What is Marketing?
“Marketing involves all the activities to draw in customers and maintain networking with past and potential clients for your business”
There are two methods to capture the audience.
- One has been evolving for ages – Traditional Marketing
- The other one just entered a few years ago – Digital Marketing
Though Traditional Marketing techniques are still prevalent, digital marketing techniques are booming and are definitely not going to slow down but accelerate.
So, what is Digital Marketing? Why is this word becoming so popular? How has it become the heart of business industries?
Time to say “Hello” to the great sensation.
We are living in the internet age where internet users make up 87% of the global population. Digital marketing also known as online marketing involves advertising & promotion activities through digital channels to draw in customers and maintain networking with past and potential clients for your business”
Digital Marketing provides you with a range of strategies with a focus on enticing your customers to make a relatively quick decision. As said, Among the wide range of digital marketing strategies, the most cost-effective and profitable direct marketing channel which should be your key pillar of digital marketing strategy is none other than “email marketing”.
In this blog, we will walk you through the basics, process of setting up an email list, and popular email marketing tools.
What is Email Marketing?
To put it in simple words, Email Marketing is “The act of sending a message to a group of people using email”
Despite being labelled as the oldest form of digital marketing channel, the following reasons will prove you the strong reign of email over customers.
- Statistics states, “The number of email accounts exceeds the combined number of Facebook and Twitter accounts” from which you can typically understand that you are more likely to drive sales and revenue for your business through email marketing than social media marketing.
- It also seems that over half of the U.S population checks email as their first online activity before diving into any other social media platforms.
- Next, as a marketer or as a business owner “If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.” With* ROI, being one of the major figures of your business, email marketing will give you peace of mind because it has the highest ROI of any marketing strategies.
- Now that you would have understood the importance of Email Marketing. With this understanding, let us take a deep dive and dig better.
Why use Email Marketing?
5 unavoidable reasons
- To build customer relationships
- To boost brand awareness
- To promote your content
- To market your products
- To generate leads
How email marketing works
Hey, it’s definitely not going to be a complicated process that will wreck your brain. But, you will need more patience, attention, and observation along the process.
Here’s a step-by-step approach that will take you into the email marketing process.
Compare and sign up for an email marketing tool
To begin with the email marketing process, you will need the help of a good email marketing tool. So, the best way is to just search Google for “best email marketing tools” after which you have to compare and select the best platform. This falls as your first and mandatory step.
Pro Tip – “Don’t worry”, We have made it easy for you to choose the right email marketing tool at a later part of the same blog.
An email marketing tool helps you create an email list, organize the email list, distribute email campaigns to your audience, automate email marketing tasks, grow your email list, make sales and most importantly provides you with reports.
Once you register with an email marketing tool
Create a strategy
Strategy helps us understand the roadmap to success. It shows what success looks like and the efforts to reach the destination. So, strategies are the shaping points along the email marketing process to achieve your overall business goal.
- Define your target audience
- You must always remember that you are communicating with your target audience. That is why setting up the right type of content and quality content comes in to be the most essential part of email marketing strategy.
- Develop clarity on when to send promotional emails and when to send regular emails.
- A successful email marketing strategy plan must involve measures keeping the following in mind
- Lead conversion
- Traffic generation
- Email Funnel
- Decide on integrations with your other marketing tools.
- Figure out your monthly costs.
- Develop mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns.
After drafting a strategy plan, it is time to get things started
Build and set up your email list
Before setting up your email list, you need to build your email list because you can’t send your email campaigns to anyone.
The email list is nothing but your email contacts which is ultimately the email addresses of your target audience who have agreed to receive emails from you.
So, how could you get this done?
Simple! You have got various ways to do it where the below discussed are more common ways that usually work.
- Adding email sign-up forms on your blog, websites, landing pages, and social media platforms which must be especially highly visible. Before adding email sign-up forms, make sure you have published great content on your site which will only push your audience to manually register to receive your emails.
- Enticing audience with premium content – ebooks, checklists, reports, webinars, free trials, assessments, etc.
- “Avail offers and discounts” can also be a great way to get people onto your email list.
- Add exit pop-ups to grab the attention of your audience at the time of exit with attention-grabbing returns for their email address.
Segment your email list
Building your email list is a good practice. Segmenting your email list is even more a better practice.
Email list segmentation is exactly what it sounds like – the process of breaking your list of recipients/subscribers into smaller targeted groups based upon specific criteria to provide them with a personalized email experience.
