Are you interested in learning more about what email marketing is? Do you want to start an email marketing campaign for your company? We have compiled a comprehensive tutorial on email marketing and the creation of successful email campaigns.
The use of email marketing as a method to sell your website or company is becoming an increasingly common practise online. It is an effective method for connecting with your audience and preserving positive interactions with them. This allows you to enhance sales, conversions, and traffic, all of which contribute to the growth of your company.
As a result, it is essential for companies and websites to begin engaging in email marketing as soon as they possibly can. In this tutorial, we will discuss email marketing and its significance, as well as the actions that need to be taken in order to set up a successful email campaign. Let’s start!
What is Email Marketing? (Introduction)
Sending promotional emails to those who have already shown interest in your business or who could do so in the future is the core component of email marketing, which is a successful kind of digital marketing. As part of this tactic, a high number of emails are broadcasted to a wide variety of recipients, either via an automated system or by hand.
You accomplish this by sending out emails that include the information and specs pertaining to the goods and services that you want to promote. It may include information about your goods and services, which would raise the profile of such offerings among audiences. By sending out emails, you can keep your clients up to speed on any new product offerings or upgrades that you have by informing them about these changes.
It is the kind of marketing that is the least complicated in comparison to direct marketing. Over 3.9 billion active people use their email every day, and this provides you with the opportunity to communicate with them directly. You can build trust amongst consumers, sell more of your products and services, and expand your company by taking advantage of this direct channel of communication with the audience.
Email marketing is still popular for a number of reasons, including the fact that it provides a direct route to consumers and a simple method for promoting a product. In addition to this, it offers a return on investment that is noticeably better than that of other marketing channels such as search engine optimization or social media (SEO).
This post will walk you through all the necessary actions that you need to do in order to get started with email marketing, and we will discuss those processes in detail. However, before we get into that, it is essential that you have a working knowledge of the many marketing email formats that are now in use.
3 Major Types of Marketing Emails You Can Send
There are primarily three categories of marketing emails that are used the most often, despite the fact that you may send marketing emails with a variety of data and different approaches. They are as follows:
- Transactional Emails
- Relational Emails
- Promotional Emails
Let’s explain about them briefly.
1. Transactional Emails
You have the ability to send an email to confirm a transaction whenever a user makes a purchase from your online shop or places an order for a product. That is an example of a transaction email like the one you just saw.
In a similar vein, you may send users emails to notify them of payment receipt, account approval, subscription information, delivery alerts, changed passwords, and so on. All of these emails are connected to the various transactions that took place on your website involving different individuals. As a result, we refer to them as transaction emails.
For instance, the account approval notice email that DreamHost issued to us after we ordered a web hosting service is seen in the snapshot that can be found below.
Transactional emails are the sort of emails that are the most interesting to read. Because they are related with the purchase, users have a tendency to inspect them thoroughly and engage with them.
If you have a high volume of sales, sending out such emails manually would be a very time-consuming process for you. Setting up email campaigns, on the other hand, makes it quite simple. Email marketing software will immediately send out these emails once a transactional activity takes place on your website.
2. Relational Emails
As the name suggests, relational emails are those that concentrate on fostering and preserving your business’s relationships with its audience and consumers. Maintaining positive relationships with your clientele and engaging in conversation with them is made possible via the use of these emails. Even if they do not operate directly to raise and promote your sales or conversions, maintaining trust is highly important because of how important it is.
You are able to send out emails to say hello and welcome to new subscribers, as well as thank them for their purchases and offer them best wishes on significant anniversaries. These emails are considered relational emails since they assist to maintain a positive connection with the client and try to offer a helpful hand to the consumer.
For illustration purposes, below is a sample of the relationship email that we get from Namecheap after acquiring a domain name from them.
This communication came from the Chief Executive Officer of the organisation! Isn’t that a wonderful sound? Establishing trust between a brand and its consumers may be facilitated via the use of relational emails.
