What is Email Marketing? (EM)

Email marketing is a type of direct digital marketing method that uses emails to engage with a business’s audiences. It involves sending promotional or informational content. Email marketing is typically used to create product or brand awareness and generate leads or sales.

EM can play a pivotal role in a company’s marketing strategy, helping it build customer relationships and keep customers engaged in between purchases. As an email marketer, you are a guest in your customer’s inbox; this allows you to communicate with them on a more personal level.

What is opt-in email marketing?

Opt-in marketing is a type of inbound marketing that takes the recipient’s permission before sending them emails. It offers several benefits—if the customer gives you permission to send them promotional emails, they are less likely to delete them or mark them as spam. It is not only more effective but more ethical too. Spamming customers with promotional emails they have not agreed to receive will adversely impact your brand image and is more likely to push customers away than draw them in.

Opt-in email marketing also allows companies and brands to target their EM efforts better—only customers who have some interest in the company or brand are likely to agree to receive email communication from it.

What is an EM service?

An EM service or email service provider is a tool that helps marketers manage their EM efforts. There are two parts to email marketing services: solutions that helps build emails and manage contacts, and an email engine that helps send out the emails.

Why is EM important?

EM is a robust, reliable way of reaching your target audience and communicating with them. It offers the following benefits:

Access to customer insights: With email marketing, you own the connection between your customer and you. All the data generated from marketing emails is yours to analyse and draw conclusions from. This helps you get a better understanding of what interests your audiences.

Longer lifespan: Email addresses have a sort of stickiness. People tend to keep the one they have for a long time, so it becomes easier to connect.

Ease of Use: With new-age email marketing services, creating and executing an email marketing campaign is easier than ever. Most email marketing service providers offer loads of templates and tools that make the process of creating and sending an email and collecting data and insights very simple and quick.

 Why does your business need EM

Customers are being bombarded with information and visual content. In such an environment, it’s difficult for brands to get the attention of, and communicate with their audiences effectively. This is where email marketing comes in. EM helps in;

1. Creating brand awareness:
   Email reaches the recipient directly, allowing you to communicate with them one-on-one. And considering people don’t let just anyone into their inbox nowadays, getting in automatically elevates you to the position of a curated or favorite brand. If your promotional emails make it to someone’s inbox, it will allow your company or brand to stay fresh and relevant in the customer’s mind.
2. Selling your products and/or services:
   Launching new products, kicking off sales, and spreading the word about promotions can all be done effectively using email marketing. EM can effectively inform customers about products and promotions, helping nudge them in the direction of making a purchase.
3. Building customer loyalty:
   From the early stages of nurturing leads to conversion, onboarding, retention, email marketing fosters customer loyalty at every stage. EM is a powerful way of building a community—it gives recipients a sense of belonging. Moreover, with the sort of customised communication that email marketing facilitates, customers feel a sense of connection with your brand, thus strengthening your bond with them at every point along their customer journey.

How to get started 

You only need two things to get your EM campaign started:

An email marketing solution: Promotional emails are best sent using email marketing solutions, whose purpose is to help you create and send promotional emails to a large number of recipients with ease and speed. Email marketing solutions, as mentioned before, offer a range of features and functionalities to help you create and send promotional emails, as well as collect data and feedback from your email marketing campaigns. Using an email marketing solution instead of regular inbox providers (like Gmail or Yahoo) will ensure better email deliverability rates and timeliness.

An email contact list: Your email contact list should contain the email addresses of subscribers who have explicitly opted to receive email communication from in. Sending emails only to customers who have given you permission to do so is very important.

Once you have these two things in place, it’s time to create and execute email marketing campaigns:

Step 1. Define your marketing goals

Don’t be in a rush to hit send on your EM campaign; before you dive in, take a few moments to establish your  goals with respect to email marketing.

Step 2. Choose the type of campaign you want to use

Based on the marketing goals you’ve established, you now need to choose the type of campaign you want to build and execute.

 Step 3. Create your first email campaign

Now that you’ve defined your marketing goals and chosen the type of email you want to create, it’s time to get to work. Whether working off a template or creating an email from scratch, follow these rules-of-thumb to design effective, appealing emails:

Design your email for easy reading

Use images and visuals to increase engagement

Personalize your emails based on your target segments or individual recipients

Add branding to your emails

Design your email campaign to work across devices

Time your campaigns strategically

Step 4. Measure the campaign’s performance

Once you’ve hit send and your promotional emails have begun landing in your subscribers’ inboxes, you can start monitoring your campaign’s performance. Campaign performance reports can be obtained from two primary sources: your email marketing service and your website analytics tool. Depending on the service and tool you use, you can expect data such as unique opens, bounces, open rates, unopened emails, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, shares, and spam complaints. Advantages and disadvantages of email marketing

As with any marketing tool, email marketing has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages afforded by EM are:

1. Permission-based outreach: it is permission-based; this means that you know the recipients of your promotional emails are indeed interested in receiving them, which in turn increases your engagement.
2. More control: With email marketing, you own the relationships you’ve built with your subscribers. These relationships are independent of platform algorithms.
3. Direct access to your recipients: it is is a unique one-on-one type of communication that allows you to engage your target customers on their schedules.
4. Measurable: The results is measurable. You own the data generated by the campaign and can use it to inform future marketing decisions.

Some of the disadvantages of relying on EM include:

1. Competition: There are hundreds of thousands of email marketers out there vying for a place in people’s inboxes. Making oneself heard over this noise is a challenge.
2. Building an email list: To execute an email EM, you need an email contact list. Building this list is no easy task. Purchasing lists can lead to data protection and privacy concerns while also making your brand appear spammy.

Tips for creating great email marketing campaigns

The design of your email marketing campaign depends largely on the nature of your products or services and your marketing goals. However, there are certain tips that can help any email marketing campaign become more successful:

1. Create segmented and targeted lists of recipients. This way, you will send emails to the right people with the right messaging.
2. Understand your subscribers so that your promotional emails can be made relevant to have the maximum impact on them.
3. Identify the goals for your campaign to create emails that help achieve the marketing goals you have set.
4. Use an email planning template to plan your email marketing activities for the entire month or quarter. This gives you a snapshot of your month’s plan and allows you to stay more organised.
5. Define the timeline of your email campaign. Your campaigns should be relevant to your audiences at every stage of their buyer journey.
6. Make sure your email’s content is suited for your subscribers—it should give them the information they need.
7. Make sure your subject lines are engaging, interesting, and click-worthy. A well-written subject line is a sure shot way to increase your email open rate.
8. Use visual content to make your promotional emails more engaging for readers. A picture is worth a thousand words and a video many times more.
9. Design your email campaigns to encourage action. Your emails should move customers from where they are to where you want them to be.

To know more about Email Marketing and Digital Marketing, kindly contact us at :

E-mail: care@sowprofessional.com   

Website:     www.sowprofessional.com                                                                                       

 Phone:        07038254989                                                                                                                                 

Whatsapp: 07038254989