Digital marketing has become quite popular among businesses these days. More than television or radio, brands are focusing more on advertising their products online through digital channels like emails, websites, mobile applications, social media, and so on. If you are familiar with digital marketing, you may know that it is a vast field involving a number of aspects – Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, content marketing, and email marketing. Professionals skilled in these marketing techniques are in high demand these days.
When brands start with digital marketing, they may initially focus on PPC marketing, content marketing, and SEO. But what about email marketing? In this age of social media and instant networking options, has email marketing lost its essence? You may think people do not check their emails regularly, and the efforts put into them may not offer good results. However, the stats depict a different story altogether.
- Email generates $38 for every $1 invested, which means a 3800% return on investment.
- 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device.
- 73% of millennials prefer communication from companies to come via email.
- 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
- Marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as high as a 760% increase in revenue.
So, we can be confident of the fact that email marketing is still one of the most effective means of promoting products and services online.
This article introduces you to email marketing and how you can get started with it.
Email Marketing – How to Get Started?
You may be receiving loads of emails every day; some of them are personal while others are promotional. Whenever you check out Quora, book a hotel online, order food from Zomato, or wait for an OTP while transferring money, you receive an email. Companies send emails to give an enhanced user experience and then gradually try to make you their customer. So email marketing is all about the promotion of products and services through email. By targeting the audience through this channel, companies aim to boost conversions and revenue over time.
Let’s discuss some of the steps which can help you get started with email marketing.
The foremost step in email marketing is the creation of an email list. It refers to the people you want to send emails to. Now, a number of users may have already subscribed to your website. If not, create forms or a pop-up window asking people to subscribe. Though it is not an easy task, you can offer some freebies like webinars, e-books, pdfs, or audios to give them a strong reason for the subscription.
Once you have the email list ready, it’s time to understand your audience. Find out what they want, and tailor your email campaign accordingly. You can learn about the different types of email campaigns and decide which will best suit your audience – it can be a new service announcement, informative blog post, the weekly newsletter, etc.
Next, you need to schedule your email campaigns. The audience may not want daily updates and may find weekly emails better. Understand what they expect and create relevant content, including an attractive call to action that makes the audience check out your content. Make sure that the content doesn’t seem too promotional. One of the most important things in the content is the subject. Write a compelling subject that makes people curious to check out what the email is all about. Don’t shy away from using a personal tone, as people find it more interesting when something is written similar to their day-to-day conversations. Additionally, make a smooth transition from adding value to pitching a product through the content.
The best thing about digital marketing is your campaign performance is measurable. The same holds true for email marketing. Using email analytics, you can find out some valuable insights like how many people opened your email, how many of them took a step further through your email (like clicking on the content link you provided on your email), and how many conversions were made. All such information can be tracked through metrics like open rate, click-through rate, subscriptions, and so on. A variety of tools are available in the market that can help you track all these metrics. By gaining such feedback, you will understand what steps can be taken to improve your email campaigns.
By following all the above steps, you may gradually start getting more subscribers, and your email list will grow. Now is the right time to split your email list into more targeted groups, i.e., use email segmentation. Divide the audience into categories like frequency of email (daily, weekly, or monthly), location, newsletter subscribers, prospects or existing customers, customers who only need offers/discount updates, and so on. It will allow you to send more relevant emails to your target audience, and they will be more likely clicked.
Businesses often do not have much time to send different personalized emails for each customer when their email list is huge. In such cases, email automation can be used carefully to send out emails regularly and maintain customer engagement. It allows brands to plan their email campaigns well in advance and schedule the series of emails to be sent over a period of time. This way, they can engage with the audience regularly and make sure they pay attention to your offerings.
Now that you have an idea about the basic steps, start with your email marketing campaign today. Only when you start will you learn how to improve over time and gain more subscribers.
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