Email marketing has been around since the .com boom, and it’s shown little to no sign of actually dying in this decade. In fact, the statistics show that email marketing is stronger than ever with 306.4 Billion daily emails being sent each and every day. Furthermore, 81% of marketers have stated that email newsletters are their most commonly used form of content. This is why we have created the Definitive Guide For Email Marketing. This will help you to maximise your campaigns.
With the current situation with the second lockdown and the coronavirus pandemic, it is important for businesses to be able to identify avenues to prospect new customers and to keep in touch with their existing ones.
Why You Should Use Email Marketing
Return on Investment
There are many reasons why you should use email marketing in your campaigns and the first one is the Return-on-Investment (ROI) involved in running an email marketing campaign. As can be seen in the below image, email marketing will bring you a $40 ROI per dollar spent; compared with SEO which brings $22.94 and internet display which brings $19.72 ROI for every dollar that is spent.
Email Has a Long Reach
It can be tempting to believe that due to the fact that Facebook has over 2.7 Billion users and other social media sites have massive user-bases, that social media marketing is the best way to get your message out there to your customers.
Funnily enough, people often overlook the sheer amount of people that use email, which stood at 3.9 Billion in 2013 and has only continued to grow since then. With the number of email addresses that are available, you can see why email marketing can be considered to have a long reach.
Furthermore, there are some issues with social media sites, like concerns over privacy and data breaches that can put people off of advertising that comes from social media. That’s not so as to say that email does not have its own share of problems, however, email has been around for a lot longer and has always flourished.
Email Has High Conversion Rates
Understandably, one of the things that marketers are going crazy over and have done for a long time, is conversion rates. Of course, it doesn’t matter how many people see your content, but it matters about how many heed your Call To Action (CTA) and convert for your products or services. This a critical part of this email marketing guide.
Email marketing has an average conversion rate of 3%. This may not seem like a lot at first, but when you compare the average conversion rate of a tweet on Twitter, which stands at 0.5%, you can see that email marketing’s conversion rate is actually six times better than that of putting a post out on Twitter.
Furthermore, 4.24% of visitors will make a purchase from an email marketing campaign, when compared to 2.49% of search engine visits and 0.59% on social media. In fact, from this, it can be seen that email marketing reigns supreme when it comes to boosting conversion rates for your business.
What is an Email Marketing Campaign?
If you’ve never run an email marketing campaign before, you could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve boggled your mind a bit with my talk of conversions and the like. So, what actually is an email marketing campaign you ask? We’ll answer this in our email marketing guide.
An email marketing campaign is defined as the following:-
A specific and co-ordinated group of individual email messages that are delivered over a specific period of time to accomplish a set goal. These goals are Calls to Action (CTA) and can involve buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter and many more.
Typically, an effective email marketing campaign will have one single CTA, but some campaigns may include a less emphasized, secondary CTA. You shouldn’t ask your readers to do too much though, because your campaign may be seen as spammy, which can cause you to lose out on conversions, or have more people ask you to take them off of your mailing list.
Your subject line should also include a snappy, attention-grabbing title to ensure that your email doesn’t end up in a spam folder, and so you can create that Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that entices someone to open your email. In the above image, you can see an example of this.
It is important to make sure that you segment your audience so they are receiving content that is more relevant to them, this will ensure that they are more likely to open your email and see what you have to offer.
These campaigns can be a one-off email, or you can send multiple emails over a period of time. You should make sure that you’re keeping your general concept the same, even if you are using a different CTA in each email. Try and be present in the mind of your audience.
What Tools Should You Use For Your Email Marketing Campaigns?
There are a number of different tools that you can use to make your email marketing campaign more effective and easier to run. The costs involved in doing this will vary, however, there are also some free options that you should be aware of. Finding the best tool for your needs is imperative to running a good campaign. Thankfully, we go into the tools you need in this section of our email marketing guide.
ActiveCampaign
At one point, ActiveCampaign was on the fringes of software tools related to email marketing. Now though, they’ve grown massively and have over 90,000 customers. The beauty of their platform is that they have an automated visual builder, which eliminates the need for expensive consultants and training to manage your campaigns.
Despite the simplicity of their platform, they also have a number of advanced mechanics that can allow you to boost your company’s revenue. These include predictive sending and predictive content for users.
One of the best things about ActiveCampaign is that it has a flexible pricing structure that makes it accessible for both small and large businesses alike.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a well-known juggernaut of the email marketing arena and the company claims that its users are sending out a collective 10,800 emails every second. Their array of reporting tools and their email template creator make it easy for newbies to develop attractive email marketing campaigns and allows them to identify whether these campaigns are working. This is our favourite tool in this whole email marketing guide.
Another benefit from MailChimp is that their free trial offering is incredibly generous, allowing you to send 10,000 emails to a total of 2000 subscribers. This is enough of an offering for you to see whether or not the platform is well-suited to your campaign needs.
One thing you should be aware of is that you should not use MailChimp if you are working on affiliate marketing. This is because affiliate marketing is banned on the platform and penalties for breaking these rules can actually lead to your account being cancelled completely.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a world-class provider that is especially effective for B2B service providers. In addition to its email marketing functionality, the company also offers a CRM, landing pages and a variety of different marketing tools that can help your company to grow exponentially. Another great feature is that its reporting function allows you to attribute each sales dollar to the avenue which found it.
