Email marketing has been around for about 44 years now and contrary to what some people might think, it is not a stale form of marketing. Now more than ever, email marketing is gaining traction, and businesses are beginning to understand the need for it. While social media platforms have made it easier to connect with your audience in a single click, email marketing – the oldest form of marketing – is more effective in increasing lead generation. In this guide, we have included everything you need to know about email marketing, including how it works and how to set up your first email marketing campaign.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a type of marketing that involves the use of personalized, mass emails to communicate with leads and potential customers to take specific action. The action can be to make a purchase, sign up for something, take advantage of an offer or a discount, or announce new events, products, and services. The ROI on email marketing is significantly higher than many other marketing channels, which is why more people and businesses are beginning to maximize it.
The number of email users has skyrocketed over the years. According to Statista, the number of global e-mail users in 2020 amounted to four billion and is set to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025. This number transcends the number of users on any social media platform.
This statistic shows how emails can be a gold mine to tap into when it comes to marketing. Also, compared to other forms of marketing, people hardly ever change their email addresses. Chances are that once you have their email address, you have them forever unless they opt out of your marketing campaign.
Benefits of Email Marketing
The average number of emails sent per day has increased over the years and is estimated to be 376.4 billion in the year 2025. This shows how email is one of the biggest communication channels. The benefits of email marketing are numerous and people will keep sending emails as a result. Here are some important benefits you should know.
1. Create Targeted and Personalized Content
Email marketing helps you customize your campaign and create targeted and personalized content for your audience. You can craft the perfect subject line that your audience resonates well with. Emails help you create authentic content and target your audience by segmenting them. This will help ensure you only send helpful content to everyone on your list, based on the level they are in your marketing funnel. To further create personalized emails, you can include a contact’s name in the email to make them feel the email was specifically written for them. There are several tools available, like MailDrip, to help you achieve this. It’s also been found that emails that include the first name of the recipient in their subject line have a higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t.
2. Build Credibility
Email marketing is one of the best ways to build credibility for your brand. You can get conversational with your emails and have a tone that your audience can get familiar with over time. Getting emails from an unknown sender or with a shady subject is enough reason for your subscribers to unsubscribe or send your emails to spam. To build credibility, you must consciously create your emails to reflect your brand tone and make them trustworthy enough to the average person. This will also help you establish your authority in your industry by constantly sharing high-quality content.
3. Improve Sales
The primary goal for many businesses when using email marketing is to generate and improve sales. Emails have become the biggest source of ROI for many marketers. Even better if you create segmented and personalized emails that can generate up to a 760% increase in revenue, as they are 26% more likely to be opened. With email marketing, you can creatively market your products or services and it is also easier to create campaigns with a low budget.
Onboarding new customers becomes easy with emails. You can create an email funnel that helps a subscriber go from a prospective lead to a customer through educational and promotional emails. This is where drip emails are most effective, and with MailDrip, creating drip email campaigns is easier than ever.
4. Build Strong Customer Relationships
Email marketing is one of the easiest ways to build strong customer relationships. You have direct access to their emails and can send them personalized content to help connect with your brand better. As a marketer, you need to improve communication with your audience if you want to generate sales. By creating a channel through which your customers find it easy to communicate with you, you will be building strong customer relationships. This can also improve your customer retention rate in the long run.
5. Produce Cost-effective Campaigns
Traditional campaigns and prints not only cost a lot of money but also take time to produce and execute. However, with email marketing, all you have to do is create something creative with the content team and push it via an email marketing tool. You can get this done within a day if you have a highly competent team, which will mostly include a copywriter, graphic artist, and content marketer. On the flip side, traditional campaigns would require long hours of photo and video shoots, location fees, printing, broadcasting fees, and more. Email marketing is cost-effective and as a result, you can reach even more people regardless of the time and budget constraints.
