E-mail Marketing Guide: What is it and How Does it Work?

What is E-Mail Marketing?

As the world of marketing grows, it is important that brands and businesses take every available opportunity to promote their offerings and advertise the products or services that they are selling. As email has been a form of communication that has been around for years, much longer than social media, it is always good to promote and advertise using email platforms! Email marketing for small businesses is particularly beneficial because it is offered freely, and if you have a good email list of potential clients and old customers, it could be a fantastic way to extend your reach! Along with being able to promote both new products and sales that you may be having, it is also a great promotional tool to use if you want to expand your customers’ understanding of who you are and the value of the products or services that you sell, ensuring that potential or returning customers are constantly engaging with your business! 

For brands and businesses that are looking for the best platforms to sell their products and promote who they are and what they stand for, email marketing is one of the easiest and most effective types of marketing around! Having a good email marketing strategy and email marketing software that is able to help you achieve your goals when it comes to advertising using this platform is extremely beneficial and it is important that brands and businesses carefully consider what their end goal is when looking to find the best types of software to use!

Why Does E-Mail Marketing Matter?

Any person who works, goes to school or functions in society is more than likely to have at least one email account that they actively scour through. Email is something that has only grown over the years, and unlike other older forms of communication, it is constantly evolving and finding ways to better help users communicate. As a platform that is used all over the world, and more than likely checked daily, it is a great tool to use to promote your brand or business! Emails allow for brands and businesses to easily interact with clients and potential customers, with immediate and easy communication that is structured to build lasting relationships. While more traditional methods of advertising have good reach, these types of platforms are generally one-way communication hubs, with brands releasing content that is then seen by users, but there is generally not much space for communication between the business and their customers. While this is in no way saying that these forms of advertising are ineffective, it highlights the need for including things like email marketing, as this form of advertising promotes a two-way communication street. 

How Does E-Mail Marketing Work?

Email marketing works by brands or businesses gaining email addresses and then using this email list to further communicate and promote their offerings to clients and old customers. There are many ways that you can get your email list, and many businesses will ask customers to supply them with their email addresses in order to keep them up to date with offers and sales. To further promote their email marketing, many brands will provide the customers on this list with deals and specials, or offer them the first chance to purchase new items! This rewards program ensures that customers eagerly await your email, and associate receiving this communication with excitement over new and exciting offers just for them. This can also instil a sense of trust in your brand, as the user receiving the email will feel as if the offers are solely for them, creating a sense of comradery between your customers and your business! This communication system works by releasing both product and sale information as well as information about who you are a brand and what you stand for, giving you the chance to better your customers’ understanding and learn more about why you do what you do! As a free platform, the sky’s the limit and as long as you are creating fun, informative and interactive emails to send to your clients, you are sure to have a high return on the investment you are purring into this marketing platform! 

How to Start E-Mail Marketing and What Do You Need?

Email Marketing Software

Unfortunately, having a good email marketing strategy involves more than just acquiring a list of participants and potential clients. Email marketing software is software that helps brands and businesses create, send and monitor the progress of their email marketing. Having this information on hand can help you to better design and create the emails that you are going to send, specifically targeting your users with the information that you want them to be provided with and in a way that your specific target audience will respond to. Having an email marketing software is a necessity for any email marketing strategy and should not be overlooked when developing this plan! 

An Email List

Email marketing without a list of clients whom you can email is pretty much like trying to fill a bucket of water without a bucket; pretty ineffective and useless. There are many ways that you can build your email list, but two forms of attracting customers work particularly well and they are lead magnets and opt-in forms. Lead magnets refer to promotions that draw people to sign up to your email list, they are usually things like a free gift or a certain percentage off when making your first purchase. It is important to consider what lead magnet you use and it needs to be something relevant to your brand or business, they can also be in the form of promotional documents that could help your clients in various ways. For example, if you are a brand that is selling makeup, your lead magnet could be a tutorial of how to create the perfect smokey eye, something that your potential clients are sure to be interested in! The great thing about this is that once created, your lead magnet will do the work for you, attracting customers! Be sure that this lead magnet is something that is timeless, to ensure that you do not have to redo it! 

Opt-in forms work by asking your potential customers to fill out a form that contains details like email addresses. These opt-in forms need to be enticing and make the user want to learn more about who you are and what you do! It is important that these forms are direct, to the point and should not contain long-winded paragraphs or rather punchy shorter sentences. With these two elements helping you to attract the best customers to include, your email marketing strategy will be extremely effective! 

What are The Types of E-Mail Marketing?