This generally
- Avoids annoying your recipients with irrelevant emails
- Boosts email open rates
- Boosts Click through rates
- Diminishes unsubscribe rates
- Overall, improves the effectiveness of email campaigns
Automate tasks
“Does it feel like you have come a long way?”
“This is the final call to enjoy top deals on our bestsellers”
“Hey Steve, start growing your business online with Gozen Growth”
“Thank you for your order. We’ll send a confirmation when your order ships.”
“Psst, We’re giving you FREE gifts!”
“Bestie, it’s time to move your items from the cart to home.”
Aren’t these mails taking up your storage too?
These are referred to as automated emails or triggered emails or behavior-driven emails. This is an opportunity that allows you to send real-time messages to your people and get them turned into loyal customers. Email automation strengthens customer engagement, improves brand awareness, saves time, improves customer retention and loyalty, and helps nurture leads into customers.
The most common automated emails are welcome emails, user verification emails, transactional emails, marketing and promotion emails, and survey/feedback emails on which we have a great post that you should not miss to check out gozen.io/blog/beginners-guide-to-email-marketing/
Why should you automate emails? The answer is simple!
- Avoid manually sending out individual emails.
- To befriend your recipients(leads/prospects/clients/customers) and take them to the next stage of the sales funnel.
To start sending automated emails, all you have to do is set up personalized and proper workflows based on customer journey and behavior to provide a tailored email experience by sending the right message at the right moment.
- A/B Testing
A/B testing is exactly the way that the name delivers. It is a strategy that helps you find out what type of email performs best with your audience.
Some audiences might like your CTA which will entice them to take an action and some may not because of which you may lack the click-through rates. In such cases, A/B testing results will definitely help you to analyze your audience.
Here’s how you must go through the process
- Select a variable – Let’s consider a CTA here.
- Create two versions of an email. For example – one with eye-catching CTA buttons and the other with subtle CTA buttons.
- Get your email drafted and send your email to your recipients.
- Analyze the results and go ahead with the better-performed variable.
- Repeat the process with the next set of variables.
Analyze Metrics
Key metrics that need to be paid attention to** evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign include
Email sign-up: A metric that helps in** assessing the email signup rate of visitors to your landing pages.
Deliverability This metric measures the rate at which emails reach subscribers’ inboxes. Check for hard-bounced emails and remove those email addresses from your list to keep only engaged subscribers
Email open rate This metric tracks the number of opened emails/percentage of people who opened your email once it reached their inbox.
List growth rate is a metric to track the growth of your list. If this is low, then lead generation and communication strategies are meant to be improved to improve your conversions.
Bounce rate gets insights that affect your conversions,
Unsubscribe rate This metric is to assess if your subscribers respond well to your campaigns and identify which content needs improvement. Unsubscribe rate measures the number of people who opt out of your email list once they receive an email from you.
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your CTAs.
Your data will sound better only when you record, analyze, make inferences from your KPIs, and take corrective action to improve them.
How to Get your email opened
This is a super important section that will help in getting your hard work paid off.
8 Quick Tips
- Design matters – Make use of impressive email templates
- Go for the Killer Subject line
- Craft the preview text (first few lines of the email) in a way to make people open your email.
- Interactive content & visuals – sound like a real person
- Know your audience - Personalize your email marketing copy
- Create the perfect CTA – It should be impossible to resist
- Timing – identify the perfect and best timeframes to send your email
- Optimize everything for mobile
Best Email Marketing Tools
SendPulse
Multichannel marketing automation powerhouse would be the correct way to describe SendPulse. Marketers can automate marketing emails or go a bit further and add other marketing channels like SMS, Facebook, or WhatsApp chatbot along with good old web push notifications.
What’s more exciting is that SendPulse offers these tools and features for free with certain limitations in functionality, so you don’t have to invest before you take it for a spin. The platform has everything: landing page builder, subscription forms, email template builder with tons of pre-made templates, email verifier tool, etc. There is even a CRM to manage your email list better.
Basic plan: $9 entry plan will allow you to send unlimited emails to 500 subscribers. The pricing plans are extremely flexible, so you won’t be paying for things you don’t use.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing software that you would have definitely come across. Mailchimp’s email marketing software makes your business stand out with beautiful emails with it’s exciting drag-and-drop email templates.
