Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the process of capturing email addresses of prospects to promote content, services, or products with the intention of building a customer relationship. In other words, email marketing in a broader sense is posting an electronic automated commercial message, to a random or loyal customer audience for strengthening the buyer-seller relationship using promotional content with the sole purpose of generating leads, sales, and engagement with your business. A/B test emails on mobile and desktop devices and pinpoint metrics by finding out the types of emails users usually respond to. Employ strategies and retarget your prospects with market automation. Run a marketing campaign using a free tool such as MailChimp to nurture sales leads, draft emails for your prospect as they journey through various stages of the sales funnel. Drive traffic to your website, build up your list, and engage with the audience to boost your business.
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How to do email marketing?

Email Marketing Basics

1.1-BASICS

• Set up measurable goals so that you can plan your email marketing campaigns, reach your target audience, and determine whether your campaign was a success or the improvements which need to be made.

• Schedule your email so that your subscribers are aware when to expect the next email from you.

• Style your email content to be consistent and to the point.

• Select user-friendly tools with features you are looking to adapt to your business requirements.

1.2-HOW TO WRITE AN EMAIL

• An Email could communicate any function such as an event, webinar, charity hosting or an open house session where you will be required to promote such event by sending an invitation via email.

• The email layout should contain the function name, date and time. Include a description of the event with Company name, address, and logo.

• A CTA or a link should be visible in the email and is a must for every email. Avail the services of a button maker and ensure your user is directed to a landing page which can be your sign up form, website, blog post or a social media page that contains more details.

• In your email marketing campaigns ensure that you send more than one emails for a particular event. Invite all your contacts via social media channels. Target your previous buyers and offer them a special discount. Split your pricing by offering Early Bird Discount and Regular paying options.

• Provide an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email to enable subscribers to opt-out of the event.

1.3-EMAIL TYPES

• One to Many- An example of this type is the broadcast emails being sent to your mailing list using an autoresponder service.

• One to One- An example of this type is the personal email sent to individuals,

• Social Media emails can be either one too many or one to one. While posting articles or status updates fall in the one to many email type, others like direct messages or replies & comment fall under the one to one.

1.4-DELIVERABILITY OF EMAILS

• The determinant of email deliverability is the reputation of the sender, bounce rates, and your customer’s engagement with your business.

• Follow best practices by having permission using confirmed opt-ins and an option to unsubscribe. Request your client to add you to their address book and avoid being marked as spam. Send out emails from your own domain and conduct an A/B test for comparing different email marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing – Mailing List

2.1-ABOUT MAILING LIST

Follow best practices:

• Lure users to join your mailing list
• Have permissions by using opt-in pages
• Lead nurtures
• Know your subscribers
• Avoid buying a mailing list
• Update your mailing list
• List segmentation

2.2-Growing your mailing list

• Use a Sign-Up button
• Use of Social Media Marketing
• Ad Campaigns and paid Ads
• Offer something for free such as a coupon, download or a  discount
• Request your subscribers to share
• Design attractive landing pages that convert
• Use an option for unsubscribing

Leads & Conversion

2.3-ABOUT LEAD NURTURING

Sales Funnel:

• Recognition of your brand
• Show interest in your product
• Evaluate
• Buy

Lead nurturing strategies:

• Content targeting 
• Scoring leads 
• Encash on opportunities 
• Conclude successful lead nurturing by analyzing and assisting the buying process

2.4- CONVERSION GROWTH IN  EMAIL MARKETING

Track Conversion:

• By timing – after the first/ second click and so on
• A/B testing for low conversion rates 
• Place of conversion on landing pages

Email analytics by using tools include:

• Google analytics integration
• Link tracking
• Goal tracking
• Tracking clicks & open rates
• Create an advanced segment that isolates the traffic coming from emails in google analytics to analyze the performance of email marketing
• Track conversion and analyze the influence of email marketing campaigns using a campaign URL builder in google analytics.

Importance of conversion tracking:

• ROI calculation
• Understanding your influence
• Improvement of results
• Good reviews and testimonials

Increasing conversion –

• Persuasive CTA 
• Subject line engagement by way of effective headlines – brief description | attractive layout/ email design | landing page which converts 
• Correct timing

Automation and Mobile

3.1 – Automation for email marketing

• It helps in connecting with the user and is the beginning of setting up automatic email campaigns for triggering off a visitor’s actions. These automatic emails are personalized, relevant and timely to the reader. Hence they get clicked and opened more often and drive visits and revenue for your website.

• Automate a welcome email that is sent when a new person joins your “Subscription” list.