One of the downsides to HubSpot is that they attempt to snare you by offering you a free trial of their products, but these trials are incredibly limited compared to the full-fledged offering. Their pricing also increases massively if you need more of something, possibly going from $50 PCM to $2000 PCM for the sake of 15,000 more contacts and some marketing automation.
You should only use HubSpot if you feel that you’ll have the budget to scale up their offering.
How Should You Collate The Emails For Your Campaign?
In this email marketing guide, we’ll go over how you should collate the emails for your campaigns.
Organic Growth
There’s a number of ways in which you can collate the emails necessary for your email marketing campaign. Firstly, you could generate the email addresses organically by adding existing customers and potential leads to your email database. This method of collating the emails can be slow to generate results, but you always know that the people you’re speaking to are going to be interested in what you have to say.
Purchasing Email Lists
If you don’t feel like you can wait to generate an email database organically, then you don’t need to worry, because you can purchase email marketing data AKA, email marketing lists. The benefit to email marketing lists is that you can segment the email addresses that you purchase by a number of different categories, including industry, headcount, turnover and location. This ensures that you’re targeting the prospects you need.
Depending on the size of your marketing budget, you can also get a massive number of email addresses almost instantly, which means that you can begin going crazy with your marketing campaign almost straight away.
Despite the positives of purchasing email lists, like with everything, there are also some negatives that can be involved. Firstly, cold emailing may cause your engagement and open rates to drop, especially if your emails are falling into people’s spam folder for whatever reason. This is why it is important to make sure your subject lines and email content are top-notch.
For more information on email lists, you can visit the page on our website, which explains our offering.
What Kind of Content Should You Use For Your Campaigns?
In this email marketing guide, we’ll go over the content you should use for your campaigns.
Newsletters
The vaunted email newsletter is one of the best ways to tell your customers about changes that are affecting your business, or things that will affect new customers. For example, this could be if you’re going to begin offering a new product or service, or even if you are unfortunately closing an office or store location. It is always important to keep your audience informed. If you do this, your audience will feel closer to you.
Promotional Emails
It is true that consumers and businesses are becoming a little warier about promotional emails due to the rise of scammers and spammers, but, if you do it right you can definitely drive a massive number of sales to your business. The challenge with these emails is communicating the value of your products or services to your audience without sounding overly promotional. If you can create engaging, informative content then you’ll be onto a winner.
Loyalty and Rewards
There’s nothing that a customer loves more than being rewarded for their loyalty, especially in an era where company loyalty is on the decline due to increased competition. This can also be automated, so for example, if a customer purchases X number of products, they will receive a 10% discount on their next purchase. These little gestures may not cost your business much, but they’ll mean a lot to a customer and keeping their loyalty.
Surveys
There’s no truer way to find out exactly how you’re doing for your customers than to send them all a survey via email. Of course, with any survey, you need to consider the results based on the percentage of the target population that you’ve managed to reach. Despite this, even if you only survey 20% of your customer base, these responses that you receive will allow you to make positive changes to your business that will improve your customer satisfaction and therefore, your profitability.
How Should You Measure The Results of Your Email Marketing Campaigns?
There are a number of key metrics that you can use to measure the results of your email marketing campaigns and these will be highlighted below.
Delivery Rate: This is the rate at which your emails are delivered to the recipient and are not bounced back or caught in their spam folder. The ideal delivery rate for your email marketing campaign is around the worldwide average of 80%.
Open Rate: This is the rate at which your email has been opened by the recipient. The ideal open rate for your email marketing campaign should align with or exceed the average of 15%-25%.
Click-Through Rate: This is the rate at which your recipient will click on a link in your email, taking them to your desired page. The ideal average click-through rate for your email marketing campaign should stand at a number of at least 2.5%.
Conversion Rate: This is the all-powerful metric that shows you exactly how many sales you are getting from your email marketing campaign. By measuring your conversions, you’ll be able to identify if your campaign is getting enough sales.
What Legal Considerations Will Affect Your Email Marketing Campaign in This Email Marketing Guide?
When you’re conducting an email marketing campaign, it is important that you understand the legal considerations that will affect the campaign itself. One of the most pressing considerations is knowing what data protection and privacy laws apply to your business. For example, if you are an American company targeting French customers, then you’ll need to be aware of the 2016 General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
You should make sure that you give your email subscribers a clear, easy way to opt for receiving emails from you and it would definitely be worth registering with the data protection Supervisory Authority in your country to ensure you’re compliant. For example, in the UK, this is the Information Commissioner’s Office.
You should also be prepared to answer questions from customers about how you received their information and to provide all of the personal information you have on that person when asked.
Conclusion
In this guide, we have discussed the finer points of what an email marketing campaign is and why you should start using email marketing. Furthermore, we have looked into the best tools to help you conduct your campaign and how you should collect the emails to fuel your campaign.
You should now also know how to measure the impact of your campaigns and the content you should be using, as well as what legal considerations are going to have an impact on your campaign.
Thank you for reading today, now go out and get that campaign started!