Email marketing is not as shiny as other marketing strategies like social media and messaging but it should be the key pillar for your digital marketing strategy as it is the most profitable and cost-effective direct marketing channel. It’s targeted, effective, and efficient, so you can build deep connections with customers even when your marketing budget is small.
If you are a bit confused about where to start? Then its quite normal. So here we will have a detailed discussion on everything that you need to know about email marketing.
After reading this you will know:
- How to create a email list with engaged customer.
- How to get those customers to click on your website regularly.
- How to convert potential customers into frequent buyers.
So lets get started.
Table of Contents
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing strategy that uses email to promote your business product and services. In other words mails are sent to a list of customers and prospects also known as email subscribers.
Email marketing has evolved rapidly in recent years so that now we can personalize content within emails, and create highly segmented audiences.
Why is Email Marketing important ?It is economic and cost effective
- Email marketing allows business owners to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of nearly nothing per message. For small-business owners on a budget, this makes it a better choice than traditional marketing channels like TV, radio.
- It is used by 50% of the world population.
- Mobile devices allow people to check email constantly.
- Email helps in building brand awareness.
- Emails builds relationship and credibility.
- It is an active channel to acquire new customers.
- It shows excellent return on investment and thus in turn increases the value of your online business.
- Email marketing can be automated.
- Performance can be measured easily and accurately.
How does email marketing works?
Its not a complicated process as it you are using electronic email as a form of communication between your company and your audience. You should find out the best way to communicate with your subscribers in a way that is beneficial for them and for your business goals.
An effective email marketing campaign requires the following element.
- Create an email list
For email marketing to work, you should have a list of active email list who have expressed interest in receiving marketing communications from your brand. It’s not only a matter of adding random people to your list but people who manually registered to receive your emails. The best way to build an email list is by giving them trial offers or other gifts in exchange of their email address.
- Sign up for an email marketing tool
Email marketing can be fully automated using an email marketing tool. It is a software that helps in managing your email list, sending emails to your audience, create email funnels to redirect users to pages/products you want them to take. This in turn helps to increase your conversion rate.
- Clearly defined goals
You can use email marketing to drive sales, increase brand awareness, generate leads and increase customer loyalty and lifetime value.
- Regularly clean up your email list
One of the ways to minimize your costs and increase the healthiness of your email list is to occasionally perform a list clean up and remove inactive subscribers from your list. Customers those who registered for your list but never check your campaigns are not good for your business. So it is essential to clean up your email list at intervals as big list will cost you a lot of money to maintain it.
Advantages and Disadvantages of email marketing
Advantages
- The cost of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs.
- Your email list will be made up of customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business.
- You can evaluate the success of a campaign by using web analytics software. This allows you to optimize future campaigns.
- Through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website.
Disadvantages
- Spam email irritates customer. If your email is not targeted to right people, they may delete or unsubscribe.
- Files need to be small enough to download quickly. Emails containing many images may take too long to load, frustrating your audience and losing their interest.
- Poorly designed emails may not get delivered. Emails that use certain spam keywords or characters in the subject heading or content of the email, are likely to be filtered out by email software and internet service providers.