Email marketing has been around almost as long as email itself, but it’s also one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there to this day.
Sure, there are newer methods of communicating with your audience and customers like social media and live chat. However, with a user base of over 4.5 billion people, email is the king of marketing channels.
In fact, marketing using emails has beat out social media ads and other marketing strategies in the last year.
Additionally, email marketing has an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, meaning it works for businesses and can work for you, too... if you start this digital marketing the right way, that is.
Table of Contents
- What Exactly Does Email Marketing Entail?
- What Email Marketing Does to Improve Your Business
- Steps to Start with Email Marketing
- Tips to Make Email Marketing Work for Your Business
- Planning Your Email Marketing Strategy
- Top Paid Email Marketing Tools
- Free Email Marketing Service
- What's Next in Marketing with Email?
What Exactly Does Email Marketing Entail?
Email marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses send promotional messages to people in mass quantities. It is typically used to generate sales by sharing promotional offers, nurturing leads, or expanding the impact of content marketing efforts.
If you open up your email box right now, there’s a good chance at least half of your messages are email marketing. Whether it's an ad, and ecommerce sales deal, or someone offering a free course for something, no one can truly avoid this type of marketing.
What Email Marketing Does to Improve Your Business
Just like any other marketing channel, email marketing has pros and cons. Let’s briefly dive into some of the more significant ones:
Email Is Permission-based
When a customer trusts you with their email address, it’s the virtual equivalent of being given the keys to their house. Gaining permission to enter rather than showing up uninvited increases the chances of engagement and conversion.
Provides Direct Access to Your Audience
You can communicate directly with subscribers on their schedules. Plus, because most people check email multiple times a day, your message is more likely to be seen.
Email Provides More Control
With most other marketing platforms, you don’t own the platform. If the platform ceases to exist, all your hard work sinks with it. If Google or Facebook updates their algorithm, your reach could be drastically reduced.
More Personalization Capabilities
You can use demographic or psychographic data to create personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns. Research shows segmented and personalized campaigns increase revenue by as much as 760 percent, according to a Campaign Monitor claim.
Easy to Measure Success
Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is crucial, and automated email marketing makes measuring your campaign a breeze. TruVISIBILITY has a great data-keeping system with their email marketing app, Messaging.
This also means that your email marketing campaign can easily scale as your audience grows without straining your resources or compromising quality. TruVISIBILITY's services are not confusing like other email marketing software can be for people who pay for one program and have to upgrade to a premium plan.
As a business, TruVISIBILITY understands that keeping up-to-date with all of your platforms for marketing needs can send your profits back instead of pushing them forward. This is why your business grows and you can pay a customized price based on your needs.
Steps to Start with Email Marketing
There are 5 main steps anyone thinking about email marketing should take before regularly sending email campaigns to either subscribers or companies.
With the following in the mind, starting your email marketing journey will seem less daunting and more manageable with even one person on your team.
Select an Email Marketing Provider
The first step toward building an email marketing strategy is finding a provider that works best for your business. There are countless email marketing tools out there, like TruVISIBILITY. Mailchimp and ConstantContact are also common software all with differing features.
In order to choose the one that makes the most sense for your business, determine your email marketing goals, some marquee features you need, the size of your audience or contact list, and overall budget for your marketing program. Your email marketing provider should be flexible and cost effective.
Know Your Marketing Goals
As you begin to set up your email marketing provider and build your new campaign, consider the overall goals of your email marketing and digital marketing efforts. Set benchmarks to measure your campaign’s overall success. This means thinking about things like customer acquisition, open rates and how email marketing will build into your overall strategy.
Remember, your email marketing campaigns should be targeted and purposeful. Don’t just send a ton of messages with random news about your company. By establishing some early goals, you can maintain the proper course as your marketing efforts grow.
Build and Segment Your Contact Lists
To have an effective email marketing strategy, you need to have a solid contact list. Some good tips to get started include featuring an email newsletter sign-up section on your website, adding an opt-in form as part of the e-commerce section of your website and adding opt-in forms on order confirmations and other customer surveys.
Keep in mind that effective email marketing starts with customers opting in to receive messages. If you send emails to customers who haven’t opted in, you’ll end up in the spam folder.
