Email Marketing 101
“Would you like to subscribe to receive regular updates about our business?”
This is the question that you can find in almost every contact-form submission, when you complete a purchase online, or any time you accept the terms and conditions of an online service.
If you’re like us, your inbox is probably overwhelmed with emails advertising their weekly ads, new products, or “best sale of the year.” These are all email marketing tactics aimed to get you back on their website, investing in the particular company’s products and/or services.
Email marketing is simply an advertisement a company sends to a database of customer emails at a predetermined frequency in order to inform and advertise their products or services.
Does Email Marketing Work?
With 39 billion daily email users, a HubSpot 2020 study found that email marketing is one of the best channels for generating an astoundingly high return on investment (ROI) — coming in at 3,800% ROI. In this study, “59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions,” which means email marketing can be directly linked to more income for your business.
5 Steps for How to Do Email Marketing, Successfully
However, it’s important to note that not every email marketing campaign is a success — it takes preparation, forethought, and strategic targeting. Without intent, your email will end up with all of the other emails clogging up inboxes, or tossed in the trash. We’ve listed the top five factors to consider when developing your campaign.
The Email List:
Your email marketing campaign will only be as successful as the email database you’ve compiled. There are many different methods to obtaining emails including, but not limited to, the ones listed above. Once you’ve collected your email list, it’s important to consider how your different audiences will engage with your products or services — not every user will want to interact with your business in the same way. And after you have segmented your database, you will still lose emails due to users unsubscribing from your list. That’s why it’s important to regularly maintain and update your database to ensure each customer is receiving relevant content.
The Frequency:
According to the previously mentioned HubSpot article, most companies send 3-5 emails to their customers each week. However, that may be too overwhelming depending on your products and services, how often the offerings update, and how often you can produce quality content. It’s important to analyze this regularly, as you don’t want to lose contacts through unsubscribing — this is common if the content you publish is not relevant to the customer, or if they feel they are being spammed with too many emails.
The Content:
At this point, we’re sure that you understand just how important the content is to the success of your email marketing campaign. Many email marketing services offer templated emails, but it’s up to you to provide the images, the text, and the products, services or information you are offering to the customer. This content will vary depending on your business, however one thing will remain the same — you want the content to drive traffic to your website by developing a compelling and specific call to action.
The Time:
After you’ve spent all the time and resources building your email database and developing the content, it’s vital that your email is delivered to your customer’s inbox at a time when they are available to receive and interact. By studying industry insights and the behaviors of your target audience, you’ll get a better understanding of when customers are most likely to click on your email and complete the call to action.
Optimization:
The fifth and final step should be an ongoing process of monitoring your email campaigns’ success, and learning from the failures. Not every email will be widely received, but you can learn from each click and alter the content and recipients of future emails to ensure the success of your email marketing campaign.
Which email service provider is right for you?
There are a multitude of email marketing services including HubSpot, emma, Campaign Monitor, send grid, and many more. Finding the right service for your business is an important first step, but regardless of the service you choose, the success of your campaign will depend on your team’s capacity to build and regularly monitor each email.
Many businesses find that they don’t have the internal capacity or industry expertise to run successful email marketing campaigns on their own. If you’re one of those businesses, Brand Mark Digital can help. Using our 30+ years of combined experience, we can help you develop targeted email marketing campaigns that sell your products and services to the people who want them most.
Contact us today, and we’ll help you deliver targeted messaging to your customers’ inboxes.
