Email marketing plays an important role in gaining customer loyalty, keeping them constantly with your brand, and making them come back to buy again. Email marketing is characterized as a marketing channel owned by you, which you can invest as you like, and this adds great value to it as an important marketing channel for your project. So how do you use email marketing effectively?
table of contents:
- What is email marketing?
- The importance of email marketing
- Advantages of email marketing
- 4 Email Marketing Strategies
- How to email marketing
- The most important tasks of an email marketer
- Professional Email Marketer Skills
- How do you increase the effectiveness of email marketing?
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What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that relies on using email to communicate with customers and provide them with useful content, whether educational or promotional content for the products and services you sell, and other forms of content. There are many types of email, as follows:
- Newsletters: The most widely used type of email marketing, and it includes audience participation with continuous and regular content, ranging from useful information to updates on your products and services, offers, and more.
- Promotional messages: sales content whose primary objective is to promote your products and services, to encourage potential customers to make a purchase decision.
- Transactional messages: Automatic messages sent to customers to perform a specific action, such as retype a password, or confirm a purchase.
- Welcome messages: These are also automated messages that reach out to new subscribers to your mailing list to welcome them, and they often include valuable information about your company and your brand to better introduce your subscribers to you.
- Evaluation messages and surveys: These messages are used to obtain customer reviews of your products and services, which helps you improve what you offer them in the future.
- Messages to re-engage customers: sent to inactive customers during a specific period of time, encouraging them to interact with you again, by offering them offers or motivating content that encourages them to interact.
What is the importance of email marketing?
The simplest answer to this question is that email is not a social networking platform like the one we know. Here, neither Facebook algorithms manipulate the reach level of a post until you have to pay money to deliver your posts to users, nor Google algorithms to select what is appropriate and show it.
What distinguishes email marketing is that once you build your mailing list, you will be able to communicate with the audience directly, and your messages will reach their devices immediately, without the intervention of third parties, as is the case with social media platforms.
You will need lower costs for posting marketing messages, in addition to that your mailing list will contain people who are actually interested in your product or service, and who have already provided you with their mail addresses, and this is known as permission marketing.
This is the principle referred to by marketing expert Seth Godin in his book with the same title, which was published in 1999 and has had a wide resonance in the field of marketing since that time until today. The summary of Godin’s book is that brands should direct their marketing messages to people who have already given permission for the brand to contact or market their product to, when users submit their email.
Advantages of email marketing
Email marketing has many advantages, since it is a proprietary marketing resource for your business that you can control and use in the way that suits you best. Among the most important advantages of email marketing:
1. High conversion rates from email marketing
Email marketing helps you generate sales , and get high conversion rates from the marketing campaigns you create. You can do this in several ways:
- The ability to provide personalized messages to customers, such as offering offers according to customer segments in your mailing list.
- Re-contact with customers who have added products to the shopping cart but have not completed the payment, send reminders and follow-up messages with them, and provide offers that motivate them to complete the purchase process.
- Assigning offers to each customer, for example, on his birthday, or the anniversary of joining the mailing list, which makes him feel appreciated and increases the likelihood that he will respond to the offer and purchase.
2. Achieving several different marketing goals with great effectiveness
Email marketing is characterized by the fact that it allows you to achieve different marketing goals, and most importantly, it enables you to do so effectively, as each goal you can plan and implement efficiently. Among the most important of these marketing objectives are:
- Brand awareness: You can send content about your brand from the moment a user signs up for your mailing list. This includes an introduction about your company, your products and services, and anything you would like the user to know about you.
- Increase sales: Email marketing enables you to increase your sales either by attracting new customers , or by persuading existing customers to buy from you again.
- Gain customer loyalty: Email marketing depends on direct communication with customers, which helps you gain their loyalty to your brand .
3. Benefit from owning customer data
One of the most important advantages of email marketing is that you own the customer data, which you can use to achieve different goals. Among the most important of these benefits:
- Know everything about the customers on your mailing list, study their data well, and take advantage of that in developing your marketing efforts to suit your customers.
- The ability to divide customers in the way you want according to common criteria among them, and provide them with appropriate content.
- Effectively analyze the results of your marketing campaigns directed at customers, and make the right decisions in the future.
4 Email Marketing Strategies
There are several email marketing strategies that can help you make your email more effective. Among the most important of these strategies:
1. Timing
The timing of sending emails depends on your audience, the area in which your brand is active, and the nature of the marketing messages in your campaign, i.e. it depends on your own experience. This means that some experiments, attempts, data collection and analysis are required, in order to be able to reach an appropriate timing strategy.
