the steps you can follow to create an email marketing campaign from scratch:
1. Choose the Right Tools
Selecting the proper tools is necessary for any email marketing strategy to help you write, send, track, and evaluate your marketing emails and campaigns. You must first find an email service provider (ESP). This tool helps you generate, organize, and send emails and also offers campaign performance tracking.
2. Determine Your Audience
Your target audience is the group of people who would want to buy your products and become your customers. Your email marketing should aim to draw them in, engage them, and persuade them to become leads or customers. Consider the following key questions when identifying your target audience:
- Who are your present customers?
- Who are your competitor’s customers?
- Who will gain from your products or services?
- How will your products or services satisfy their needs?
- Will they want to become long-term customers?
3. Create Your List of Subscribers
You need to collect your customers’ email addresses to create your subscriber email list. Create pop-ups on your website for customers to submit their email addresses. You can also feature an opt-in form on your website. The opt-in form is a feature that can be seen in the sidebar or footer of your website and allows your website traffic to submit their email addresses to register for receiving your newsletters while surfing on your website.
4. Determine Your Goals and Performance Evaluation Metrics
Your personas and target market have been identified. Your email list is complete. Now, you need to determine which goals you want your email online marketing to achieve. Think about which goals you have for your email and how will you measure its success. For each email campaign, you can choose one or two objectives. A few typical goals and performance metrics are:
- Expanding your email list
- Boosting your click-through rates
- Featuring your content and getting more views
- Increasing the number of regular customers
- Retaining customers who haven’t visited your website for a while
5. Compose Emails That Cater To Your Objectives
With your homework done and the required information complete, you can begin crafting up some creative emails. To start, first, determine which emails should be featured in your campaign. You can use these questions to come up with email ideas for your campaign:
- Are any new products launching that could feature in your newsletters?
- Are there any holidays coming up to feature discounts and promos?
- Can you feature snippets of your daily website content in your newsletters?
Don’t Write Off Sending Emails as an Old Marketing Tactic
There are many moving parts and pieces involved in email online marketing. Having a strong strategy is important if you want to keep track of it all, plan multiple campaigns, or evaluate their performance. It’s important to learn more about email marketing so you can use it to optimize your customer outreach, engage and retain customers, and ultimately boost your sales.