Promotional Emails

When releasing new products or having a sale, many brands and businesses send out promotional emails to let their customers know about the offers being provided. These promotional emails are an important part of email marketing and they help provide customers with new and exciting information. These emails need to be accompanied by an easy way for customers to make a purchase, whether it is a link to the website where these products are being offered or an easily accessible contact number to make a booking, ensuring that your customers are able to quickly and easily make a purchase is vital to the success of promotional emails. 

Informational Emails

Not all emails are promotional, and not every interaction with your client has to be promoting specific offers that your brand is promoting. Email marketing can also be about supplying information to your customers about who you are and why your products can help better the lives of those who purchase them. Whether you are looking to explain how your products are made or are looking to demonstrate how your services are ecologically friendly, giving your clients information about your business can help to create a better connection with them! This does not mean that these emails will not result in a sale or purchase, but that is not the overall goal of these emails. These types of informational emails contain relevant information that can instil a sense of trustworthiness between you and your clients and help them better understand the products and services that you supply! 

What are The Best practices of E-Mail Marketing?

When it comes to any sort of digital marketing tactic, knowing the best practices to use to better your strategy and help you gain the attention of your clients is always important. Email marketing involves many different things and the following are just a few of the very best practices to follow and be sure you use when developing your email marketing strategy. 

Segment Your Audience And Send Relevant Content

Your target audience will never just be made up of one specific group of people, and you usually have a few different categories that fall within your audience, Ensuring that you segment these different groups and stream the most relevant content to the most relevant groups of people is a very important part of email marketing and this can help you better structure your email marketing funnel! Supplying specific information to direct groups of people will ensure that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible! A good example of this would be to look at a clothing brand. You may sell both men’s and women’s clothing, but email lists that contain predominantly women’s clothing should be sent to women, and emails that contain predominantly men’s clothing should be sent to men. Emails that are not relevant to specific groups of people should not be sent to them, as this may deter them from looking at emails from your brand or business in the future. 

Automate Processes

One of the best email marketing tips that we here at Markethinkers can supply you with is to ensure that your email processes are as automated as possible! Having previously designed and specified lists, automated name entry and other automated processes designed and set up will reduce the amount of work that goes into creating and sending specific emails. To be able to send out as many emails as defined within your email marketing strategy and work on the unique aspects that are included within each email sent, be sure to automate the processes that can be automated and reduce the amount of time that goes into these often unnecessary and time-consuming tasks! 

Monitor And Change What Isn’t Working

Email marketing software is equipped with metric monitoring tools that allow you to check certain elements of your email marketing. A good example of this is the click-through rate that can be measured for every email that is sent out. Being able to see how many people are clicking to go to your website or the next step of the process will let you know if the tactics that you are using to attract the attention of your audience are actually working. If your goals are not being met, you need to ensure that you go back to the drawing board and see what went wrong, adapting your strategy to ensure that your next email has a better response! 

What Strategies Should Be Created for E-Mail Marketing Success?

Using the best and most effective strategies to plan out your email marketing is the best way to ensure that your tacos are as effective as possible. Though each email marketing plan will have unique features and elements, there are a few general strategies that should be kept in mind when considering how to improve your email marketing! The following are just a few of the best strategies that should be created and used to ensure that your email marketing is successful. 

Choose The Right Email Marketing Software

Using the best email marketing tools and software is an important part of creating an effective email marketing strategy. There are a variety of different types of software that are uniquely designed to help promote certain products or services. Doing your research and finding the most appropriate one to use can help ensure that you are creating the most effective content plan and ensure that you are getting the best possible information to your customers. Each business has different and unique needs and requirements that should be taken into account when deciding on which email marketing software platform would be the most effective. 

Never Buy Email Lists

When looking at email marketing for beginners, many new email marketers think it is a good idea to purchase email lists, as this seems like a quick way to broaden the reach and scope of your email marketing. This is however never a good idea and purchasing email lists is incredibly detrimental to your email marketing strategy. One of the main concepts that make email marketing so effective is that the emails are going straight to consumers who would want to purchase your items, consumers within a specific target audience. Purchasing email lists provide you with tons of emails, but not necessarily from email recipients that would want to buy your product. Another negative about purchasing email lists is that you are not given permission by the recipient to send emails to them, and very often the emails received from addresses that are not known are considered to be spam. To avoid instances of this happening, be sure that all of your email accounts gained are taken through lead magnets or opt-in forms. 

Optimise For Mobile

As mobile use grows each and every day, the need to optimise your content so that it is easily read on these devices is more important than ever! The majority of people have email both on their desktops and on their cellphones, meaning that they are likely to read an email on either of these devices. Ensuring that the structure of your emails is optimised to be easily read on mobile devices will provide your users with an easy way to read the emails that you send, whether they are sitting behind a computer screen or on the move with their mobile device! 

