Do you know that Email marketing is one major if not the best strategy to grow your business? So what is email marketing? Well, in this article, I will provide the step by step guide and a full course on Email marketing.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is an effective marketing tool with the use of direct email to promote products or services. What this does is to foster relationship between your business and potential customers thereby helping you build awareness of your brand. This functions as a marketing channel that helps you nurture your and convert your customers into leads and also generate sales for you. According to research conducted, this has overcome affiliate marketing, social media, and SEO in conversation rate and built trust for business brands.
Email marketing enable businesses target their audience and keep potential customers informed about their brand. Although, its limitation could be as a result of persistent spam emails sent to customers. This in return drives the customers away. So it is advisable you schedule your emails when sending to potential customers. On the contrary, you can add a newsletter plugin to your website or use the email software to schedule automated promotional emails for your potential customers.
Benefits of Email marketing
Email marketing campaigns come with so many benefits and advantages. This benefits brings so much relevance to your business especially in terms of growth.
- Brand awareness: the great thing about email is that it allows a direct reach to someone especially the one-to-one communication. Therefore, email helps you plant your brand in the minds of people. Meanwhile, this adds more impact because it goes directly to someone’s inbox unlike social media where you may not get attention or could be seen under probability. The good thing about brand marketing is that you can send emails to large numbers of people at a very low cost when compared to other marketing platforms.
- Conversion Rate: one important benefit of email marketing is the high conversion rate for your products and services. According to research from the study conducted, more than 1 billion shopping stores in 2019 made sales with email marketing having a conversion rate of 2.3%, compared to 1% from social media. This supports links and quickens the call-to-action strategies.
- The Loyalty of Customer: email has the power to nurture, convert and retain your customer. This also helps foster long lasting relationship between you and your customers. You can also make use of their loyalty to build a community because of the trust built overtime with your emails.
- Build your own Email lists: with this marketing campaign, you can build your own email lists. This helps you engage in a direct contact with the people who are most interested in your products and strengthen your intimacy with your audience. Meanwhile, you need effective email marketing software and email lists containing email addresses of interested subscribers to achieve this.
- Cost effective: Sending emails are very cheap as you don’t pay for any advertising fee or media space.
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Free Email Marketing tools you can use to promote your business
Constant Contact
This is one of the leading email marketing tools in the world. This tool enables you manage your subscribers. Using this email marketing campaigns gives you access to create professional email designs with templates using the drag-and-drop editing tools. You can also track the performance and send automated emails to new subscribers using this marketing service.
Sendiblue
This is a 2-in-1 email marketing tool because it contains an email marketing software and SMS marketing software. The marketing comes with a drag and drop tools you can use to build automated workflows and high-converting emails. With Sendiblue, you can send up to 300 emails per day for free but has a paid plan as well with just $25.
Drip
This is another marketing tool that enables users create conditional statements with email messaging. This tool contains organized campaigns, workflows and triggers. With this tool, you can easily create complex automation workflows. You also stand a chance to enjoy a 14-day trial period. Drip comes with different plans; the basic plan goes for $49/month with up to 2500 subscribers while the Pro version goes for $99/month with up to 5,000 subscribers.
Aweber
This is another well-known email marketing tool with multi-purpose tools inside it. These internal tools include email builder, autoresponders, segments, etc. It comes with a 30-day free trial with great customer support service. Aweber is one of the cheapest marketing campaigns tools. The pricing starts at $19/month.
Convertkit
This is one of the most expensive email marketing tools because of the advanced features it possesses. It functions like CRM tool and possess advanced features like complex autoresponders. You can start with $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers and goes up incrementally as time goes by.
Mailchimp
This is a very popular email marketing tool for users who are just starting out. This great tool has a friendly interface and it is very easy to set up. It is cheapest of all as the paid plan starts with as low as $10/month. The free plan has up to 2,000 subscribers. But the only limitation is that you can’t use the autoresponders and other advanced features on the free plan until you switch to the paid plans.
GetResponse
Just like Mailchimp, GetResponse is also a very popular email marketing tool useful for small businesses. GetResponse comes with amazing features for the free plans. With GetResponse, you can create automated campaigns with a unique drag and drop builder. You can also make good sales by organizing segment contact and send any number of emails designed for specific groups. The Customer Service Support can be contacted via the phone, live chat, and email.
Steps on How to Make your Email Marketing Campaigns Work
Choose the right email marketing software
As discussed earlier, there are popular email marketing tools you can use. They include Mailchimp, Convertkit, Mailjet, GetResponse, Constant Contact,hubspot and so many more. When choosing the right email tool, it is advisable you check for the tool with the right features especially the pricing by subscribers that corresponds with quality email volume.
Build your Email list
One of the ways to engage your subscribers is to build your own email list. What this does is to send a reminder of your products to your customers which may end up as sales. You can make use of the some email Service providers to help you reach the right subscribers and customers with the right emails and the right time. This company will create subscription forms that will be embedded on your website. The subscription form comes with a sign up promise, this will tell the subscribers the kind of content they will receive, when to receive it and how often they will get it. Once, you are able to achieve this, then you are already on your way to building your email list which will not boost your profit, but also yield massive conversion rate for you.
Setting Up a Welcome email for new subscribers
The first you need to do when someone signs up for your email list is to engage them with a nice welcome email. This is to catch the attention of the subscriber and create a lasting relationship. You can use a link to useful information, and also give a nice welcoming discount, etc.
Make the goals of your email marketing campaigns clear to your subscribers
You must set clear goals for your email marketing campaigns such that your audience must have a clear idea of your business. Examples of these goals include getting more downloads for your latest ebook, sharing a discount with loyal customers, promoting a new product.
Have a schedule for your campaign
In this case, you have to be strategic as you devote yourself to knowing the best time to send emails to your audience. Take for instance; when you send out an email on the same day every week, it will set a reminder in the mind of the subscribers, making them know when to expect emails from you. According to research, email campaigns perform better on Tuesday or Thursday in the mornings around 10:00 or in the afternoon around 2:00 pm.
Check your email campaign before sending
It is advisable to you check for errors and proofread on your device either mobile or desktop before sending it. These errors include incorrect links, text formatting errors, typographical errors, etc.
Monitor your campaign result
There are so many things to check when you send your emails campaigns to your subscribers. This is to let you know how well you are doing so that you can improve in any area. They include:
- Open rate: this is the number of people who open your email divide by the toatal number of recipients.
- Click-through rate: The ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the total number of recipients.
- Unsubscribe rate: This states the number of people who unsubscribed divided by the total number of recipients (hopefully, as close to zero as possible). Please note: If this number is high, you need to review your email frequency and segmentation.
- Bounce rate: this indicatesthe number of emails that failed to deliver divided by the total number of emails sent. Meanwhile, there are two types of bounce rates, they are the soft bounces and the hard bounces. Soft bounces occur as a result of temporary issues like the recipient’s inbox being full. Hard bounces, on the other hand, are due to permanent issues (e.g. an inactive email address).
Finally, make sure your emails have intriguing subject line and are made with unique templates.