Email marketing is marketing to your customers via emails. It takes a cue from its pre-digital age predecessor, direct-mail marketing. In the old days (and occasionally today), companies would send dozens of sales letters, catalogues, newsletters, or coupon books to customer’s physical mailboxes every week.
Each of these communications served a specific marketing goal. A sales letter asked you to send a check for the product, a catalogue, or coupon book enticed you to come into the store, and a newsletter shared behind-the-scenes updates to help you feel more connected to the brand.
There would be something eye-catching on the envelope to motivate you to open the mailer. Then the design and copy kept you reading until the end (if the marketer did his or her job right.)
A very similar dynamic now exists in the email marketing world. Companies still send sales pitches, coupon codes, product announcements, and newsletters directly to customers. Only now, most send them through – you guessed it – email.
Instead of a snazzy phrase on the envelope to inspire you to open it, email marketing relies on compelling subject lines.
Email marketing can take many forms. However, the birds-eye view of how email marketing works is the following:
- First, a company convinces customers to provide their email addresses & permission to send marketing emails to them.
- Next, the company sends a welcome email. This email is meant to set expectations for what’s to come and solidify the tone of their email marketing.
- Finally, the company begins sending each subscriber their regular marketing emails. The content, frequency, and structure of marketing emails depend on the company’s goals.
Many service-based businesses send helpful, in-depth content related to their service (much like blog articles), which are designed to establish the company as a reliable authority in their industry. Other types of businesses, such as e-commerce companies, send promotional emails announcing a new product launch or sale. The content of your email marketing will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.
- Creating personalized content.
With email marketing, you can customize your campaigns and create targeted content. Personalization can be as small as including a contact’s name in the email. In fact, emails that include the first name of the recipient in their subject line have a higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t.
On the other hand, you can also create individualized content based on segmenting your audience so you send the right emails to the right customers. For instance, perhaps you want to send an email marketing campaign to returning customers and a different one to one-time customers.
One of the main benefits of email marketing is that your content can be highly personalized to your audience’s needs. Your emails might have variations including different images or subject lines to increase your engagement. You can even create segmented lists based on geography or engagement levels. To have a successful email marketing strategy, you need to send the right email to the right people at the right time. That’s where segmentation and personalization can help.
- Collecting feedback and surveys.
Keeping a pulse on the customer experience is very valuable if you want customers to continue to interact, engage, and purchase from your brand. Email marketing can help you do this. For instance, you can send customer satisfaction surveys to obtain customer feedback through email campaigns.
In fact, this is one of the best ways to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This score helps you find out the percentage of customers who are brand ambassadors and the ones who are detractors. With this information, you can come up with strategies to improve your customer experience.
- Improving sales.
While email marketing is clearly an excellent marketing tool, it can actually improve your sales as well. In fact, 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI and marketers who used segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
Email marketing campaigns can feature products or services, encourage customers to purchase after abandoning their cart, or deliver special offers to your customers. Furthermore, 59% of respondents in this survey say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. Your email marketing campaigns can easily incorporate messages to encourage a purchase to an audience that’s more likely to buy from you because they’ve opted-in to your messages and updates.
Additionally, you can use email marketing to automate part of your sales process, which can help increase sales as well. For instance, with HubSpot’s free email marketing tool, you can automate sales drip campaigns and send automated messages to prospects your salespeople want to follow up with.
- Communicating with your audience.
As a marketer, it’s always important to improve communication with your audience. When your audience feels like they can talk to you, they’re more likely to become loyal to your brand. Just think — people appreciate good emails. Think back to the last time you received a marketing email from a brand you love — was it disruptive or did you enjoy looking at the latest news? If it’s a brand you like, you probably enjoyed the experience and it kept you in touch with one of your favorite brands. With email marketing, you can reach more of your audience and easily communicate with brand ambassadors. Plus, these emails keep your audience engaged during every time of the year, whether it’s a slow or busy season.
