Email Marketing, when used effectively, can be a valuable part of your marketing arsenal. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or promote your business’s products and services, marketing by email is a super cost effective method of advertising your business, products and services.
We all check our emails daily, whether that be in our personal life or within a professional capacity, which means that the potential opportunities to connect with your audience and stand out from your competitors are huge.
To help you understand why your business should take advantage of email marketing, we’ve out together this handy blog to highlight why email marketing is important for your business and how you can make the most of this revenue driving channel!
What Is Email Marketing?
In practice, email marketing allows you to reach customers, including leads, new, and existing, directly in their inbox, in a personalised manner.
Usually sending a commercial message, email marketing is used by many businesses to send and advertise their products or services, request business, solicit sales or share information about their brand and resources.
Using a specially curated list of contacts (the collection of email addresses your messages will be sent to) you’re able to reach all kinds of people in your sales funnel. These contacts will often come from various sources, such as newsletter sign ups from your website or through the registration documents your customer completes when making a purchase.
Why Should I Start Creating Email Marketing Campaigns?
Email marketing campaigns are an effective way to promote your business to your target audience. It allows you to distribute high value content to your customers, straight to their inbox, frequently.
Email marketing can help you build stronger relationships with your customers, as you can provide them with value, including insights and inspiration, along with selling your products and services. If you strike a good balance between sales and inspiration, your customers will look forward to receiving your emails, as they’ll more likely be engaged with your content.
Hubspot recently found that there are 4 billion daily email users! When you combine that with the fact that 37% of brands are increasing their email budget and 77% of marketers are seeing an increase in email engagement, it’s clear that email marketing is prevalent. Brands are now seeing how email marketing is a perfect opportunity to actively reach their customers.
What to Consider As Part Of Your Email Marketing Strategy
Creating an email marketing strategy will ensure that you stay on track with your plans, and maintain efficiency throughout the whole process of your email creation.
We’ve narrowed down the key components of creating an email marketing strategy for you to consider, to help make getting started a little easier.
Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform
There are many different email marketing platforms available for your business to choose from, depending on your business needs and budget. Mailchimp, and Ominsend are popular platforms for many businesses, thanks to their easy to navigate interface and large number of integration partners. Some businesses may be looking for a CRM and email marketing platform combined such as Hubspot, Brevo or Spotler CRM so they can keep all of their customer and marketing activity aligned. Fortunately, many platforms offer informative demos and free trials for you to try out their tools and see which service seems best suited to your business. Here you’ll be able to explore everything from tools and tech to data exporting functions and ease of use.
Building a Successful Email Marketing Calendar
By building an email marketing calendar, you’ll be able to remain consistent with the frequency of your emails, whilst also taking into consideration notable dates. With these by your side, you can easily provide relevant and trending content to your customers.
Yearly events, such as local festivals and national holidays are ideal for capitalising on! Consider what’s coming up and whether it’s relevant to your business. If you have historical sales data, it might be worth seeing if there is anything that tends to need a push at certain times of the year.
For example, fitness coaches might find that their PT programmes sell well in January, so building an email campaign starting from November would be a great way to build prospective customers interest. You could consider adding some helpful fitness and nutrition advice and as December comes to an end, you could consider focusing on promoting specific programmes can purchase.
By having a calendar in place, you’re able to stay on track with upcoming events and the messaging you want to share with your customers. This helps make the creation process quicker and easier moving forward across all platforms, including your print, website and social media. To create a calendar, there are many email calendar templates available online, or you can consider using an online project management tool, such as Asana or Monday.
Optimise Your Strategy With Automated Email Marketing
An automated flow, is an email, or series of emails, that are triggered by customer behaviour. Once customers enter your flow they will be filtered based on the actions they take in emails directly or on your website.
Email automation is a great idea dor businesses who are looking to personalise their email marketing, especially those who are trying to to re-engage or reward customers.
Using automated flows, your business can send personalised messages to customers to prompt them to take an action or start engaging with you depending on the focus of your flow. For example, by setting up a “welcome flow” you can showcase your business’s USP’s, some of your top offers and give reasons to visit your website, such as a useful blog post.
You could also have an “abandonment flow”, where if someone abandons their cart, an email is triggered with a 10% discount code, encouraging them to revisit your website and make a purchase.
There are many great ideas for email flow creation including these 9 by Shopify! Think about what you want your customers to do or what goals your business needs to meet, then you can consider building a flow to convert customers or increase your brand awareness.
Optimal Times To Send Email
Many email marketing tools will provide you with data to help you decide how often to send emails and the best times of day for ensuring optimal opens and clicks.
The ideal time to send an email will depend on the industry you work in, and your customers general demographic. Research by Omnisend suggests that 2pm, 5pm or 8pm are the best times to send, as a general rule of thumb. However it’s always good practice to set time aside to create and schedule your emails in advance, so you can make sure you keep the quality of your content high while testing different times to see what works for your audience.
Increase Email Success with A/B Tests
Once you’ve found the best time to send your emails, you can start testing different tactics to improve other areas of your emails.
A/B testing allows you to send two emails which are like for like, but include a subtle difference. Utilising A/B tests will help you understand which email was the most successful, before sending the rest of your email list the most optimal email.
For example, you may send 2 emails about a new product. One of which contains a link with the price, the other without. Whichever email gets the best result based on your goals (for example clicks to the offer, or conversion rate) after a set amount of time, will be released to the rest of your email list.
Some great A/B test ideas include:
- Displaying pricing or not
- Different subject lines
- Varying content length
- Different design schemes
The Importance of Reporting on Your Email Marketing
Keeping track of your metrics is key to a successful email marketing campaign. Analysing your data will help you keep a clear view of what is or isn’t working to make sure you’re able to make changes where necessary.
Most email marketing platforms will provide you with an analytics centre, and with a handy dashboard, it’s never been easier to grab the information you need! Key metrics to look out for are:
- Number of emails sent - to see how many customers your email went to. This can also help you see how quickly your list is growing to manage your email platform and any costs incurred.
- Open rate - knowing how many people opened your email will (the percentage of people opening your email compared to ignoring it).
- Click Through Rate - giving you insight into how many recipients are actively clicking on linked elements within your email, including links to websites or a button. This will help you obtain insight into whether your content inspired the customer to take action.
- Unsubscribes - as part of GDPR, if someone unsubscribes from your emails, you must stop sending them messages immediately. Usually customers will unsubscribe if they’re not interested in your business any more, or if they think the information you’re sending is irrelevant, or low value. You can also trigger unsubscriptions by sending too many emails in a short space of time, as it may be seen as spam.
- Revenue - It’s good to know how much money your emails have made, especially if the goal of your email marketing is to increase sales and transactions. By following the customers order journey you’re able to attribute sales to the emails which you sent.
It’s key to note that you need to give your customers time to read their emails before recording metrics. For the most accurate representation, you might want to consider waiting a few days or a week, before analysing your reports, depending on the number of people in your email list.
By taking the time to analyse your data, you’ll be able to make the necessary tweaks to your strategy and content to really pin down what works. Getting to grips with your email metrics will help you nail your email strategy planning!
In Conclusion
Using email marketing is a fantastic, cost-effective way to reach your customers directly, helping you meet business goals whilst building engaging relationships with your customers.
Successful email marketing takes a lot of learning and adapting, but remaining consistent is key to making a success of this marketing channel. Now’s the perfect time to join the many businesses who are already investing in email marketing. Make a mark in your industry and meet your marketing goals faster with a stellar email strategy.
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