Everything you need to Know about Email Marketing

Email marketing can feel a little conflicting to some. After all, no one likes getting spammed, and the concept of email marketing can feel a little bit like telemarketing through text; repetitive, annoying, frustrating, and ultimately, worthless.

The reality is far from the truth though, as there are several key factors distinguishing the style of communication in email marketing, from the style of communication in telemarketing.

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For one thing, email marketing is a mutually consensual arrangement, whereby a company presents the opportunity to sign up to a mailing list and the customer chooses freely whether or not to sign up. Telemarketers generally receive phone numbers surreptitiously and through less-than-legitimate means. Not only this but email marketing benefits far outweigh any shortcomings. Read on to find out more.

What is Email Marketing and Why Does it Matter?

Email marketing is a digital marketing platform that uses customers’ emails to establish a direct line of communication and promotion with an established audience. For this reason, it is an effective tool in many Conversion Rate Optimisation campaigns.

If you’re still not really sure how email marketing works this scenario may help clarify things:

Let’s say that you run a website selling camping gear. You’re getting good foot traffic and reasonable conversions but you think that things could definitely be better. You notice that tents are selling particularly well, and decide to capitalise on this. Using some kind of email automation software like Mail Chimp, you set up an email to be sent to customers whenever a tent is ordered. The email offers a code for 10% off camping sets if customers sign up to your mailing list. Before you know it, nearly everyone who buys a tent is also buying a camping set, and although you lose 10% per sold item, now you have a whole lot of people who have given you permission to continuously market directly to their inbox.

This email campaign example highlights exactly why email marketing works and why it’s important. It lets you access an established audience directly and repeatedly. This is a process known as “remarketing,” using a connection to an established audience to build on the conversions they may yield.

Email list marketing is also highly effective, with studies showing that it is up to 40% more effective than marketing by social media such as Facebook or Twitter. This is likely due to its persistence. Email marketing forces audience members to take an action, either read the email, delete it, or archive it. Until they do either one of those things it just sits in their inbox, reminding them that you exist. Then when they finally deal with it, they get a more in-depth reminder through the interaction.

These email marketing benefits alone lead to one incredible result – email marketing can fetch you a ROI (Return on Investment) of 4400%. That means for every $1 you spend on an email marketing campaign, you can expect to receive $44 back!

Read on to find out how to start your own email marketing campaign, or you can contact Traffic Radius and we’ll take care of it for you!

SMS or Email Marketing?

A valid question, after all SMS marketing works off the same base principles as Email Marketing. We’re going to explain why, although a worthy contender, we prefer Email marketing over SMS.

Do you remember the 2019 election? The first year where the United Australia Party actively ran for the position of Prime Minister? If not then don’t worry, we’ll explain why this is being used as our framing device of choice. To those that do remember it, you probably remember the outrage you felt when you received a text from “CliveUAP” that said:

“Make Australia Great. Fast trains for Melbourne. 1 hour to CBD from up to 300kms away. Vote 1 United Australia Party, Clive Palmer. Auth.”

Followed by a link to a website.

It was a scandal because it showed the public something very clearly that they did not sign up for. Firstly, people in power had access to our information. And second, they were willing to abuse that information to further their own ends. It was all over the news, and it brought into the public eye how non-private our lives actually are.

It’s for this reason we avoid SMS marketing campaigns. Although they use the same direct line of communication and although the phone numbers of the target market are also gained consensually, there is something far more personal about an SMS than email marketing; and people don’t like being marketed to on their mobiles, this much was evident with Clive Palmer’s texting bungle.

How to Start an Email Marketing Campaign

When you’re exploring the avenue of email marketing, goals have to be set, just like with any form of marketing strategy. It’s important to be realistic when setting these goals. Also, why do you want to get into email marketing? Are you trying to increase profits? Optimise your conversions? Remarket to an audience? Build an audience? Make sure you know what you want and that you set your expectations according to realistic standards.

After you’ve established your goal, you’re going to need to choose a platform for your email campaign, for example, MailChimp or AWeber. To help you decide which platform is right for you, consider the following:

• How many emails do you intend to send, and which platform matches that capacity?
• How many subscribers do you have, or what’s your conversion rate?
• What capabilities in terms of design and A/B testing does the platform allow?
• What functions for maintaining your mail list and automation does the platform have?
• What kind of result monitoring is offered?

