What is Email Marketing and How It Can Boost Your Business

How Email Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow

Say you spend $500 on social media advertising. You receive engagement on posts, and people buy your products. But once your campaign is over, what happens to the people who were interested in your business? Will they ever be able to find you, or will you need to keep paying $500 to find new customers and start the cycle all over?

That’s where email marketing comes in.

Email marketing makes it possible for you to retain interest and maintain a relationship with your customers over a long period of time. That means the $500 you just spent on social media advertising became exponentially more valuable because instead of leading to one-time purchases, you’re able to build a relationship with your customer that can last years.

Emails also receive exponentially more engagement than a social media post. The average open rate for emails across industries is 36%, according to one source. Meanwhile, the average engagement rate for social media posts is around 2%. Unlike PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, where you have to keep on paying to get attention, with emails, once you receive a contact, you don’t need to keep paying to have someone on your list.

Any business can start email marketing, regardless of the type. The analytics, such as open rates and click-through rates, will help you tailor your campaigns so they resonate even better with your audience.

4 Steps to Get Started With Email Marketing

Here are the four basic steps to keep in mind when getting started with email marketing.

1. Choose an Email Service Provider (ESP): This is where you’ll be sending your emails from, keeping your audience lists, and scheduling your campaigns. Some popular ESPs are Mailchimp, Hubspot and Klaviyo.

2. Build Your List: This is will be an ongoing effort, but basically, you want to set up ways for people to get on your list. One popular way to do this is offering something for free in exchange for an email (we cover lead magnets below).

3. Write, Plan and Schedule Your Campaigns: Once you have an audience, you need to plan out what you’ll say to them.

4. Track Engagement and Analytics: When your audience starts getting your newsletter, you’ll get feedback on how well your campaigns are doing. Use that to improve your future campaigns.

Consistency is Key For a Successful Email Marketing Strategy

There is one thing that is key to making any email marketing strategy successful in the long term: Consistency.

Regardless of whether you communicate with your audience every week or every month, consistency allows people to build trust for your brand over time. Choose a cadence that’s realistic for your business and capacity. Ideally, you will plan out your emails in advance and create them in batches to reduce the time you’re spending on them.

Brainstorm Content For Your Email Marketing Strategy

When you’re first starting out email marketing, focus on developing your brand voice and gaining experience connecting with your audience in an authentic way. If you morph your voice to adapt to your analytics too much too soon, you’ll lose the authenticity that is making people read your emails in the first place. Ask yourself: How can I give as much value to my audience as possible? Get creative and brainstorm. Once you’ve done this, go back to this initial question and ask whether the campaign gives your audience value.

You can also think about different segments for your email. For example, emails can be organized by location or by interests, and you could tailor your emails to specifically suit different segments of your audience, which will make your emails more personalized.

Start Building Your Email List With a Lead Magnet

These tips fall flat if the only two people on your list are your mother and best friend. So, how do you build your email list? One of the most effective ways is to create a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something you offer for free in exchange for someone’s email. For example, a jewelry company might have a pop-up on their website that offers 15% off your first purchase when you subscribe.

Offering a discount for a first purchase is a popular and simple lead magnet ecommerce stores can easily implement. Other options include: A workbook or PDF that teaches something or informs your prospective clients about something they want to know that you’re offering. For example, a personal trainer might offer a free 10-minute mobility routine as a lead magnet. An enticing lead magnet increases the likelihood that people will want to sign up. A good way to think of your lead magnet is to ask yourself what would be worth $15 to $20 to your audience and give them that in exchange for being on your list.

Best Practices and Tips for Email Marketing

There are a few email marketing best practices.

Frequency and Timing of Email Sends

It’s worth repeating: Consistency really is key when it comes to building a relationship with your audience. You can choose every week, every two weeks, or once a month based on what you think is realistic. Daily emails can work well for ecommerce brands, but you have to make sure your content is engaging and relevant or people will disengage or unsubscribe. Start with a reasonable cadence, and you can always add more for special promotions or special events. As you learn more about your audience, you can segment them and tailor email campaigns based on their interests. For example, you can send emails more frequently to subscribers who open every email.

A/B Testing Subject Lines, Content, and Send Times

Subject lines are one of the most important factors that will determine whether your email gets opened or not. You want your subject lines to be short and catchy. But you can also test them by sending out different options (A/B testing) to your audience. Your email service provider (ESP) should have a function to do this. A/B testing can help you determine the kind of subject lines and content that resonate most with your readers. (But, honestly, if you’re just starting out, don’t get bogged down by this, and just focus on establishing an authentic relationship with your audience.)

Ensuring Deliverability (Avoiding Spam Filters)

Here are a few steps to take to avoid spam filers and help ensure your emails are delivered:

1. Use a double opt-in process to make sure all the people on your list truly want to be subscribed.

2. Regularly remove inactive contacts or bounced email addresses, which reduces the risk your email will be marked as spam due to a high percentage of invalid addresses.

3. Avoid phrases or words that are likely to be flagged as spam. Some examples: Free, urgent, make money fast, and risk-free.

4. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe with one click.

5. Test your email with a spam checker that will flag any potential issues before you send it to your audience. (Mail-tester.com and isnotspam.com are two options)

Using Data and Analytics to Continually Refine Campaigns

Every time you send out an email to your list, you’ll receive information about performance, which you can use to inform the next newsletters you send out.

Here are the core metrics you can track:

1. Open rate: The number of subscribers who open your email

2. Click-Through-Rate (CTR): How many people click on the call to action (CTA) in your email. For example if your email is telling people to sign up for a course, how many of them click on the link?

3. Conversion rate: The percentage of subscribers who end up doing the desired action (for example, buying the course you’re selling)

4. Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that were not delivered. This could be due to someone's email being full or an inactive email account.

5. Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of people who unsubscribe when you send an email. Unsubscribers are normal, but if the percentage is too high, it could lead to your emails being flagged as spam.

6. Spam complaints: The percentage of recipients who mark your email as spam.

You can compare these metrics to industry standard metrics. For example, according to MailChimp to assess your performance, the average open rate is 35.6%, average click rate is 2.6% and average unsubscription rate is .22%. MailChimp breaks these numbers down further by industry.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid in Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. But there are pitfalls you need to avoid to do it effectively.

1. Sending too many emails: Have you ever bought something from a store only to be bombarded with daily emails right after your purchase? It’s annoying. Sending too many emails will likely increase your unsubscribe rate and frustrate your audience. However, unless you’re sending it every day or more than once per day (which some brands do!) it’s probably not too much.

2. Overlooking personalization or segmentation: Email is a very personal form of communication and your subscribers want to feel like they are engaging with your brand directly. You can do this by addressing people by name, asking your audience to engage directly, or giving opportunities to interact.

3. Neglecting to optimize for mobile devices: About three in five people check their email on their smart phone, according to one study. Email templates ESPs provide don’t always seamlessly translate to mobile, so don’t forget to check and make sure your template is actually viewable on mobile.

Image: ESP typically allow you to see what your email looks like on desktop and mobile.

4. Failing to comply with email marketing regulations: Make sure you’re getting explicit consent to add people to your email list. This is important as it ensures your audience genuinely wants to be receiving your messages. Beyond this, different regions have specific legal requirements, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe.
   
   

Start By Sending Out Your First Email