Companies often list email as one of their most powerful marketing channels. To this day, the size of your email list is a demonstration of your reach and thought leadership. However, “Your email marketing campaigns should be part of a holistic approach to educating your contacts about your company”.
Your marketing emails need to be complimented by other efforts, such as search engine optimization, content creation, social media engagement, and behavior-based nurturing.
Facts about Email Marketing-
Checking email is what 58% of adults do first thing in the morning. (OptinMonster)
85% of users use smartphones to access email. (Adobe)
Mobile email usage is at its lowest on Monday, desktop email usage is at its lowest on Sunday, and webmail email usage is at its lowest on Wednesday.
“Finance” and “shopping” show above-average webmail views as compared to other industries, at 49% and 48%, respectively.
Email marketing is a powerful channel but also one that presents many questions and difficulties.
Integrating email data with other data systems
Challenge:
Other data systems,” including form submissions and activities on-site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation. Just think about it–if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to optimizing your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.
Solution:
Get Your Hands on The Right Tool
To integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you
need to use a marketing software that allows for that integration to take place.
Think Segmentation
By combining your various marketing databases, you can segment your target market and send more relevant email messages to your consumers and prospects. Keep your buyer persona in mind once you have access to an integrated marketing system and concentrate on the chance to target the appropriate audience with the appropriate message.
Develop Content
The more targeted your email campaigns are, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits their intent and their needs.
Improving deliverability.
Challenge:
Deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that make it to recipients’ inboxes out of all the emails sent. It reveals how many emails bounced, and if that figure is high, it is a sign of inactivity. Both soft and hard bounces are possible. The soft bounce, which happens when an email server rejects an inbound message, is a brief event. Whenever your recipients’ inboxes are overflowing, for instance. On the other hand, a hard bounce is less benign and shows a permanent failure to deliver an email. This normally occurs when the addresses you email are incorrect or invalid.
Why You Mind Your Deliverability Rate.
A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). Abandoned email addresses may potentially be labeled as spam traps by ISPs. This means that even if you obtained emails legally, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam phishing sites. A low delivery rate, in addition to all the ISP issues, also indicates that you are sending messages to invalid addresses is a waste of money.
Solution:
Regular maintenance
Remove addresses from your email list that are no longer active to purge them. These addresses can be located using metrics like opens, clicks, or website activity.
A stricter opt-in Process
If your deliverability issues are particularly bad, you may wish to redesign your opt-in procedure to make sure that no invalid emails are added to your list.
Either use double opt-in or make users submit their email twice.
Preference Center
Be careful to give your recipients the chance to change their email addresses. From every email you send, invite recipients to your preference center.
That might also assist you in segmentation and general engagement growth.
Growing & retaining subscribers.
Challenge:
Growing and maintaining subscribers ranks as the third most difficult issue for marketers when it comes to email marketing.
Solution
The definitive value proposition for email opt-in
Instead of buying email lists, work for your subscribers. Be explicit with your target audience about the benefits of email subscriptions. Make sure to explain the perceived value to them in detail. Will your emails, for instance, provide customers with: (1) business advice and resources, (2) company-related product updates, or (3) email-only deals? Before they decide to fill their inbox with even more emails, your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe.
Improve and Test
Don’t just test the subject lines of your emails. To improve email performance, incorporate testing of numerous components in your email marketing campaigns. For instance, you can test landing pages using A/B comparison.
Achieving measurable ROI.
Challenge:
Another difficulty faced by marketing professionals in the world of email marketing is achieving quantifiable ROI (return on investment). In other words, it’s challenging for them to make the connection between the messages they deliver to potential consumers and the point at which those subscribers become more engaged and make a purchase.
closed-loop marketing
You may follow leads from their initial channel to first contact and to becoming a customer by putting closed-loop marketing into practice. You may then determine which of your marketing channels is the most effective and give each one a distinct value thanks to such intelligence. You will be able to determine the ROI of your other efforts, such as social media and blogging, as well as your emails in this way.
Using email for funnel optimization
Challenge:
As mentioned in the introduction of this class, email campaigns should be only part of your holistic marketing approach. Email can help your other projects succeed, but it cannot produce ultimate success on its own. (In the same way that you cannot solely rely on blogging, social media, or search engine optimization to achieve your goals.) Real power is gained when a solid marketing mix is achieved. However, this appears to be a problem for marketers. How can emails be used to improve your sales and marketing funnel?
The majority of marketing professionals are used to delivering one-time email blasts that are not always relevant to the actions, interests, or needs of their email subscribers. Such a tactic can alienate leads instead of helping move them down the sales funnel.
Solution
Lead Nurturing
Other names for lead nurturing include marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Lead nurturing, to put it simply, is a method that allows you to email a lead at an early stage in an automated series before transferring them to your sales team, to pre-qualify them.
Make sure you space out your communications to keep your leads interested throughout the month if it generally takes them a month to decide whether to buy from you. This strategy saves your sales team time since you educate and qualify the lead gradually.