Build and Send Your First Email Campaign
As with planning your overall goals, set up your first campaign with goals and benchmarks to determine its overall success. The main goal of each campaign should be to feed into your overall marketing goals. Focus on template design to create a beautiful message type that fits your business. Consider other important aspects, like subject line, open rates and conversion rates to better plan your overall email marketing effort.
Test and Refine Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a process that will never truly reach perfection. It’s constantly changing, and your approach to building an effective strategy should be done with this in mind. As you introduce new campaigns, make sure you track different aspects of your emails.
This includes deliverability, open rate, click through rate and conversion rate. Keep measuring these benchmarks as you optimize subject lines, overall design and message frequency. As you get better at email marketing, you can fine-tune these aspects to create an efficient program.
As you can see, these are the basics, such as choosing an email marketing service and creating an email marketing list. But let's now dive a little deeper into how you can send marketing emails, how you should format them, and ultimately plan your email marketing strategy.
Tips to Make Email Marketing Work for Your Business
It's not enough to know the type of design you want or to copy the look of another great email marketing campaign. You have to capture data of how well your campaigns are doing, see how your audience responds to the sender, and make sure you are putting the right content - the message out there.
The following tips apply to marketing email and newsletter alike, ensuring it goes to the recipient's inbox instead of their spam folder.
Appear Human
In a way, these email messages ARE from a human, so this should be easy. Because email marketing is popular, this also means it is competitive. Use email to speak directly to your users, use their name, and let them see the human side of your brand. Personalizing email messages and headers helps tremendously.
Use Engaging Titles
Using interesting subject titles is crucial to increasing email open rates, but keep them on topic and non-spammy. If users feel duped, they’re likely to unsubscribe or mark your message as spam, which impacts deliverability.
Use Short Messages in the Email Body
Most email is read on a mobile device, so keep your copy concise and to the point. Direct users to a blog post or landing page if you need to share a ton of information
Use CTAs
On landing pages, CTAs are always included above the fold—use the same strategy with email by including strong CTAs after the first paragraph and again at the end.
Ask Permission and Deliver
Though it's not recommended (at least right away) to buy email lists because it can be illegal in most cases and won’t deliver ROI, there are other strategies. If you offer a deal or great content, make sure to deliver high-quality content or offers.
A good example of this is to offer coupon codes for your ecommerce store and provide great purchase and shipping confirmation on top of it. Everyone loves to see that the good deal came through and they can trust your business to deliver on this promise on top of going above and beyond!
Planning Your Email Marketing Strategy
For most people and business owners, email is less confusing to manage than chatbot conversations. However, there may be more features or tools that can go into an email strategy. This comes with a lot of questions that you hopefully already answered before creating your first campaign.
Some things you may need to consider before building your first email marketing strategy include:
- Figuring out who your target audience is. Do you sell video content targeted for teens? Do you have a store that sells furniture for the elite or upper class people?
- The message you want to send. Are you wanting people to simply go to your home page? Or do you want them to sign up for deals from your online store? Or do you have a holiday coupon to give to special subscribers? The message you send, especially the FIRST one, will say a lot about your brand. This means a solid welcome message describing your business and what the subscriber can expect to get or see is vital.
- How will you get your contacts? Email marketing really starts at getting your target audience (once you figure out who that is) to opt in to receive your emails. Do you want to send cold emails to companies if you're a B2B company? Or do you plan on advertising on social media to garner attention of people who will likely sign up for emails through a landing page?
- What can you offer your audience? Your subscribers may expect discounts for the products your business offers. They may want free tutorial for a software of yours. Time will tell (and some A/B testing) of what type of content and value they expect from your business.
- Research other marketing strategies. Do you know of an online store that also sells high-end furniture? Sign up for their newsletter or become one of their subscribers to eventually see all the deals and email campaigns they send throughout the year. When you know your competition, the better off you will be. And the better your marketing can top it.
Top Paid Email Marketing Tools
The rate at which your marketing brings in leads and customers will not depend on whether or not you paid for the "best" email app of all time. But if you want more than just a free trial run, these options can offer a solid email builder for a small price after the free trial period.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue makes sure your emails go to your email list in time, whether you schedule your emails or send them manually.
