Email is one of the oldest forms of digital communication but it’s also one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there. Sure, there are newer methods of communicating with your audience and customers like social media and live chat.
Getting into someone’s inbox is like being invited to their home for dinner. If they ask you to take your shoes off, you respectfully do so. Treat their email inbox with the same respect. You’re a guest they’ve invited into their lives and they can ask you to leave at any point.
So be on your best behavior and remember… you’re a guest in their inbox. Before diving into the strategies you’ll use to build and leverage email marketing, let’s cover the fundamentals. These tips will help you maximize your email marketing campaign, which we’ll dive into next..
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that uses personalized emails to educate your email list about your product or services. It can also be used to convince your email list to take a specific action like making a purchase, booking a demo, signing up for a trial or registering for an event.
Let’s dive into the most comprehensive guide to email marketing on the entire internet.
- Why Email Marketing is Important
- Email Marketing Glossary
- How Email Marketing Works
- Growing Your Email List
- How to Create an Optin Form that Converts
- What Email Marketing Service is Best?
- Segmenting Your Email List
- Improving Email Open Rates
- Automating Your Email Marketing with Autoresponders
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Why Email Marketing is Important
- Creating personalized content.
- Collecting feedback and surveys.
- Improving sales.
- Communicating with your audience.
- Generating traffic to your site.
- Sending timely campaigns.
- Increasing leads.
- Reaching the right people at the right time.
- Producing cost-effective campaigns.
- Providing more value to your audience.
- Having a forum for self-promotion.
- Owning your media and contact lists.
This guide walks through how to start email marketing planning and how to create an email marketing strategy.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why you need email marketing
- How to create an email marketing strategy and build email lists
- Which metrics to track in your email strategy
Why You Need an Email Marketing Strategy
We get it. Email isn’t the most exciting option for marketing anymore.
But email’s been around a long time for good reason. Email marketing boasts one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) of all marketing channels.
For 60% of consumers, email remains the preferred method of contact.
Marketers can create email marketing campaigns that support a variety of business objectives, such as:
- Driving website traffic
- Increasing brand awareness
- Increasing sales volume and revenue
- Facilitating customer success
- Informing and educating customers
- Building credibility
And finally, email marketing works seamlessly with your other channels, including your website and social media pages.
Driving Website Traffic
You’ll find a nice selection of websites that monitor traffic and provide up-to-date conditions. Trafficview.org is one example of a website that will capture your location to provide timely updates on potential delays concerning construction, accidents, congestion, weather radar, and more. If you create an account, you can enter your travel routes to keep track of what’s ahead on a road trip.
Visiting LocalConditions.com will also enable you to check out local and national road conditions. Click “open traffic map” to see a map of your local area. You can also click on hour-by-hour weather, a five-day forecast, warnings, and advisories.
Increasing Brand Awareness
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the way in which consumers recognize and remember your business. The greater the brand awareness you have, the more audiences will be familiar with your logo, messaging, and products.
Brand awareness is important because it helps audiences understand, recall, and become comfortable with your branding and products. If you can build brand awareness among your target demographic, you can help your brand become top-of-mind when these consumers are ready to research and make a purchase. Brand awareness is often seen as the first stage of the marketing funnel. By creating brand awareness, you can cast a wide net across your audience of potential buyers. From there, you can funnel leads toward the research and decision-making processes, and eventually the buying process.
Increasing Sales Volume and Revenue
Focusing on sales volume is a common tactic used in many sales departments. You can move inventory faster to make space for incoming stock or increase the number of sales your team makes by focusing on sales volume.
Sales volume is the number of products you’re selling over a given period. A high sales value can indicate that a company’s marketing and sales tactics are effective. Sales volume is a common metric of seven email marketing strategies that many sales professionals measure along with revenue, but they’re not the same. Revenue tracks how much money you’re bringing into a business, while sales volume tracks how many units of products you’re selling.
Facilitating Customer Success
Customer experience is rapidly replacing product and price differentiation as the primary dimension of competition for businesses across many industries. In other words, customers now care more about their experience engaging with your business than they do about the products that you sell. If “customer experience” is a customer’s impression of how your company treats them, your customer success team’s goal is to make sure your company provides the best service possible. Customers who genuinely have seven email marketing strategies like doing business with you will stay loyal, grow with you and recommend your services to others.
Everyone at your organization should be focused on meeting the needs of your customers, but a customer success specialist should be on the front lines talking to customers every single day. As a result, the customer success team is one of the most important sources of feedback that you can develop for your business.
Informing and Educating Customers
Whenever I think about customer education, one brand immediately comes to mind- Apple. Apple invests a lot of resources in educating its customer base through hands-on experiences at the retail stores, where customers can feel the products and see how they work, as well as free training classes and workshops that teach customers how the products work and how to use them. As a result, they have a lot of loyal customers who also advocate for the brand both online and offline. Create and put out content where the customers can easily access them, it could be on your website, via email, or social. In your content, tell them exactly how to use the products in very simple terms.
Building Credibility
Building credibility isn’t just for workplace leaders. It will also serve you well when looking for a job in your field. Employers often look for candidates who are not only well-versed in their field, but also who are skilled and ethical decision-makers, problem solvers, and communicators. Showing proof of your accomplishments and giving examples of team projects you have taken part in is a good way to demonstrate your credibility.
Changes happen in every industry. No matter how skilled you are in your field, it’s important to have an ear on the ground for emerging trends that impact the company you work for. This shows team members, supervisors, employers, and other people in your field that you know what’s going on in your industry and can adapt to the changes. You can never have too much knowledge and experience in your field. Continuing education and professional development courses can help you gain competency and become more industry savvy, making you a trusted source of information.