Comprehensive Guide to Email Marketing for Website Owners and Businesses
“Are you bending an ear with your customers?”
Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to communicate with their customers, nurture leads, raise brand awareness, and drive sales. In this guide, we will cover the benefits of email marketing, types of email marketing campaigns, tips for creating successful campaigns, and key metrics to track when conducting your email marketing campaigns.
So What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing involves sending emails to current and potential customers (duh). With the aim of increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, nurturing leads, or making sales. It is an essential component of any digital marketing strategy, offering a high return on investment (ROI). In 2022, the average ROI of email marketing was $36 for every $1 spent.
Top 6 Benefits of Email Marketing
Each of these aspects help to contribute to your traffic and sales. Boosting your revenue and making you more profitable.
Increase Brand Awareness
Email allows you to share valuable resources, educational content, news, updates, and more with subscribers, helping to spread the word about your brand, products, and services.
Generate Website Traffic
By sharing snippets of recent articles and linking to your blog or including CTAs that direct subscribers to landing pages and sales pages, you can drive more traffic to your website.
Drive Sales and Revenue
Email marketing enables you to promote your products and services directly to customers, offering discounts, free shipping, and showcasing specific products to generate more revenue.
Boost Other Marketing Channels
Integrate email with other marketing channels to drive traffic to social media, landing pages, blogs, and events. For example, you can encourage subscribers to leave reviews on Facebook or participate in Instagram challenges.
Keep Customers Engaged
Experiment with different types of email campaigns to keep customers interested and excited about your brand, helping you stay top of mind.
Gain Valuable Business Data
Collect customer data through email analytics, surveys, and feedback forms to improve your emails, products, and services. Automated workflows can also help send the right email to the right person at the right time.
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
Generally, you can break email campaigns down into a few different categories, depending on the circumstances.
Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are the first emails a subscriber receives when they sign up to your email list or make a purchase. These emails introduce new contacts to your brand, products, and services, often with a clear next step, such as downloading an app or continuing their journey on desktop. Welcome emails have an average open rate of 50%, making them an effective way to engage new subscribers. It’s generally a good idea to schedule these to be immediately after someone signs up for your email list, if not within the first 24 hours.
Newsletter Emails
Newsletter emails are regular updates that share industry news, tips, blog roundups, and more. They help build trust and long-term relationships with your customers by keeping them informed and engaged with your brand. If your regular blog content is good enough, then you could use it as a way to get people to sign up to your email list.
Promotional Email Campaigns
Promotional emails aim to promote specific products, services, or sales. These emails can showcase top sales, offer discounts, or highlight special collections to drive sales and revenue.
Cart Abandonment Emails
Cart abandonment emails are sent to shoppers who added items to their cart but did not complete the purchase. These emails remind customers of their abandoned items, creating urgency and offering incentives to complete the purchase. Using these follow up emails can help to improve your conversion rates and your bottom line.
Seasonal Marketing Campaigns
Seasonal emails are sent around specific times, such as holidays or special events. These emails promote products or services relevant to the season, helping to increase sales during peak times.
Re-engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails aim to reconnect with inactive subscribers, encouraging them to engage with your content or make a purchase. Subject lines often include phrases like “We miss you” or “Are you still there?”.
Triggered Email Series
Triggered emails are automated emails sent based on specific customer actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or abandoning a cart. These emails are highly relevant and timely, making them effective for driving conversions. You can also get very complicated with these, sending or not sending specific emails in a series of emails, depending on what the customer does.
Post-Purchase Drip
Post-purchase emails are sent after a customer makes a purchase to enhance their experience and encourage repeat business. These emails can include shipment updates, requests for reviews, and offers for future purchases. These are a great way to get important feedback from customers and make sure that they are satisfied and engaged with your brand after a sale.
Connect-via-Social Campaigns
These emails encourage subscribers to connect with your brand on social media. Incentives, such as loyalty points or discounts, can be offered for following your social media accounts.
Tips to Create a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Build your list
One of the best ways to build an email list is through lead magnets if you are focused on services, or by collecting contact information from your customers if you sell physical items.
Choose a Relevant Email List
Segment your audience to ensure your emails are sent to the right people. Avoid buying email lists, as this can lead to low engagement and spam complaints. You want your email list to be built organically and naturally.
Design Your Email
Create engaging email designs by applying your branding, adding white space, using images, ensuring responsiveness, and establishing visual hierarchy. Many email campaign management tools can help you with this process, giving you templates to get you started.
Personalize Your Email
Use subscriber data to tailor your emails. Mention the subscriber’s name in the subject line, promote local events, and recommend products based on past purchases to increase engagement.
Be Conversational
Write in a friendly, approachable tone to build relationships with your subscribers. Avoid overly salesy language and talk to your subscribers like you would a friend. Natural language is always best, think like you want to have a conversation with your subscribers.
Create Follow-Ups
Sometimes a single email isn’t enough. Use follow-up emails to nurture subscribers and encourage conversions. For example, follow up on abandoned carts with reminders and incentives.
Send Emails from a Real Person
Use a recognizable sender name to make your emails more personal and increase the likelihood of them being opened. Obviously automated emails like “order confirmed” can be sent from a “no reply” email, but if you want the people on your email list to pay attention, use a personal email address to send it from. YourName@website.com is always best.
A/B Test Your Emails
Test different versions of your emails to see which performs better. This helps you improve your campaigns and learn more about your audience. A good thing to keep in mind is that you should run these tests on a subsection of your email list, before you send them out to your whole list.
Follow Email Regulations
Comply with regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR to avoid penalties. This includes providing clear unsubscribe options and not using deceptive language. Many email marketing management tools like MailChimp will help you make sure that you are complying with all of these requirements.
Track the Success of Your Campaigns
Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, and spam complaints to evaluate the performance of your campaigns and make data-driven improvements. Any good email marketing tool will be able to help you track these metrics.
Key Metrics to Track
Open Rate:
Indicates the percentage of subscribers who open your emails.
If you are seeing emails not getting opened, try changing the subject line.
Click-Through Rate:
Measures the percentage of subscribers who click on links within your emails.
If you are seeing low click through rates, you may want to look at changing your call to action in the email.
Bounce Rate:
Shows the percentage of emails that were not delivered. These might be bad email addresses, or indicate you have an issue with spam filters. Use tools like Mail Tester to check for any issues.
Newsletters spam test by mail-tester.com
Unsubscribes:
Indicates the number of people who unsubscribed from your email list.
These will happen naturally over time but look for any spikes in the average number of unsubscribes, especially after an email push.
Spam Complaints:
Tracks the number of times your emails were marked as spam.
These will happen, even if your emails are legitimate. I’ve personally had emails from newsletters that I signed up for be put into spam by Gmail. However, you should make sure that you are not seeing any large or consistent spikes in your emails getting marked as spam. If you do start looking for deliverability or other issues such as getting blacklisted by email providers.
If you want our help managing and optimizing your email marketing efforts, contact us today for a consultation and discover how Heartless Bastard Digital Strategies can help you succeed.
