The digital market industry has evolved at breakneck speed, sprouting so many more types of marketing options to pick from, this is supposed to be great news for marketers.
However, too many options have caused most marketers to become paralyzed by the psychology of indecision whenever they have to choose a marketing platform to pick for their business promotion.
Most successful marketers don’t fall in this category of people who suffer indecision when it comes to choosing a marketing platform because they have learned to use the psychology of choice to their advantage.
They make their first pick for email marketing in a pool of so many options.
First, email marketing is cost-effective. Email platforms are often free or priced very affordably, which is why savvy online marketers and digital experts have no intention of giving it up any time soon.
Second, email marketing campaigns are very easy to implement.
With the help of email automation tools, you can run email campaigns 24/7 without your direct involvement.
Plus it is highly profitable. Email marketing continually delivers substantial investment returns, as you’ll find out in the later sections of this guide.
It’s a tried and tested business investment that brings amazing results.
Lastly, email marketing provides you with the most direct line of communication for conversion to sales, it’s the only reliable channel of communication that remains private.
There is a direct connection and relationship between you and your target market and existing customers.
Email marketing has helped businesses enormously and it is for this reason that we would continue to hold marketers’ hands to the place of successful marketing by providing result-driven guides to drive massive sales for businesses.
This beginner’s guide will explain what email marketing is, how it works, and how to get started.
At the end of it, you’ll have a solid grasp of the basics along with the know-how to launch an effective email marketing strategy for your business using the impactful tips provided in this guide to drive sales.
What Is Email Marketing?
The act of sending promotional messages, typically to a group of people (Audience), using emails is what defines email marketing.
In a broader sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
The most successful email marketing campaigns follow the effective sequence of events as putting the cart before the horse will not afford good hopes for your email marketing efforts.
So to put priorities right, first things first.
#1. Choose an Email Marketing Service Provider
Email marketing services are designed to help businesses grow their customer bases and market their services and products.
Working with a provider is the only way your business can leverage email marketing automation to effectively deliver messages to large groups of contacts or subscribers.
The best email marketing services make it easy to create professional-looking emails, seamless workflows, and up-to-date contact or mailing lists.
#2. Gather Contacts for your Email Marketing List
Being personal in online conversations makes your users feel more human and real and for this reason, there is every need to carefully build your email marketing list based on interests, age, gender, and more, you should be segmenting and personalizing your email marketing.
This will ensure it is engaging and relevant to your audience.
As a natural result of having targeted audiences, you’ll ultimately earn a higher engagement rate.
3 simple, Creative Tips to Grow your Email List
#1. Include Email Signup forms on your Site: most e-commerce platforms and content management systems make it simple to add email signup forms to your website. You can add them to a sidebar, the footer, or as an exit intent pop-up.
#2. Use Social Media to Encourage signups: Are your social media followers on your email list?
Leverage Social media platforms to turn your followers into your subscribers and customers.
#3. CTAs: An email collection call-to-action (CTA) can be as simple as a button on your landing page that reads “Join our mailing list”. That said, CTAs that imply value have a higher likelihood of being clicked.
Mistakes to Avoid Here
There are several best practices that should be used in any email list building strategy, this should be adhered to religiously as neglecting to follow best practices can lead to low open and click rates, result in email blacklisting, and even have legal implications.
#3. Add Contacts to the All Subscribers List
This is a foundational part of your online marketing strategy, growing your list is crucial, but, to see the best results, you’ll need to manage it properly. You can improve your email performance metrics by optimizing your email list.
If you aren’t sure where to start, an email marketing automation tool makes it easy for you to collect, segment, and personalize your marketing campaigns for the best result.
#4. Set Up Your Welcome Email
74% of new subscribers expect to receive a welcome email from you. Don’t leave their hopes hanging. Subscribers who receive welcome emails show 33% more long-term brand engagement than those who don’t.
#5. Recreate a Reusable Email Template
While one-off emails take time to design, reusable templates help you to send out emails almost instantly. You only have to load the email template and replace the content or graphics with the elements that you need in the new email.
#6. Practice writing persuasively
Writing Persuasive marketing emails is about gently pulling your prospect from being a reader to becoming a buyer.
When they engage with your emails, your audience is (more likely) in the consideration stage of your sales funnel. You want your email to get your prospective customer from Stage A, the consideration stage, to stage B, the purchase stage.
This Simple 3-Step Persuasive Formula will do the magic trick for you. Just follow the formula, and answer the questions to create persuasive email content
Headline: what are you offering?
Message body: how will it help the reader?
Call to action: what should they do next?
#7. Spend time on subject lines
Do you know how long it takes to nail that first impression?
Yes! The first seven seconds.
