“Email Marketing is buried in the grave -dead”, we have all heard this pretty often from time to time, chanted in marketing circles. The truth is very different though. Email Marketing is as thriving today as it was when email first came out, and it will keep growing and evolving with every new IT advancement.
To the newcomer, email marketing is a complex form of digital marketing which will take quite some time to learn, practice and master. Forget all the complicated lists and articles you read on the internet about email marketing.
Here are some time tested, proven strategies to start an email marketing campaign and guarantee your business success in 2020.
What is Email Marketing?
Ask yourself, who does not use email marketing? The answer is not surprising. Almost 9 out of 10 people have in some form used an email. It has become an essential form of communication which is dartingly used by everyone, especially adults and professionals.
Now picture this most used form of communication being used for marketing. Reaching out to customers and potential customers with offers and discounts. Sending product updates, flash sales and other promotional content, or simply just initiating a conversation which will someday lead to a sale.
Is that not efficient? In simple terms, when a company uses the email channel to reach out to its customers, potential customers and target groups to promote and conduct its business it is known as email marketing.
Got that weekly newsletter from Myntra? Got that weekend offer from Amazon? Got that webinar invite? These are all examples of email marketing. If used correctly, email marketing is a very powerful and efficient channel to capitalize on with a guarantee of exponential results.
Is Email Marketing the right channel for me?
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The short answer is yes. Email Marketing is one of the most cost-effective and successful channels of marketing in the modern age. It really does not matter whether you are a one-man business, a freelancer, a small start-up or large company, you can employ email marketing as a channel of marketing to ideally reach and interact with your target group. The first level of marketing begins with interaction with your ideal customers, informing them about your products/ services and getting them interested. Email as a channel for marketing can enable you to easily initiate the conversation with customers.
Prepare a nice mail which has information about all your products and services, what your business stands for and how the customer can benefit. Content like this can easily get potential customers hooked and interested in your business/ products/ services. Once you have their attention, you can eventually start marketing to them.
How to get started with your email marketing campaign?
Before you get started with an email marketing campaign, you must know one thing. Email Marketing is no magic pill to get sales and new customers. It is a slow process of building trust and rapport with your ideal customers. So, if you are expecting that you will just instantly gain followers and gain customers, then that will not happen because the channel of email marketing is focused more towards long term growth. Advertising is ideal for short term growth while an email marketing campaign is a long term, arduous process which must be done constantly for an increase in lead generation, sales and customer acquisition
Why starting an email marketing campaign is challenging and how can you do it?
Email is the primary source of a person’s digital identity. Because of this reason, people are very cautious as to whom they give out their emails. To begin with a campaign, you must first have an email marketing list through which you can contact, connect and establish a marketing channel.
The best way to collect email IDs is through a few different methods. Let’s have a look:
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- Start an online blog and newsletter. Newsletters are an effective way of collecting email from your blog/ website visitors. The benefit of this method is that the people who sign up for your email newsletter will already be interested in learning more about your business/ services. Which in turn means that they will be more receptive and accepting to your email marketing.
- Ask visitors to sign up on your website/blog/ online store. Asking customers and visitors to signup is an effective way of getting their email ID. You can add incentives and offers for those people who sign up, as a way to increase the number of people who sign up. Most people like freebies, offering a freebie such as a pdf, discount coupon or offer will help you in getting more registrations, which will also increase and grow your list of email ID’s
- Invite customers and visitors for special email offers and discounts. The easiest way to get a person’s email ID is to be open and frank about why you are asking for it. Inform your customers about your email marketing offers and you will see that, most people who are your interested and frequent customers will be very likely to share their email ID.
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Once you have successfully built a list of even 5 email ID’s you can begin focusing on email marketing, but the bigger your mailing list, the more results you will get. So always work towards growing your mailing list to increase the success rate of your email marketing campaigns.