It’s also crucial when pursuing good timing that you don’t flood your audience with unnecessary messages, and always remember that you most likely got your users’ email addresses as a result of making a presentation, and so they aren’t ready to hear much from you so often.
2. Personalization
Personalized can be simple, such as adding the user’s name to the title of the mail message, or more personalized and targeted, such as the content of the message directed to a specific individual or group of users, such as personalizing information or offers according to each individual or group.
Statistics show that an e-mail message that contains the username in the subject, the user is 26% more likely to open the message than messages that do not directly mention the username. Therefore, personalization is an important means that increases the efficiency of email marketing campaigns , because it makes messages more personalized and targeted to the audience, and more appropriate to their needs and interests.
Effective personalization depends on having enough data to help you do just that. For example, when a user orders a product from your online store, and then cancels the order later, this is an excellent opportunity to target that person with an email informing them that an offer is available on this product.
3. Marketing by drip
Drip marketing is one of the most important email marketing strategies, and it consists of a set of pre-scheduled messages according to a chronological sequence, which are sent successively and automatically to each user when he subscribes to the mailing list. This strategy is also known as Automated Marketing.
What distinguishes this technology is the ability to move the user according to sequential steps from the first moment in which he recognizes your brand, all the way to the goal that you want, whether it is the purchase of a product, service, or otherwise. For example, suppose you provide a directory in the form of a brochure on your website, and you ask visitors to provide you with their email so that they can download the guide.
Once the visitor provides his email address, he will receive a message with an attachment to download the guide. Let’s say you want to sell a course, you start by establishing a relationship with the user via email, and send them a message a few days later with more details on the topic the booklet discusses.
After another short period, the user receives a message from you telling him that he can learn more about the topic through the educational course that you offer, and then you send another message in which you offer an offer or a discount on registration in your course, given that the user is interested in this topic.
Thus, through distillation marketing, you became able to build a strong relationship with users, and you moved it from one stage to another, and at each stage you provided him with something that strengthens this relationship and makes it more valuable for your product or service, up to the purchase stage, as well as continuing post-sales communication. The advantage of this strategy is that you are not required to do it every time, but rather do it once based on automation, and the messages are then sent to each user automatically.
4. Retail
According to a study by Campaign Monitor, which specializes in digital marketing, it showed that email campaigns that are more personalized and based on segmentation of subscriber lists have a higher return-in-value rate of 760%, and messages within these campaigns are 26% more likely to be read than messages that do not be well customized.
Therefore, it is important to realize the value of segmentation strategy and divide the audience and users according to different factors such as: interests, needs, age, gender and how closely they relate to your brand. By dividing your subscribers into categories, you will be able to target each category accordingly.
For example, you can target groups that are most relevant to your brand with their own content that enhances their loyalty to your services, and target groups that are less interested with targeted content that motivates them for more interest and follow-up. So, consider a good segmentation strategy for your subscriber lists, based on enough data about each category, to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing.
How to email marketing
Before you start marketing via email, you must think carefully about whether this strategy really suits you or not, so that you don’t put effort into it, and later discover that it is an inappropriate strategy for your audience. In the event that you decide to rely on email marketing, you can follow the following steps to implement it:
1. Set email marketing goals
Email marketing goals vary depending on the nature of your business and how you use it. It is not a requirement that you seek to achieve all marketing goals, as this may distract your effort, especially at the beginning. Set your goals before you start, and develop these goals constantly. Examples of email marketing goals are:
- Improving project sales, by encouraging customers to buy.
- Promote brand awareness , post content about your project in general, the products and services you sell, the latest updates on the project, and other forms of content that enhance brand awareness.
- Increase the rate of visits to your website , by directing users to the content on it.
- Improve customer retention and return and increase the lifetime value of each customer.
2. Good study of the audience and competitors
A good study ensures that you obtain the necessary information, through which you can in the future design appropriate email marketing campaigns for you, according to correct data and information, not just assumptions and personal opinions. You must study both:
- Target audience: Study the customer’s personality well, understand your audience’s needs and their different classifications, and divide them into segments according to common factors that bring them together.
- Competition: Research competitors in your industry and see if they use email marketing. And if they do, how exactly do they use it, and what content do they provide to their customers.
3. Build your mailing list
This is one of the most important and hardest steps in email marketing, how to build your mailing list . The challenge you face here is how you can convince your customers to give you their email, and to accept your continuous communication with them.
