Email marketing is a very powerful and effective way to promote your business. It enables you to reach out to your targeted audience with personalized messages. However, it isn’t easy as ABC for everyone to use email marketing properly. If the segmentation of the list is not done properly, then it can be costly for the business. On the other hand, it is a very profitable channel that generates ROI between $38–$42 for every $1 spent.
In this article you will learn:
- What is Email Marketing?
- The History of Email Marketing
- How To Write Emails Like A Pro?
- Who To Send Emails?
- How Emails Help in Business and Product Promotion?
- Email Marketing Demographics
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a strong medium of direct and digital marketing. It revolves around online marketing through websites, blogs, social media, and more. Its basic use is to create awareness about the services and products a company or brand offers. It is a very powerful and cost-effective tool that ensures engagement with potential and existing customers. It can produce better results than other digital platforms as it directly connects to the target audience through their inbox.
In some cases, it comes from someone who knows your email address. But most of the time it comes from service. These services usually start with Email services and Marketing providers.
The History of Email Marketing
Email marketing was first popularized in the early 2000s. While it has been around for a long time. There is a lot of confusion about what email marketing is? And what are the best practices associated with it?
While some people think it’s spammy or annoying to constantly bombard their customers with messages. But others know that email can be one of the most cost-effective marketing tools.
Emails may be sent out to a large list of people via an email broadcast. It means that it’s very easy to spread the word about your brand, product, or service quickly. Because of this, email marketing can be great for reaching a large audience and increasing sales.
How To Write Emails Like A Pro
To make sure your emails get read, there are some basic strategies you can follow to ensure your success. You should always keep Your audience in mind before creating emails. The campaigns should also be engaging and stand out in a crowded inbox. Here are some tips for creating effective email marketing campaigns.
Subject Line
- Limit punctuation marks in subject line.
- Emojie in subject line makes it more attractive. It helps to grab attention.
- Only use one emoji in the subject line.
- Optemize form field, don’t use Re: and Fwd: in the subject line.
- Shorter subject line is better, up to 10 words.
- It will be very effective to use personalization like “Hey FirstName”.
- All caps seems shouting at the reader, so avoid all caps in subject line.
- Don’t use in between uppercasing in subject line.
- You may use sendcheckit.com to test if your subject line looks spammy.
Body
- Choose font colors in body of the email sparingly. Limit them to 3.
- Don’t use shorten or affiliate links in your emails.
- Keep your emails to the point, readers get bored with long emails.
- Be polite.
- Before you send the email review the content for any spelling mistake.
Media
- Balance text and images to 60/40 ratio.
- Use relevant and good quality image that does’nt distract from the text.
- Use image that delivers the spirit of the message.
- Don’t use attachments in emails.
Open & Click-Through-Rate
- Increase open and click-through rates by approaching people with your pitch.
- Emails are most likely to get open if the subject line & tone of voice is clear.
- Use right timing.
- Bad Tab words (these are the words that provide the sense of urgency) hurt the open rate.
- Build trust with your audience to increase open rate.
- Use Attention, Benefit and Curiosity strategy in subject line to increase open rate.
Spam
- Don’t use high importance feature.
- Avoid using spam words so your emails don’t land in spam folder.
- Stay out of spam folder by writing strong subject line.
- Email tracking by sending hidden images or links marks it as spam. Apps such as GetResponse provide this functionality by default.
- Build your reputation by keeping up your sending score. You may use mail-tester.com to get your sending score.
- Avoid having complaint and bounce rate to zero or as low as possible.
- Use mxtoolbox.com to see if your domain is not black listed.
Personalise & Segmentation
- Readers feel valued with personalized content.
- Keeps your audience interedted with in-depth and personal conversations.
- Create email list of subscribers based on their inerest.
- Use lead magnets to find audience efficiently.
- Use images and videos to capture readers’ attention.
- Send regular emails to keep your audience engaged.
Who To Send The Emails?
Now at this point, you already know how to write a good email and just land in the recipients’ inbox, but WHO ARE YOUR RECIPIENTS? To have someone as an intended recipient you need to create an email list. This can be done by using a lead magnet.
Lead Magnet
A lead magnet could be anything a course, an article, a video, or an ebook. The best lead magnet is something that provides value but also builds trust with the customer.
Email subscribers are more engaged than social media followers or blog readers, so adding your lead magnet will help you build up your email list quickly.
This piece of content will give subscribers the insight they need to know more about your business or the product you are promoting.
Prepare your lead magnet with some valuable content and provide a link for subscribers to go to when they choose to opt-in. This will reduce unsubscribes and increase your email list growth.
