With the advent of latest gadgets and interactive smartphone apps, people are spending lesser than ever time on reading something. More than ever people have adopted the quickest form of news outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.
Although social media and social media apps remain the most used application in daily life, people still resort to email when it comes to finding legit information, buying something, subscriptions, and for educational or official updates.
With email still on the go, email marketing has adopted newer and more effective ways to cater to the audiences’ unique needs.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a marketing campaign targeted to reach to a huge number of potential customers through the smart use of email. It is undertaken to advertise a new product or to provide information about the business or services including discounts, offers, new releases, specials, and others, to both existing and new customers.
Email Marketing mostly caters ‘Subscribers.’ When it comes to subscriptions, the goals of email marketing revolve around;
- Welcoming new subscribers
- Boosting engagement
- Nurturing existing subscribers
- Re-engaging subscribers
- Segmenting subscribers
- Sending cart-abandonment alerts
- Social media notifications
- Product and Service updates
- Discounts and offers
Does email marketing still work in 2019?
Yes, mainly because it is still the cheapest and most reliable form of marketing alive.
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32. –Data & Marketing Association, 2018.
For a marketer, the return on investment is massive, while for a customer, it remains a reliable form of communication.
According to the data, 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (Emarsys, 2018).
Spam
One of the biggest drawbacks of email marketing is that it gives rise to spamming. During the 1990s when email marketing was in rising, people started blocking out toxic advertising emails to prevent spammers from taking-over their inbox.
With toxic advertising being blocked, the good guys were also affected. This made them come up with ethical processes to reach out to the customer hence eliminating the chances of spam.
Today, almost every email service provider automatically filters spam from other emails. If you want to reach out to your customer, you must follow ethical email marketing practices.
Why does it work?
One of the biggest reason why email marketing works is;
Personalization
One of the biggest advantages of using email marketing is that it can be personalized or targeted to each customer. Personalization is a means of meeting the customer's needs more effectively and efficiently, making interactions faster and easier and, consequently, increasing customer satisfaction and the likelihood of repeat visits.
Digital marketing has risen from generic marketing to personalization, so the engagement rate has grown exponentially.
How Email marketing can help new business to build their brand?
A business can benefit a lot from email marketing. The use of email for marketing remains applicable to both B2B and B2C businesses.
a. Save Cost
Digital marketing is the cheapest method to advertise and promote a brand. Among every digital marketing channel, email marketing is known to be the most affordable marketing method. It is accessible, widely used, and dependable form of marketing.
b. Increase Brand Recognition
What better than to promote your brand online. You can always highlight your logo, brand image, color, palette, and message during email marketing that helps to keep your brand fresh in their mind.
c. Connect with the target market
Email marketing helps you keep in touch with your audience on a regular basis, keeping you afresh.
d. Increase your credibility
Consistent, relevant, and helpful emails to your customers help to build your credibility. Other than staying in touch, it helps to make you a dependable source of information.
e. Attract new audiences
Email marketing also helps to reach a new market or audience base. It helps to attract new audiences through email newsletters, offers, referrals, etc.
f. Referral email Marketing
Referral Emails are a successful promotion strategy that retailers use to promote their referral program to their advocates and grow sales. It is a complementary form of marketing – your customers will refer you to others in the form of personal recommendation.
If you observe the whole process, you will see that referral marketing is an owned channel that boosts your brand’s value. The idea is to nurture the audience and bring them towards conversions.
Referral leads convert 30% better than the leads generated from other marketing methods.
Different types of email/ Types of Email for brand Building
The different types of email we shall be discussing are as follows;
a. Newsletter
An Email-newsletter is a digital marketing tool designed for sending news, product launch, marketing goodies and reports to users online. A newsletter has transpired from written to digital form for covering various aspects of the business or entity to inform its members, customers, employees or people, who are interested in.
70% of email readers open emails from a brand or company in search of a deal, discount, or coupon – Getmailbird.com
b. Standalone emails
Standalone marketing emails focus only on one topic at a time. The email is designed to offer information on a single product and service. The CTA (Click through Action) is limited to only one button so the entire engagement can be driven to a single goal.
What differentiates standalone email from the newsletter is that standalone email generally covers a single topic with a single CTA, however, a newsletter may cover multiple topics with more than one CTA.
c. Lead Nurturing
Lead-nurturing email basically means a series of emails that are sent over a period of times (days or weeks) as a follow-up. The idea is to engage the potential customer through a series of emails to lead them through the funnel and convert them into customers. Each email carries helpful content and takes closer to conversion through engagement.
44% of people who received targeted emails acknowledged buying at least one item because of a promotional message.
d. Transactional
Transactional emails basically cover confirmations and receipts of the certain transaction on a website. The transactional email is common during an e-commerce transaction. These types of email have higher open-rate, hence, along with sending a confirmation, you can choose to send them additional information on new products or services in the form of indirect advertisement.
e. Milestone emails
Milestone emails are generally sent to a customer when a certain milestone is reached such as birthday, anniversary, holidays, etc.
Birthday emails are the most effective emails with a 481% higher transaction than promotional emails. – Campaign Monitor
f. Plain-text email
Plain-text emails are basically a similar marketing email as others with one exception – No HTML/Graphics. The plain-text email tends to be lighter and easy to read. A reader may find it easier to read a plain-text email than a heavily formatted or graphically enhanced email.
g. Mobile optimized
Mobile optimized emails are marketing emails optimized for mobile or smartphones. A mobile user reacts entirely different to a desktop user. This can cause a decline in email open rate that will hamper the company’s marketing goals.
Popular Email Marketing Services
The widely used, adapted, and reliable B2B or B2C email marketing services are as follows.
- Constant Contact
- Drip
- SendinBlue
- Mailjet
- ConvertKit
- AWeber
- GetResponse
- MailChimp
How to create Awesome Autoresponder sequences
An autoresponder sequence is a series of emails that are automatically sent out to people subscribed to your email list. For higher CTR and great response, you can always try combinations of messages.
For the unique autoresponder sequences, you can consider
- Asking readers
- Listening to social media
- Assessing your own content
- Researching keywords Source
Advanced Email Marketing Strategies
Advanced email marketing strategies basically stand for email marketing dynamics that help to get more return at lesser cost and effort. Here are a few of the essential strategies that you can implement for your next email marketing campaign
i. Collecting high-quality contact data for your clients
The personalization with email marketing only works when you have the right data in your hand. The first step to acquiring the right data is to implement relevant fields in the contact form such as full name, contact/secondary contact, age-group, occupation, etc.
ii. Create segmented lists of your clients’ subscribers
The second step is to segment the client’s or subscriber’s list according to age-group, location, occupation, or hobbies in certain cases. This helps to prepare appropriate campaigns for each like-minded group of clients.
iii. Get personal with your clients’ audiences
Attest your email with their name. You can personalize the email body, title, and CTA according to their taste or interest. This helps to grow CTR (Click through Rate) of any email campaign.
iv. Use dynamic content with engaging design
Create great content by taking help from media such as photos and videos. An email with video has a higher CTR than the one with fewer media. Visual appeal is always attention-grabbing!
v. Use marketing automation to measure and streamline email campaigns
Marketing automation basically allows you to collect high-quality contact data, develop segmented lists, direct personalized content at scale, and even use engaging email design templates.