What is Email Marketing?

Digital marketing is essential for the success of modern-day marketing strategies. Email marketing is the best digital marketing technique for return on investment as found by research by Campaign Monitor. Email marketing is a way to promote your products and services directly to the customer. Not only does it help to promote your business, but it also builds relationships with customers and leads.

Every email you send to a lead or existing customer is a form of email marketing. Therefore, you should optimise every email you send with techniques such as forms and call-to-actions (CTAs).

Ways in which you can optimise your email marketing:

Subscription forms and consent The caveat to email marketing is that, when done in excess, it can feel like spam that just clogs up your client’s inbox. There is a fine line between clever marketing and spam. Therefore, you want to make sure that your mailing lists are specifically sent only to those who have manually ticked a box or given written consent to opt into receiving email marketing from your business. That way you know that your newsletters and promotions are going to have a lower bounce rate and higher engagement potential as they are being received by the people who want to see it.

Sales, Deals, and Promotions Sales, deals, and promotions are always an effective way of drawing in more sales. Emails that are specifically designed to only have one promotion or purpose is a great way to make sure your emails do not become a nuisance or too spammy to the customer but rather a welcome and useful piece of correspondence.

Variety Don’t only send out Newsletters and promotions. You want your emails to be as insightful and helpful for the customer as possible. Blogs and insights are often useful tools in a marketing strategy as they can provide free, beneficial advice, particularly about your company or products.

Emailing lists and Segmentation Emailing lists are a quick and easy way to maintain an open line of communication with your clientele. Your emails may be relevant to some clients but not others. To avoid people un-subscribing from your mailing list make sure you’re sending your content to the right people and not just everyone.

Segmenting your prospects, customers, and clients into persona groups helps to streamline your email marketing strategy. You could have your mailing lists segmented into ‘audience type’ groups on your customer management system (CMS) allowing you to send the right content to the right people every time. This way, every email you send will feel personal as they will always be focused on that group of people’s particular shopping habits or needs.

Personal touches Personalisation such as addressing the email recipient by name or emailing when previously desired products come back in stock can also be worthwhile tactics. You want to make your subscribers feel special by giving them a personalised service. This is supported by research from HubSpot who found that personalisation is the number one tactic used by email marketeers to improve performance.

Social media strategy Ideally, your email marketing strategy should go hand in hand with your social media strategy. You want to make sure all emails have links to all your business socials to be easily shareable and increase reach.

CTA buttons You want to make sure every email you have has a purpose. An easy way to do this is with call-to-action buttons. Whether that be a subscribe button, a link to a new product, or a promo code, you want to make sure your emails have goals that you can easily analyse.

Legal obligations Make sure your emails have a button to make it easy to unsubscribe from the mailing list and are never click bait. If your email subject headers are misleading or you don’t give an easy opt- out option, you could come into issues with the CAN-SPAM Act. It is always best to put your customers first and always avoid trapping them in marketing schemes. Marketing material will only be effective to those who voluntarily want it. Otherwise, your content will just be flagged as spam and alienate any further potential business transactions.

Routine Having a schedule can be a good way of making your customers comfortable with your content in their inbox. They will be able to expect when they will receive marketing material from you and so it will become less of a nuisance and more of a routine. Research from HubSpot found that 35% of marketers choose to send three-to-five emails per week to their customers and that 80% of marketers have found increased engagement with email marketing since 2020.

Mobile responsiveness Make your emails mobile responsive. Mobiles are only becoming more and more integral to our everyday lives, particularly our shopping behaviours. Think with Google found that 59% of shoppers surveyed say that being able to shop on mobile is important when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from and Litmus found that in 2019 42% of email opens were done on mobile. Those are not numbers to be scoffed at. This is not only important for shoppers and the retail sector. This research shows how important it is to be able to check emails while on the go.

Perks of email marketing

Emails can be an integral part of your marketing campaign and the results can be easily analysed. They are easy to set up, track if they have reached your audience, and trace exactly who clicks on the desired links. For instance, you will know instantly if someone signs up for your newsletter from the email sign up option. Research by Litmus found that companies who A/B tested every email gained a 37% higher increase in marketing returns than those who do not use this analysis method.

The ability to segment your mailing lists makes email automation very easy. Some CMSs are capable of scheduling emails in advance. These emails are triggered to be sent to a customer or lead when they complete a desired action. Emails can be used to reignite a customer’s interest, to share promotions, to thank the customer and more.

Email marketing can be a very low-cost marketing technique and an easy way to send regular business and promotion updates.

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