Some resort to buying ready-made mailing lists, but in reality it can backfire. The essence of email marketing is getting customers’ permission, and their willingness to receive content from you based on that. Purchasing mailing lists means that this audience does not know you, and did not give you the required permission to communicate.
As a result, the content you send to them can be classified as spam. In any case, most of them will ignore your messages, as they did not choose to subscribe to your mailing list. Even if he doesn’t unsubscribe, he won’t interact with you as expected. Therefore, it is important to focus well in the mailing list building process. There are three main steps to performing this process:
a. Deliver value to your customers
What might lead customers to give you permission to communicate with them? Your customers need the motivation that encourages them to do this, which can happen if you provide them with real value, and it is better that this value is free, so that your customers are motivated to obtain it, and they agree to provide you with their data, including email.
There are different forms of values that you can present to your customers, such as e-books or templates that customers can use to perform different tasks. The important thing is that you choose a value that suits your audience and their needs, to ensure that they want to obtain it and provide their data to you.
B. Display this value as appropriate
You now have value to offer to your customers, the question here is how can your customers access this value and know its existence in the first place? For example, the e-book is on your site, and the audience may not know it exists. So, it is important to choose how you proposition the value to reach your customers. Forms of value proposition:
- Landing pages that are specifically designed to display and provide value to your audience, for example a page for an e-book that includes an overview of the book and its content.
- Sharing content on social media to encourage customers to get it.
- Opt-In Forms that you can place on your website in prominent locations visible to customers.
c. Follow up with clients
Once the data is registered, you can start communicating and following up with clients. Don’t try to sell your products directly to them, instead focus on building a relationship and interacting with them first. You can rely on drip marketing, and prepare complete content that is sent to each customer who records his data automatically without your intervention.
4. Segmentation of the mailing list
Segmentation is one of the most important strategies for email marketing, by dividing subscribers to your mailing lists into smaller groups, according to specific criteria that bring them together, so that you can offer them personalized content.
There are many ways to segment your mailing list into smaller segments, such as segmenting customers by geographic location and age, or according to personal interests and preferences. Some may only want sales offers, others may be interested in knowing about the new content you publish, and so on. Rely on asking the customer when they sign up for your newsletter, to give each customer what they are really looking for and interested in.
There are also other ways to segment based on customer interaction. For example, new customers can create welcome content for them, in addition to a set of useful messages that are sent successively. And customers who have not interacted with you within a specific period of time, you send them content that encourages them to interact again.
5. Implement email marketing
In this step you can begin to implement email marketing, and this includes several actions that must all be implemented effectively to ensure the success of the marketing process. This includes:
- Choosing email types: Among the types of email out there, which ones will you base your strategy on.
- Thinking about how to use email marketing strategies: Determine how to implement email marketing strategies in your marketing campaigns to get maximum effectiveness.
- Content Preparation: Content includes both the written content and the visual designs used in email messages.
- Budget Allocation: Allocating the right budget helps email marketing campaigns to be successful.
- Setting the implementation agenda: setting the timetable and all the details of the implementation process.
- Performance Analysis: Evaluate email marketing performance, find out what needs improvement, and take actions to improve performance.
6. Choose the right email marketing tools
There are many email marketing software that you can use in your business, some of the most popular are GetResponse, and Sendinblue. In fact, your choice of tool may vary depending on your need and the stage at which you are using email marketing. So these criteria will help you to determine the most appropriate email marketing tools that suit you as follows:
- Projected Workload : How many contacts do you have or expect to have? And how many emails are you thinking of sending? What are the exact types?
- Design: If you do not have experience designing emails, it is a good idea to choose a program that provides you with ready-made templates that work in a drag-and-drop manner. But if you have the experience, the design will not affect your choice.
- Automation: Automation is an essential part of email marketing, as are welcome messages. So, be sure to check out the automation options offered by the tool.
- Platform features: There are different features offered by email marketing programs, such as the ability to segment contacts, schedule messages, transactional messages, and other features. Evaluate these features and choose between them to choose the one closest to your needs.
- Pricing Plans: Each platform differs in the features that they offer for free or within their various pricing plans. Review pricing plans carefully, and make sure you choose a program that offers you the most important features you’re looking for within your email marketing budget.
These six steps need experience and professionalism to be implemented correctly, so you can rely on professional email marketing services Provided by GetResponse experts The largest email marketing services company where you can find all your needs Read more about GetResponse, to ensure the effectiveness of email marketing, and to obtain the highest efficiency in its implementation.
