How does email marketing work?
Email marketing involves sending out messages to potential and current customers through email in order to promote your business or product. This can include special offers, coupons, or simply providing information about your business. It helps you improve your conversions and revenue by giving your subscribers and customers helpful information to reach their goals.
The following text reviews when email marketing should be used and provides benefits and statistics to support why email marketing is valuable.
You can learn the basics of email marketing for free with an online course.
When to Use Email Marketing
There are many ways to use email marketing — some of the most common including using the tactic to:
- Build relationships: Build connections through personalized engagement.
- Boost brand awareness: Keep your company and your services top-of-mind for the moment when your prospects are ready to engage.
- Promote your content: Use email to share relevant blog content or useful assets with your prospects.
- Generate leads: Entice subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable.
- Market your products: Promote your products and services.
- Nurture leads: Delight your customers with content that can help them succeed in their goals.
Email Marketing Benefits
- There are over 4 billion email users worldwide, so if you’re looking for a way to reach your customers, email is the perfect place to find them.
- As of 2020, email generates $36 for every dollar spent.
- 79% of marketers list email marketing in their top 3 most effective marketing channels.
- Email visitors are the most likely to convert on forms.
- Perhaps the best reason to use email marketing is that you own the channel. Outside of compliance regulations, there is no external entity that can impact how, when, or why you reach out to your subscribers.
Email Marketing Stats by Industry
The rules for email marketing varies depending on your industry and your target audience. Some email marketing trends that may be useful for your strategy include those specifically tailored to B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and real estate companies.
Email Marketing Stats for B2B
- 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads.
- Email is the third-highest owned-media platform B2B marketers used to
distribute content in the last 12 months. - B2B marketers say email engagement is the fourth most insightful metric when evaluating performance over the past year, more than social media, search rankings, and lead quality.
Email Marketing Stats for B2C
- Roughly 60% of e-commerce, consumer goods and services, and retail companies are personalizing emails based on past purchases.
- 37% of B2C marketers send daily marketing emails to their subscribers.
Email Marketing Stats for Ecommerce
- 57.2% of marketers say the ecommerce brands they manage have 1,000 to 10,000 contacts on their email lists.
- 85.7% of ecommerce marketers say the primary business objective of their email strategy is increasing brand awareness.
- Roughly 72% of ecommerce marketers say the biggest challenge they face with email is low open rates.
There are 5 steps to creating an email strategy that encompasses your organic, newsletter content (that isn’t overly promotional), and your promotional content (that sells products).
Each of them can be situated within a week (maximum!).
Your email marketing strategy does not have to wait until you have more knowledge or things slow down. The first step to creating a newsletter is to choose the type of newsletter you want.
Step 1: Choose Your Type of Newsletter
Email marketing allows us to build relationships with our audience without selling them anything. If we use a weekly newsletter, we can touch base with our subscribers 52 times a year. This would be useful in giving them marketing information that could help with launches, campaigns, and business endeavors.
There are 4 types of newsletters to choose from:
#1: “Letter-from-the-editor” or “Featured Article” Style
This type of newsletter is best suited for:
- Brands with something to say and/or points to make
- Companies wanting to take a stance on something happening in their industry (have an opinion, provide tactical advice, etc.)
- Businesses willing to dedicate more resources and time to create a valuable newsletter
#2: “Link” or “Curated Content” Style
This type of newsletter is best suited for:
- Brands and businesses who want to provide quick value to their customers
- Companies strapped for time and people power
#3: “Blog” Style
This type of newsletter is best suited for:
- Brands with a dedicated blog and/or content repository
- Companies that want to drive A LOT of traffic to their content
#4: “Hustle” Style
This type of newsletter is best suited for:
- Brands with a dedicated content team that can really put pen to paper
- Companies that are big on the affiliate side of marketing
- Businesses that want to establish themselves as THE AUTHORITY in their industry
You will need to decide on a regular schedule for sending out your newsletters. Once you have decided how often you will send them, you can begin creating your newsletter content. Use surveys or polls to find out what content your audience would most like to see from you.
Step 2: Create an Editorial Calendar for Promotional Content
You need to have a promotional calendar as part of your email marketing strategy. We aren’t saying that you need to have your whole year mapped out without any wiggle room. If you have a clear idea of what you want to promote, you only need to dedicate three months to developing a solid plan. If you need to shift anything, you can do so during the course of those weeks. The promotional calendar can help you see what content you have coming up and how it can be used to support marketing campaigns.
You should create a promotional calendar so that you are aware of when offers and products are launching. This will help you stay organized and on top of your marketing campaigns. Utilize the calendar to determine which content lines up with special offers and products to help optimize your campaigns.
