None of the marketing methods are as stereotypical as email marketing. It is identified with obsessive chaotic mailings, spam and predicts his imminent death. Yes, this method is a dinosaur in the world of digital tools, but he also continues to explode the market with new technologies, work to retain customers, and make a profit. And no matter what is predicted, the era of email marketing is far from over.
Email marketing is the communication of a business with a subscriber or customer using email for the purpose of building relationships or sales. Marketers love email for their availability, high return on investment, and the ability to use the channel both for generating profits and for communicating with customers. In email marketing, the written skills of employees are very important, because a well-composed e-mail forms an impression of the company from a partner or a buyer. Often companies do not devote enough time to improve the skills of their teams in writing or they do not have enough time, in such cases, you can use the services of a professional writer EssayWriterHelp.
According to Campaignmonitor, the ROI from email channels, depending on the industry, is 3800% – 4000%, which means that every dollar spent on average generates $ 38-40 in profit for the business. 90% of messages are delivered to customers’ inbox, except for those whose inboxes are full or become inactive, while a Facebook post will appear in the feed of 2-4% of business page subscribers (Campaignmonitor).
According to Litmus research, 43% of emails are read on mobile devices, which means that the user can receive information without being tied to a desktop. While social media scrolls quickly, email read times are growing from year to year. Thus, 61% of recipients interact with the content of the message for more than 8 seconds, 23.5% – from 2 to 8 seconds, and only 15% spend less than 2 seconds viewing the message.
Interaction with email content can be truly engaging, and the results are always measurable:
- AMP technology made it possible to order a product or book a room in a couple of clicks directly in an email without going to a website or other resource.
- The design of letters has unlimited possibilities: quests, puzzles, polls, interactive elements like a wheel of luck and much more – all this can be implemented within the framework of the email itself. While the message format in messengers has its limitations, you can send an informative email, and it will also help to cover all points of contact with the customer.
- The built-in analytics of mailing systems has data on deliverability, click-throughs, open and read times, statistics on domains and contacts, devices, browsers and much more. The business can analyze, optimize and calculate the ROI.
Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing is primarily a customer experience strategy that starts with acquisition and focuses on repeat purchases and building lasting relationships. It is suitable for any type of business, but it will differ in strategy and set of triggers (automatic emails). The strategy is drawn up as a separate document and is an action plan that is implemented step by step.
The strategy includes:
- KPIs and goals we want to achieve.
- Budget and list of required resources (costs for a specialist, mailing system, web tracking, data storage).
- Competitor analysis.
- Contact collection plan.
- Required automatic chains: welcome series; product training (if necessary); support of the order; response to user actions on the site; reactivation of inactive subscribers.
- Description of segments and work with them.
- Mandatory promotional mailing plan.
The list of strategy sections depends a lot on the sales funnel.
Newsletter software
Personal mail is only suitable for personal communication. For business mailings, you will already need a corporate address and tools to automate processes and analyze the result.
If you want to build a good domain reputation and become a trusted sender, you need to configure digital signatures on the server. Otherwise, your mailings may be blocked by email clients or end up in the “Spam” folder.
To support clients, especially b2b, it will be enough to set up mailing lists in CRM. If your goal is to make constant mass mailings, accompany orders, send automatic letters, for example, about abandoned carts, then you should stop at a special mailing system (ESP).
The main advantage of ESP mailings over CRM mailings is that they provide more opportunities to:
- Segment and manage groups.
- Quickly typeset beautiful letters in corporate design without deep knowledge of html and css.
- Quickly adjust responsiveness and see how the email will be displayed on mobile phone and desktop.
- Receive a report on the results of the mailing.
- Create omnichannel chains. For example: send an email and web push, and if they are not read, deliver a vibe message.
- Configure any scenarios with the necessary conditions: sending to those who followed the link in the letter, performed an action on the site, indicating the time of sending, etc.
- Tracking clicks from mailings in your Google Analytics without complicated settings and manual assignment of UTM tags.
