E-Mail Marketing: Everything you need to know

I am sure you must have come across the promotional e-mails in your inbox. It could be from a company you purchase from before or a website where you had filled in your email address. If you’ve signed up for my newsletter I am sure you have seen my article announcements in your inbox too.

Let’s talk about the mails and your inbox. What are they doing in your inbox? how did they reach you offering you those special discounts for products in your Shopping Cart? Wait a second! How did they know what did you have in your shopping cart?

E-mail Marketing
An example e-mail from my inbox.

Well, a number of marketing tools that the businesses use to lure you into making that purchase! So don’t worry. There is no human who is stalking your every move it’s just a software that is collecting cookies for the websites you visit to offer you the best deal on them.

In this blog, you you will be reading about-

Why e-mail marketing should be a part of your campaign?

Before I start listing reasons for you, answer this-

  • When when was the last time you made a purchase or visited a website because you received an email in your inbox?

Look at it this way- if you were attracted by this email and upon clicking the link in the email you made a purchase, it simply means that you were a prospect that turned into a customer because of one simple email. You can use this strategy to grow your business in an efficient way.

If a brand can use this strategy for converting you as a lead to a customer so can you use it for your business. Moving to the 3 c’s of email marketing.

  • Communication
    • Email marketing is a great way of communicating with your customers.
  • Conversion
    • Like you witnessed in the above example it is a great way of converting a particular lead into a customer.
  • Edge over the competition
    • Using email marketing as a part of your digital marketing strategy is giving you an edge over your competition by different ways like making a brand appearance to your leads.

How to get started with email marketing?

You will need two things before you get started with your first email marketing campaign.

  1. Email Addresses- Database Building
  2. An email marketing service provider

Start with collecting e-mail addresses

Now let’s see why you need to collect email addresses. For instance, I am looking to buy a new car for which I visit a showroom near my house. The salesman took down my contact details. It’s been a few days since I visited the showroom, and I get a call from the salesman saying the car that I was interested in has got a new variant that is available for a test drive at the showroom. I go down to the showroom to take a test-drive of this new variant.

Well, guess what, I’ve liked the car and I’m making the down payment and driving the car home. Here, simply collecting my contact details helped the salesman convert me from a lead to a customer.

Take this online, a visitor on the website is a prospect. If you’ve collected his e-mail address, in a way, you’ve generated a lead for a potential customer.

How to start collecting a database?

For email addresses you can directly import all the email addresses from readymade database and start spamming them. But this is a very poor move in email marketing and is not recommended at all. The right way to go about this is to have them sign up for it. (For some email marketing service providers this step can be a mandate too and can block your email campaigns if it comes across some unusual email addresses in the database.)

The best way to get people to register or sign up for emails is to create a lead magnet on your website. Now you may ask what is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is an amazing way of collecting email addresses of prospects by providing value in return. How can you provide value in return while collecting email addresses?

Lead Magnet Example

When I say provide value it could be in the form of an ebook, PDF, free webinars, or anything that helps the prospects in some way or the other. For example, for an e-commerce website, it could be a one-time discount coupon in exchange for their e-mail address. (This might persuade the visitor to make that purchase instantly in order to avail that coupon code, If not, you’ve got another chance to lure them in by using e-mail marketing)

Let’s say he made that purchase right then, even now you can use his/her e-mail address to get repeat orders. How?

Got a new product announcement to make? Make sure it reaches all these inboxes from your data base. It might be easier to convert these into repeat orders if you’re confident about providing a quality product.

I hope you’re clear as to why you’re collecting these e-mail addresses and how you’re going to use them for your marketing campaign.

How do you select a good mailing service?

Now, there are multiple options available in the market. Here’s an article that will help you choose one from the best ones in the market.

10 Best Email Marketing Services for Businesses

How to design/create a good e-mail campaign?

Step 1: Have a well-defined approach

Define what’s the purpose behind sending these e-mails to your database? Is it a new product/article announcement? Is it a discount coupon or a sale announcement that you want to make?

Define what do you want the e-mail to do. Once this bit is sorted out, set some expectations as to what amount of sales/traffic do you expect the mail to deliver. Doing this will help you analyse every mail campaign and prepare you to do things differently in the next one that you’re planning.

Step 2: Make the e-mail appealing

Make sure you’re giving the mail a relevant subject line that helps the readers understand the content of the mail in their inbox. Make it interesting so that they open the e-mail and it doesn’t stink in their inbox. But don’t make the subject line a clickbait that doesn’t deliver to the expectations of the readers. Doing that will do some serious damage to your brand.

Add a relevant and appealing image to your campaign. Using the right set of images will give your marketing efforts a boost. Pair this image with an attractive font and use a good font size for highlighting the main points. If your e-mail is appealing to the viewers’ eyes then your Click-Through-Rates(CTR) is going to be good.

Make sure that you’re using words that make the message clear for the readers instead of complicating it further. Avoid using words like ‘Sale’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Discounts’ because using these words might make your mail more salesy and push these mails into the viewers’ Junk/Spam box.

Link to the relevant website/social media page in your mail. Don’t end up using too many links. This will confuse the viewer and direct their attention to a particular one leaving the other one unvisited.

The Dos and Don’ts of E-mail Marketing

Dos

  1. Take Consent
  2. Maintain a decent Frequency(Time period between the e-mails)
  3. Have a strong lead magnet
  4. Choose the right mailing service
  5. Have a strategy/aim before starting an e-mail campaign
  6. Do analysis provided by the E-mail Service Provider to understand the Click-Through-Rate(CTR), Open Rate, etc. Use this data to improvise in your campaigns.
  7. Personalise the e-mails by collecting the subscriber’s name

Don’ts

  1. Spam
  2. Give up/Skip on E-mail Marketing
  3. Miss out on my Newsletter 😛

That’s E-mail Marketing for your Business. A complementary marketing effort to e-mail marketing would be SMS Marketing. In the following articles, I will be covering this topic too. So make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter! Cheers!

Like what you read? Share it with your connections.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Hardik

    Amazing article again as usual!

Leave a Reply