Step 3: Schedule When Your Emails Will Go Live
Although your email marketing strategy’s primary purpose is to sell your products, it is also important to remember that it plays a role in nurturing your audience. The rule of thumb we like to follow is to publish a newsletter consistently (1-3x/week) and to only run 3x promotional offers per month. If you send emails more frequently than that, your audience will become tired of them. This means that people are so overwhelmed with promotions and offers that they immediately delete your emails when they receive them.
If your open rates are decreasing, your click-through rates are small, and your profits are not doing well.
In email marketing, the worst-case scenario is when your messages are not opened or read by your subscribers. You need a plan to avoid this by making sure your messages are interesting and relevant to your subscribers. You’ll need to schedule when your emails containing your newsletter and promotional content will be sent.
For example, suppose you have a weekly newsletter that goes out every Monday. There are 3 offers that will be promoted from November 29th to December 31st. For each offer, there will be 3 emails sent out for a total of 9 promotional emails.
These are general numbers, though. You can adjust the number of promotional emails you send based on how many products you’re promoting, the final purchase date, and how your campaign is progressing (if it’s not doing well, send more emails).
An email calendar will help you keep track of when each email you plan to send will go live. This will help ensure that you stay on track and do not miss any important deadlines. This calendar can also be used to determine when to have newsletter content and promotional copy written, edited, and uploaded to an email platform.
Email is one of the most important aspects of a business, so it’s important to have someone on your team who is dedicated to handling it. The job of the person in this position will be to make sure that newsletters are sent out on time, and that promotional copy is written and scheduled for advertisement campaigns. The only way to avoid forgetting about emails is to regularly check and respond to them.
Step 4: Use Email for Market Research
Because of Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes in 2021, a lot of data was lost. Although it may not seem ideal, it is actually beneficial that people are aware of and can select where their data is shared. This transition simply required a shift in marketing strategy. We should stop relying on other people to get data for our campaigns and start doing it ourselves.
And email marketing is the perfect place to start. Your email audience is more than hot leads. This means that by understanding your audience avatars, you can better cater to their specific needs, wants, and interests. The client can tell you what type of newsletter they would like, the products they want you to market, and how they feel about your email marketing strategy.
But, you have to ask them first.
You can use your email platform to conduct market research by asking your subscribers questions about their needs and preferences. This information can help you improve your products and services to better meet the needs of your target market. We will now create an email marketing strategy from this. Tag subscribers based on their answers to Send subscribers down funnels for products they actually care about.
As your promotional calendar starts rolling out, you have lists of subscribers who are interested in those products or topics. If we surveyed our email subscribers and asked what they were struggling with the most, SEO would be one of the answers.
You can make your email strategy more effective by surveying your audience to find out what topics they are most interested in. Based on their answers, you can send them content and funnels that are specific to those topics.
Step 5: Test, Optimize, and Stay Flexible
The best marketing advice that any business can take is to be consistent. Marketing is all about testing, optimizing, and staying flexible. Great marketing plans aren’t written in stone. The metrics tell them what story needs to be adapted and they change it accordingly.
If you, for example, start sending out an email newsletter with 4 curated links every week and your open rate decreased from 30% to 10%, that would be an indication of a problem. Your audience doesn’t want you to curate links for them. They’re looking for something else entirely. This is your cue to ask your subscribers what they want to see more of and incorporate that into your future emails.
We annually evaluate our most successful email subject lines to identify areas for improvement and which subject lines to discontinue in the new year.
Try out different sections in your newsletter to see what your audience loves the most. You can keep tabs on this by looking at the open rates and click-through rates on links in that specific section.
It is important to listen to what your subscribers want to see more of. This can be done through market research and by paying attention to what topics generate the most interest.
The main point of this text is that you shouldn’t get too attached to your marketing plans, because they might not always work out the way you want them to. Update your plans in response to new information.
Use email marketing tips.
Think about the formatting and subject line of an email you send to a friend. Email marketing requires a lot more consideration. The time you take to send your email to the time it takes for your email to be opened on various devices matters. The goal of every email should be to generate more leads, which makes crafting a marketing email a more involved process.
Let’s touch on the components of a successful marketing email:
Your email copy should match your voice and only talk about one topic.
Your images should be chosen in a way that optimizes them for all devices, makes them eye-catching, and keeps them relevant to the rest of your website.
Your call-to-action should be relevant to the offer and stand out from the rest of the email.
The best time to send an email, based on a study that observed response rates of 20 million emails, is Tuesday at 11 AM ET.
Responsiveness: 55% of emails are opened on mobile. Make sure your email can be read on any device.
Use a personal tone when writing emails, as if you are addressing a friend. Address your reader in a casual and friendly manner.
The email subject line should be clear, to the point, and make the reader want to open the email. It should be personalized to the reader, and match the content of the email.
The most important rule to follow when sending a marketing email is to treat your subscribers like humans.
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