stmEmail marketing is still considered as the fastest and most reliable way to get across to the customers with essential and detailed information after several years.
In today’s content, a good email campaign must be incredibly catchy, informative, engaging, relevant, and entertaining to not get stocked in your customer’s inbox. Your marketing emails should satisfy some core factors to earn this. They must be trustworthy, relevant, conversational, coordinated across channels, and strategically made.
Using email for marketing with the efforts to promote your business services and products, as well as setting up incentive customers’ loyalty is a type of online marketing that can create awareness for customers on your email list about new products, discounts and new offers, updates, and so on.
Email Marketing can also be a softer sell to educate your audience on your brand or product value, or to keep them engaged between purchases or anything in between. Let’s dive further and understand what is all about and how to do it right.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a sort of a system of direct and digital marketing, in which email is utilized in the promotion of your business’ services or products.
It is an avenue to make your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing automation efforts. It can also play a significant part in your marketing strategy and can boost lead generation, brand awareness, relationship building, or customer engagement in-between purchases using different marketing emails types.
The email marketing concept is a very simple one (i.e., you send promotional message with the hope that your prospect clients or customers clicks on it). However, the execution is much more complex. First thing that requires of you to do at all, is to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following:
- Individualizes both in the body and in the subject line in your content
- Kinds of emails the subscriber will get must be clearly stated
- Offers a clear, simple and unambiguous unsubscribe option
- both transactional and promotional emails need to be well integrated
- You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.
Email marketing is one technique that has proven to be a highly effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.
How To Do Email Marketing The Perfect Way
Here are the necessary steps to get started the right way in email marketing:
Email Lists Creation
- Building your email list
Three most important customer or client groups that you use email to reach is: current, past, and prospective customers.
You can make use of a spreadsheet to create a database of their details such as names and their email addresses. Assuming you do not have the email addresses already, you’ll need to jump on collecting them.
To build your list, use your website, storefront, front desk, and every phone call to request your visitor’s email address.
- Promise Privacy
Many people may feel reluctant to sign up for an email list only if you assure them that their personal information and email addresses will be kept private and secure.
You should develop a privacy statement that will be included at the bottom of every email that you send out along with the initial promise.
- Create Different Email Lists
Make sure to Keep all the email addresses organized in spreadsheets and do make sure to separate them.
At the minimum, you should have the emails broken into lists of current, past and prospective customers.
You creating distinctive and separate email lists allows you to send different emails to different groups, each with their own targeted content.
Generating Effective Content
- Have clear and specific goals in mind
Always have it at the back of your mind the acronym “AIDA” as you about to compose the message – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
Your subject line needs to appear catchy, mind blowing and follow “AIDA” in order to catch their “attention” for them to open the email. Once they’ve opened it, it will spark their interest to continue reading it.
Create in the mind of your reader the “desire” to read further by providing them with a motivating offer.
Lastly, they have to take the final step and be moved to “action” – which may be to click on a link, buying something from your website, calling your business and so on.
- Write an effective subject line
If you don’t want to deal with the risk of being flagged as spam, it is advisable for you to write a good subject line. A good subject line can diminish that possibility of being flagged.
It is okay or even best to write a subject line of something about or less than 40 characters. 20 to 30 characters is okay.
- Provide interesting content
Instead of immediately focusing on pitching your product on the heart of the reader of your mail, the email should be made about your readers.
Instead of long and detailed descriptions of your amazing services and product offers, you can as well write on problems that might be afflicting your readers, then introduce solutions that include your services and products. Remember every entrepreneur or service provider is a problem solver.
- Keep message simple and easy to read
Some people receive hundreds of emails every day and you probably aren’t going to have their undivided attention. Make sure the email is concise and easy enough for a quick scan through by the recipient.
Break the content up into short paragraphs if the need be. Stay focus, be clear and directly to the point. Include relevant images in your mail to break up the segmented text.
- Create an action-oriented goal
The recipients should be enticed and prompted to take some kind of action. However, action does not necessarily mean getting them to buy something immediately.
The aim could be getting them to reply to the email or just getting them to just click a link that brings them directly to your website.
While some people do manage to sell in their emails and drop people directly onto their credit card page, you will have more success getting people interested in reading more about your product and services you can render.
Now, Sending the Email
- Send a welcome email and provide an opt-in option
First thing to do before you commence the process of marketing to someone who is new is to send “a welcome email”.
It is in this your “welcome email” that you try to introduce the company and let your clients or customers know what to expect from future emails.
Provide an opt-in form that allows them to confirm that they are willing to be receiving further emails from you. To give them incentive to opt-in, provide an attractive offer in your “welcome email”.
