Email marketing can be an extremely powerful way of selling products or growing a brand.
In this article, well look at its benefits as a form of promotion as well as provide some helpful hints and strategies for getting started with email marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing Is A Form Of Online Advertising
Email marketing can be an extremely powerful form of direct and digital advertising for promoting products or services, including integration into marketing automation tools to reach out directly to your customer base about new offerings or special discounts.
Emails also play an integral part in lead generation strategies as they build brand recognition while cultivating relationships or keeping consumers interested between purchases.
Ray Tomlinson sent the first-ever email, composed entirely of numbers and letters, but it marked an era in communication.
Additionally, Tomlinson is responsible for popularizing email addresses using "@" symbols; Gary Thuerk, who worked at Digital Equipment Corp in 1978, used this new direct method of informing consumers about products through emails sent directly.
In the 1990s, internet access became commercially accessible to everyone, and email became an invaluable advertising medium as peoples communication changed radically.
Email marketing necessitated new regulations; accordingly, the U.K. The Data Protection Act was revised to incorporate an opt-out option within all marketing emails sent out.
Email Marketing Has Many Advantages
Email marketing for business has long been one of the most powerful strategies, partly because email requires action - staying in your inbox until read, deleted, or archived.
Email marketing allows businesses to connect with customers while driving traffic back to other areas - be that their website, social media pages, or blog.
Emails can also be targeted based on demographic information so as only to send relevant messages directly.
Email marketing allows for A/B testing of subject and call-to-action lines of text messages to determine their most successful versions, thanks to email marketing software which also makes sending emails simple and efficient.
Email Marketing Has Its Disadvantages
Email marketing is an ideal way to connect with customers, find new clients, and build important business relationships.
However, it has some disadvantages. Many businesses use EZ Texting for communication.
Spam
Our inboxes are flooded with useless information. Click here to get a huge discount. They are sent to us all, and we delete them almost instantly.
We also only see some of these emails, as they are sent to our spam or junk folders. These messages, unless you actively avoid spam filters, are often a waste for companies that send them.
The Size
Your email may take too long to download, or it could not even load. During the time that it takes for your email to be downloaded, you may lose a customer.
Competitiveness
Email marketing has its disadvantages, but it is also a very popular marketing method. This means your message will be one of many emails in users mailboxes.
To stand out, hire copywriters who can write compelling messages or offer extra promotions to grab your customers attention.
Engaged In A Variety Of Ways
A customer will often sign up for email based solely on the offer or ad they saw. It may be that they dont use it.
They are in your database, but they may still need to click on your links and open your emails. If you dont find new ways to keep your audience engaged, then it could lead to high unopened rates and a large number of unsubscribes.
You can also Design your Own
Now that your email can be accessed across numerous devices - computers, phones, and tablets alike - designing emails optimized for each platform may prove challenging.
Email marketers dont always take into account which operating systems recipients utilize; once appealing emails can become confusing with breakage, logos, and missing graphics that irritate subscribers quickly; in many instances, these emails become difficult or unreadable as spam or scam, losing value while irritating recipients in turn.
The Cost Of The Product
Many email services claim theyre free, yet may charge extra fees for extra actions such as adding images or going over their word limit.
Before taking advantage of free email services or incurring additional costs incurred from them - be aware of any rules related to using them as well as fees that might arise; for instance, you might discover that having someone create and build up an email template and list may cost more than anticipated.
Examples Of Email Marketing
Email marketing comes in many forms. There are many different types of email marketing. Each has a specific purpose and a unique way to interact with your target audience.
Lets look at a few of these different kinds so that you can design the most effective email marketing campaign possible for your business.
Welcome Emails
The email will welcome your customers and invite them to find out more about the product or service. Sometimes they offer a free trial or another bonus.
This is done to attract a new potential customer.
Newsletter Emails
They are popular because they highlight the latest products and services. These emails may include customer testimonials, articles, and blogs.
There will usually be some call to action that encourages the reader to take action, such as reading a blog or trying out a product.
Lead Nurturing Emails
Lead nurturing emails aim to convert an audience by sending multiple, targeted emails over time. Lead nurture emails target specific groups who have expressed an interest in products or services they could purchase; by increasing interest through more relevant information and promotions sent in subsequent emails, they move users from consideration into purchase mode more rapidly.
Confirmation Emails
Confirmation emails should be sent out when someone signs up for newsletters or purchases an online item for the first time to verify all their details were sent successfully and ensure all relevant users remain on our lists to receive additional info in future emails.
Confirmations emails also serve to notify recipients theyve successfully placed their order or that their registration was complete.
Emails Dedicated to You
This is called a "dedicated email" if you only want to send an email to a specific part of your list. The list can be created based on criteria such as recent purchases, clients who are inactive, or new members.