In this manner, the audience members have a greater chance of purchasing anything from you if they have a need for something. Relational email is a highly significant sort of email marketing that focuses on keeping your connection with audiences rather than immediately increasing sales or conversions. This type of email marketing works in a roundabout way to generate sales and conversions.
3. Promotional Emails
Promotional emails are the form of email marketing that are the most frequent and extensively utilised. These emails are essential for everyone. It is a method for informing your audiences, clients, and readers about any changes to your goods and services, as well as any new updates to those products or services. They are often employed for the purpose of directly promoting your goods and services.
These promotional emails are sent out in large quantities with the goal of selling your features and goods in addition to providing information. They are almost often accompanied by other details, such as information on the pricing of products, discounts, events, or offers.
For illustration purposes, below is a marketing email sent out by Yoast SEO about a special deal.
Promoting forthcoming events, providing reminders about pricing changes, and sending out emails about newly reduced items and services are all examples of promotional emailing since they promote your services and content.
B. 10 Reasons Why Email Marketing is Important
Email marketing is still a highly popular marketing medium, despite the fact that there are many different forms of marketing methods available. Even though the first marketing email was sent in 1978, it is still widely regarded as one of the most important marketing methods for the expansion of a company.
It’s a pretty common method of marketing these days. Every single day, there are around 306.4 billion emails sent and received, and many businesses employ automated bulk emailing to engage with their clients. This only demonstrates how widespread the use of email marketing really is. However, what factors truly contribute to the success of email marketing?
because electronic mail in general is so widely used as a reliable mode of communication in a variety of contexts, including personal and professional relationships. The vast majority of individuals carry at least one digital gadget, on which they have installed an email client, and they often check their inboxes. This is a significant contributor to its overall success.
Email marketing is a wonderful chance to communicate with people, display and advertise your items, or build positive relationships. Your company will be able to expand as a result of increased exposure to a large number of potential customers as a result of this.
There are many different reasons why businesses should employ email marketing, and it is because it is seen as a highly significant marketing approach that all businesses should use. In this section, we are going to discuss a few of those reasons.
1) Easy Reach Due to User’s Habit
People are used to continually connecting with the outside world via the use of various digital gadgets and forms of media. And emails are one of the frequent forms of media that people utilise all the time. And marketing emails might take use of this routine to sell their services to individuals. You just need to do one thing, which is to send an email to everyone on your contact list in mass.
Because it is common practise for individuals to check their email at least once every day, your campaign will have no trouble reaching large numbers of people.
According to data compiled by Campaign Monitor,
- Approximately 58 percent of individuals will look at their email as soon as they get up in the morning.
- Over ninety-one percent of users log in to their email accounts on a daily basis.
- A whopping 94% of internet users log on primarily to check their email.
- Email marketing is the preferred method of advertising among consumers by a majority of 72 percent.
These points demonstrate that increasing your reach to a greater number of individuals is simple to do via the use of email marketing.
2) Promotion of Content
In order to boost the number of sales or the amount of traffic to your content, you need to market all of your items, content, and services. And one of the most effective methods to promote your content is to engage in email marketing.
You have the ability to send out emails that include information on your goods and services. It enables you to communicate with a very large number of people, and you may advertise and present your goods to those people.
You may also mention the primary focus or highlight of your website or blog in the email in order to attract the recipient to visit your content and check it out.
3) Generate and Nurture Leads
Lead generation refers to the process of drawing prospective clients to your business and gathering their contact information (such as email address, social media follower information, phone number, etc.) so that you may communicate with them in the future. Leads are defined as individuals who voluntarily submit their contact information to a business.
It is highly vital for the growth of your company to generate leads and then to nurture those prospects. And email marketing is the perfect solution to this problem!
You may get leads for your company by using a variety of tools and strategies associated with email marketing. You may gather emails via your website by adding popups, subscribe forms, and other similar features. One common strategy is to ask visitors for their email address in return for providing them with free material or services.