The easiest way to create a lead magnet is an ebook, If you have your own content, you can convert it to a pdf file and create a beautiful cover page in CANVA. The other option you can use is to find PLR websites and download a free ebook. PLR websites offer to reuse the available material.
Landing Page For Email Marketing
The landing page plays an important role when it comes to email marketing. It is like a coin, on one side it helps you to build your email list on the other side it shows the product you are promoting. Many apps such as GetResponse are offering landing page creation along with email list management.
Pop-ups
Pop-up forms are displayed on top of the website. Some pop-ups are used to collect user information such as email for the exchange of lead magnets, some are used for call-to-action. Another type of pop-up is exit intent pop-up. It appears when a user wishes to leave the site. The exit-intent pop-up is shown in an attempt to convince the visitor to stay on site.
How Emails Help in Business & Product Promotion?
At this point, you’re probably wondering how email marketing can help your business. We’re glad you want to know!
In fact, email marketing is not only driving traffic to your website or landing page to increase sales. It can be up to 40 times more effective than social media! So if you want to see better results from your online marketing efforts, think about email marketing with automation and autoresponders.
Automation & Autoresponders
Let me explain what are autoresponders, It is a functionality of the software that is responsible to send a response(an email) after someone subscribes to a newsletter. It is a good practice to start communication with subscribers with a welcome message, It helps to bridge the gap between the sender and the recipient. Autoresponders are a series of emails sent on a predefined schedule.This means less work for you while still getting great results!
On the other hand, automation is a series of emails and action steps such as sending messages, sending push notifications, and more. These actions take place if a particular condition is met, these conditions include subscribed, message opened, link clicked, etc.
Email Splitting
Let’s say you have an email list and emails are sent via automation, There will be users who always actively open your emails and you have a good click-through rate. We call them active subscribers. While there will be users who don’t open your emails more often, let’s call them not very active subscribers.
Now based on these two behaviors of your subscribers. You can split your email list into two parts and keep the different users in separate lists. This technique becomes handy when you are promoting special offers and you want more engagements.
Sequence Emails
Sequence emails are sent out based on the actions of the subscribers. If you are promoting a product or service and automation system sends out the emails to your list. But the subscribers in your list never avail of your services or buy your product. To make them your customers you can send them emails in a sequence. Let’s say some of your subscribers opened the email and click the link in your email which brought them to the sales page but they left without any purchase. In this case, you can send them a reminder email and offer a discount to make a sale.
Another scenario is that some of your subscribers opened the email but didn’t visit the sales page. Under this scenario, you may send them an email with the benefits of the product to convince them to buy the product.
Sales Funnel Emails
Sales funnel is also a sequence of emails but the subscribers on your list are already your customers. Meaning to say that they have already purchased a product from your website. So sales funnel emails are sent out to promote another product or related services. The sales funnel helps you to increase your sales by offering more products to your customers, who have the capacity and means to shop online.
Email Marketing Demographics
We talked about splitting/segmenting the email based on subscribers’ behavior. Let’s go one step further with the segmentation of email list based on age, gender, income, and location commonly known as demographics. These details tell us about persons’ interests, likes, and needs. So how can we get benefit from demographics?
Location
You can target very specific demographics with email. For example, if you want to specifically promote products that cater to women aged 18-25 in South Florida. Then you can do exactly that.
Previous Purchses
Let’s say you are selling printers online and somebody bought from your online store. You can send them emails promoting printing paper. While you can take a good guess when they might need to refill the printers’ ink you can email them proposing to buy the refill.
Money Spent
You can promote products based on customers’ buying power, you can use customers’ history of buying from your online store. Then send them emails within the same price range they spent.
Time of Last Purchase
You can create a segmentation based on when did a customer purchased an item from your online store. There would be customers who buy more regularly than others. You can divide them into regular and rare buyers. Then based on this you can send emails promoting new products to regular buyers, while to rare buyers you may send promo codes to encourage them to purchase from your online store.
Pro Tip: There are many benefits of email marketing in services and product promotions. This can also pose certain challenges if adopted for the first time. If you make use of demographics intelligently, then it will definitely increase your open and click-through rates. You can measure the success of your email marketing campaign by tracking these rates. Sales made from emails sent and more. This will help you to allocate your marketing budget according to customers’ behavior.
Conclusion
I’ve shared with you some of the best practices for email marketing, but let me know what your experience has been. What have you found to be most successful? What were your biggest mistakes? There are many opportunities for success when it comes to email marketing that just doesn’t exist in other forms of online marketing.
If this article has helped you understand more about email marketing. We’re ready to help you take advantage of the latest tools and strategies that drive success online. Which type of content do you think would be most successful at capturing the reader’s attention?
So feel free to share any tips or stories about how email marketing has worked well for you!
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