Email marketing is one of the fastest-growing marketing tools today, and it is here to stay. It can prove to be a powerful tool for keeping your customers engaged and raising brand advocates, which ultimately leads to growing your business.
To fully leverage the power of email marketing, it is crucial to select the right email management software that can take your marketing to the next level. These tools are much more than just a means of sending emails - they can be used to segment your audience, track open rates, see the ratio of unsubscribes, create automated workflows, and much more.
When implemented properly, the ROI provided by email marketing can substantially double the ROI generated by other marketing methods that organizations use like mobile marketing, banner ads, catalogs, and keyword ads.
In order to achieve 2X ROI, you need to craft an exceptional email marketing strategy. The typical email open rate should be approximately 22.02%, with a 2.13% click rate. And if you are not able to achieve these numbers and are falling behind, you need to work on your email marketing strategy.
Even though every brand is unique and has different campaign objectives, there are some common elements that contribute to an effective email marketing strategy. By this, we don’t claim that email marketing is a “one-size-fits-all” approach. However, there are a few important things to consider before you intend to achieve the engagement you desire for your business.
We’ll examine 10 such components in this blog. But first, let’s have a look at why an effective email marketing strategy is important for your business.
Why is Email Marketing Still Better Than Other Modes of Communication in the Business World?
Cost-effectiveness
It enables organizations to reach a large number of customers at a low cost when compared to other modes of communication. Thus, even with all sorts of media and social platforms coming up, email marketing remains on the top of the best customer acquisition tactics, because it requires fewer resources to run successful campaigns and doesn't depend on paid ads like social media.
Mass Communication
The best email marketing software allows you to send messages to thousands of subscribers at the same time. This is the reason why it becomes possible to spread information quickly and in an inexpensive manner.
Easy Customization
Even though emails are sent out in bulk, it’s super easy to customize them for every receiver. With top email marketing tools, you can include the recipient’s name in the subject lines and in the email body. You can opt for offering personalized product recommendations, unique welcome messages, or shopping cart reminders in your emails to make them more relevant to your subscribers.
Drives Online and In-store Sales
According to a study by Deloitte, around 65% of consumers say that they use coupons received in emails while shopping online. The business of e-coupons is huge, and email marketing is the core of it. It’s a great way to reach the increasing number of people hunting for online bargains.
Now that you know why email marketing is worth investing in, let’s go through the types of emails that can be sent to your subscribers.
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
1. Welcome Emails
When you gain new subscribers, they might not be ready to buy or deal with your business initially. Even though they are qualified leads, they aren’t prepared to buy something straight away. Thus, welcome emails serve as the best way to make the initial contact.
Welcome emails with a personal touch that introduces your business without loading up a sales pitch have higher open and click-through rates. It is the first step towards building a relationship with your subscribers, and when done right, it will leave them more responsive to future emails.
Here’s an example of a welcome email sent by Airbnb:
2. Newsletters
A majority of businesses send email newsletters to stay in front of their subscribers' minds. Newsletters are excellent tools for informing people about your business as well as spotlighting employee information, interesting media, and the company’s ambition projects.
This is the reason why numerous organizations use newsletters as the cornerstone of their email marketing strategy. They are useful not only for advertising your products but also for fostering existing customer relationships with company updates, product launches, and review requests.
Here’s an example of a newsletter sent by Goodfirms. It briefly describes how the global insurance industry is changing and asks the user to take a survey, for which they will be awarded a featured quote in the research article. This is a great example of how subscribers can be asked to take an action in return for something that can be beneficial to them.
3. Lead Nurturing Emails
Lead nurturing is all about knowing the details of your leads’ requirements and timelines. Thus, it is critical to determine your buyer personas in order to successfully reach your targeted audience. Else, your emails might go ignored or deleted.
Lead nurturing is the introduction of a closely connected string of emails having a defined objective and plenty of useful content. They can be curated to promote a variety of subjects, including marketing collateral like blogs, webinars, and ebooks, along with coupons and discounts.
4. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are messages that are ignited by certain actions taken by one of your users and authorize them to finish that action. For example, when you sign-up for a webinar by filling out a form, you get a confirmation or a thank you email along with login information.
These emails also consist of messages sent by e-commerce platforms for order confirmation, shipment details, tracking information, and other data about your purchases.
Below is an example of a transactional email from Slack:
5. Feedback/Review Emails
Today’s buyers often go through platforms like Google Reviews, GoodFirms, Glassdoor, etc, to research companies on the basis of their past customers’ reviews. By seeking feedback on such sites, you can improve your business’ credibility as well as search engine results.
To begin with, you can request reviews from your most satisfied customers. Along with the review link, you can also consider adding a discount coupon or a gift card in the email to increase the rate of reviews received.