What are the most important tasks of an email marketer?
The email marketer’s tasks vary depending on the brand and its goals. Among the most important tasks of an email marketer are:
- Create and implement email marketing campaigns by selecting the most appropriate strategies and practices.
- Building mailing lists, dividing customers into contacts according to common criteria.
- Collaborate with different marketing teams, such as the content team to write email messages, and the design team to develop the appropriate design for messages.
- Evaluate email marketing campaigns and analyze performance to make the best marketing decisions.
- Communicate and follow up with customers to find out their ratings, opinions and experiences with the brand.
What skills should a professional email marketer have?
An email marketer needs to possess several skills that help him carry out the tasks required of him efficiently. Some of the most important email marketing skills required are:
- Content Writing: Producing appropriate content or proofreading content submitted by the content team.
- Good Research: Understand your audience well and know their needs to design the right email marketing campaigns.
- Customer Service: The ability to communicate with customers smoothly, to provide them with appropriate support, and to ensure their continuous interaction with the brand.
- Technical skills: Understanding of different email marketing tools, and handling the complexities of some platforms.
- Automation: Understand how automation works in email marketing, to use it to increase performance effectiveness.
- Analysis: Studying the executed email marketing campaigns, and evaluating their results to make the right decisions.
How do you increase the effectiveness of email marketing?
To increase the effectiveness of your email marketing, you can rely on the 5Ts, which is a technique that includes five actions that you can focus on to improve the performance of your email marketing as follows:
1. Tease: arouse the interest of the audience
Your audience receives many emails per day, and often marks many messages as read without even opening them. Therefore, be sure to arouse the interest of the audience by writing an attractive title for your messages, which motivates your customers to open them and enter to read their content.
2. Target: Targeting with customized content
Most email marketing strategies are based on the principle of dividing the audience into different categories according to common criteria that bring them together. Therefore, be sure to do so and target each category with content that suits its needs and aspirations, and provides customers of each category with what they are looking for.
3. Teach: teach the audience
A large part of the continuity of email marketing relies on the content of the newsletters, which are often educational content, focused on adding real value to the audience. So invest in creating educational content that gives your audience a great benefit, and makes them more loyal to your brand.
4. Test: Test different versions of the content
The test requires extra effort, but the results are really impressive. So, no matter how long it takes, it is important to make sure to test different versions of your email marketing content, to determine which one is most effective and gets you the desired results. Not only do you test written content, but also various message designs, until you find the perfect email look.
5. Track: Track your email marketing performance
Be sure to monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns, and analyze their results to improve content. Understand what exactly is going on, and why, for example, did clicks go up or down? And other items that need to be measured. This will help you make the best decisions for developing your email marketing strategy.
Obviously, this is a very basic example, but hopefully you can see why tags are such a crucial part of automations. (And don’t worry, I’ll dive into automations specifically in a moment.)
Finally, I need to touch on something called, ‘web-event tracking’ – which, after installing a snippet of code, allows GetResponse to track how your visitors interact with your website.
This opens up a whole new world of dynamic tagging. An example of this being when a subscriber visits a specific page on your site.
Again, this is just one example, but I’m sure you can see just how powerful this system can be when you begin to implement dynamically added tags.
Verdict
Aside from not being able to use manual tagging, GetResponse really puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to subscriber management and targeting.
Automation
I talked a bit about automation in the last section, but, as I’m sure you know, solid marketing automation isn’t solely reliant on tags.
For starters, let’s talk about the automations workflow builder. The environment you’re likely to spend a fair bit of time in if you decide to use GetResponse.
Therefore, all ‘items’ or building blocks are stored in the right pane, and although there are not many items such as partnerstack.com or Drip, they are still relatively strong here.
Connecting elements together is a case of dragging elements into the workflow area, then dragging the points from one block to another.
To be honest, I did find this process a little frustrating at times (e.g. changing connections around can get a bit messy), but you do get the hang of it eventually.
If I had to deduct points for anything, it’d have to on the basis of creating emails from within the automations builder. Reason being, you can’t.
Adding the “send message” block (yeah, that’s what they call emails), you’re only given the option to choose from existing emails, so you can’t create one on the fly.
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In conclusion, email marketing is an effective marketing strategy that helps you build continuous relationships with your customers, and enables you to significantly increase conversion rates. Make sure to implement it correctly if it suits your customers, to ensure that you achieve different marketing goals for your project.