Email Marketing for Beginners: Grow your Business

As someone who owns, runs or manages a (big or small) business, the goal every now and then usually revolves around reaching as many people as possible, attracting new customers (while servicing the old ones), outdo competitors, make more profit, etc. Email marketing is a great way discover new leads and nurture existing ones.

To achieve this, a lot of effort has to be put into getting the business or brand in the eyes (and heart) of as many people as possible.

Businesses can be promoted and marketed in a number of ways, especially digitally: Social Media Marketing, Email marketing, Digital Advertisement etc. Digital is the way forward, and many businesses know this.

This is why over the past 10 years, the adoption of digital marketing particularly via Social Media has been snowballing. However, Email is one aspect of digital marketing some businesses fail to pay attention to. Or worse: put less energy into.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the use of email for marketing. It is involves promoting your business, products, and services using email as the delivery platform.

You build an email list by prompting targeted users to optin receiving valuable and useful messages from you.

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Be guided, e-mail marketing entails more than just sending commercial messages to a selected group of people or targeted customers, but before we delve deeper, let’s talk about the types of mails in email marketing.

Type of EMails

While business owners & customers send and receive marketing emails, they are actually of different types;

Transactional Emails

These are the types of mails you receive you make an action on a website. These types of mails are usually automated. For example, the “Welcome to XXXX, Mr. You” message you receive in your mailbox when you sign up on a new platform is a Transactional email.

Ditto payment confirmations, receipts, order tracking etc. Transactional emails are important; a broad street for effective marketing.

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Operational Emails

Basically tells your subscribers or prospects things about your business operations/activities. Early closure, holiday or maintenance plans, events, or change/update of terms and conditions are examples of operational emails.

These may not seem important, but they go a long way in carrying customers along, increasing trust, engagement and awareness.

Marketing Emails

These are the types of emails that are used for email marketing. Monthly / Weekly/ Daily newsletters, promotions, reports, deals, recommendations, coupons etc are examples of marketing emails. Marketing emails are specifically sent to users who specifically requested /opted-in for the information.

How to Do Email Marketing

Here are the steps you need to take to run an effective email marketing campaign

Identifying Campaign Goal

Just like every journey, there should be a destination, a place you wish to be, and something you wish to achieve. Same goes for an email marketing campaign; a successful campaign.

So, before jumping on the email marketing train, its best you list out things you wish to achieve as it is crucial to running a successful email marketing campaign. In fact that is the only way you will be able to access if the campaign was successful.

Your business needs to grow – that’s an established fact. But what does your business need to grow? How does it need to grow? Who are your targets? New customers? More sales? Engage existing customers more?

Email Marketing is a powerful digital marketing method. Using it correctly in line with your business need will likewise bring powerful impact and results to your business.

Create Effective Optins

This is the first and perhaps, the most important step in any campaign – creating and growing your email list.

To do this effectively, you’ll need to employ several optin channels. Optins could be in the form of pop-ups, welcome gates, or at the bottom/sidebar of your website.

For the best results, it is recommended that you embedded optins in multiple positions on your website. But be careful though, you don’t want to vex off visitors / prospective customers.

You can do an A/B test to determine which position of your optin forms works best.

Choosing Email Marketing Services Provider

Right after identifying your needs and creating a strategy, choosing the appropriate provider for your marketing campaign is also crucial.

There are quite a number of platforms that offer email marketing service out there, as well as help manage and run your campaign. MailChimp, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, Zoho Campaigns are good examples of email marketing services.

Monitoring, Analyzing and Optimizing Campaign

After all is set and done, probably after sending your first set of mails, the importance of monitoring and analyzing your campaign cannot be overstated.

Deliverability rate, Click through rate, opening rate, reactivity rate, and churn rate are some indicators to look at for. These help point out if your campaign strategy is effective, or need some improvements.

Why is Email Marketing Important

Email marketing is one of the most effective way of customer acquisition and building brand loyalty. Its beauty is the fact that you are completely in control of your contacts.

Once you have built your email list they are yours to do whatever you want. This is a stack contrast to social media where the network owns everything. You can get locked out of your social media account and lose all your audience in one fell swoop.

It also has one of the highest (usually the highest) customer acquisition and customer retention rates. This is why it is a no-brainer for most businesses.

The high rate of customer acquisition and retention also means it delivers high ROI, which makes it cost effective.

Email marketing also allows segment your audience into similar grouping. This means you can target each grouping with a tailored message that will have more impact on them. In fact, you can even target a message to one or a handful of contacts

This ability to personalise and customise your messages makes it a great tool for building a meaningful relationship with your customers.

Email marketing will also provide useful insight about your customers.

How to Write a Marketing Email

To make the best out of your email marketing, you have to write your content well. A well written email marketing copy will lead to more leads and conversion.

Here are some of the best tips on how to write a marketing email that wins.

Write a Catchy Subject Line: write a catchy subject line as this is what the recipient see first. The subject line determines whether your message will be opened or ignored. It is a good idea to put a lot of thought to it.

Know your Audience: The beauty of email marketing is that you already have a targeted audience. So, make sure you understand this audience and write only content that they will respond to.

Organise and Structured your Content: Your copy is should be written like you are writing a blog post. It should be focused and structured.

Respect your Readers, Avoid Spam: Keep your writing simple. Don’t just be capitalizing everything or using multiple text colours and unnecessary use of bold and multiple exclamation marks. Behaviours such as these can lead can lead to recipients viewing you as spammy, which will be negative for your brand.

Keep your Goal in Mind: While crafting your copy, make sure you do not lose sight of your goal. This is why each message should be focused to a clearly defined goal.

Be Personal: Use the segmentation feature to create groupings of people who are similar. This enable you target them at a personal level. Also letting your readers know who you are will also help build trust and engagement.

Test your Campaign: Sometimes you could have multiple ideas on how best to deliver your message. Using A/B test will enable you determine what works best. You can target the different ideas to similar groups, measure the response, and determine the most effective idea.

How Much Does Email Marketing Cost

The cost of email marketing ranges from $9 to over $2000, depending on the platform. Usually, email marketing services offer a base cost in double digits, but your cost increases as your number of email contacts and/or volume of email messages increases.

Some platforms like GetResponse and Aweber charge you more depending on your number of contacts while some platforms like SendinBlue charge you based on the volume of email messages sent.

There are also others like MailChimp that factor-in both your number of contacts and the volume of messages you sent.

Conclusion

Email marketing is broader than all that has been said above. However, as a beginner, these are the basic things you might want to take into consideration and get to understand properly before venturing into using email to improve your business.

Email Marketing for Beginners: Grow your Business

What is Email Marketing?