The Complete Beginners Guide to Email Marketing: The 10 lessons for your email marketing campaigns
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New to digital marketing and want to grow business, but don’t know what is email marketing?
Well, prior to getting started, you must know that email marketing is a major component of digital marketing that enhances the chance of reaching the maximum target audience.
As a beginner, you must know everything about email marketing, as getting started without complete knowledge, can shatter your dreams of yielding maximum return on investment. To learn and sharpen your skill to promote brands, products, and services online, we bring to you the beginner’s guide to email marketing.
Let’s get started.
What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is one of the oldest formats of marketing. It is also one of the cheapest methods of marketing since it costs nothing to find prospects and communicate to existing customers.
Email marketing is so far the best online marketing strategy, as it allows you to connect with prospects and customers directly. This strategy is useful to increase brand awareness among the target audience.
It’s not just that, email marketing is useful to make the buyers and prospects know about the product, services, and deals you offer. Email marketing is a powerful strategy for lead generation and to user engagement by dropping them a mail about new deals, contests, loyalty programs, and more.
Email marketing permits you to share all the latest updates about your brand, product, and services with the people who agree to receive emails from your end.
In legal words, these people are the subscribers of your company. The approach to perform this type of online marketing changed with passage of time.
In today’s world, email marketing emphasize on content relevancy, customization and segmentation on the basis of users demographic, behaviour, interest and buying journey.
By doing the A/B testing of the subject line, email marketing also proves beneficial to find the relevant subject line which offers a better open rate.
To build a relationship with the audience you need to communicate with them and email marketing is the perfect way to do so.
By dropping a regular email to the target audience, you can increase website traffic and turn the visitors into customers. Once the customer reaches to your website later that can be used for remarketing and retargeting ads on Google and Facebook.
Types of Email Marketing
As a beginner, if you wonder how to do email marketing, then primarily you must know the types of email marketing campaigns. Each subscriber is different from another, hence you need to have different types of email marketing to connect with the audience. For example, some among them may be new subscribers and some may be pre-existing customers.
Below-mentioned are the types of email marketing that help you drop the right content in the right inbox.
Different types of email marketing are:
- Introductory Emailers – Its an introduction mail to a new web visitor or you can say this ‘ A Welcome Email. This is supposed to be very informative and creative that can bring the prospect back. This type of email can help you building contact lists or this is a partnership between company and user. This type of email has the highest open rates.
- Email Newsletter-: This is the best way to keep your prospects and customers updated about the latest launches and product and service updates. This helps to keep the contact lists fresh
- Dedicated Emailers-: This is the time when a customer loves such types of emails. New users don’t know email marketing. They simply know that the company has sent to me. personalized emails always work and are a good way to get clicks and give you a good click rate.
- Lead Generating mailers: Simple campaigns and straight to the point about selling services and products.
- Sponsorship Emailers: This is for them those who are looking for web traffic and engagement on their website. It can be useful for e-commerce, bloggers, or media networks
- Transactional Emailers: Focused for payment of the checkout
- Re-Engagement Emailers: Automation always help in such campaigns. Ecommerce websites use this type of campaign and this type of activity is good for reengaging the prospects who have not to check out or bringing customers back.
- Story-Based Emailers: Or you can say smart email campaigns
- Review Emailers: To get product reviews, personalized campaign bring customers to leave their feedback on the particular service or product
After knowing what is email marketing and the types of email marketing, the next thing to understand is how to do email marketing.
How to do Email Marketing?
Step 1: Find the Right Email Marketing Tool or Software
The primary step to get started with email marketing is to find the appropriate email marketing software. The perfect software will help you manage subscribers and email campaigns seamlessly.
The most popular email marketing software are Sendinblue, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and HubSpot . To find suitable software you must know the purpose of running an email campaign.
In short you must focus on:
- Budget
- Kind of emails do you want to shoot and how often?
- How many subscribers do you have?
- Will you design an email or use an email template?
- Do you wish to opt for an automated mailer?