In order to nurture your leads, email marketing is also quite vital. You may cultivate relationships with your leads by sending them emails that are timely, relevant, and suitable. This enables you to provide your consumers with up-to-date information and keep them abreast of any newly released items or services.
You have the ability to disseminate information on fresh content, products, deals, events, and many other topics. Additionally, this may be useful in gathering new consumers and increasing the number of sales you make.
4) Automation
The ability to automate tasks is one of the most compelling arguments in favour of using email marketing rather than any of the other strategies. The practise of sending out a large number of emails to your audience or subscribers in an automated fashion is referred to as automation in email marketing.
The majority of websites provide subscription forms on their pages, allowing visitors to sign up for updates and get new information in this way. This enables the website to get your email address and to contact you through email about new goods, upgrades, or other relevant information.
It is a very challenging endeavour for a website with a huge subscription base to send emails to each individual subscriber. And when you consider the fact that you have to send out multiple emails at different times, the task is enormous, and without any automation, it is just not possible.
There are a variety of email marketing software options available, and one of those options allows you to easily programme emails to be sent automatically in response to specific activities taken by users. You can customise it to be unique for each individual recipient by using variables to save their name and address, and you can also configure it to send based on a variety of activities.
The programme operates according to the parameters that you provide and sends bulk emails to the subscribers. You can simply specify a certain time or category of subscribers to receive it and keep them up to date with the information that you deliver.
5) Direct Sales
Email marketing has a significant competitive edge over other marketing tactics since it may lead to direct sales. The effective use of a plan for email marketing might result in a significant rise in the number of sales you generate for your company. You may directly sell your services or goods by including a link in emails that you send out to recipients, which should have an interesting tone.
If the users are interested in finding anything similar to it or have a desire for it, then the email serves as a convenient entry point to meet their needs. Because of this, it will be much simpler for customers to buy the services or items that contribute to a rise in your sales.
6) Follow-up or repeating sales
It is possible to configure your emails so that they are sent out automatically after certain actions such as subscribing, making a purchase, submitting a form, or engaging in other activities. These emails may be great for showing new consumers that you appreciate their business, thanking them for their purchase, or even introducing them to other items and services that are linked to what they just bought.
Follow-up emails are those that are sent out after a given activity has been completed. Follow-up emails may help you give a warm hand to clients, which further increases the atmosphere of confidence in your business and also allows you to sell relevant items to customers. You have complete control over the information that is included in these emails. You have the ability to choose the contents of follow-up emails, as well as when to send them and to whom.
The following are some examples of popular follow-up emails:
- Sending a welcome message to new clients through email.
- Warning that the shopping cart has been left unattended.
- Emails of confirmation for all orders made.
- Emails announcing new plans or offers.
- Expiring plans update email.
7) Feedbacks From Consumers
It is not necessary to limit emails to standard and straightforward formats. Using the email list, you may send almost any form of email to the people who have subscribed to your website. You should also consider including a feedback box in your emails since it is one of the most crucial things your recipients can do.
This makes it possible for your clients and users to input what they think about the services and goods, as well as provide feedback on your company. This contributes to the development of an interactive atmosphere between the company and its clients.
Most importantly, you can also use the comments and ideas that clients provide you to enhance your company and give more attention to what it is that customers desire.
8) Analysis
There are a variety of tools included with a variety of email marketing software packages that allow you to do an analysis of how well your email marketing campaign is performing and what its statistics are. Using analytics tools, you will have an easy time monitoring all of your activities and progress.
Your click rates, open rates, subscription ratio, and many other metrics are all available for analysis. Understanding and analysing this data will help you further optimise your email marketing, which in turn can assist in the expansion of your company.
Additionally, you are able to measure conversions as well as the impact that email marketing makes to sales. Your email marketing may be improved by seeing and analysing all of your essential data, such as your ROI (return on investment) and conversion rates.
9) ROI
It is possible for an email marketing campaign to generate a Return on Investment of around 4,000 percent. It indicates that for every dollar you invest, there is a possibility of receiving a return of $40. In particular, when compared to several other marketing methods, this strategy has a very high percentile.