The next step would be to organize your email list in one place which will make it easy for you to mail your customers based on the requirements of your email marketing campaigns. Doing so will make your email marketing easier to organize as you will have everything in the same place. It will also enable you to personalize your email marketing campaigns, helping in increasing lead generation as it is a proven fact that customers respond positively to emails and marketing material which is personalized to suit their needs. Generalized content works too but not as good as personalized content does.
But how do I actually conduct an email marketing campaign?
Now that you have understood the prerequisites of email marketing. The next step in becoming a successful email marketer is to understand your customers and build campaigns around your customers’ needs and demands. As mentioned above, customers are more likely to respond to personalized content rather than generalized content.
Like any marketing campaign begins with a goal, your email marketing campaigns also must have a fixed goal, which will help you measure if your campaign is working or not.
Set a marketing goal and identify the right target group which will help in achieving that goal. For example, if you wish to run a campaign which aims to sell 50 jewellery items in the following week, the ideal target customer group will be that of women.
The real benefit of having a large mailing list will now come in handy. You will need to filter out your mailing list for women customers as they will form the basis of your campaign. Now you are all set to begin marketing through mail.
Let’s look at the steps once again:
- Prepare Email List
- Organize Email List
- Set a campaign goal
- Set a target group which will fulfil the requirement of the Campaign Goal
- Create Personalized Email based on Campaign Goal and Target Group
- Publish Campaign
Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing is simple and successful but it all depends on how good you can communicate with your customers and how likeable your brand is. The best solution for this is to build a trusting relationship with customers. This can be achieved in many ways like offering a genuinely good product, not overcharging or defrauding the customers. You can go a step forward and give timely incentives and bonuses to your customers for staying loyal to you. Achieving this long-lasting trust and loyalty ensures that your customers are interested in your business/ products/ services.
Your focus should always be on keeping the emails short and simple, and a friendly tone of voice. Design the mail in a beautiful and aesthetic manner which will keep the customers interested and interacting with you. A best practise of email marketing is to never burden your mailing list with constant emails which they will start to get irritated with.
Always keep it friendly, witty and professional. Write a good email subject line which will get people to open it. Here is an example for you:
Bad Tagline: Shoes On Sale
Good Tagline: You cannot miss this! Your favourite shoes are on sale
You will also need to monitor your campaign for how many people opened it, how many people responded to it, did people take the action you want them to take?
Depending on how many people opened your mail, how many took action etc. You can understand if your email was a success or not. The higher the numbers, the better your success rate.
The last thing that you are wondering by now is, where do I actually conduct my email marketing? And we have just the perfect answer for you
What to use for email marketing?
If you are just beginning your journey as an email marketer, you will come across many automation services that assist you and drive your campaign in the right direction. Among them, a few noticeable names are MailChimp, HubSpot, SendinBlue and so on.
The question is, which one should you try out in 2020?
We came across one particular platform that can be just the right one for you.
PeppyBiz allows you to create and publish email marketing campaigns at the click of a button. It’s intuitive and user friendly which means you do not need to be a tech expert to use it.
PeppyBiz’s email marketing allows you to create email lists from scratch or pre-existing data. It has a detailed and beautiful email designing tool and you do not have to be a professional designer to use it. You can design emails from scratch or use their pre-existing templates.
The best thing about PeppyBiz’s email marketing is that it is a complete tool which also lets you manage and monitor your email campaigns. You can access all the statistics about your email campaign and its performance. What’s more, is that you can track your campaign and its performance with real time performance tracking.
It’s simple and powerful. It integrates other services like MailChimp in its software, so it is definitely worth checking out.
Follow the 10 Best Strategies for email marketing success.
- Choose the correct service: PeppyBiz, SendinBlue, etc.
- Create and grow your mailing list
- Create an email marketing goal
- Define the ideal target audience for your goal
- Design beautiful, friendly and professional emails
- Publish campaign and send mail to your target audience
- Monitor progress of your campaign
- Optimize for changes based on campaign performance
- Repeat from Step 1
