The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing

Once you reach and attract your target audience it helps you build your brand awareness and convert your target audience into visitors. It’s also very important to continue communication with them in order to engage and convert them. Email marketing comes into play here, helping to engage prospects, as well as nurture and convert them into customers. And don’t forget, keeping existing customers is less expensive than generating new ones!

Even after all hi-tech developments in communication, email marketing is still one of the most effective and cost-efficient communication channels. It offers numerous advantages in terms of your target audience and prospects in the sales funnel.

Although there are other cost-efficient ways of communication like social media marketing, email marketing gets better ROI because of its targeting, segmentation, and personalization features. Segmenting your audience and sending them personalized messages allows you to build a relationship and make email marketing a profit-building tool. 

You can also effectively leverage your social media and email marketing efforts with cross-channel marketing activities.  All the visitors to your site, the engaged users on social media, etc. are the prospects of your email list, so every possible channel like social media is an opportunity to have an increasing email database. You can use social media to extend your email list, then nurture these leads and turn them into customers with email marketing.

Now, let’s have a look at how you can build an email campaign step by step.

1. Focus on the Main Goal

The first step to build a growth-driven email marketing strategy is to analyze the opportunities and problems. After reaching your potential customers, you should define your goals. These could be attracting more website traffic, generating leads, taking customer reviews, lowering sales cycles, etc. This is best done with a monthly growth analysis of your brand in terms of your digital marketing KPIs.

2. Determine Your Emailing Tactics

You need to create growth tactics aligned with your goals to convert visitors into potential customers or existing customers to brand promoters. 

According to the industry, service, or product, emailing tactics can vary, but it is all about what you can serve as a valuable source. Decide what your target audience needs and what you should serve them to increase engagement. 

Your emailing tactics may include:

• Sending Announcements: Announcement emails, which include product or service updates or new product launches, are important to reveal more about your company and its solutions. This is because they build trust with your subscribers by giving a message that you update yourself according to industry trends, your competitors, and the market needs. Special occasions such as receiving an award, giving highlights after a successful event, or showing the growth numbers are a great way to show your business success as well. 

• Sending Newsletters: It is important to keep your subscribers up to date with periodic newsletters. While analyzing trends, improving industry knowledge, and renewing your business, why not serve these accumulating valuable information to help others along the way?

Sending weekly or monthly newsletters with useful resources build brand loyalty. To retain your subscribers, be a trusted source and thought leader by serving the industry knowledge to your subscribers.

• Sending Deals and Promotions: Create new deals and promotions for your subscribers to dramatically increase subscriber engagement and brand loyalty. Its personalization power is one of the most important things about email marketing. Take advantage of personalization and give subscribers special offers via personalized messages to make them feel special. 

• Sending Webinar Invitations: Webinars allow you to provide information in a well-directed way to your target audience. It is an opportunity to introduce yourself by showing that there are no geographical barriers to your delivery. Use webinars to explain your tools and products better or to interact with your audience with Q&As.

3. Grow Your Audience List

The nature of email marketing constitutes a building of trust with your subscribers and retaining them as a prospect in your sales funnel. Build and grow your email list in a clever way to retain them.

There are lots of tactics and tools for collecting email addresses, but they are effective only if your content creates value. So, you need to build a growth-driven content marketing strategy in order to collect email addresses that can be converted from subscribers into customers. 

Your data collection tactics may include:

• Gated content: Gated content is one of the ways to grow your email list because it requires filling out a form to download online materials, such as case studies, whitepapers, e-books, tutorial videos, webinars, etc. 

• Blog page: Creating a blog page will help people to visit your site and get insights from you. Turn them into your subscribers by placing an attractive pop-up on your landing page.

• Free Trials/Coupons: Offering consumers a free-trial or coupons for free for a short period of time will encourage visitors to fill out a form.

Source: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nbt-next-big-thing#section-overview

Important note: In order to encourage visitors to fill out your forms, instead of requiring many details, shorten your questions to get their main contact information. 

How to increase engagement in email marketing?

There are some key tactics that increase the engagement of your email database:

• Segmentation: Segmentation is basically grouping your subscribers according to their similarities to send them relevant messages. This way, you can personalize your email messages since one size doesn’t fit all. Audiences can be created based on their demographics, location, preferences, source, latest engagement with your brand like purchasing your product, subscribing to your newsletter, downloading your whitepaper, etc. It is the right way of communication to get mutual benefits and keep them engaged.

• Personalization: Personalization is all about tailoring your message to each subscriber. After segmenting your audience, you can send relevant emails according to that segment’s needs. You can also add your subscribers’ names to the subject line or email body, which will make subscribers feel special.

• Timing: The time you send the email is as important as the segmentation and personalization. Analyze your subscribers’ behaviours to find the optimal time period in which subscribers engage. 

Bonus: A Useful Tool and a Guide for an Effective Email Marketing Planning

In order for you to plan and track your email marketing tactics and activities easily, here’s our Email Marketing Planning Guide for you to have an understanding of how to create an email marketing plan, the main email types, and some tactics for you to use in your email marketing activities. Moreover, take a look at our tool for Email Marketing Planning for you to practice and exercise on how to create new plans and track them. 