You do, however, have to pay per email you send. If you're a small business that wants to grow faster, the money you'd have to put into Sendinblue may hinder your profit-making. Luckily, you can send up to 9,000 emails (or 300 emails a day) in the free trial run, giving you enough time to figure out if you want to continue to use their templates and email tools.
HubSpot
Unlike pricier counterparts, HubSpot brings in traffic to their email app through other apps that are better known, such as their website or blog creation software.
HubSpot also touts their all-in-one software, which mainly consists of a group of marketing tools, sales tools, customer service tools, or a few other options. This may seem reasonable when you see prices start at (either a free trial run) or $45 per month.
But what if you want the customer service tools that other email marketing software offer? You'd have to buy a separate package for that.
Instapage
They do emails? Yes, their landing page builder is great. But did you know it goes hand in hand with their email marketing app? Creating a landing page with Instapage is good, but the integration with their email marketing app is simpler than those mentioned above.
Instapage offers great articles on email marketing as well, which you can access with being one of their subscribers. It should be noted that their focus is on pages (of course) and can integrate with tons of other platforms.
Their plans start at $149 per month after a 14-day free trial run.
Free Email Marketing Service
Any free email marketing service may limit what metrics you can view to improve your future email campaign. Starting on the right foot and making sure your free software allows you to view data analysis of the most important metrics is key to improving your most valued email marketing path.
To really set smart, measurable goals, we recommend looking into the following metrics:
- Unique opens – the number of subscribers who opened your email
- Bounces – when an email can’t be delivered to the indicated email server, it’s called a bounce
- Unopened emails – as the name implies, shows the number of subscribers who didn’t open your mail
- Click-through-rate – how many email users who opened your email also clicked on the link
- Unsubscribe rate – what percentage of the audience has unsubscribed from your email list
- Spam complaints – subscribers who tagged your email as spam
- Shares – subscribers who shared your campaign on social media or forwarded it to a friend
The best truly free (for life) software that lets you send and improve upon the emails you send is TruVISIBILITY. It allows its subscribers and clients to create emails, use templates to send high-converting campaigns, and track how well each campaign is doing.
The services are also personalized for businesses who want help building chatbots, landing pages, or content for an entire website. Though the personalized attention growing businesses may love in the future are not always free, the truly free services that anyone can sigh up for often turns leads into customers.
This is why growing businesses think it's the best:
- Easy segmentation of email list. You'll want... in fact, you'll need to separate your email contacts into lists. What if you have English-speaking customers and strictly Spanish-speaking customers? All of your subscribers will not be able to understand the newsletter sent in English. Each email campaign can be sent to multiple or just one group of emails.
- Wide range of tools and email features in builder. You can do video, photos, hyperlink your pages to a particular photo, or follow one of the high-converting templates to the tee. If you want borders, background, and anything else to match your brand colors and label, you can do that with so many customizable and relevant features.
You can check out the templates for email campaigns here. A huge plus is that you can change the content and arrangement of widgets any way you like to best match your message and satisfy recipients.
- Simple integration with other marketing apps and brand building software. Did we mention you can send emails automatically after someone signs up? This is a trigger, and you can set up various kinds of triggers for your automated email system, such as happy birthday discounts and more.
What's Next in Marketing with Email?
You don't need a certification in marketing, digital marketing from an online course, or any other fancy digital thing you think you may need to manage emails.
Any email campaign will have good content, a solid list of contacts to send to, and a safe digital way to send emails to people of any nation across the globe. With the right marketing services, you can feel secure as you grow your business and send campaigns online.
So many seemingly small things will actually make or break the success of sending an email to a recipient, such as deliverability, the hard-bounce and soft-bounce number, the different segments or tools you choose to put in your email, an easy way to opt in or out of your email marketing campaigns, and more.
These things, including following GDPR laws, are not so small and should lead every business to take great care in sending emails.
So, how can you make email marketing work for you? To get started, you need a trusted email marketing app that can meet your standards of performance. TruVISIBILITY also has personalized services that can help you create a website, chatbot for your site, create landing pages, and more.
What are we saying? Start email marketing today since it's proven to be one of the most profitable routes of marketing.
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