How Email Marketing Works
Businesses use email service providers (ESP), also known as email marketing platforms or email marketing tools, to create email campaigns for their audience. Common ESPs include MailDrip, MailChimp, HubSpot, Sendinblue, and MailerLite, among others. This is different from internet service providers (ISP) like Gmail, YahooMail, Outlook, and iCloud Mail which are mostly designed for personal use and not for personalized bulk emails.
On the other hand, email marketing tools work perfectly for personalized bulk emails and they provide different features to support your campaign. To set your marketing strategy up for success, you need a great email marketing service that has all the necessary features you need to be successful.
How to Succeed In Email Marketing
While email marketing has been proven to be effective over the years, it doesn’t happen just by chance. You have to be strategic with your marketing process and have a working plan that can be replicated over time to yield successful results. Below are some tactics to implement to succeed in email marketing.
1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy
A well-crafted strategy for your email marketing campaigns can go a long way in promoting your business to yield success. If done right, it can increase your ROI. Start by defining your goals and identifying the context for your campaigns. Then, get to know your audience and what they would like to get in their inbox. Work on creating strategic content that appeals to them and a calendar for sending emails.
2. Build and Segment Your Email List
You need an email list before you start creating or sending out campaigns. There are different ways to go about this. You can include a popup link on your website where every visitor has a chance to subscribe. You can also automatically migrate everyone who purchased from your website or use a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is a free item or service given away solely to collect contact details such as email addresses. This can be an ebook, a coupon, a free webinar, free trials or samples, and free consultations. Key things to consider when creating a lead magnet include that it must be relevant, actionable, easily consumed, and immediately available.
You can also segment your list based on the level of the leads in your funnel. Segmented email campaigns increase open rates by 39%, which will subsequently improve revenue. Segmenting allows you to divide your email subscribers into smaller groups using criteria. This will help you send more personalized content to your subscribers that they will find interesting.
3. Set Up Your First Email Marketing Campaign
Put a lot of effort into your first email marketing campaign. This is especially important if you have new subscribers expecting to hear from you and it can determine whether they stick to you or unsubscribe without thinking twice. Ensure the design is neat and aligns with your brand; use colors that your audience can easily recognize and get used to. Then, focus on your subject lines and most importantly, make them personalized. Let your content also tell a story and finally, use a call to action that pops.
How to Optimize Your Open and Conversion Rates
It is one thing to create and send email marketing campaigns and another to ensure it works. You need to optimize your emails to ensure you have increased open and conversion rates. If no one opens your emails, then there’s no point in everything you did to create the perfect email campaign. Below are some ways to go about this:
1. Make Sure Your Subject Stands Out
The above image shows what most people look at before deciding to open an email and the subject of the email is one of them. 69% of email recipients report emails as spam after reading the subject line. Craft a compelling subject that will move your recipients to open your email.
2. Know the Right Time to Send Emails
MailChimp did a study on the best day and time to send emails. See the results illustrated below.
Sometimes, what determines your open rate isn’t dependent on the audience or content but rather on the time of the day you sent the email campaign.
3. Make Sure Your Emails are Mobile-friendly
Over 70% of people read their email in a mobile app, so you want to ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly. Use larger fonts and write short paragraphs to make the email easily readable on mobile. Use larger CTA buttons to make it easy to tap with their thumbs. Also, use more text and fewer images, as images might have trouble loading quickly on mobile.
Can Email Marketing Get Any Better?
Email marketing might just be that gap in your business that you are yet to take advantage of. There are many rules today on email marketing but the key thing is to always put your subscribers first. Remember that they are humans before subscribers and you should create content that appeals to them and will drive them to take action.
To get the most from your email marketing, you need the best hands to work with you. It’s not just about putting a group of people together to make a team but rather getting the best expertise. At MailDrip, we are working to ensure more businesses get the most from their email marketing strategies. Beyond using a tool like MailDrip, you can partner with us to help create an email marketing strategy for your business that would generate great results.
By working with our team, you can relax and be certain that your email marketing worries are well taken care of. Fill out the form below to get started with us!
