Email marketing is a way to promote products or services through email newsletters. Email marketing is a top digital media tool that can not only attract and retain customers, but also increase brand loyalty.
Why email marketing is needed
Firstly, it is a fundamental source of marketing communications, and secondly, it has a number of positive characteristics:
- High ROI – for every dollar spent, email marketing gives you back $44.
- Email marketing is 40 times more effective at attracting new customers than Facebook and Twitter.
- Easily integrates with other communication channels. Emails are great for expanding your audience by integrating with your social media profiles and SMS or push notifications.
- Helps SEO promotion. You create valuable content for potential customers, send it to your subscribers, get backlinks and increase traffic.
A well-designed email marketing strategy accomplishes many different long-term and short-term goals. Take a look at the most popular among them.
Increase brand awareness. Email marketing is a great way to remind customers about your brand. The more often they see your company’s mailings in their inbox, the more likely they are to choose you when looking for a product. Remember, promotional campaigns alone won’t help you create the right brand image in customers’ minds, so combine promotional emails with educational content.
Increase sales. This is probably every marketer’s main goal. If your brand is trustworthy, your customers will have a long time to decide to buy from an email newsletter. You can keep subscribers informed of upcoming sales, hot deals and provide them with personalized offers.
Build trust. You can do this with email newsletters. Be honest and straightforward – customers appreciate that. Add reviews and testimonials to your emails so subscribers have proof that your brand is trusted. You can also provide a link to a page on your site that contains customer reviews. Be sure to add a testimonials section to each product card.
Increase traffic. It doesn’t take much effort to achieve this goal. Each email has links to specific pages on the site, so if you manage to create an attractive topic and a relevant offer, customers will click on the links. In this way, you can either increase traffic to popular pages or promote those that are still getting little traffic.
Reduce the buying cycle. If you sell services or complex products, it takes your potential customers much longer to make a purchase decision. Email newsletters help gradually solve this problem. You can share a step-by-step guide, helpful checklist and video tutorial to help customers clearly see the benefits of using your product.
Automate routine tasks. Trigger and transactional newsletters can help you with this task. You can use them to automatically send emails in response to your customers’ actions. Such mailings include the following: registration confirmation letter, welcome series, cart abandonment letter, order confirmation, reactivation letters. This way, you will reduce costs and be able to focus on more important tasks.
The most important thing is to understand why you need email marketing. However, setting goals doesn’t end there. Make sure that each goal is:
Clear – define your target audience and the benefits of the campaign.
Achievable – calculate a budget, consider resources and skills.
Time-bound – make sure each goal has a deadline.
Measurable – specify KPIs to track the success of the campaign.
Combine email marketing and social media
Email marketing and SMM are very effective tools. Integrating them will greatly increase your results. Yes, you can occasionally on social media invite users to sign up for your email newsletter and vice versa. Internet marketing has another effective tool for combining email marketing and SMM – referrals based on incentives. For example, you can send emails to customers with the text, “Send this link to a friend to receive an exclusive e-zine.”
Personalize the email
A personalized email newsletter has a better open and click-through rate. So set up the newsletter so that the recipient’s name is mentioned in the email. Yes, instead of a generic “Dear Customer,” it’s better to write “Kate, we’ve prepared a personalized offer (discount promo code) for you.” Also, if you want to increase the effectiveness of your mailing list, you should take advantage of segmentation. Separate the list with subscribers’ addresses into specific categories.