• You need to set up the email once for automating the marketing and then as more people keep meeting the trigger that has been defined, the email will continue to be sent to them.

• Automated emails that can be sent are welcome eMail  | Upsell | News Letter | Event  | Repeat Engagement  | Abandoned Shopping cart  | Follow Up – Emails.

Automated email personalization.

• By recording your subscriber’s information and segmenting your audience, personalized campaigns that captivate your audience can be created. Email personalization can reach all your distinct subscribers by keeping messages relevant for increasing conversion. An email service provider can help you to personalize messages using engaging content, data, segmentation etc.

• Respond personally to specific situations: Some situation will demand that you respond personally and it cannot be solved by merely sending a template. Here it is best to avoid automation which can cause more damage than good.

Click on marketing-automation to read more.

3.2- Mobile for email marketing

Mobile market share is increasing in the total internet traffic and email open rates have been growing. Provide a good UX user experience for reading to improve conversions.                     

Evaluation of the influence factor

• responsive web design                                                                                 
• preventing one-click user by adding internal links & related posts 
• predicting user behavior

Landing page optimization 

• All the marketing campaign revolves around your Landing page.
• To get visitors to convert you need an effective marketing strategy in place to direct traffic coming from your Landing page through social media channels, email campaigns, online advertising, etc.                        
  

  Mobile optimization for email

• A mobile-friendly design means the website is designed in such a manner that it becomes easy to access it from a mobile 320 px for a portrait format 
• Single column layout ensures that each segment follows the other
• Most important content to be placed at the top
• Using an app for opening emails on mobile devices becomes more convenient when it comes to checking emails.

Image optimization

• graphics and images with small details and links to be avoided
• A recognizable sender name
• Preheader text & small topic line
• Font size preferably 16px Georgia
• CTA button preferably 46px square

E-mail Marketing Software

4.1 – Some popular tools used in E-Mail Marketing are given below:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Get Response
• A Weber
• ConvertKit

Metrics & A/B Test

5.1 – METRICS IN EMAIL MARKETING

• An open rate is the percentage of subscribers who opened your email.

• Unsubscribe rate shows the number of subscribers who do not want to receive any newsletter/ updates and unsubscribe from your mailing list.

• Subscriber list growth rate- It grows as new subscribers sign up to receive email updates and reduces as bounced email addresses are deleted and users unsubscribe.

• Forward rate or an email sharing rate is the number of recipients who clicked on the forward button or the share button on social media as they found the content to be useful.

• Bounce rate is indicative of the number of emails that cannot be delivered due to a temporary problem is known as a soft bounce or a permanent failure known as a hard bounce.

• Conversion rate (has to be defined) is the rate of those subscribers who clicked on a link in the email and completed an action that was pronounced as a conversion, nonetheless if that happened to be a download or a buy.

• Click-through rate (CTR) stands for the number of people who clicked on one or more links in your email and is the first and the most important one which needs to be tracked.

• Return on investment (ROI) is a metric that compares the total cost of the campaign to the total revenue and shows how the campaign has performed.

5.2-EMAIL CAMPAIGNS A/B TEST

In an email campaign, test for ‘a subject line’ which includes:

• word-count referred to the length.
• word-choice is for words that convert.
• word-order is about the correct length and selection of words.

A/B testing refers to the splitting of subscribers into two classes and sending them two different versions of the email content.

• Body text for A/B test offers many variations for text formatting such as title, heading, paragraph, bold, italics, highlight texts, colors coupled with the message length that needs to be short and to the point.
• CTA  can be tested for  Size | Color | Font | Font color | Text | Position in the email.
• Focus your CTA and limit the efforts it takes to act. Rely on size & position in the email for emphasis. CTA should inform subscribers what to expect and taking action can be a breeze.
• Types of offers refer to free download, images, video courses, templates, discount coupons, etc.
• Visualization is referred to as the visual elements in the email designs that include images and videos.
• Time limitation – Here offers are limited to a short time maybe a few days which affects the rate of engagement as users will be forced to take action within the validity.
• Personalization – A personalized email will write the subscribers’ names with a catchy theme.
• Localization establishes a rewarding relationship with local customers and targets local elements such as language, currency, events, sales featuring pricing, etc thereby increasing clicks and conversions.

5.3-How to do A/B testing?

• The test simultaneously means running two options to give relevant results
• Test a large sample if possible to increase your accuracy by drawing a large sample out of a population of subscribers.
• Test one thing at a given time can be accurate if one element at a time is taken for A/B testing.
• Compare the initial data and the results after A/B testing & draw conclusions.