Here’s an example of a feedback survey email by Thumbtack:
6. Re-engagement Emails
All top email marketing platforms offer detailed analytics regarding your campaigns. If yours shows that a considerable percentage of subscribers have been inactive, then it might be the time to send re-engagement emails to ignite the spark again.
Asking for feedback, an invitation to an upcoming event, giving a discount coupon, or sharing a valuable piece of information is a great way to remind them of your organization.
In order to craft any of the above emails successfully, you need to make sure that your email consists of the right components. Below are the 6 main elements that you need to pay attention to.
6 Main Elements of an Email
1. Sender Name
The “From” field, i.e. the sender’s name is the first thing that users see when they open up their inbox. Thus, make sure that your name/your company’s name displays clearly.
2. Subject Line
Write a subject line that is relevant, creates positive anticipation, and piques people’s interest to open and read the email.
3. Pre-header
In some email applications, the first few lines of email content are displayed below the subject line. To make good use of it, in the pre-header or preview text, you can include snippet content or a call to action.
4. Header
The header shows up in the preview pane. You can utilize this to persuade people to read your email.
5. Body
Ensure that your email’s content and purpose are completely aligned with each other. The most crucial part of the entire message is the call to action. Make it stand out using contrasting colors, be crystal clear, and place it in a prominent space.
6. Footer
Use the footer section to include a privacy policy, links to social media accounts, company address, and an unsubscribe button.
In order to make your perfectly designed emails truly effective, you need to take your marketing efforts up a notch by incorporating the below-mentioned 5 Ts into your emails which can drastically increase your open and click-through rates.
1. “Target” the Right Way
Every marketing strategy should include campaigns that are relevant to your target audience. Thus, you need to provide them with customized content by anticipating their existing needs and desires. Offering personalized content to your subscribers will increase their chances of engaging with your emails and persuade them to act.
2. “Tease” with Subject Lines
One of the most efficient ways to create interest and build curiosity is by running teaser email campaigns. Create catchy and relevant subject lines, but avoid making it look like clickbait. Subject lines like “Our makeup Mega sale is live!”, or “Take a sneak peek at our new product launch” can increase your open rates drastically. You can also add an emoji to make it more friendly.
3. “Teach” your Subscribers
“What’s in there for me?”, “How will this product help solve my issues?” - these are some of your audience’s concerns that your email campaigns should address. Start working on addressing your target customer’s needs by offering them useful information. Instead of pressuring your subscribers to buy something, provide them with educational content.
4. “Test” your Emails
If you don’t test your emails, you can never find out whether your email marketing strategy is effective or not. Multiple testing methods can be used to test emails where A/B testing is the most common. As the name suggests, it involves sending two variations of your email to two groups of people. When the test is done, you’ll know which variation of the email produced the best results. An email archiving software can be used to compress and store all your top-performing emails that can be used for making improvements in future campaigns.
5. “Track” your Results
Just like testing, tracking your results is also crucial for successful email marketing. The best email marketing tools available out there have an inbuilt analytics feature that will help you track the performance of your campaigns. Continuous tracking allows you to take the next steps based on the information gathered from your customers.
Goals of a Successful Email Marketing Strategy
While creating a strategy for your email marketing campaigns, you need to have some goals in mind. Below are some important objectives you’ll want to cover:
Generate Brand Awareness
One of the main objectives of running email campaigns is to inform people about your brand. Regularly appearing in your customers’ inboxes provides an excellent opportunity to keep them up to date on everything related to your business. You can inform them about an upcoming event or fundraiser, a funny brand story, new product launches, or changes in your office address.
Drive Traffic to Website
Emails can be effectively used to drive people to your website or landing pages. When you create emails with this goal in mind, you’ll bring your potential customers one step closer to turning into paying customers. With the use of buttons and links, you can guide readers to your product pages, the latest blogs, or survey links.
Convert Readers into Customers
Converting readers into customers and retaining existing customers is a significant goal of email marketing efforts. You can do this by sending constant emails along with contact information and social media links. Keep providing them with the latest sales, deals, exclusive coupons, and discounts that will persuade them to make a purchase.
Upsell and Cross-sell
After you have converted a potential customer into a paying and regular customer, you can create email campaigns to cross-sell an item related to their previous purchases. Also, determine the buyers’ use patterns and send upsell emails near the time when their purchased product needs to be restocked.
Build Relationships
Email marketing can be used to achieve numerous other objectives, such as getting repeat purchases, obtaining referrals, offering holiday special sales, etc. But, the most immediate value that a well-designed email campaign can achieve is the development of a trusting and mutually rewarding relationship with your customers. Everything else will follow.
Why is an Effective Email Marketing Strategy Important?
