Email marketing is a great way to establish one-on-one communication with your audience and help your business nurture leads. Despite a few predictions made that we are going to see a decline in this form of marketing, due to the rapid growth of other marketing channels, recent statistics show us that there are no signs of email marketing slowing down!
Just in 2021 alone, it was estimated that with every $1 spent on email campaigns the expected ROI is $42. With those numbers in mind, it’s impossible to ignore the benefits that businesses can reap by implementing email marketing into their strategies.
You might now be considering how email marketing can fit in with your current business goals. However, before you jump in, it’s important to have a clear strategy in place before you start running your email campaigns.
In this blog, we will highlight the key elements of building a successful email marketing strategy and starting your first email campaign.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the act of sending commercial messages in mass quantities to email subscribers. In today’s world, email marketing is more than just mass communication. For email campaigns to be effective and help you drive better results, a large amount of focus needs to be put towards the segmentation of your email lists as well as the personalization of your email copy.
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Email Marketing
Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing will help you better understand if it is the right time for you to implement this type of marketing in your business.
Advantages Of Email Marketing
Let’s first take a quick look at the advantages:
1. Increase Conversions
Effective promotional emails are a great way to increase conversions by highlighting new sales or new products or services to your email subscribers. Promotional emails help you clearly outline the exact action you would like the recipient to take. Here are a few email types that can help you increase conversions:
- Offers or Discounts: Including special offers and discount codes in your email can help nudge your customers to make a purchase.
- Abandoned Cart: These emails are a great way to remind a user to complete their purchase when a website visitor abandons a cart during their online purchase process.
2. Brand Awareness
Email marketing is a great way to consistently pop up in a subscriber’s inbox. Through the use of newsletters, you can ensure you are always providing valuable content to keep your readers engaged while staying at the top of their minds!
3. Builds Loyalty
Email campaigns and automation are great ways to build loyalty between new leads or customers and your brand. Through educational emails, you are able to guide a lead during the different stages of the buyer’s journey by providing them with valuable information on your product or service, industry trends, industry news, and more. Similarly, communicating with clients on important company updates is a great way to increase customer retention.
4. Affordable And Scalable
Working with email marketing software can make this an extremely cost-effective strategy. Most email marketing tools offer free plans and are willing to accommodate all budgets! An email marketing tool will also help you scale communication without straining your resources.
5. Contact Lists
In order to send email campaigns, you need an emailing list. Once you have built a list of contacts that have given you permission to email them, you will always be able to communicate directly with the contact through the email they provided.
Disadvantages Of Email Marketing
Now let’s understand some of the disadvantages:
1. High Competition
It’s no surprise that it can be hard to stand out in a cluttered inbox. With this in mind, you would need to ensure your email subject is engaging and eye-catching.
2. Rules And Regulations
There are various rules and regulations that you need to be aware of when building your email marketing strategy. A common regulation is known as GDPR compliance, however, in all of the regulations, unwelcome emails are a direct violation and can damage your sender’s reputation.
3. Delivery Issues
Your emails might struggle to land in a recipient’s inbox, as deliverability is not guaranteed. With this in mind, you will struggle with delivery issues and can measure this through your email bounce rate. Keep in mind that a bad sender reputation will also affect if your emails get delivered.
Building A Successful Email Marketing Strategy
Let’s look at how you can build a successful email marketing strategy:
1. Choose An Email Service Provider (ESP)
An email marketing software will help you manage and analyze the performance of your email campaigns as well as subscribers. To help you select the right ESP, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
- What is my budget?
- What types of emails am I going to send?
- How many contacts will I load or expect to have?
- Do I require automation?
- What are the segmentation capabilities?
2. Build Your Email List
If you don’t have a list of contacts who have opted-in to receiving communications from you, you will need to build your email list. You are able to build your email lists through the use of lead magnets. Always make sure to be clear with your leads or users on what they can expect from signing up, and make sure to always fulfill what you have promised.
3. Welcome Email
Once your email list starts to grow, you should start applying your mind to creating a welcome email to help you further engage with your subscribers. This welcome email should be used to help you further introduce your brand and highlight the types of content your subscribers can expect to receive.
4. Set Your Goals
Defining your goals is extremely important when creating email campaigns. Popular goals that businesses try and achieve with email marketing are:
- Brand awareness
- Increased sales
- Increased engagement with blog content
- Customer retention
5. Build Design And Email Copy
Email design plays a crucial role in helping you further communicate your brand and engage your audience. Using an ESP means you have access to drag and drop builders to help you create highly engaging designs. Email marketing software also provides you with great templates that can be customized to fit your brand standards.
The email copy and the subject line will be the hardest part of your marketing strategy. Your email copy needs to hone in on topics that can be of interest to your email subscribers. Make sure to use conversational language to make the copy easily consumable.
Lastly, your subject line should be striking and appeal to the user’s ambitions, emotions, and needs to ensure that your email gets clicked on! Using A/B testing for both email copies and subject lines is a good way to make sure that you are maximizing the engagement with your email campaigns.
6. Set Email Schedule
Before scheduling your email campaign, make sure to give it a proofread to avoid silly spelling and formatting mistakes. Once you are happy with the look and feel of your email, it’s time to schedule your campaign!
When scheduling your campaign make sure to do it at a time that makes sense given what you know about your subscribers. This will help you maximize the engagement.
7. Analyze Results
Analyzing your email campaign results is extremely important in helping you identify areas you can improve on for future campaigns to help you maximize your results. This is where an email marketing reporting software like Oviond comes in handy!
With Oviond you will be able to report and analyze the performance of your email campaigns against metrics from other marketing channels. This will help you identify what areas of your overall efforts are bringing in the best results.
Oviond integrates with the most popular email service provider to ensure that clients can report on the marketing data they need. Popular email performance-related metrics that you can expect to find on Oviond are:
- Open rate
- CTR
- Unsubscribe Rate
- Bounce Rate
Build Your Email Campaigns Today
Now that you know a little bit more about how to implement an email marketing strategy and how to build your first email campaigns, it’s time to put your knowledge to the test!
To learn more about digital marketing, email marketing, and digital marketing reporting, visit our blog!
