Your Guide to Effective Email Marketing

Although associated with spam, email marketing is maybe the most effective marketing channel you may ever use. But there is a catch. It only brings impressive results if you do it right.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to returns on investments, many marketers believe email can offer the best ROI. According to HubSpot, you can get $36 for every $1 spent.

If it’s that lucrative, why doesn’t everyone do email marketing?

Well, the answer to this question is quite complex. But the main reason is that email marketing is harder to do right than most online guides lead you to believe. Some professionals dedicate their entire lives to email marketing and still discover nuances in every project they start.

But to make it easier for you, we’ll do our best to present how you can approach email marketing the right way.

Understand How Email Marketing Works

Simply put, your business’s email marketing should follow some basic steps. You’ll need to start with a strategy, find an email service provider, build a list if you don’t have one, and send your campaigns.

Yet, things start getting complicated when you consider that your strategy needs to match the context of your industry, as not all email marketing strategies should look the same. Then, you need to figure out how to get an email list of users interested in your field. And last but not least, you need to be careful that your copy is relevant to your subscribers and does not fall victim to spam filters.

On the bright side, once you establish your email audience, you can nurture leads and communicate your special offers faster to a warm audience.

Outline Your Strategy

On the bright side, once you establish your email audience, you can nurture leads and communicate your special offers faster to a warm audience.

Finding an Email Service Provider

When you’re done outlining your strategy, you need to select an email service provider before getting into action. And as mentioned before, you need to mind their policy. Some platforms may accept businesses basing their activity in any industry, while others may be more restrictive.

Sendinblue

With over 100 million emails sent daily, Sendinblue is renowned for its customizable dashboard and user-friendliness. It provides various advanced features, including A/B testing, a vast template library, and a contact management section. Furthermore, Sendinblue helps its users with a complex email design tool, as well as detailed reports.

Active Campaign

Active Campaign is best known for its marketing automation features. It offers complex reports, including page visits, click-maps, and geo-tracking. The entry-level plan allows 500 subscribers at a monthly cost of $15. However, this option is very limited and difficult to learn.

MailerLite

MailerLite is known to be the easiest email marketing software to use. It has a drag-and-drop interface, making it quite intuitive to create templates. Also, the free plan allows 1,000 contacts. However, it doesn’t include CRM functionalities and may ask for a little too much company information.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing suite titan. The platform comes with a plethora of tools and reports for all of your digital marketing campaigns across various channels, plus a bunch of training resources. It doesn’t have any free plan but bills you depending on the contacts you are marketing to. However, HubSpot’s value can be really felt only when you are looking to move in all your marketing and sales activities. It’s not the best choice if you’re looking only for an email marketing software.

Moosend

Moosend is the best choice when pricing is the deciding factor. It has a 1,000 subscribers free plan, and the paid plans are relatively cheaper than most competitors. However, the UI/UX is quite basic and prevents users from sending campaigns from Gmail or Hotmail addresses.

Drip

Drip is considered the best email marketing software for e-commerce because of advanced workflows and list segmentation, but it lacks drag-and-drop functionality for designing templates.

Build Your Email List

In marketing, the more you know about your customers, the more you will be able to drive sales. Therefore, short-sighted approaches like buying email lists or phishing email addresses won’t get you far.

To reach an exponential ROI with email marketing, you need to build your list carefully from scratch and update it regularly. So, an email marketing software that provides signup forms, tags, and segmentation can be helpful in this regard.

But first, you need to figure out how to draw in the right audience to subscribe to your list.

How do you do that?

The simple answer is that you get that signup form in front of the internet users that resemble your ideal customer the most. But that’s easier said than done.

Yet, for building subscribers list, you can:

Ask your website users to subscribe;
Ask your social media users to subscribe;
Ask other websites’ users to subscribe;
Find them offline.

The first and most straightforward way to build your email list is to get your website users to sign up.

To do that, you should implement a subscribe form within the footer and a pop-up that prompts users to subscribe to your newsletter. The pop-up can appear either after a certain period (30 seconds) or when the user wants to exit the website.

In any case, you can encourage the users to subscribe by promising that you will keep them updated with the most essential development of your business, offer exclusive content, offer a discount, or grant access to events such as airdrops or private sales.

And if you do not have much traffic on your website, to begin with, you can get it by doing the following:

Search Engine Optimization – optimize your website so that search engines will show your website in their results. A blog is highly recommended.

Pros:

It can give you much traffic you do not pay for directly for a long time;
You don’t have to go out of your way to find new clients; they come to you themselves;
Leads coming through organic traffic may have a higher buying intent.