- Generating traffic to your site.
When you produce great content, how do you disseminate it to your audience? Most likely, you send them an email.
With email marketing campaigns, you’ll send traffic to your site and improve your SEO. Plus, you’ll keep your audience engaged with your brand and your site. For example, many of you might have reached this page from a marketing email from HubSpot. That’s because email is a great way to provide value to our audience, and we do that by sending our content in our emails and generating traffic. When you’re creating an email that links to your content, keep in mind that each email should contain a call to action (CTA) so readers can click through to your site.
- Sending timely campaigns.
Although traditional marketing campaigns have a time and place, they can take months to plan and organize. Even then, you probably aren’t sure if people are going to see your campaign assets at the right time. However, with email marketing, you can create an entire campaign on shorter notice because they don’t take as long to plan. Additionally, you can ensure your audience sees the email at the right time. For example, you can make sure you send content at the right time by segmenting your audience.
- Increasing leads.
In the same vein as improving sales, you can also increase your leads with email marketing. In fact, with the inbound method, email marketing is used to nurture leads and improve conversions.
For example, let’s say you downloaded a lead magnet from a site. Then, you start receiving drip emails, and in the end, you decide to book a demo and learn more. You just went from an MQL to an SQL, which improves the marketing teams number of qualified leads to the sales team. Email marketing campaigns can further qualify leads so your sales team isn’t wasting time on bad leads. Plus, if your company does lead scoring you can keep track of whether those leads open your emails or engage by clicking the links in your email.
- Reaching the right people at the right time.
To have a successful marketing campaign, you have to reach the right customers at the right time. Yes, I’m reiterating this point because it’s that important. With email marketing, it’s that much easier to reach people because they always check their email. They can check it at any time, on multiple devices, which can improve the success of any marketing campaign. This means you’re getting in front of your audience on a regular basis, so you’re always top-of-mind.
- Producing cost-effective campaigns.
While traditional campaigns like direct or print can be costly, email marketing campaigns tend to be more cost-effective. For example, you won’t have to pay for any photoshoots, location fees, printers, mailing, or placement. All you need is a copywriter and graphic artist (if you aren’t using stock images). This can even be one person on your team.
Additionally, email campaigns don’t take long to produce. If needed, you can produce an email in one day, which is much more cost-effective than the time it takes to produce a direct or print campaign. Since time and budget constraints always impact marketers, email marketing campaigns can be more efficient, while also generating revenue and leads.
- Providing more value to your audience.
One of the main goals of any business is to provide value for your audience so they keep coming back. Email marketing is a great place to cultivate loyal customers because you can add value even when customers aren’t making a purchase.
Additionally, since customers or prospects opted-in, you can use email marketing to provide more resources to contacts who are interested in what you have to say. If you continuously provide value for your audience, more people will pay attention and you’ll produce a higher ROI.
- Having a forum for self-promotion.
Sometimes it can be awkward to self-promote in places where prospects haven’t necessarily opted-in to receive updates about your business. However, self-promotion is one of the best ways to attain customers. If you can’t promote yourself and sell your company, no one will buy from you.
With email marketing campaigns, you’ll always have an avenue to promote yourself, especially since customers opted-in. You can send emails about new products, features and benefits, or new content. Since customers want to hear from you, this self-promotion isn’t unwanted or disruptive.
- Owning your media and contact lists.
With platforms like social media, you don’t own your contact list or even the information you post. Typically, the content and your follower list is owned by the social media platform. Just think — if social media went away tomorrow, how many followers and customers would you lose?
That’s why building an email list is important for marketers. This is a contact list you own and you can interact with them regardless of the email provider. Plus, you’ll also own the content that you produce and send as well. Email marketing is one of the top ways to reach your audience. Plus, it can also improve sales and leads. Since this is still the place where people want to receive information, let’s just say that email marketing isn’t dead.
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Source: blog.hubspot.com