- Send a test email first
You can’t make proper corrections or change any of any errors in your content. If you are about or perhaps prior to sending an email out to your entirely made email list, try to send it to a few key people in your company for second eye even third eye view. Because as soon as you click “send” on an email, there’s no going back.
You should all review the email content, confirm if all the attached links work, proofread the text, read and over again, make sure the formatting looks right, etc.
- Track the effectiveness using analytics
Many of the existing providers of email services include free analytics when you use their programs. The analytics will provide you with a great deal of information about the email’s effectiveness.
The three most vital metrics are the open rate, click through rate (CTR), and unsubscribes. Mastering this vital information will help you tweak your content to create greater excellent email marketing in the days to come.
How To Create An Email Marketing Template
Making a new email marketing templates is very easy.
The steps to take to make your own email template include;
- Visit and create your free Tidio account
- Go to the Email Marketing section in your admin panel
- Click Create/Custom Templates
- Design your template with the drag-n-drop editor.
- Save it
That’s it. You can make use of your new template in your campaigns.
There are many features that will make your emails effective and attractive. With the email template editor available in Tidio you’ll be able to:
- Add custom images from a free stock library that work with the editor
- Change the layout of different components of your emails
- Add CTA buttons and change their looks
- Add videos and social media icons to it
- Configure extra settings for mobiles to make responsive email templates
Top 10 Free Email Marketing Templates To Use
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp remains one of the most popular email marketing tools which also provide free email templates that you utilize for your email marketing template. Because of its popularity email marketing services, Mail Chimp offers thousands of catchy looking email newsletter templates which can be used with their emails service.
- Cakemail
Cakemail is another source that is embedded with free email and newsletter templates that you can adopt for your campaigns.
On Cakemail.com, there are awaiting you about 56 downloadable email templates, and all of them are responsive and HTML editable format.
- Zurb
Zurb offers 5 free distinctive responsive email newsletter templates with several and dynamic different layout options.
On Zurb, you can find, also preview, and as well download the templates that you like for easy customization to suit your taste.
- Litmus
This requires a process whereby you enter your email before you can access the free templates, but once you do, there are 5 responsive HTML templates waiting for you that were designed to function on a larger distinctive feature.
There is a room for direct downloading from their website and provide a great base on which you can build your own branded templates.
- Zoho Campaigns
ZOHO Campaigns aside from numerous functions also provides a range selection of free email templates for any form of business.
This tool is embedded with hundreds of templates to customize, alongside some great features, including an A/B testing function and clear, concise analytics.
- Campaign Monitor’s Email Marketing Templates
Campaign Monitor has a lager free library of responsive email marketing templates that are guaranteed to look incredible on mobile and desktop alike.
Campaign Monitor offers a colorful collection of more than thirty free email marketing templates for you to download and use as you see fit.
- Email Octopus
Email Octopus’ free plan called ‘Shrimp’ provides users to send unlimited emails to up to 2500 subscribers at a time. This has a little popularity source but has a good selection of free email templates.
The template designs here have a mobile-responsive format with look just as good on mobile devices same as laptops.
- Stripo
This alone has a big database of free HTML templates, clocking in at over 300 options to choose from. This is an excellent source for email templates for marketers that are looking for several of unique design ideas.
- EmailOut
In EmailOut template, there are some really slick professionally designed templates you can select from this site and edit to suit the purpose and your taste, as well as tools for custom fields and your own HTML. You don’t really need to begin from the basis.
- Mailjet
There are several templates that focus on photographic elements which you can start experimenting using their take on a ‘drag and drop’ editor.
The best thing about this tool is its handy mobile app, so you can edit campaigns anywhere at anytime.
7 Powerful Tools And Software To Have As A Beginner In Email Marketing
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a comprehensive marketing platform that assists you in customer and client management and relationship building. This is done through periodic talk or chat exchanges.
The aim and effort is to shift the marketing attention on healthy contact management practices, making room for business transaction easy, for an exquisite working of beautifully designed campaigns, and powerful data analysis.
- Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing software that provides its services across the world.
It has an easy interface in use with a sixty-day free trial makes it a best email marketing service and software for a beginner.
- Sendinblue
SendinBlue will help you to be everywhere in the world and help you connect with your clients or customers anywhere they are.
With email marketing at its core, you can get your word of mouth deliverability, sophisticated personalization level and tone through concise messaging.
- Aweber
AWeber is combine email marketing and marketing automation platform. Functioning as one of the best software for email marketing campaigns, AWeber provides creativity, beautiful, and engaging Sign-Up forms, email templates, and many more.
It ensures the best compact and reliability base on delivery culture to your mail, with the emphasis on the fact that the mails are getting dropped right in the inbox it should be.