Invite Emails
This type of email is often used to announce events, product launches, and seminars. These emails are used by most companies to draw attention to special events and raise awareness.
Emails Promotional
They are common, generic emails that go to large audiences. These emails are used for maintaining awareness, and they may also tease new services and products.
Survey Email
The best tool for any business is feedback from its customers. These emails show your customers you care about their opinions and that you want to offer them a product or experience they will enjoy.
These surveys can be used by businesses to improve their products and services.
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Emails For Seasonal Marketing
Many businesses use the holidays or other special occasions as an opportunity to inform their clients and prospects about upcoming promotions and sales.
These are usually tied to special occasions like Mothers Day and Fathers Day.
How To Build Your Email List
How can you begin building an email list to use for Internet marketing? There are various approaches you can take, all centered around treating customers well and applying effective marketing practices.
Stay away from purchasing email lists; policy prohibits this action. Creating lead magnets is one way of encouraging subscribers to opt-in; offer discounts or free shipping as incentives when people subscribe via your custom form, or allow subscribers to win something when signing up - these tactics could all help expand your mailing list quickly! Here are a few more strategies for building up an email database:
Establish national and international email rules. When sending automated emails, be aware of any local laws or legal requirements applicable in your region that affect automated emails, such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the US, Canadas Anti-Spam Law, or Europes General Data Protection Regulation that apply.
Educate yourself about any relevant legislation applicable both locally and to subscribers who receive automated messages from you.
Email can be an extremely powerful means of reaching customers and clients alike, not only as a marketing strategy but also for other purposes like sending surveys, thanking your clients for purchases theyve made or following up on an abandoned shopping cart, and even just saying hi and staying connected! Email allows your audience to provide valuable feedback while at the same time getting to know more about who runs their company and its leaders.
Do not abuse someone elses email address by bombarding subscribers inboxes with irrelevant emails that wont interest them; otherwise, they could lose interest and unsubscribe altogether.
Instead, provide engaging, relevant communications that reflect what their interests are to ensure long-term loyalty from subscribers.
IT Industry Will Benefit from 10 Myths about Email Marketing
Email marketing has long been one of the primary channels for digital promotion; having been around since at least 2001, it is no small feat in terms of digital promotion!.
Since it has been around for so long, cannabis has accumulated many myths and misconceptions that may cloud its true image. But times are shifting - now is the time to learn what cannabis truly can offer us all!
Some myths can be understood logically; their basis was once grounded in reality but has changed with best practices over time, leading to their persistence.
Other myths, however, can cause much consternation; believing such myths could significantly compromise an email marketing campaigns success and must never happen! Nobody wants that fate for themselves!.
This blog aims to disprove myths, misconceptions, and misunderstandings surrounding email marketing. Suppose you would like to submit any myths for consideration by us in the form of a comments section submission.
Our next part may even need your input!
The Myths of Email Marketing
1. Trigger Words that Land You in Spam Filter
Email marketers have long been instructed not to include certain words in subject email lines that are often associated with spam - for instance, "Free," "Cash," "Quote," and "Save." This was due to spam messages flooding email inboxes at one time; now, spam filters have become much better at recognizing legitimate emails than before, and they take into account more factors when determining if an email should be classified as spam than just its subject line alone.
As part of our own test to examine if "Free" would affect the deliverability of emails, we conducted our own experiment to see whether including it raised red flags but had any impact.
It makes sense since this gives an indication as to whether or not someone may be spam.
2. The People On Your Opt-In List Want To Hear From You
All your contacts come through opt-ins - an amazing feat in itself! This means people have raised their hands to say: hey you! You! It is true...
yet not entirely so; some opt in but dont intend on staying subscribed; when someone opts in, they could expect something different or may become disappointed by what their email messages actually contain; alternatively, they could unsubscribe at some point later if necessary.
Over time, contacts may read your email but become disengaged with it over time - perhaps due to changes at work, relocation, busy lives, or simply losing interest in what was said - though they never unsubscribe outright.
Your list may include subscribers that once appeared interested in what you offer but later decided not to engage.
Instead of solely counting unsubscribes as evidence of engagement with emails sent out from you, pay close attention to how people actually use and interact with these communications.
So it is crucial that your email engagement be periodically assessed, reinvolve disengaged recipients into your campaign, and purge any contacts who dont respond back after repeated re-engagement attempts (you can read up on how best to achieve this here on our blog).
3. Unsubscriptions are Bad
When someone unsubscribes, they wish to refrain from hearing from you. Bad, right? But slower. Unsubscribing from your email list is a great way to clean up the list.
As weve just discussed, you have a lot of people who want to avoid receiving your emails. They wont bother to open your email and unsubscribe.
Unsubscribes are fine if you maintain a low unsubscribe percentage (less than 1%). Consider it a natural cleansing of your list that you need to perform to maintain a healthy one.