Once you’ve weighed up all these considerations, picking the right platform should be relatively simple. Once you’ve chosen your platform you need to build your email list. It can feel tempting to buy a mailing list, but pretty much any professional marketer will tell you it’s a bad idea. Buying mailing lists uses the emails of people who did not voluntarily put their email on your mailing list. This means that when a customer sees your emails, they’ll at best completely ignore them, or at worst accuse you of spamming them. Remember how big a part the consent of the audience played in the 2019 UAP text fiasco? Consent is everything when it comes to direct marketing like this, and buying mailing lists has been directly linked to high bounce rates, low conversions, and angry subscribers.

This leaves the question of how you actually get people to subscribe to your mailing list. It’s all about targeting. Create a dedicated landing page offering a special on or in tandem with your most sold item in exchange for signing up to your mailing list.

Also, make sure to add calls-to-action that encourage your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list.

Also, be sure to experiment with content that people can’t access until they hand over their email addresses for your mailing list. This could be anything from instructional videos to eBooks, bonus coupons etc.

The next step is to start creating your emails. When it comes to email marketing campaigns there are two main kinds of email, promotional and transactional.

Promotional email examples include things like special offer emails, sales emails, or event announcement emails. These emails are designed to keep your audience in the loop of what’s going on with your business. They offer a feeling of exclusivity and opportunity. Transactional emails are order confirmations, notifications about the status of an order’s delivery, subscription confirmations, and receipts.

Make sure that you’re drafting emails according to their specific purpose.

6 Tips for Your First Email Marketing Campaign

Now that you know how to start your campaign, let’s go through some best practices to help you make it a successful one:

#1 – Segment and Personalise your Emails

When we say “email list,” we actually mean “email lists.” It’s important to go through your email marketing analytics and make sure that you know who your subscribers are, so that you can segment your list into groups based on a chosen factor (what they bought, frequent buyers, location, etc.) and then personalise the emails sent to those groups so that the content and information they receive is relevant to them.

#2 – Make Sure your Emails are Easy to Read

No one wants to have to get a magnifying glass out to read your emails. Double and triple check the fonts, making sure that it is big enough and designed with legibility in mind.

#3 – Add Images and Videos

Catering to people’s desire to be entertained, images and videos can go a long way to helping your audience convert. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth 25 pictures per second. Adding either one is better than just relying on walls of text.

#4 – Call To Action

The call to action is one of the most commonly used tools in marketing. It simply consists of a prompt encouraging a visitor to take an action. Calls-to-action are extremely prevalent in content and copy for marketing, and with good reason. Emails with a call-to-action have been proven to increase clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%.

#5 – Test Subject Lines and Sending Times

47% of recipients open their emails depending on what the subject line says. Make sure that you’re using your subject line, not leaving it blank or making sure they don’t sound like clickbait. Also, be wary of what time you’re scheduling your emails to send. Typically, emails sent at around 8:00 am have an open rate of around 20%, while they have a click-through rate of roughly 8%. If you’re having trouble coming up with subject lines, there are plenty of email marketing samples online you can turn to for inspiration.

#6 – Check your Spelling

There’s no point crafting a nice, fancy email if at the end of it your copy is littered with spelling mistakes that make your audience think that your emails are just typical spam. Spelling and grammatical errors are one of the primary give-aways of spam and phishing scams. Always go through your spelling and grammar with a fine-tooth comb, otherwise it could seriously damage your campaign and your reputation.

After all of this when your campaign has been out for a month or so, make sure that you evaluate your email marketing analytics, including open rates, click rates, bounces, engagements, and forwards. Additionally, if it’s a feature offered by your email platform, try syncing your emails to Google Analytics, as it provides detailed information on several key areas, such as topics your audience likes, subject lines they respond to, and effective send times.

Too Much Work?

Luckily you don’t have to go through it yourself. Traffic Radius is here specifically to help businesses like yours with marketing stuff like this, and our email marketing services can’t be beaten. In our decades of experience, we’ve had hundreds of clients (our current clientele includes over 400 small and large businesses) gain fantastic results as a product of our assistance.

If you’d like to know more about our email marketing services, then contact us here, or call us on 1300 870 901 today!