What’s more exciting is with Mailchimp you can you can boost your business with AI-powered creative tools, Customer journey builder to create email automation and offers integrations to more than 250 plus apps. Mailchimp’s free plan supports up to 1500 contacts, with access to limited features. For more contacts, Mailchimp recommends making use of the premium plans.
Basic plan: With $11 per month invested in Mailchimp you can import up to 500 contacts with access to more exciting features like email automation, sign-up forms, A/B testing, creative assistant for better marketing, audience features that nurture your contact via personalization, access to multichannel tools to find new leads, 100+ pre-built email templates.
Hey wait! your monthly email limit is 10,000 with a daily limit of 2000 emails. For all other plans, the monthly email send limit is 10 times the contact count.
Sendinblue
More than an email marketing software, Sendinblue is a sales and marketing toolkit that bundles all the features of email marketing from scratch to end. Apart from emailing, you can make use of SMS marketing features, live chat with customers, sign-up forms for optimal results.
What’s more exciting is all plans (including the free plan) comes with unlimited contact storage. That means the pricing depends on the number of emails to be sent/per month and based on the plan you pick you will have access to the features. By signing up to the free plan, you can send up to 300 emails/per day.
Basic Plan: With $25 in your pockets**,** you can send 20,000 emails in a month with no daily sending limit. You will get access to a ton of features like email & SMS personalization, email template library, advanced segmentation tool, customizable signup forms, page tracking, email automation, and real-time reporting.
Hubspot
Hubspot is an easy-to-use email marketing software that is also popular for the integration ability of marketing features with a range of functions spread between the marketing hub and sales hub.
What’s more exciting is Hubspot is very simple to use with plenty of features like drag and drop builder, advanced personalization tools, and A/B testing tool. The free plan allows you to send 1000 emails with free access to ready-to-use email templates, personalization, insights, drag and drop tools.
Basic Plan: $45/month allows you to send 10,000 emails to 2000 contacts monthly. Hubspot’s product & services catalog will help you with more detail on their packages, products & features associated.
ConvertKit
Convertkit is the go-to email marketing platform for creators, influencers, and bloggers to grow audiences, automate marketing and sell digital products. The email marketing features include list segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, and automation software.
What’s more exciting is that convertkit allows users/creators to monetize their products (eg – ebooks, newsletters, coaching materials, presets etc) in the same platform with the help of a commerce tool where marketing the work, payment collection, and delivering the products becomes so easy with their customizable sales page.
Basic Plan: The free plan lets you accommodate 300 subscribers with access to limited features. For more advanced features, the price starts at $15/month which is the basic plan, and $29/month will provide access to more advanced features.
Gozen Growth
Gozen Growth is an easy-to-use and one of the best email marketing platforms in the market with high-quality marketing solutions. Gozen Growth promises affordable email marketing service, industry-specific email marketing solutions with automation, a massive email template library, and a High inbox delivery rate.
What’s more exciting is you can try Gozen Growth for free up to 5000 emails every month. And, if you get started with the free plan you can import up to 3000 contacts, make use of the drag and drop editor, integrate Gozen growth to your favorite apps, access template gallery and email campaign reports, create 1 free sign-up form, manage subscribers,
Basic plan: If you want to send more emails and make use of more interesting features you can upgrade to a basic plan starting at $9 per month which is comparatively the best beginner plan in the market.
Drip
Drip is a perfect email marketing partner for eCommerce platforms. With Drip, eCommerce merchants can track valuable metrics and analyze purchase behavior.
What’s more exciting is this tool comes with a visual email builder that helps eCommerce merchants to create marketing emails along with email list segmentation and e-commerce and other featured integrations.
Basic Plan: You can try Drip free for 14 days and then gain access to all the features by paying just $39 per month.
Aweber
Aweber is a handy email marketing tool that offers a stock of features with an AI-powered design assistant. This tool comes with an extensive library of email templates, drag and drop editor, email automation features, and pre-made workflows with email templates to run your campaign. Supports integrations with almost all apps including salesforce, WordPress, Google Analytics, etc.
What’s more exciting is that aweber is an advanced email automation tool where creating and sending emails becomes so easy. Also, the drag-and-drop landing page builder is paired with pre-built templates and a stock of images to create attractive pages in a minute. From sending emails automatically on a scheduled time to generating advanced reports, this tool takes care of your entire email marketing process.
Basic Plan: Though the free plan supports all basic features, Aweber Pro at $16.15 per month can be your perfect business partner where you can get unlimited access to email lists, landing pages, and email automation.