Cons:

It’s relatively difficult to set up and takes quite some time to see results;
In the beginning, the investment can be rather significant;
Your rankings are not a given and may change anytime a new update comes out;
You don’t have much control over who finds your website, and some industries are difficult to rank in.

Paid Ads – set up a paid advertising campaign to get the needed traffic. You can display your ads to many users who have shown interest in your field and gain their attention.

Pros:

The results come in fast, and you get to choose who finds out about your website;
You can hook your audience with your value proposal right before they get on the website;
You can bid for more exposure and buy the positions you desire.

Cons:

You need to pay for the traffic, and your budget limits the number of visitors you get;
You’ll get conversions only from a part of your paid traffic.

Be it Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can engage and create a community of like-minded people thanks to the growth of social media platforms. And thanks to the social media dynamics, users tend to flock by interest, ultimately giving you a well-defined demographic.

You can build up an email list if you have a social media community by asking them to subscribe.

Unfortunately, no matter how active and engaged your followers are, most of them won’t see your organic posts. So, you can boost the reach of your posts by promoting them to all your page’s followers. This way, you’ll be able to gather new email addresses faster.

Nowadays, the affiliate marketing sector is flourishing, and you too can find new subscribers by being mentioned on other websites.

Keep in mind that most reputable publishers will be reluctant to promote subscribing to your email lists directly. Yet, you can promote contests requiring users to sign up or get sponsored articles about your project.

Once the users reach your website, a well-crafted value proposal will be enough to make the visitors subscribe to your email list.

Find Them Offline

Although it’s old school and involves some logistical efforts, building your email lists by asking people in the real world can be one of the most effective ways. It’s not the most efficient, but when you’re talking to someone at an event, it’s easier to convince them to sign up for your email campaigns.

Craft Good Copy and Improve It

If you’re already set up on the technical side, and the email list is ready, all you have to work on is the email copy.

When you’re just starting, you first want to know if your subscribers react better to email personalization. If you use their names and other data, do they convert more?

And the text length is a big deal as well. More text details in the email may draw more attention to some brands. To others, a short text and a graphic do the trick.

Some even say your email’s text should fit on one mobile screen. But no matter what opinion you choose to listen to, you need always to make sure that your title and first paragraph can hook your readers into learning more about the topic.

Measure Your Email Marketing Performance

The real work of an email marketer starts after you send out your first campaigns and start seeing the first results. That’s because every successful marketing effort requires performance measurement and constant improvements.

There are lots of metrics and email marketing KPIs that you can track. But in the beginning, you should keep it simple and measure:

Delivery rate;
Open rate;
Click rate;
The number of conversions.

With the delivery rate, you will track if the email reaches the inboxes. You need to ensure that this rate is as close to 100% as possible; otherwise, the email marketing platform might deactivate your account.

With an open rate, you will track how many subscribers from your audience are actually opening your emails. You can improve that by making the subject more appealing. A catchy sentence, an emoji, and introducing the subscriber’s name in the subject might improve your open rate significantly. And by introducing the subscriber’s name in the subject, you may even pass some spam filters.

With click rate, you will track how many of your subscribers have actually clicked the link you’ve attached in the email. A persuasive email that states the advantages and the benefits or hooks the reader into finding out more will improve the click rate. Emphasizing your call-to-action buttons will also impact your click rate positively.

The number of conversions will tell you how many desired actions took place. It depends a lot on what your goal is. If you want sign-ups, sales, or deposits, tracking conversions is your top priority to understand how email marketing performs. Look into our article about conversion rate optimization to understand how to pump those numbers up.

Yet, if your goal is to get readers on your article instead of a clear conversion, then you should track the landing page’s bounce rate and average time on page.

Key takeaways

Many marketers believe email can offer the best ROI. According to HubSpot, you can get $36 for every $1 spent.

At the very basic, to do email marketing, you’ll need to start with a strategy, then find an email service provider, build a list if you don’t have one, and send your campaigns. Additionally, you’ll have to mind the market’s particularities.

According to Investopedia, the 6 best email marketing campaign software are Sendinblue, Active Campaign, MailerLite, HubSpot, Moosend, and Drip.

To build a subscribers list, you can ask your website users to subscribe, ask your social media users to subscribe, ask other websites’ users to subscribe, or find them offline.

When getting started with email marketing, try to find out how email personalization works for you and what text length is the best for your project and audience.

You can track many metrics in email marketing, but at the beginning, you should start with delivery rate, open rate, click rate, and conversions.

Your Guide to Effective Email Marketing

Understand How Email Marketing Works

Outline Your Strategy