In this Beginner’s Guide, learn all about Email Marketing from the basics of what is email marketing to professional tips from Your Marketing People’s Email Specialist. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We always here to help!
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the practice of using email to promote your business to your current and potential customers.
Emails serve a variety of marketing functions. With abandoned cart emails, you can automatically send a discount offer to anyone who leaves your ecommerce site before checking out. Or, you can create a series of emails to massage B2B leads down the funnel, from a whitepaper download offer to a free consultation with your sales team. Emails that promote your latest blog content, or inform customers of upcoming sales or events, also fall in the category of email marketing.
With strategic email marketing, your business can develop relationships with potential customers, convert blog subscribers into customers, and keep your current customers coming back for more with personalized offers.
Why Your Business Needs Email Marketing
At $32 return for every $1 spent, email marketing consistently delivers one of the best ROIs of all digital channels.
That’s because, with email marketing, you “own” your subscribers. You’re not dependent on the ever-changing algorithms of social media to surface your latest post to your Facebook fans. You don’t have to hope for the best when you share your video on YouTube. And you’re not subject to Google’s latest search update. Once a person signs up for your email list, they’ve opted in to direct communication with your brand. That’s a powerful thing.
Plus, your customers want to hear from you. A majority of consumers enjoy getting promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis, and nearly half of them wish they received those emails more often.
Email marketing is inexpensive, easy to track, and endlessly customizable. You can continually spin up new campaigns to target specific customer segments—with the content they need to say yes to your brand—at precisely the moment they need it.
Email Marketing
The Stats
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Average Open Rate
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Average Email CTR
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Return for Every $1
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
Follow these steps to get started with email marketing for your business.
1. Choose an email marketing provider (ESP).
Popular email providers like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Hubspot, and Aweber are excellent options for businesses just starting out. These providers give you all the tools you need to embed subscription forms on your website, manage your subscriber list, build email templates, and set up A/B testing.
2. Define your goals.
What’s the main thing you want to get out of your email marketing? Is it conversions, lead nurturing, event or sale awareness, or simply helping customers remember you exist? When you’re starting out, it’s best to narrow in on one or two goals. You can always expand your email marketing later once you’ve got a feel for what works.
3. Create email campaigns to serve those goals.
Once you have your goals defined, it’s time to build your email campaigns. If you’re nurturing B2B leads for your service business, you can develop email templates for whitepaper offers, or invites to your educational webinar. You can create a separate email template to share your top blog posts of the month, and still more templates to promote upcoming sales.
4. Build your subscriber list.
Next, you have to find the people to send your emails to. Otherwise, all you’ve got are a bunch of email templates. Locate areas on your website where you can encourage people to sign up for your list, such as a signup box on your blog or home page. Include a quick signup form at checkout and/or a marked checkbox to add anyone who purchases from your ecommerce site.
5. Measure and iterate.
Once you begin sending your campaigns, pay attention to your analytics. Your email marketing software will show you the unsubscribe, open, and click through rate for each of your emails. Review your emails to spot any trends. Are certain days more popular? What kind of subject lines perform better? Does using image- or text-based emails tend to generate more sales? You get the idea.
6. Get help when you need it.
It can be challenging to keep track of all your email campaigns, and to know which are the right campaigns to focus on in the first place. Plus, there are all sorts of little details (like adding an emoji to your subject line) that can move the needle for a campaign. Call Your Marketing People when you’re ready to take your email marketing to the next level. We custom-build email strategies that produce results.
Pro Email Tips from Your Marketing People
- Create drip campaigns to funnel customers towards converting. Drip campaigns are automated series of emails that begin sending based on a unique trigger, such as immediately sending a 10% welcome offer to new blog subscribers, and a roundup of your most popular blog posts a week later.
- (A)lways (B)e A/B testing. Emails can always be improved. That’s part of the joy of email marketing. With each of your campaigns, regularly test different elements to see what resonates better with your audience. We recommend starting with send times, subject lines, and layout.
- Segment your list. Organize your subscribers based on lead warmth (cold vs. hot), purchasing behavior, and even your customer personas. By segmenting your list, you can delight customers with emails that feel truly personal.
- Choose a Sender name, and stick with it. Getting dumped in the spam folder is the worst thing that can happen to your email. Avoid that scenario by familiarizing customers to your brand, and using a consistent, recognizable name in the “From” field. Typically, a person’s name from your company works better than a general one, like “info” or “marketing.”
- Don’t forget your CTA. Never sign off an email to your customers without a clear call-to-action for them to follow, whether that’s downloading a case study, watching your YouTube video, browsing your newest product collection, or reading your blog.
Learn More About Email Marketing
Want to know more about email marketing? Subscribe to the Your Marketing People blog. We’re always sharing our best marketing advice, based on our own experience with clients. Plus, we keep you informed on all the latest industry trends. Some of our recent blogs have focused on our top tips for email drip campaigns, and the nitty-gritty of writing an effective marketing email. For best practices like these and more—for all your marketing channels—check out our blog.
See What Email Can Do for Your Business
Your business deserves email marketing that boosts conversions, drives site visits, and keeps your brand top of mind with customers and leads.
If you’re ready to unleash the power of email marketing for your business, but you’re not quite sure where to start, Your Marketing People is the partner you need. From strategy to execution, we’ll partner with you to develop an email marketing program that meets your business goals—and your audience’s needs. Our email services include email drip campaigns, A/B testing, list segmenting, ongoing reporting and optimization, and more.
With Your Marketing People’s help, one of our clients doubled their lead generation efforts from email, with 39% more opens and 67% more clicks. Take a look at the work we’ve done for clients here.
See our work
“Since Your Marketing People has taken over email marketing, revenue for this channel has increased by 84% with an almost 90% increase in transactions. It’s now one of our largest drivers of sales! The stellar improvement of our email marketing has led me to sign up for their SEO services.”
Charith Perera
President