- Mailigen
This is a Professional email marketing software as well as services which also provide mobile and social media marketing in more over hundred countries across different continent of the world.
Mailigen prove itself to be a perfect tutor of email marketing for local markets and help them grow worldwide with its internal knowledge base.
Furthermore, it offers the Application Programming Interface (API) integration to help developers develop Mailigen integration solutions with different platforms.
- Benchmark Email
Benchmark Email helps with powerful tools to drive email marketing campaigns towards tremendous returns by making a sort of mighty email marketing strategy.
They have the belief that for a rapid growth, fussing with a complicated platform you just need clever solutions to build from the basics isn’t necessarily result-oriented.
- iContact
iContact is an international email marketing service provider which is very popular among the small, medium and the premier businesses.
iContact is taking the leading service space in the email marketing software industry, with options for it creating, tracking and sending HTML-based emails and social media messages made available for users.
The company has almost seventy customers and more than one million users globally.
Best Strategies And Practices For Email Marketing
Create an email marketing plan
To make the planning part easier, the following under listed best practices you’ll want to consider when devising a strategy for your email marketing.
- Define your audience
Audience definition helps you to have a clear identity of who your audience is in order to effectively communicate with them.
Mailchimp allows you dig a little deeper to segment users within your audience so you can be able to send personalized emails to them that will help in increasing engagement build trustful relationships and generate greater ROI.
- Signup sources
Going forward, the awareness of how, where and when your customers was added to your list will aid you with a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to intensify your marketing efforts.
So some of the important useful data your signup form has to provide is where and how subscribers sign up for your list.
- Segments and groups
This is where you will prioritized your client. By identifying smaller collections of people within your bigger audience, then you will have the occasion to group them and put them in a separate segments so as to send more personalized and relevant emails to them—doing this will aid a better result.
- Decide what to write
Now that you know who you’re writing to, it’s time to think about your content. As you are about to send email out to your subscribers, always bear in mind what they pay or subscribe to.
- Establish your sending frequency and goals
There’s no law or rule guided how frequently you should send email to your customers, though sending frequent and constant message to them may likely to tune out what you have to say or unsubscribe altogether.
- Make a schedule
Using of a content calendar to schedule your campaigns. This is one of the best ways to make sure you’re staying on track, blog posts, social media posts, and more.
Design your emails
- Design tips
Designing your campaign may be a little bit tactful but while designing your email campaigns, focus on your message and keep your design straight to the subject matter.
It is advisable you prioritize the elements in your campaign in a hierarchy of important and relevant. Put the main takeaway toward the top so people can quickly grab the vital part of your email if they’re people who have short or little time.
- Code your own templates
You can choose the several options that you have in other to code your own HTML template and import directly to Mailchimp.
Put your emails to test
- Test in several ISPs and email clients
Since all the email clients have a separate creation, meaning that the campaign you designed in Mailchimp might look slightly different in your clients’ receiver folders.
You can double check the emails using mobile devices as well as they can look different in responsive designs.
- Send test emails to friends and coworkers
Send a test email to your friends and coworker so they can preview the campaign directly to their inbox provided if you have any friends or coworkers who can check your email for typographical error and give you some feedback on the original text.
- A/B Testing campaigns have the best version
Running an A/B test lets you utilize the diverse different versions of your emails to see how the changes you make impact on results.
Marketing automation; what do you do with it?
Automation is a series of emails or targeted email that you can set and forget unlike regular campaigns.
Automation will assist you in the streamlining of your communications with customers so as for you to have ample time to focus on creating content and increasing return on investment (ROI).
Time to measure your performance
As you are taking steps ahead, the marketing analytics data you have collected using your Mailchimp reports will assist you in redefine your marketing format.
- Opens and clicks
Talking about measuring campaign engagement open and clicks are the most important statistics, they will help indicating how tandem your subject lines and campaign content are with a particular list.
Though, importantly if you don’t want to be seen your statistic wasteful you have to consider how you’re open and click through rates compare to other companies in your industry.
- E-commerce data
Turn on e-commerce link tracking for your campaigns so as to view purchase data for your subscribers in campaign reports, subscriber profiles, and on the account platform.
- Website traffic
The already sent campaigns you have mailed can assist you generating more traffic to your website. So for this, make sure to track any trends in website traffic or e-commerce activity immediately you have sent a campaign.
Conclusion
Thinking of selling or communicate something about your brand or sell your stuff, the effectiveness of email marketing for this purpose has never been in doubt.
A study found that for every single dollar spent, email has an average $38 return on investment (ROI).
When shoppers and shops owners are ready to buy something, they often look for emails from their favorite stores to facilitate their transactions.