“In 2020, an average of 306.4 billion emails were sent and received per day.”
With this level of competition prevailing among companies in order to receive the attention of their customers, you would want to ensure that you have an effective strategy at your disposal.
Email marketing software, like other platforms and mediums, has evolved to make it easier for your business to contact customers than ever before. When you create an effective email marketing strategy, you will be able to achieve the following for your business:
- You’ll stay in constant contact with your target audience. The simplest messages like “Hey, you are on our minds, here is a special offer for you!” or “Hey, here’s a quick rundown of what happened this week” will make them think of you.
- Through emails, you can reach your customers in real-time. Today, 81% of subscribers read emails on their mobile devices. Thus, it is absolutely possible to make your emails reach your audience right when they are scrolling through their screens.
- An effective email marketing strategy can help drive insane amounts of traffic to your website. Along with your email content, the best practice is to include a relevant CTA button that takes users to your website. The CTA can ideally direct people to your blog, contact, newsletter subscription page, and the like.
- As compared to other marketing tactics, email marketing is easier on the pockets! A lot of top email marketing software offers free plans which are sufficient for small to mid-sized businesses. For instance, MailChimp allows you to send 1200 emails a month for free.
Now that you have an idea of why it is important to create a competent email marketing strategy, we’ll take you through 10 key components that you should consider while creating your own.
10 Key Components of a Successful Email Marketing Strategy in 2022
#1 Make People Opt-in
Sending emails to people who didn’t subscribe for it is a big NO. This is the first rule of email marketing and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Purchasing email lists or sending emails to those who didn’t opt-in for them is not only morally wrong but also illegal in some cases. The sole method of generating an unceasing list growth for your email marketing campaigns is to always get permission before sending emails!
However, transactional emails related to order confirmations, purchase receipts, etc. serve different objectives and are thus exempt from this rule. You can also implement a double opt-in method to ensure that users genuinely wish to receive your emails.
Users who fail to confirm their registration might have signed up mistakenly, or they might just be having second thoughts regarding the addition of more volume to their emails. Allow them to leave right away by asking them to validate their email address. You can also use an email verification tool that automatically separates incorrect and invalid emails from your list. In any case, you don’t want disengaged users on your list.
#2 Make Subscribing Easy
Have you ever been in a situation when you searched for a newsletter sign-up page but couldn’t find it? Or have you tried to sign up for a newsletter but gave up midway through as the process was too time-consuming? The easier it is to sign-up for a newsletter, the more subscribers you’ll get. Below are some tips to simplify your sign-up process:
- Sign-up areas should be clearly displayed across the website. You can consider navigational bars, feature boxes, and content pages for the same.
- Let users subscribe to your newsletter through social media channels. There are some email service providers like Constant Contact and MailChimp that offer social media integrations enabling users to sign-up for your emails directly from social platforms.
- Let your audience clearly know if they require to follow a double opt-in method to confirm their subscription. This is important as they won’t know if they will be receiving an email for the same and might end up missing it.
#3 Optimize Emails for All Devices
There “were” days when users used to access emails from their desktops. And now, there “are” days when a majority of users use emails on their smartphones and access messages on the go. Thus, you need to optimize your emails by keeping mobile users in mind.
Creating a responsive design is the best way to ensure that the accessibility of your emails isn’t imperiled for any user. A responsive email template will help make sure that everyone can view your emails properly, regardless of the device they use.
If your emails consist of clickable buttons or links, they need to be optimized for a touch screen, ensuring that users don’t have to make any extra effort to zoom in or zoom out to view or click an element. Consider ergonomics here - almost every user taps and scrolls using their thumb, thus tappable elements should ideally be kept in the middle of the screen.
#4 Take Personalization to the Next Level
Your subscribers don’t want to be considered as a random name picked up from a mailing list. Around 42% of people have claimed that they unsubscribe from emails that have irrelevant content. Thus, rather than doing a bulk email blast, try to start a conversation and engage with your readers.
Without making it appear like a marketing pitch, focus on providing value through knowledge and insights, latest updates, new content, and the like. Use customized tags, write content in a conversational tone, and solicit feedback from your audience. Meticulously incorporate subscribers’ preferences, previous purchases, and interactions into an entirely personalized message.
#5 Segment your Subscribers
Just as personalization ensures that your message reaches the right way, segmentation guarantees that it reaches the right person. It is crucial for improving open rates and generating more ROI. You can segment your subscribers on the basis of demographics, geographics, and behavioral data.
Also, abandon the thought that you’ll lose money if you don’t send a campaign to all of your subscribers. Because when you send the same message to your entire email list without segmenting, it will lead to a higher unsubscribe rate and spam complaints, as probably most of the males won’t be interested in receiving coupons for female products on a regular basis.