Implementing an effective plan for email marketing does not need a significant financial outlay on your part in order to get a return. Because of this, you need to be sure that your company has a solid plan for marketing through email.
10) Own your audience
If a client subscribes to your newsletter or gives you their email address via a variety of different forms, you can take use of this information to send an automated message to that consumer. You will have an easier time promoting your items and content from that location. That is to say, you are able to communicate directly with your target audience.
Nevertheless, you won’t find that to be the case with all marketing methods. In the case of social media marketing, for instance, it’s possible that you won’t always be able to contact directly with your consumers. Your message has a greater possibility of becoming buried behind a pile of other messages, being banned, or perhaps being blocked altogether.
It is essential to note that individuals do not always often look for such posts on social media. On certain sites, you are not even given the email addresses of the people that follow you, making it impossible for you to communicate with them. This is a significant drawback of using alternative tactics in competition with email marketing.
Email marketing also does not prevent you from branding the content of your emails or the emails themselves. Your audiences are only there because of your brand, therefore you don’t need to communicate with them on other platforms if you want to maintain control over them.
C. Getting Started with Email Marketing
Email marketing is not a straightforward endeavour; rather, for it to be successful, a number of distinct processes need to cooperate with one another. In order to be successful in email marketing, you need to have your platform figured out, generate and nurture leads and email lists, know your audiences, and more. Despite this, it is not impossible to do what has to be done.
You have access to a wide variety of online information and tools that you may utilise thanks to the availability of the Internet. You can also discover some helpful tools online that will make the process of email marketing more simpler and more streamlined for you. You won’t waste any time getting started thanks to these methods and tools.
There is no need for you to be concerned about starting started on a path with email marketing. In order to help you achieve your objective in email marketing, we’ve put up a step-by-step tutorial.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Choosing the Best Email Marketing Platform
To get things rolling, the first and most important thing you need is a solid plan for your email marketing platform. When you’re first starting out, it might be difficult to make decisions since there are so many different possibilities. We’ve compiled a list of some of the top email marketing platforms available so that you can make an informed decision about which one to use.
It is crucial that you know what features you need in your email marketing platform before you pick one. This should be done before you choose an email marketing platform. It is easier to make a smart decision for the long run if you have a thorough understanding of all of your needs and the essential characteristics of a good platform. Features such as automation, email list management, and many more should be included in a decent email marketing platform.
Therefore, let’s begin with the elements that a decent email marketing platform should have, as well as how you should go about selecting your platform.
How to Select the Best Email Marketing Tool?
Having stated that, let’s go on to the next step, which is to investigate some of the most effective platforms for email marketing.
Best Email Marketing Platforms You Can Try
You are now in a position to choose an email marketing platform for yourself now that you are aware of all the qualities that are necessary for effective email marketing platforms. We have compiled a list of the most effective email marketing platforms so that you can make an informed decision.
i) Mailchimp
Mailchimp is extensively utilised due of its always free email marketing service plan, which has helped it earn a reputation as one of the top platforms for email marketing. You are able to send up to 12000 emails to a total of 2000 subscribers with its free plan.
In addition, Mailchimp provides a premium service that, for a fee, enables users to send emails to an infinite number of recipients. It comes equipped with automation tools, a simple email builder that you can use by dragging and dropping, and it also divides your contacts into a variety of categories.
PROS
CONS
ii) Sendinblue
SendInBlue is a well-known name in the world of email marketing, and it also provides SMS service. You may expect it to include all of the standard capabilities that come with an email marketing platform. It is a highly user-friendly platform that is expanding extremely rapidly at the moment. You will have no trouble using its automation, segmentation, or CRM, among other features.
There are paid and unpaid options available. With the free plan, you may send up to 300 emails each day; but, if you want to send 40,000 emails each month, you will need to pay $25 each month. A landing page builder, customer relationship management, and Facebook advertisements integration are all included in the subscription version.