- The data type- is your data opt-in or not
Step 2: Create Mailer List (email contact lists)
You need to have a list of subscribers to do email marketing. Make sure the signup for Newsletter is visible prominently on your website to have a list of those who are interested to receive emailer from your end.
Another way to build a mailer database is to offer a deal on being a subscriber. To build a mailer list you can offer:
- Free one month trial
- Free Download
- Product Updates
- Loyalty Points
- Online leads
- Existing customers
- Purchased database
Step 3: Shoot an Introductory Email
Now, you are ready to communicate with subscribers. Shoot an introductory mail with the aim to build a relationship. A few lines about thanking subscribers for connecting with your brand and gestures such as
- free coupon
- first-time discount
- Welcome message
- Company introduction
- Greetings
- Announcement news and offers
You can send the campaign to the selected database. Like you want to send new to data set 1 and announcement to data set 2 and greeting to data set 3. this will work positively for your brand.
Step 4: Know your Goals
The next important thing to know about how to do email marketing is to have the purpose of running an email campaign. For example, you want to do email marketing for:
- Introducing a new Product
- Offering a Discount Coupon to loyal clients
- Sharing company’s achievement with subscribers
Step 5: Design a Responsive Emailer
If you wonder how to set up email marketing then this is an important step to know. People are tech-savvy today and you must use this as a tool to increase website traffic, user engagement, and conversion rate.
Shoot a responsive emailer and allow subscribers to participate in the activities such as:
- Poll
- Contest
Step 6: Curate High-Quality Content for Emailer
Content is undoubtedly the king in all spheres of digital marketing. Curate relevant content for the emailer by keeping things in mind such as:
- What you want to communicate
- Audience expectation from you
- Curious Subject Line
Step 7: Get Customized
It is ideal to have a brand name in the sender’s email id. This makes the emailer more authenticated. The addition of brand name in the sender email also makes it easy to recognize for the receiver. For example,
- Your brand name in the newsletter. For example, AB Newsletter
- The combination of brand name and your name. For example, info@thedigitalchapters.com
- Non-identical sender name for each emailer. For example, AB New Product Launch
Step 8: Test Run the Campaign
It is likely to miss small mistakes in the mailer content. But they can be embarrassing for the brand if noticed by the receiver. Ensure sending a flawless email to the subscribers by a test run of the same. This helps to find out:
- Format of the template
- Color combination
- Font, Font Size, Alignment, and general temp settings
- Spelling Mistake
- Typos
- Grammar Mistake
Step 9: Schedule it Right
The most important thing to consider, if you want to know how to do email marketing, is scheduling. Try to find out what is the right time to communicate with clients and shoot the mailer accordingly. The dropping of an emailer in the inbox at the wrong time can ruin the aim of sending a mailer.
Check the right time, day, and date which matters a lot in email marketing. Most marketing professionals focus on morning time somehow that works but the evening campaign or late night mailer might work as people get free and start checking their emails.
Step 10: Track Open Rate, Click Rate, and Conversion
This is important if you wish to know how to set up email marketing? Monitor the email campaign by tracking open rate, click rate, and conversion after running an emailer campaign. This performance analysis of the campaign will help you sending the right campaign at right audience-:
- Open rate: It is the percentage of how many subscribers opened the emailer against the number of total subscribers who received the emailer.
- Click-through rate: It is the percentage of subscribers who clicked on the given link in the emailer against the total number of subscribers who received it.
- Unsubscribe rate: It is the rate of subscribers who unsubscribed against the total number of emailer receivers. In case, this number is high, then you need to check details such as email frequency, demographic selection, and other details.
- Bounce rate: It is the percentage of emailers that failed to reach subscribers inbox. This may happen either because the subscriber’s inbox is full or there is an internet issue.
Conclusion-
In the end, I want to tell you that sending an email campaign is easy but it will take time in setting up things in the right way. Be careful about selecting the right tools, buying the right subscription, creating contact lists, and setting the right template. For a successful email marketing campaign, three things are most important 1 Right tool 2. Contact list and 3. Catchy subject line. All these three are the main pillar of a successful email marketing campaign.
If we have missed any point and if you want to suggest or inquire about it. please write in the comment box