#6 Set the Timings and Frequency
The timing and frequency at which you send emails have a lot of impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns. The time when users receive your emails can affect the major performance metrics including the open and click-through rate. A great practice is to segment your list based on your audience’s time zone so that your emails are delivered at a time that is appropriate for the recipients.
In addition to that, people are experiencing high email fatigue and will not even open your email if you swamp their inboxes. Increasing the volume of emails will only lead them to be less effective. An ideal frequency is to send no more than two emails per week to ensure that you’re reaching out to people without annoying them.
#7 Include the Right Content
All your personalization and segmentation efforts will go in vain if your emails don’t contain the right text and visuals. The message is everything - make your content and images appealing and inviting. Include more visuals than text as users don’t want much to read. Through images, they can quickly scan the entire message and understand its purpose.
In case you have a lot of content to offer, avoid including it all in the email. Instead, give a brief idea of the message and use a CTA (Call to action) button to divert the readers to a relevant landing page. The call to action should be prominent from the rest of the email so that readers can easily notice it and take the desired action.
#8 Provide Value
A majority of deliverability concerns arise due to sending irrelevant content to users, resulting in high unsubscribe rates as well as spam complaints. Ideally, you should be sending emails about what the users signed up for in the first place. If you promised discount coupons, industry insights, and informative newsletters, provide them with that.
All your emails should successfully pass through the “so what” test. Ask yourself why your subscribers should care about your email and what value they’ll get after reading it. Make your content about your subscribers, not about your business - that’s when your engagement rates will soar high.
#9 Automate Emails Using Workflows
When a user provides you with their email address, they immediately turn into a lead. Following that should be a series of emails that nurture them, educate them about your company, and make them want to purchase. As stated earlier in the blog, you can create automation workflows that include welcome/onboarding emails, lead nurturing emails, promotional emails, and transactional emails.
Craft out emails that thank users for subscribing, provide them updates on new product launches, give event or sales announcements, consist of exclusive discount coupons, lead them to informative articles, and keep them updated on their orders. Email marketing platforms can be used to create these email series without hassle.
#10 Measure your Metrics
It is crucial to monitor and measure the results of your email marketing campaigns to enable continuous improvements. The most essential data that you should track without fail include the open rate, click-through rate, and rate of unsubscribes.
If your open rates are low, your subject lines don't stand out from others. If the click-through rates are low, it suggests that subscribers opened your email but the CTA button didn’t catch their attention. Irrelevant content can be the reason behind an increase in unsubscribe rates and spam complaints.
When the send volume of emails is high but the delivered rate is low, the chances are that your emails are getting bounced. In such a case, the best step is to clean your email list and remove inactive email addresses. You need to measure all these metrics provided by your email marketing software and take the necessary steps to make the most out of your email marketing efforts.
Precisely, in order to build and maintain an audience that includes a list of people who are actually interested in receiving and reading your emails, you need to keep the following things in mind:
Study National and International Email Regulations
While sending automated emails, ensure that you follow all legal requirements and laws in your country. For instance, there is CAN-SPAM Act in the US, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) in Canada, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. The rules depend on the country you live in as well as the country of your subscribers, and it’s your obligation to understand which laws apply to your business.
Don’t Buy Email Lists
As mentioned earlier, buying bulk emails from agencies can do more harm than good. Also, when it comes to email addresses, a majority of top email marketing software has a stringent permission-based policy, which implies that delivering emails to purchased lists is restricted.
Create Conversational Emails
Emails can prove to be helpful for your business in a lot of ways other than marketing your products and services. You should consider taking breaks from normal marketing content to conduct feedback surveys, express gratitude to your customers, follow up on abandoned carts, or simply drop a ‘hi!’.
Avoid Sending Unnecessary Emails
Only send emails when you need to - people have subscribed to your emails for a reason and you won’t want to spam their inboxes. If you send way too many emails to your audience, they might end up losing interest and eventually unsubscribe. Send them meaningful, interesting emails about the things they like and they’ll stay loyal for a long period of time.
Final Thoughts
Regardless of how your email marketing campaigns are performing right now; there’s always scope for improvement! The tips mentioned above will help you justify your investment in email marketing, make your campaigns perform better, reduce spam complaints, and shoot up your conversion rates.
The global email marketing market was valued at 7.5 billion U.S.D in 2020 and it is expected to increase to 17.9 billion by 2027. For that time period, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is expected to be 13.3%.
Thus, with this drastic growth in email marketing revenue expected in the future, it becomes important to follow effective email marketing strategies for effective marketing and better revenue generation. Besides that it also becomes significant to select the best email marketing software that enables you to automate your campaigns, track results, and monitor important metrics, ultimately making you capable of achieving your desired business goals.
