Messaging Pipeline News and Discussion
Understanding Email Marketing
You have probably heard 'email marketing' many times, but do you know exactly what it means? Is email marketing effective and worth the hype? Is it still relevant to this day?
Maybe you are confused or don't have the right basics but don't sweat about it. Once you are done reading this, you'll know exactly what email marketing is. Better yet, learn how to use email marketing to launch and expand your business effectively.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing sends ads via mail or commercial ads to a list of contacts who have consented to receive such promotions and communications.
There is more to email marketing than just sending a generic advertisement email. You can use email marketing to build your brand community, update your customers/ clients on the latest offers, introduce promotions via regular newsletters.
Modern email marketing has become more personalized. It reaches your audience like a carefully curated mail for them, unlike previous spam mails from hundreds of companies with bland interaction.
Why email marketing?
It is a great way to engage with wider audiences cost-effectively. Did you know that email marketing is the most productive direct marketing tool? It creates a significant return of $42 for every $1 investment.
It has direct and broader audience access to loyal and potential customers. Email is also one of the oldest online communication platforms, and it has a wider demographic of users, and even the least tech-savvy people have an email account.
Let's have a look at the numbers. On a global scale, there are 4 billion email users. At least 80% of Americans check their inbox once a day, and 62% of customers rated email as their most preferred communication platform with small businesses.
You shouldn't ignore email marketing, and it is probably one of the best resources to expand and keep in tandem with your clientele. You should not leave this out in your digital marketing.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Growing your small business involves a lot of interaction with your customers. From latest arrivals, order updates to newsletters, managing all aspects of your business can be a lot of work and tricky. Email marketing helps you tick off all the boxes.
1. Conversions (selling your products and services)
You can promote a sale or a new launch directly to your subscribers. A carefully crafted promotional email can boost sales. This is how you can successfully run an email marketing campaign:
- Promote special offers or coupons on occasions like the subscribers' birthdays. You can also re-engage your audience by informing them of offers or holiday sales on items.
- Abandoned cart emails: Occasional mail informing the customer about the items in their cart. However, frequent reminders may be off-putting to some people.
2. Create brand awareness
Keeping in contact with your subscribers and potential customers goes a big way in creating more awareness about your brand. Other marketing platforms take a lot of resources to develop with lesser audience outreach. With email marketing, you can reach a more extensive number of people quickly and effectively with a single click.
3. Building your community
Building your community becomes vital to foster growth in your business. Customer loyalty is a must-have factor in every business model. Keeping in touch with your customers, feedback, and reviews can improve your customer service. Our clients, LFA Media, focus a lot of their email marketing efforts on user retention and new user lead generation for their free local fuck app and mainstream dating sites and apps.
How do you start email marketing?
You have probably understood what email marketing and its benefits are by now. So how do you start email marketing? Let us talk you through it.
It is tough running a business, dealing with production and logistics all day. Add to that having an engaging presence online. That's why most companies use ESPs, aka, Email Service providers.
You can avail of the services of ESPs. These are software designed to send and manage email marketing campaigns, and they are also commonly known as email marketing software or email marketing tool/ platform/ service.
Do you need an ESP?
You can do email marketing with your regular email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, but there are some serious limitations. First of all, these are primarily designed for personal use, which doesn't necessarily support sending mass emails at a go. Your email account can be flagged as spam and disabled.
With an ESP, they are more equipped to handle the services. An ESP is also less likely to be flagged by spam filters and face issues with bandwidth. Email delivery becomes crucial, and ESPs possess the required infrastructure, which ensures high delivery rates.
What do you need for email marketing?
Setting up an email marketing campaign is easy as it sounds, and you require only 2 critical components to kickstart your campaign.
1. Get an ESP (email service provider)
Avoid all the hassle and give your business a head start with an ESP. Finding the right ESP for you can make all the difference. ESPs like SendinBlue and Mailchimp are popular and favored by most businesses worldwide.
2. An email list
This is a no-brainer; you require the list of email addresses who have opted in to send your emails. Remember that this list should contain only those subscribed accounts that agreed to receive your emails.
Launching your email marketing campaign
You need to keep in mind a few things before you launch your email marketing campaign. ESPs operate in two forms: pricing by mail volume and pricing by subscribers.
- Pricing by subscribers:
ESPs like Mailchimp offers this service. At first, they usually have attractive offers at low prices, with a specific subscriber limit. However, as your business grows and expands, so will your subscriber list, and the cost jumps significantly.
- Pricing by mail volume:
ESPs like SendinBlue operate through this pricing system. Regardless of the number on the subscriber list, they work by the number of emails sent. You can grow your clientele and business at an affordable rate.
You can try Sendinblue today with their free 30-day trial. Avail 300 emails daily for unlimited contacts.
Their paid services start from $25 a month for unlimited subscribers and 20,000 emails. Sendinblue has different pricing plans for various marketing needs. It is noteworthy to mention that all pricing plans come with unlimited contact storage.