Email marketing opportunities
Email marketing can be implemented in a company as a separate sales funnel, or supplement the set of digital tools that are used to attract and retain customers. Let’s consider the tasks more specifically.
Advantages of implementing email marketing in business
Returning the audience to the site and converting it into buyers
Finding a product or service, reading a description on a website, putting it in a shopping cart, going to another site for comparison, distracting myself and forgetting where I was looking is a common, normal behavior of a buyer. It is possible to fix the situation, email marketing has all the tools for this.
With the help of trigger letters, you can remind you of a forgotten purchase, inform about the appearance of a product in stock, etc., while doing this automatically:
- Letters about abandoned views – sent if they were interested in the product, studied the card with its characteristics.
- Letters with products from the wishlist – the product has been added to such a list, we remind you of it and encourage the purchase.
- Abandoned cart emails – the item was added to the cart but did not place an order.
- A notification letter about a sale – the trigger is relevant when the user wants to pre-order or noted that he wants to know when the product will be back in stock, if it was absent at the time of the search.
Product training – onboarding
Letters from this series help you retain and engage your subscribers. They are the ones who show the value of the product and teach you how to use it as efficiently as possible. For example, onboarding emails are part of Zapier’s email marketing strategy.
Customer success is very important in terms of customer retention. If he understands what to do with the product, learns about new functionality, he will not continue to look for a convenient and understandable alternative from competitors. If you want to reduce churn rate, consider a series of training emails.
Restoring relationships
Database burnout is an inevitable process. People change their email addresses, they are no longer interested in the product, and more interesting offers from competitors appear. You need to work more actively with such segments: offer additional goodies, ask about the reason for their passivity and take action. If a subscriber ignores you, then it is better to unsubscribe from the mailing list – this is the basis of the base hygiene and optimizes costs.
Built-in analytics of the mailing system allows you to segment people who do not open emails or do not buy for a certain period of time. You can stimulate their activity:
- A valuable lead magnet (e.g. white paper);
- Bonuses;
- Discounts.
At the same time, some tools, such as Pabbly Email Marketing, provide the ability to manage all contacts in one place, dividing them into different categories, such as age, city, gender, etc., to make emails more personalized.
Direct sales
Promotional mailings are responsible for this function. Regular and relevant offers promote repeat sales and retain customers. The main thing is to know when to stop and not to bore the subscriber.
Company service supplement
Many companies have realized that the quality of service is an integral part of the sales process, which affects loyalty to the company and income, respectively.
When working on a company’s service design, include in strategic transactional emails, order status notifications, thank you messages.
What does it take to start email marketing?
Your email marketing setup plan should include the following items:
1. Decide on a mailing system. Each business has its own product and its own tasks: someone sells webinars, someone sells toothbrushes, so companies will need different functionality to automate sales.
There are systems that are universal, with a maximum set of tools, and there are limited and sharpened ones, for example, only for e-commerce. Some ESPs have more opportunities for segmentation, analysis, testing, etc., while others have less. Form your list of requirements for the mailing system before paying for the tariff.
How to make your choice?
- Ask for a recommendation from fellow marketers, for example, in thematic groups on Facebook;
- Read reviews of mailing systems;
- Read the terms of use for each service – are they right for you?
- Ask the sales department all your questions before paying for the tariff and setting up email marketing on the platform.
2. Start collecting contacts of subscribers in offline and online space. Add subscription forms to the website and Facebook, at the point of sale, when registering for the loyalty program, take the client’s consent to receive mailings, launch targeted advertising in the lead form format.
3. To NOT get into spam, you need to create signatures DMARC, DKIM, SPF. Mail clients first of all pay attention to their presence, otherwise they will not become a trusted sender, as you may be mistaken for a fraudster.
4. Create a master template that covers all possible structures for use in future mailings. This significantly saves time on creating letters.
5. Prepare content, send to the desired segment.