In 1978, Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation sent the first mass mailing to approximately 400 customers. He claimed to have generated $ 13 million in sales as a result, revealing the high potential of email marketing as an effective marketing tool.
Today, email marketing remains one of the most efficient methods for promoting brands and interacting with customers and leads. Since Thuerk’s first email, campaigns have evolved over the years, from mass mailing to highly targeted and strategic messages. In this article, we will analyze what email marketing is, and how your brand can use it to generate engagement and growth.
What is email marketing?
Also known as mass mailing, newsletter or e-marketing, email marketing is an effective digital strategy that involves sending mass emails to potential customers and current customers of a brand or company. This valuable tactic can be used for a variety of purposes, including increasing conversion rates , promoting products, or generating interest and loyalty in a brand .
Email is a key strategic channel for almost every industry, and it is one of the most effective ways to convert readers into customers. In fact, email marketing statistics have shown that companies receive an average return on investment of 42 times for every dollar spent .
What is email marketing for?
E-marketing can serve various purposes for a business or organization, depending on its content. Its main benefits include:
- Promote products or services
- Generate interactions with your brand
- Drive traffic to your website
- Convert leads into customers
- Build brand loyalty
Since email is a direct line of conversation with customers, it has many advantages over other forms of communication and marketing. First, people are more likely to see an email than a social media post, which may not appear in a potential customer and follower feeds.
Second, emails allow you to send different messages based on the individual wants and needs of your subscribers. Compared to mass marketing campaigns, with email marketing you can send personalized campaigns to each client, making it much more efficient to generate conversions and get more leads .
Types of email marketing
From automated emails to weekly newsletters, different types of messages achieve different goals for a brand. You can use a combination of them to put together a comprehensive email marketing strategy:
- The email campaigns are sent with a specific purpose in mind, whether to promote a special offer, encourage users to download a document or an ebook, or sign up for a free trial.
- The newsletters (or newsletters) are sent constantly to provide regular updates to subscribers. A newsletter can share new blog posts, talk about a product update, or highlight upcoming events.
- The marketing emails automated are sent automatically based on predefined triggers. For example, you can send a welcome email to new subscribers, a celebration email to subscribers celebrating their birthday, and a reminder email to customers with abandoned shopping carts . Or, you can send out a drip campaign that nurtures potential customers and convinces them to buy. Regardless of the type of email you choose, you can set up strategic automated emails with Ascend from Wix .
- The transactional emails are another effective way of marketing automation that are sent automatically after a transaction. They include order confirmations, shipping updates, and appointment or event reminders. While these emails are fairly simple, they are important for building trust with customers, especially on e-commerce websites.
How to send mass emails?
Now that you know what email marketing is and why it matters, it’s time to learn how to create email marketing campaigns in 5 easy steps:
- Build your contact list
- Choose an email marketing platform
- Segment your audience
- Create great content
- Optimize and improve your campaigns
01. Build your contact list
The first step in starting an email marketing strategy is getting subscribers.
The best way to gain subscribers is to use tactics that encourage people to sign up voluntarily. One way to do this is by offering a discount or gift to potential customers, in exchange for their email addresses. Most of these gifts are not products, but digital goods such as:
- Coupons
- E-books
- Webinars
- Technical documents and case studies
- Guides and Toolkits
- Queries
Once you define the incentives that you will offer to your potential customers, add subscription forms to your website to encourage people to sign up. Make sure to use compelling headlines and compelling CTAs that ask users to subscribe.
For example, you can offer a downloadable email marketing guide with the title “Email Marketing Best Practices” and the CTA “Download Now.” Next to the download button, you will have a field for the subscriber’s name and another for their email address. You can place these forms in a variety of strategic places on your site, including a pop-up window, a sidebar, or a blog post.
Remember: You will need to get people’s permission to use their addresses, either with a caption where subscribers approve it in the way the data is collected or in some other way. Buying a mailing list is illegal in many countries, and most email marketing platforms have strict permissions and data protection policies.
02. Choose an email marketing platform
Because this strategy involves handling a large number of subscribers, sending targeted messages, and analyzing your email metrics, you will need an email marketing platform to help you manage and organize your work. There are several different platforms available, including:
- Wix Email Marketing
- MailChimp
- SenInBlue
- Benchmark
- SendPulse
Wix Email Marketing is a particularly effective tool that you can conveniently integrate into your website. It includes built-in analytics features, such as statistics on email opens, views, and clicks, so you can analyze the performance of your campaigns. In addition, you can use one of the newsletter templates, customize the design to look professional and reflect your brand identity.
Do you want to know more about each of these tools? Check out our article on The 6 Best Email Marketing Tools.
03. Segment your audience
Once you choose the ideal email marketing tool for you, you will want to divide your audience based on their unique interests, characteristics, and behaviors. This process, called segmentation, allows you to send more specific communications so that your newsletters speak directly to the wants and needs of your target market.