One of the main advantages of lead nurturing is that it helps marketers quickly establish contact with their new leads and maintain top-of-mind awareness among prospective and even existing clients. Lead nurturing is also more straightforward to set up than email marketing because it is automated and requires less persistent attention.
(Many businesses and organizations send emails to stay top of mind for their recipients. In this section we will cover the different types of email marketing)
Types of Marketing Emails
“Different types of email formats have different goals and Advantages.”
Whether you are new to email marketing or have some prior expertise, you have certainly wondered what kinds of communications are appropriate to send out.
Should you send out weekly newsletters to nurture your subscribers? Are dedicated sends more effective in enhancing your marketing and sales funnel? Do email digests count?
When choosing the best format to achieve their email marketing objectives, marketing professionals should take into account all of these pertinent considerations. The many forms of marketing communications, as well as their advantages and drawbacks.
Email newsletter
The newsletter is a powerful way to keep your clientele engaged and informed of your products and services. These are some general guidelines for using newsletters as the foundation of your email marketing program
Define your goal
You must choose your goal before we can discuss the specifics of building email newsletters. What do you hope to accomplish with your email newsletter? You could wish to cultivate your current contacts so that you become the first company people consider when they require a good or service in your sector. If your company is a B2C one, this would be a great objective. Another objective would be to boost sharing to expand your list of subscribers.
Consider the measurements you can use to measure your progress as you create your objective.
PROS of sending a Newsletter
Brand Awareness
Newsletters create a similar level of anticipation from readers as newspapers do.
You get used to getting it, whether it’s a daily newsletter or a weekend communication. If you appreciate the information, you’ll probably continue receiving the newsletter, and look forward to the next email. Your email subscribers might recognize your brand and correlate it with a good feeling by developing a habit of receiving your emails.
Repurpose Content
Typically, content in newsletters has already been published by you.
Many businesses create summaries of their most popular blog entries and include links to the newsletter articles. By doing this, they encourage subscribers to visit the business website again and engage them with further company information.
CONS
Diluted call-to-action
Newsletters have a format that makes them seem overwhelming and unaware of a specific call to action. Your readers’ attention will likely be divided among several teasers or article summaries instead of remaining fixed on one particular piece of information if you include a series of them. Naturally, you can solve this problem by placing the most crucial information at the top of the newsletter and adding a clear call-to-action after/next to each block of text.
Design
Newsletter layouts are far more difficult to do with than it is with dedicated emails. It will take some time to choose the appropriate alignment, prioritizing, and placement of images and text. Fortunately, there are several resources available to support you in your endeavors. For instance, MailChimp provides a collection of 36 straightforward, adaptable templates that you may use as a starting point.
Newsletters in addition to feeding your existing customers with company news and events, product releases, and feedback requests, newsletters are fantastic for marketing to prospects and nurturing your sales team.
Such constant communication will help you in keeping satisfied clients and gain insightful information about them.
Keep your goal in mind as you work on your newsletter style and content creation, and make sure you are taking steps to achieve it by giving calls-to-action the highest priority at the top of the email.
Similar to newsletters, email digests offer a picture of a particular period, such as a week or a month, as well as summaries of the latest information.
DIGEST
Digests typically highlight the articles that are the most well-liked and that new readers will be drawn to. You may, for instance, get a digest of the best movies or books to read.
Some software vendors send usage data digests.
Digests, which typically contain lists and links, should be simpler to read than newsletters.
This makes it easier for readers to swiftly scan emails and click on the content they are most interested in.
A digest’s and a newsletter’s objectives are likely to be similar. Remember to monitor clickthrough rate and conversions, and set the most relevant call to action at the top.
If your objective is to direct traffic to particular pages, keep a careful eye on CTR, and don’t forget to optimize the pages you are directing people to.
Here is an example of an email digest with links to significant articles and summaries of what the reader would learn after clicking.
Compared to newsletters, the digest’s design can be much simple. Of course, you can create a few different designs and see which one gets more subscriber engagement.
Email digests can be sent to a range of target audiences, just like newsletters, depending on the objective you’ve established for them. A blog digest is a popular option because it compiles notifications about the items you publish over a particular timeframe and sends out an email with the links.
DEDICATED EMAIL
Dedicated emails, also referred to as stand-alone emails, provide details about a single offer. You may, for instance, invite your target audience to an event or let them know about a new whitepaper you’ve published.
You can promote the key call-to-action by introducing it in dedicated emails. They are similar to landing pages in this regard.
While there are some circumstances in which all of your subscribers should be informed about a particular marketing campaign, such as a timely new offer or an impending event, in the majority of cases you would want to segment significantly based on your subscribers’ various behaviors and interests.
PROS
Focused call-to-action
Dedicated mailings, unlike newsletters, can concentrate on effectively generating results for a single call-to-action. These calls to action are not added to another message or crammed after a newsletter. They are the main focus of the dedicated email, which can greatly increase their impact.4