4. Create Your Campaign

An email campaign has many components. How we use these components is as important as understanding opportunities, creating tactics, and collecting the audience to implement the tactics you have developed.

• Subject Line: This is a really important component to convince people to open your email, directly affecting the email open rate. Note that the subject line should be clear and relevant to the email body. 

• Mail Body: This is where you can create value and catch the subscribers’ attention. The messages you want to give should be given in a well-organized way, which is generally created by creative teams, because the readers should understand the main idea of the whole content, and what email offers even if they just scan the email body.

• CTA (call to action): Using a CTA button affects the click-through rate of your email campaigns. Make sure you are clear about what actions you expect from the email recipients. Use catchy and relevant messages in your call-to-action button to see the increase in your click rate.

• Visuals: Visuals you place in your email campaign should make sense to your subscribers, be relevant to your messages, and, most importantly, should not spread over a large area and should not prevent the visibility of the messages you give.
• Design: Design is not just how an email looks – it actually affects users' behaviours in deciding to click your email. If the messages, call-to-action-buttons, and images are not placed correctly, it is not important how good your content is.  

After you create a campaign, you should send a test email before sending it to the audience. At this point, there are important things to consider:

• Relevancy: Beginning with the subject line from the moment your email comes into your mailbox, check all the components you have placed in your email campaign, and make sure that you are giving relevant messages as a whole to your audience.
• Readability: Make sure you provide the content in a well-structured way to ease its readability and catch the audience’s attention.
• Responsiveness: Check the test email from different devices. Make sure you are serving a good user experience on all screen sizes, using a mobile-friendly approach, optimizing the images to not slow down the loading time.

The more you develop and improve yourself in creating a campaign, the more your metrics (open rate, CTR etc) will get better.

5. Automate Your Email Marketing

Sending automated emails is another way of keeping contacts engaged and building brand loyalty. Email marketing automation, basically, provides you with a chance to automate your email tactics by sending personalized, timely, and relevant messages. 

Users want to receive relevant messages in line with the actions they take. So, the power of personalization and segmentation capacity should be fully utilized when you automate your emails. For example, when we open an account on any platform, we receive a welcome email. That’s an action-based automatic email. 

In order to increase your campaigns’ open rates and engagement, you can create many automation scenarios based on users’ actions.

Email Sequences

As we mentioned at the beginning of our article, email marketing is a communication tool, therefore, you need a communication strategy. The best communication strategy of sending entirely relevant messages relies on considering users’ behaviour. Let’s take a look at the work-flow, known as email sequences, that you can set up in line with users’ behaviour:

Step 1: Create Action-Based Autoresponder: This refers to the messages triggered by the actions your users take. Did users download the free ebook on your website? At this point, you can reach them by sending them a thank you email and recommend similar contents. 

Your action-based autoresponder tactics may include:

• Sending a welcome email
• Sending recommendations based on users’ preferences
• Sending a thank you email for the download, purchase, etc
• Getting review
• Reminding abandoned cart 

Step 2:  Follow-Up by Tagging Your Contacts: When users take action, tag them according to their interests. For example, add an Event tag to users who sign up for a webinar invitation with the prediction that they have an interest in such events so that they can also register for future events. – So you realized you segment your users, right? You can create a workflow that will automatically send your event reminders or invitation for your next event to those users you segment.

Creating manual email campaigns for every user isn’t feasible. For this reason, you should automate your email campaigns by targeting users with similar behaviour. Thanks to email marketing automation, you can create a more efficient workflow and create a structure where you can repeat tasks without any effort. 

Using data-driven email marketing automation allows you to:

• Send personalized emails to your segmented users
• Streamline your email marketing efforts
• Improve your campaign performance
• Save a significant amount of time

In this way, you can 

• Grow your audience list and convert new visitors into your prospects
• Minimize your sales cycle and convert prospects into customers
• Increase customer retention and improve customer loyalty.

Therefore, most of the businesses start by setting up automated workflows that trigger the email sending according to the users’ actions to convert visits into revenue. 

6. Measure Your Email Campaigns’ Success

Although your email marketing goals are linked to building brand loyalty, which is aligned with your company’s goals and KPIs, indeed, you need to specify the email marketing goals to measure its success in the way of your final goal. 

Source: https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-tracking/

It is important to analyze an email campaign’s results to make the email marketing channel a growth tool. To optimize your efforts for better improvement, you need to monitor the performance. Depending on your email marketing goals, the metrics you need to track will vary. Metrics which you focus on will give you the insights to increase the success of your campaigns.

In order to have a comprehensive idea about tracking email performance and email marketing metrics, you can check out our Guide to Tracking Email Marketing Performance. 

Bonus: Email Marketing Tactics

Last but not least, here’s a wide range of Email Marketing tactics we have prepared for you to implement into your growth marketing activities. You can choose the tactics according to your main goals (brand awareness + traffic generation, conversion, and retention) as well as the difficulty level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

Related Content:

Growth Marketing Planning Guides – Email Marketing Planning: Learn how to create an email marketing plan step-by-step.

Growth Marketing Planning Tools – Email Marketing Planning: Practice how to create an email marketing plan and execute your plan with our easy-to-use tool.