How to use Email Marketing?

Emails are the oldest way of communication over internet. They have been around for a long time and will be around even longer.

According to stats, 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis and the ROI of email marketing is a huge number of 3800%!

Email marketing is a method that leverages power of emails for business benefits and is the best way to sell your products and services online.

The advantage that email marketing has over social networks is that email list is yours to keep forever and no one can take it away from you but you can be deplatformed from social networks! In addition to that, emails are more private compared to social networks.

People receive lots of emails in their inboxes and in order to choose which one to read or even subscribe to, the email must have certain characteristics to make them appealing and successful.

In this article, we will show you how to use email marketing and how to send out great emails.

• Opt-in form

The goal of opt-in form is to encourage visitors to give away their email address so your opt-in form should be attractive yet simple. You can use visuals with your opt-in form to make it more convincing.

Don’t ask for too much information from people other than their email address. Ask too much and you will scare away prospects!

Your opt-in form has to have a load and clear call to action (CTA) to invite readers to subscribe. Use a contrasting color or a non-generic text for subscribe button.

Where in your website you put your opt-in form is important too but splash page is the best option as is a designated sign-up page.

There are many free tools out there to help you with the opt-in form that can be embedded on your website but your web designer can have the form built in from the beginning as well, making it more personalized and in tune with the rest of your website.

• Free offer

Putting an opt-in form alone doesn’t fill your email list. You must encourage people to sign up for your email list and for that you need to provide them with a free offer first.

The offer doesn’t have t be monetary; a file in any format works well. You can create a great compelling content in the form of eBook, white paper, podcast, free trial and even a coupon and offer it as a free value if they sign up for your email marketing list.

You can be absolutely creative about your free offer. Just remember that your free offer must be small in size and easily understandable and highly functional meaning it offers tips and tricks to your target audience which they can use in their real life.

But above all your free offer must be relevant to your target audience. Since you are at this stage of your digital marketing, it is assumed that you have your marketing plan all set up and you have clearly defined your target audience and your customer persona so you know who you are giving the offer to.

• Personalization

Email marketing must be personalized to each and every prospect and customer. General emails rarely attract any attention in exploding inboxes. People like to be called by their name and read about the things that are interesting to them.

• Segmentation

One of the ways to organize your email marketing list is to segment it. Segmentation helps you to send out emails that are relevant to every individual and helps your recipient to receive only what they want to read about.

Segmentation can be done based on demographics and preferences assuming people have provided you with it. But time of subscription, open rate, inactivity and shopping cart abandonment are great factors too.

• Timing

Day, time and sequence of your emails largely depend on the goal of your email and preferences of your recipient but type of content, age, location and occupation have their roles too.

• Measurement

After all the creative work you put in designing and sending perfect emails, you should evaluate your success and measure some metrics.

Email Open Rate indicates how many of your sent emails have been opened. If it is too low; look at the subject line and the timing of your emails.

Click Through Rate indicates the number of actions that are being taken by email recipients. If your rate is low, check the content of your emails first.

Unsubscribe Rate indicates the number of subscribers that opt-out of your email list. If it is high, remember the reason they subscribed and if you provided them with valuable offer that you promised them in the first place!

• Automation

Like any other industry, email marketing is benefiting from automation too. There are great apps that can make your job easier by doing repetitive tasks for you.

Auto responders are one of them. They send emails based on certain events that are recurring for every subscriber or a segment of them such as joining the email list, being inactive or leaving the shopping cart unattended.

The emails are crafted in advance and your job is done once you have created it! Auto responders have huge impact on nurturing and retaining your subscribers and turning them to loyal customers with the help of amazing content that you have created in the email.

• Other Dos and Don’ts

Remember that you must have permission to send emails! You can’t collect emails from online forums or business cards and just send them newsletters or you run the risk of being labeled as spam which is definitely not what you want for your business!

And you must provide a way for subscribers to opt-out whenever they want to.

You must send emails from a credible domain and IP address which has not been used for spamming.

Do not use spamy salesy language in subject line or the copy. Your subject line should make the recipient curious about the content that is inside.

The content must be in your own language and style which is easy to understand and interesting to follow. The format is better kept simple.

Your emails must be interesting meaning they require appealing visuals that simply showcases the intent of the email.

And it should certainly have responsive design as most people are checking their emails on their smart phones.

Outsourcing your Email Marketing

By now, you know that you can do your own email marketing if you have the time. But outsourcing your email marketing is a great option too so you can focus all your time on other aspects of your business.

At Admark Vision we can help you to use email marketing to send out the most beautiful, convincing and professional emails and newsletters that have high conversion rate which leads to high sales!