You may also incorporate automatic email into your WordPress site using SendInBlue’s standalone SMTP bulk email marketing solution, which is available to you if you use the service.
PROS
CONS
iii) AWeber
Despite its long history, AWeber remains one of the most widely used systems for email marketing. It manages the email marketing demands of small and medium-sized organisations and comes with a large array of tools and services that may be used for that purpose.
If you require assistance for more than 500 subscribers, you will need to upgrade to one of AWeber’s premium plans; their free plan only allows for up to 500 users to be supported. The premium plan begins at around $19 per month in price.
PROS
CONS
iv) Constant Contact
The email marketing platform Constant Contact, which is widely used and popular, comes with a large number of high-quality email templates that are extremely simple to use and put into action. You also have the ability to automatically develop individualised layouts for a variety of emails and campaigns depending on the preferences you provide.
Because of its many valuable features, it has become the most popular and rapidly expanding platform for email marketing. You will get access to tools such as email automation, contributions, and surveys, as well as options for list segmentation and integrations with Facebook advertisements, and more. In addition, its straightforward monitoring and reporting features may be used to do an analysis of your email marketing process.
The service does not offer a free plan, but if you sign up for the free trial, you will be able to test it out for a full month at no cost. It begins at a price of around $20 per month.
PROS
CONS
These systems, however, are among the most widely used email marketing platforms that are now available. You may select the one that meets the requirements of your email marketing the most effectively from this list.
Step 2: Setting Up Your Email Marketing Account
Mailchimp is going to serve as our marketing platform for the email marketing guide that we are developing. This is because it offers a free plan that is loaded with lots of features that can accommodate any kind of small company.
i) Sign Up and Activate Mailchimp Account
To begin, you will first need to create an account for yourself on MailChimp after signing up for it. Visit the website of MailChimp and after that, click the button labelled “Sign Up Free.”
You also have the option of selecting a plan by clicking on the button labelled “Pick A Plan.” When you click on it, you will be sent to the price page for MailChimp. You are able to consider a number of different price alternatives and choose one that is appropriate for you.
If this is your first time using the service, going with the “Free” plan is probably the best option for you.
As soon as you continue, you will be sent to a registration page where you will be able to establish your Mailchimp account. In order to create an account, you will need to provide your email address, choose a username, and select a password.
Remember to create a robust password for the account. You may use a password manager such as LastPass or one of the many others available to create and store strong passwords. After you have finished entering all of the information, you will be able to click the “Sign Up” button.
After that, you will arrive at a website congratulating you on your accomplishment and informing you to check your email.
You will need to activate the account by clicking on the activation link that will be sent to you.
Following the activation of your account, the account setup page will become visible to you.
ii) Set Up Your Mailchimp Account
Your first order of business should be to verify the price plan once again. If you are just getting started, you may want to consider signing up for a free plan.
The ‘Profile’ stage is the next one in the process of setting up an account. In this section, you will be prompted to provide profile information such as your name, the name of your company, the website’s URL, and your phone number. After entering the necessary information, proceed by clicking the button labelled “Continue.”
The next step is to complete the section for our company’s address.
At the fourth stage, you will need to decide whether you already have a list of contacts or if you need to create one. If you have a list of people you can email, you may respond with “Yes” and also specify how many people are on that list. If this will be your first time creating an email list, choose the “No” option from the drop-down menu, and then click the “Continue” button.
MailChimp will inquire as to the kind of services that your company provides in the fifth phase of the process. Make your selection from the available options here. It will offer the email marketing features for you based on the response you provide. For instance, we went with “original material” since the blog pieces that will be featured on our website, SiteSaga, would be unique.
And last but not least, the “Finish” stage, in which you simply choose which emails from Mailchimp you wish to receive in the future. After making your selections for the updates you want to hear, click the box labelled “Continue.”
After you’ve finished, you’ll arrive to the dashboard for MailChimp. Boom!
You can quickly compose emails and landing pages, as well as manage both of those things, from this dashboard. In the stages that follow, we will walk you through all of them!