There are a few categories to segment subscribers:
- Demographics: Factors like age, gender, and income level can tell you about a person’s needs and interests.
- Geographic location: Information about your audience’s country or region can help you tailor content based on different interests, languages, and cultures in different parts of the world.
- Behavior within your website: Data about user interactions with your website, such as the pages they visit and the products they see, can signal their interests and help improve your e-marketing strategy.
- Purchase history: Your customers’ purchase details can help you target emails differently to unique buyers compared to regular buyers, as well as to send different messages to people with different interests.
- Amount Spent – The amount of money customers have already spent on your site can give you an idea of how much they are willing to spend overall and what types of products they are likely to buy.
- Position in the marketing funnel : If a user is a new subscriber or has an abandoned shopping cart, you can use this information to create emails that guide them towards making a purchase.
- Personal Interests: Information about people’s personal interests, which you can collect by allowing users to create profiles on your website or save their favorite items, will give you a better understanding of their individual preferences.
In general, keep your communication as targeted as possible, even if you choose to send mass mailing to massive audiences. By sending different email campaigns between these categories, you can create content that is more relevant, identifiable, and compelling, thus increasing your chances of success.
04. Create excellent content
At this point, you are all set to create an amazing email marketing campaign. The next step is to generate the content itself.
Regardless of the type of content, you are creating – an automated message, an informational newsletter, or a new product update – you will need to keep a few key principles in mind.
First, remember that the goal is to become a welcome guest in your subscribers’ inboxes. Instead of looking spammy or annoying, create thoughtful emails that provide your audience with real value. You can do this by providing benefits or information that your subscribers will appreciate, be it practical advice, exclusive content, or a seasonal discount coupon.
The writing itself should also be attractive. Build rapport with your audience by speaking to them individually (for example, addressing them by name and writing in the second person). Convey your content with personality and add humor where appropriate. Your goal is to sound like a helpful friend, rather than a company. As you build your email marketing campaigns, these content writing tips can serve as a helpful guide.
05. Optimize and improve your campaigns
Once you have written and sent the mass emails, you will need to analyze the metrics in order to continuously optimize your campaigns. These metrics should already be integrated into the email marketing tool.
The most important tests to track include:
- Delivery Rate – This tracks the number of emails delivered. If some emails are not being delivered, it is possible that they are being sent to addresses that do not exist. 95% or more is considered a high delivery rate; if your number is less, clear your subscriber list and remove invalid addresses.
- Bounce rate – Opposite of delivery rate, this metric shows how many emails were not delivered. If your bounce rate is high, you run the risk of destroying your sender’s reputation, which can trigger your IP filtering and blocking (or in simpler words, label you as spam). To avoid this, make sure to regularly purge your email list to keep your bounce rate low, increase your open rate, and avoid being sent to the spam folder.
- Open rate: Shows the percentage of subscribers who opened the email, allowing you to understand if people are really interested in your messages. If your open rate is low, consider how you can improve the subject and content of your emails and better target your audience.
- Click-through rate – This reveals how many people click on the links within your emails. It’s also a useful way to understand which links are generating the most clicks. If your click-through rate is low, you likely need a more strategic targeting strategy and better calls to action, or CTAs.
- Spam complaints: shows if your emails are marked as spam. To avoid this, make sure you have a valid list of subscribers who have opted in to receive your content. You should also maintain high open rates and low bounce rates to maintain a strong sender reputation and avoid spam filtering.
Based on these numbers, you can find out what is working and what needs to be improved in your email campaigns. You can then use this analysis to refine your email marketing strategy, attract subscribers, and increase your conversion rate.
Good email marketing practices
As you optimize and improve your email campaigns, there are a few key strategies you can implement to drive engagement and drive conversions:
- Follow email marketing etiquette: always set a goal for people to actively appreciate and enjoy your emails. This means treating your subscribers with kindness and respect. Only send messages to people who have shown interest in your business by subscribing to your emails. Make sure you keep your promises to your users too: write a non-misleading subject, don’t send emails more often than you say, and make it easy for people to unsubscribe.
- Perfect your timing: think carefully about the time of day you send emails. There is no black and white answer for which times are more strategic than others; in fact, the age, location, and occupation of your audience will affect email opening times. However, you can get an idea of what times work best for your business by A / B testing and using the results for future campaigns.
- Optimize your newsletters for mobile devices: recent research has shown that email openings on mobile phones are over 40% . For that reason, it is essential that mass emails are optimized for mobile devices and for the desktop. Consider some ways to adapt to the small size of a mobile screen, including shortening subject lines, simplifying formatting, reducing image sizes, and using large CTAs that users can easily tap with their thumb.
- Added value: You may have lured your customers into subscribing by offering them some kind of value, be it a free downloadable guide or a discount code. After that initial offer, keep adding value with practical advice, special content, and the occasional birthday message or wish you happy holidays. As a result, you will generate engagement and build loyalty to your brand.