Choose an Engaging Email Newsletter Design

People use emails for work, school and many different things, often receiving hundreds of different emails each day. It is important that you create an email newsletter design that is able to capture the attention of your potential customers, setting you apart from the crowd. Using each and every one of the email marketing tools available will ensure that you are able to design and structure the perfect email template, but you need to also focus on who your target audience is and apply this knowledge when designing the perfect email template! It could also be a good idea to have different template designs for different target audiences, for example, if you have a newsletter that is being directed towards your male customers, you may go with a less feminine and more masculine design and vice-versa. 

Set Up a Welcome Email For New Subscribers

When a new subscriber joins your email list, it is always a good idea to have a standard welcome email set up that goes straight to them as soon as they are added. This email can contain information about who you are and what you do, and could even include a free goodie for the new subscriber to enjoy. This is a great way to make a good and lasting first impression with every new subscriber who joins your email list. Having just one designed and automatically sent out to each new subscriber is an effective and easy way to introduce yourself and can be set up using your email marketing software. 

Why Should We Use E-Mail Marketing?

Email is a very effective advertising platform that any brand or business is able to use, whether you are an e-commerce website or a physical store, there are endless possibilities to consider when it comes to email marketing. As with any good marketing strategy, there are both advantages and disadvantages, and understanding the benefits and pressure points will help you better construct an email marketing strategy that is as effective as possible. 

What are The Advantages of E-Mail Marketing?

An email marketing service is extremely advantageous and there are many reasons why brands and businesses prefer this form of marketing to others. The following are just a couple of the email marketing advantages to consider if you are thinking about starting an email marketing campaign. 

• Easy to measure: With any good email marketing software, brands and businesses will be able to easily monitor the effectiveness of their content by measuring the metrics made available. Things like the click-through rate and the number of sales generated through one email blast will provide permanent information about the effectiveness of an email marketing strategy. These measurements make it easy to see where issues lie and how to solve them. 

• Cost-effective: While making the actual content that is delivered to your clients is not free, using email marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to advertise your brand or business. The total email marketing cost is dependent on the content that you produce and whether you are using internal or external personnel to create this content, but the actual platform itself is free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. 

• Automated processes: One of the benefits of using email marketing as an advertising platform is that there are many processes that can be automated. Automatic welcome messages, scheduled email blasts and set newsletter designs will help make it easier to send out emails, streamlining what could be a confusing and expensive process. Taking the time to automate the various systems will ensure 

What are The Disadvantages of E-Mail Marketing?

While there are many benefits to this form of advertising, there are also email marketing disadvantages to consider. The following are just a few of the most impactful disadvantages to be wary of when designing an email marketing strategy. 

• Spam: As the use of bought email lists has become a more common occurrence, email companies have become warier of accounts releasing mass emails, with many of the emails being placed in the spam inbox and ultimately being ignored by the recipients. Potential customers may not even know that they have been sent an email from your brand if they do not regularly check their spam accounts, which, let’s be honest, none of us really do. 

• Size: If an email is too large and has too many components, it may take a long time to load, leading viewers to ignore them. The size of each of your emails should be carefully considered, and shorter emails should be chosen over longer ones that contain lots of pictures and images. 

What are The Tools of E-Mail Marketing?

In order to use the best email marketing practices, you have to have the best tools readily available. The following are just a few of the best email marketing tools to use when creating your email marketing strategy and sending out your emails! 

HubSpot Email Marketing

HubSpot Email Marketing is a platform that allows users to design and optimise emails without having to go through any technical processes. From free to use templates to metric tools, there are tons of reasons why the HubSpot Email marketing would be an extremely beneficial tool to have! 

Sender

Whether you are looking to build your own design or are rather hoping to find the perfect template to use to send your emails, Sender is a great platform. One of the main benefits of using Sender is that they build and design their templates so that they are easily delivered across any network, with no issues around sizing capacity or technical issues encountered! 

Sendinblue

For those who are looking specifically to find the best-automated systems around, Sendinblue offers fantastic tools that can help automate even the most complex processes when it comes to email marketing. 

How Can Our Expert Team Help You With E-Mail Marketing?

As a team of SEO copywriting and professional SEO consulting marketers, we here at Markethinkers are able to help you create the perfect content and attract the best customers when it comes to your email marketing strategy. We are able to provide you with samples and email marketing examples that will highlight how you can create or improve on the current tactics that you have in place! With a team who can be your email marketing guide to all the best practices and strategies, you can be sure that your email marketing plan will help to improve your brand or business. Whether you are looking at email marketing for e-commerce or are a store that is looking to gain attention through new marketing tactics, we are a team that can help you to reach your goals! The importance of email marketing should never be overlooked, and we here at Markethinkers have the tools to make sure that your email marketing campaigns are as successful as possible!