Marketing

How Email Marketing helps your Business?

With the new revolution of video calling, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and chat bots, it sometimes seems like email marketing is long past its time and people think that it is now not the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them and then turning them into customers.

But if you think email marketing is completely dead or outdated, you are completely wrong.

Is Email Marketing Outdated?

The truth on the flip side is that Email marketing is still going strong today, and is possibly the best strategy for your business. In fact based on 2018 data, email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating out social media, SEO, and other marketing tools.

Now let us discuss about what Email marketing is and how is it an effective marketing tool.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, generally to a group of people, through email.  In most simple terms, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered as email marketing.

When you want to communicate or inform something about your brand or want to sell your stuff, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to do so.

Sounds interesting. Right?

You would be even more surprised to know that in a country like United States, almost 85% of adult internet users are on email which beats out search engines by 15% and social media by 22%.

Now we will also discuss about the entire procedure of setting up your email marketing campaign so that you can acquire more and more leads and can generate sales all round the year.

What things you must consider before marketing your business or business products on email?

No doubt that email marketing is the best and most efficient marketing tool but you must also consider and take care of the following things for the smooth and seamless marketing:

• Remember that you are a kind of guest in their inbox and you must not interrupt them purposefully
• You might think that your email is special to you, but there’s a high probability that for the reader it looks the same as the rest
• It is important to remember where you are, and must respect your customer in a good manner and should not post any personal note to them.

The first and the most important thing you need are to take permission to email your prospective clients and customers. No email campaign can be built without getting permission and then making a sizable email list.

While lot of people do so, but we recommend you not to buy email lists and should not add emails from people’s business cards that you collected at conferences unless you have the permission to send them your email newsletters. Your emails to them would be counted as spam and will not help your business in anyway.

Sending them anything and everything would be a complete waste of your time and money. You may also have the option to make them appear at certain times to specific people browsing your site to maximize your conversions.

Note: Email marketing is not a spam or it’s not a personal note from an old colleague either. It’s something in between. Your customers never give their information easily, but if used right, email marketing can be both a relationship-building and profit-building tool.

Emails must be used to build an existing relationship more strong by providing accurate, relevant and valuable information that will help for the further growth in the business.

Importance of Email Marketing

1. It helps in building relationships
2. It helps people know about your brand
3. You can share your blogs and useful content to a large number of people
4. It helps in increasing leads
5. Promotion of your products and services

 The importance of email marketing is not only limited to the above points but its importance is more vast and wider.

What can be the best Email Marketing strategy?

1. You can try to define your audience and understand what they want and tailor your email campaign to your needs of audience
2. Try to gather some context and research the average email statistics for your industry and use it as a benchmark to achieve your goals.
3. Try to treat every subscriber or customer as a golden opportunity which will ultimately help your email list and business grow vertically.
4. Divide the different email campaigns as suited to the different types of audience so that the customers can sign up only for those emails that are relevant to them.
5. Inform your audience about any changes or any further schedule about your new innovations so that they do not forget about you
6. Try to measure your results if they were of that standard or not which you were expecting.
7. Build your proper email list.

Best practices for Email Marketing

If everything is as per plan and goes well, you need to build a list of subscribers and leads that might be waiting to hear from you. But that doesn’t mean that you can just start emailing any random person unless you want to end up in a spam folder, or worse, a blocked list.

Below are few very important things that you should keep in mind before you start emailing your precious list that you worked so hard to build.

What can be the tips for Email Marketing?

When you send any email to any friend or relative, you probably don’t think twice about the formatting or subject line of an email but when it comes to email marketing, it requires a lot more consideration and a proper format.  Whenever you send your email to the devices on which your email could be opened, it really does matters.

Your goal with every email is to generate more leads, which makes crafting a marketing email a more involving process in comparison to any other random emails that you write.

Take care of these things:

Subject Line:	You must use clear, attractive and catchy language that is personalized and match with the body of the email.
Images:	Choose images that are standardized for all devices, eye-catching, relevant and to the point.
Timing:	Your timing to send the mail must be a day time or a scheduled time at which your contacts can read it
Responsiveness:	55% of emails are opened on mobile. Your email should, therefore, must be optimized for this as well as all for other devices.
Personalization:	Be personable and try to send it in a very simple and understanding language.

Calculation of effectiveness of your sent Email

1. Deliverability measures the rate at which emails reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes.
2. Open rate is the percentage of people that open your email once it reaches their inbox.
3. Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your CTAs.
4. Unsubscribes measures the number of people who opt out of your email list once they receive an email from you.

How to Improve Your Email Results

If you aren’t getting the desired numbers you want, try playing with these tricks to improve your email results.

Deliverability

• Ensure that you follow the best practices when it comes to avoiding spam filters.
• Remove inactive people and their email addresses from your email list to keep only engaged subscribers.
• Check which emails got hard-bounced and remove those email addresses from your list.
• Try to Adjust the time and day that you send your email to see what works best.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

• Evaluate your offer to ensure that it provides value to your contacts list.
• Try to rewrite your copy to make sure that it is clear what you want the reader to do.
• Try different graphics, bold versus subtle.

Unsubscribes

• First, consider if this is a blessing in disguise, as uninterested parties are removing themselves from your list.
• Ensure that you have not performed over actively by promising one thing and delivering another.
• Make sure that your emails are providing genuine value to your audience.

Conclusion

While there are many rules to send a marketing email, the most important is this: Treat your subscribers like humans and respect their privacy as well.

You can achieve all of your email marketing goals if you keep this golden rule on top of your mind

Your subscribers want to hear from you, and they want to relate to you. Be a genuine resource, and they will look forward to open your email in the same way as they would like to receive from their friends.