4. Lead Generation by Email is Not Effective
Email marketing strategy can be used as an effective tool for nurturing leads.
It helps convert them to qualified marketing leads while not directly producing new net leads. But does that really work?
Wrong. Email should not only be used as a nurturing tool. Keep in mind that emails get shared frequently - with those outside your list as well.
If an email containing a call-to-action that generates leads is shared or forwarded by people not already on it, this may create new leads! If you still need to implement forwarding and sharing social media buttons into your emails, now would be an opportune moment to add forwarding and sharing buttons!
Email can also help generate leads because it combines lead generation with nurturing: when subscribers subscribe to our blog, they only agree to receive notifications about new blog posts - not signing up for webinars or attending.
Whenever we notify these subscribers about newly posted blogs via email alerting, this alert could contain a CTA that generates leads, effectively upgrading them into leads within your database.
5. Emails Must Be Well-Designed
No doubt. Sometimes sending plain text emails has many advantages over complicated ones. Sending plain emails that almost exclusively use plain text brings some advantages for both sides.
No one likes being sold to, so our recipients didnt feel pressured into reading what you have to say; readers could read as is without distraction from bells and whistles.
Not everyone responded positively - although some segments responded more favorably to HTML than others on our test list - results may differ depending on who receives and reads your email, as with many email tests.
Email messages tend to render more easily than their desktop equivalents; rendering emails with multiple elements, such as large images and videos, may prove more complex, though.
Your recipients might turn off images by default which could alter how it displays; additionally, mobile device readers might take longer for your email to load fully and look the way it was meant when designed on desktop PCs; rendering is, therefore, often not guaranteed when designing for mobile readers.
No need for complex designs in email marketing simply for the sake of it - test out more complex design elements gradually to see if any increase in conversion rate occurs as a result.
6. You Are A Winner If You Follow The Can-Spam Laws
Nuh-uh. Youre in compliance with the law if you follow CAN-SPAM. But it doesnt guarantee that you will get in inboxes.
Theres a higher correlation between those who are CAN SPAM-compliant and people who are inboxed. Spammers reach inboxes less than legitimate email marketers.
You need to improve your reputation as a sender if youre going to get more emails into your inbox. As a starting point, I recommend reading this article, "How Marketers Can Avoid Those Dreaded Email Spam Traps." Stay CAN-SPAM Compliant and, of course!
7. The Open Rate Is An Important Email Marketing Metric
Email service providers often misrepresent open email rates as being indicative of who has opened your emails in total on your mailing list.
The title implies this will show exactly who has read each one from you! Email open rates would be crucially important to monitor if available as an accurate metric. Unfortunately, open email rates can often be unreliable due to various causes.
As Outlook recipients by default block images, their open rate cannot be accurately tracked as any time an image download indicates an email open, no such opens would have been recorded if all images had been blocked by default.
Email clients increasingly support image-blocking features by default or can block images automatically; email marketers might think I hate their images but, generally speaking, I do not.
Similar to desktop computers, mobile devices often default to text-only emails without automatic image downloads; this increases open rates significantly.
Pay attention to your click-through rate on email calls-to-action and how many leads were generated; that should matter.
8. The Open Rate Is A Useless Email Marketing Metric
Its true; I told you that open email rates arent important metrics. It doesnt necessarily mean that it isnt useful.
Open rates for emails are useful in comparison. You can compare open rates by segmenting your email and assuming that theyre all affected similarly by "issues" with open rate metrics.
Open rate may not be a good email marketing metric for gauging how many people open your emails, but it is still a useful metric when compared to other metrics.
9. Email Marketing No Longer Works
Many people believe that because of the growth of content marketing, email marketing has lost its effectiveness.
This is not the case.
In 2015, more than 205 Billion emails were sent and received. This number will only increase as 3 billion users of email are expected by 2020.
Email marketing remains highly successful, not only because it is popular but also because email is still widely used. Email marketing generates an ROI of $38 on average for each dollar spent.
10. It Takes Time And Resources To Do Email Marketing
Email marketing might appear time-consuming and costly; however, its use can benefit all companies regardless of size or budget.
Build an email list by including an opt-in form on social media pages and your website, working with an experienced content marketing provider to develop an email plan tailored specifically for your goals, brand, and size.
Pennington Creative can assist your agency or small business in realizing the full benefits of email marketing. Content is an effective solution that offers advantages both large and small alike, so let us develop your email strategy today.
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Conclusion
Email campaigns with value are the best way to engage your audience. The reader will be interested in the message if it offers them value.
Email marketing solutions are an excellent way to stay in the minds of customers and prospects so that they do not think about your competitors.
Your email marketing campaign will be successful if you do it correctly. It can also lead to customers taking action, something that all companies want.
