What is Email Marketing? Here's a guide for beginners!
Whether you're an individual company or a junior marketer, email marketing is an area you need to focus on. There are over 4 billion email users worldwide, so the email marketing channel is worth investing time and thought into.
To make this activity a little easier, we've created this ultimate guide to help you kick-start your email marketing campaign.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the sending of various forms of business information via email. These emails serve many purposes: including promoting services and products, sharing special offers to customers, and more. Sending any email to a potential customer's inbox is an email marketing campaign.
Some people think that email marketing is useless; they feel that the form of email marketing is outdated. But the truth is that the effectiveness of your email marketing depends entirely on the quality of your product, the tools you use and the content of your emails.
Email marketing is now more effective than ever. If you don't believe me, take a look at the following set of numbers.
- 97% of professionals use email marketing to convert recipients into buyers ([Social Media Today](https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/50-email-marketing-stats-to-guide-your- 2019-strategy-infographic/540640/))
- 59% of marketers note that email generates a higher ROI than any other promotional tactic
- * * In 2018, * * * 235.6 billion * * * email exchanges occurred every day. This number is growing at a rate of 5% per year ([Radicati](http://radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary. pdf))
- In 2016, every $1 spent on email marketing generated $44 in profits
What are the advantages of email marketing?
Many people find email marketing redundant, especially when compared to other types of e-marketing. Some may prefer social media marketing (SMM), but we can come up with at least four reasons why email marketing is better; others may argue that pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a more sound investment, but there are enough advantages to email marketing to put it ahead of most other forms of marketing.
Advantage 1: Low Price
Many email marketing tools are available to make your workflow easy and smooth, and keep the cost of email marketing down. For example, all-in-one platforms like Snov.io offer complete email marketing services on a monthly or annual subscription basis, allowing people to start their email marketing for less than $39 a month.
Advantage 2: Accurately target different customers
Email marketing is the perfect combination of personalisation and bulk. You can send extremely personalised emails that accurately target different customers and automate the entire process, including follow-up activities, with the help of email automation marketing tools. Email marketing makes it possible for you to reach people who are genuinely interested in your products and with whom you can maintain a long-term relationship.
Advantage 3: Easy to get started
All you need to kick off your email marketing campaign is an email list. There are many ways to build this list. The next step is to compose the email, which you can conceptualise yourself. Once this is in place, the email marketing campaign can begin. Take a small step, see how it works and then see what can be improved.
Advantage 4: Follow-up and analyses are possible
After your marketing emails have been sent out, the next step is to analyse the results. If you are still running small email marketing campaigns - using an email tracker can help; if you are using an email sending tool, keep a close eye on the stats page for the number of opens, clicks and replies, and edit your email content based on this data to achieve the best results from your email marketing.
Advantage 5: Easily Reach Anyone
Unlike many other marketing channels, with marketing emails you can reach almost anyone because everyone has an email address, whether they are a teenager or over 80, a CEO or a freelancer.
Advantage 6: Personalisation
Email marketing allows you to send emails directly to different subscribers, giving them a great personalised experience. Personalisation has a huge impact on open rates and conversions, with 62% of emails being opened solely because they have a personalised subject line.
Advantage 7: Segmentation
Segmentation and personalisation go hand in hand. Segmenting all prospects into different groups based on some specific parameters such as location, age, interests and job title to send targeted offers is very useful to do so.
Advantage 8: Automation
The development of automation in email marketing is remarkable. Whereas you used to have to send marketing emails manually, you can now enjoy the convenience of email automation marketing and save hours, if not days, of your time. You also don't need to constantly check and manage follow-ups - with just one debug, you can be sitting pretty for weeks.
Advantage 9: No Character Limits
There is no strict character limit for marketing emails, which means you can create an engaging email as often as you like, adding stories or visually appealing content such as images or videos within the email.
Email Marketing Strategies
There are so many things you need to do to become the best email marketing expert you can be. Here are ten tips to help you kick-start your first email marketing.
Choose the right email marketing tool
Whatever your situation, you need tools to make your email marketing smooth and efficient. Use an email address finder tool to get started - it will help you build a high quality list of targeted emails quickly and without too much of a hit to your wallet. We've created an email address finder tool comparison to help you make the best choice for your company based on your business size and budget.
Build your email list
Start with a short but highly targeted list to see which prospects convert the most and focus on building your email list based on these parameters. This can be difficult to do if the list is too long, so start with 100 prospects and keep growing this list.
Verify the validity of your e-mail list
Sending out invalid emails can hurt your company's interests. Small businesses' KPIs are put at risk when people don't verify the validity of their mailboxes, while large corporations lose hundreds of dollars due to invalid emails being sent. To avoid this, test your email lists regularly, as it is possible for a customer's email to be abandoned or blocked.
Learn how to write a cold email
This is something that requires serious research! Check out what email templates your competitors are using. I highly recommend using the AIDA template: Attention - Interest - Desire - Action and the BBB template: Brief - Blunt - Basic (Brief - Blunt - Keep it Simple).
Categorise your prospects
Creating your customer persona (buyer persona) and segmenting your leads will increase your level of personalisation and conversion. You can check out our guide on how to create a perfect customer persona and segment your leads.
Personalise your emails
It can't be stressed enough - personalisation works wonders for your email marketing. If you have other information about your recipients besides their email address, put it to good use. Personalised emails tend to have higher open, click and conversion rates.
Always comply with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the U.S. Anti-Spam Act (CAN-SPAM).
Ensure that the emails you send comply with international regulations. Don't expect services to carry this burden - senders are responsible for their own behaviour.
Become friends with your potential customers
This rule is as simple as that. It's vital to remain friendly, genuine and supportive - don't be metaphysical, your aim should be to genuinely help your prospects.
Automate your email marketing
Don't waste time and resources. Whether you're an individual company or a large, established business, you can use email automation tools to kick-start your email marketing and create personalised marketing emails with automated follow-up features.
Self-improvement through books and podcasts
Learn from renowned experts in various industries to perfect your marketing. We've created a list of the best books for email marketers and a list of our favourite marketing podcasts, with some dedicated to email marketing.
How can you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing?
I sometimes ask people if they find email marketing difficult. The answers vary, some say "it's the easiest way to market", while others think "it's so hard they don't even know where to start". And I'd say the truth is in there - email marketing is very easy when you break the process down into small steps. But as those steps add up, every now and then you'll feel like you're forgetting something.
Creating a buyer persona, building an email list, writing the email, choosing the recipients, generating the email, monitoring the results, analysing the data …. That's a lot of steps, which is why it's important that you look for ways to improve the efficiency of your email marketing, and one way to do that is to use the tools we've mentioned before, which can make almost every step more efficient, and sometimes even fully automated.
This may sound like turning on the charm, our team has created a platform to improve your workflow and make your job easier.Snov.io's features cover email list building, list cleaning, email sending and marketing analytics. Email marketing may be a headache, but you can make it a little easier.
Final Words
As you can see, email marketing is a cost-effective way to increase your KPIs and improve customer relationships. Don't be put off by the sheer amount of work involved in getting started - you can learn more from the experiences of others and automate the process as much as possible.