So subject lines need to quickly grab the recipient’s attention. It’s estimated that subject lines with 50 characters or less result in 12% higher open rates and 75% higher click-through rates than emails with longer subject lines.
That’s why you need a catchy email subject line every time you send an email to drag your user into the body of your copy.
#8. Preview and test before you send
After all the effort you put into crafting the best marketing emails, you don’t want to overlook a single error as that will be devastating for your marketing efforts, that is why you need to preview and proofread the email before hitting send button.
#9. Send your email
Your contact list is unique. Getting to know the habits of the people who fill it up is a process of trial and error, but every campaign is a learning opportunity.
For example, when a career counsellor realized her audience reads her emails after work hours, she tried sending them at 6 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. Her open rates increased because her emails appeared at the top of her contacts’ inboxes when they got home.
Take note of any differences you see.
Perhaps your campaigns with lower open rates were sent in the morning, while your campaigns with higher open rates were sent in the afternoon. Or perhaps you have better open rates when you sent on a Monday or Tuesday versus a Thursday or Friday.
#10. Track your results
You had guessed that email marketing ends at the sending stage, right? but hell no, won`t you like to see if your email campaigns are driving results?
Tracking your email campaigns is critical to ensuring you’re driving results and reaching your goals or you need to change your approach.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Like Newton’s Third Law “for every action, there is an equal opposite reaction”. Yeah, that will come in handy for email marketing too despite its enormous marketing impact, there exit some pitfalls with it too.
Email Marketing Advantages
It is believed that the number of email users may hit 4.6 in 2025 according. This presents huge opportunities for businesses to be able to reach their audience through emails. However, let’s look at some of the advantages of using emails to reach your customers.
#1. Speed and Time Saving
The time it takes to create an email newsletter is a lot shorter than creating campaigns for traditional media.
Email helps you save time while reaching the largest audience possible. Once you have developed a template you can reuse it for numerous email campaigns.
#2. Ease
Learning how to end emails is fairly straightforward and easy.
#3. personalization and segmentation
One of the benefits of email marketing is that you can segment and tailor your message to capture different customer lists so that when they receive your message, they hold the impression that the message is especially for them, this will help boost their engagement with you.
#4. Immediate response and power of choice
Unlike telephone marketing, recipients can read your message at a time that suits them. Customers can also update their preferences if they would like to receive different messages from you or unsubscribe if they feel they no longer want to receive your email communications
#5. Shareable
With the option to share an email newsletter, it’s easy for people to forward your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your business.
#6. Integration
Email makes it possible for marketers to unite their email service provider with systems like their CRM or point-of-sale system for even more personalized, relevant, and efficient messages.
#7. Conversions and increased sales
Email marketing can help businesses expand their reach, boost their conversion rates, connect with their audience, and increase sales.
Email marketing is also effective at every stage of the buying process. For example, you can influence someone to choose your product, nurture the customer relationship post-transaction and also encourage future purchases.
#8. Real-time Marketing
Through email marketing, you can connect with customers in real-time. It makes it possible to be to satisfy a customer`s need for immediacy; increase connections with your target audience and, increase the quality of engagement.
#9. Environmentally-friendly
Email marketing is better for the environment than direct marketing by postal mail since nothing is printed.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
#1. Spam
This unsolicited marketing approach of email marketing is not welcomed by most receivers of those emails. Commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers a lot.
#2. Design problems
Your email must be designed so that it appears as it should across multiple devices and email providers, be it mobile phones, desktops and PCs. So considering that email design and development can be hectic and tricky.
#3. Undelivered Emails
Poorly designed emails may not get delivered to intended receivers. When a mail server sends a lot of spam or is found to send suspicious content to multiple mail servers, a company often adds the offending mail server to a blacklist and that disables the server from delivering emails.
#4. Resources and skills
For a successful email campaign, you must ensure that you have the right copy, design and marketing list. When you don’t have the time or skills in-house, you commit resources to outsource some of these elements.
#5. You Need an Email List
With email marketing, you must start with building an email list for your campaigns to be effective. What is most intimidating to do is how to find from the scratch the people that your business target.
Email Marketing Examples
#1. The Hustle
The Hustle is a daily email newsletter that catalogues some of the day’s most important headlines in business, tech, and culture. They send a healthy dose of news so that one doesn’t necessarily get to read the BBC every day to get news updates.
#2. Airbnb
Airbnb is an online marketplace for short-term lodging and vacation rentals. Airbnb acts as the broker throughout the transactions and provides this connection for a fee. Self-described as ” A Community Built on Trust,” they have built up a strong reputation which supports that.
#3. Quora
Quora is a question and answer website where people go to find information. Every piece of content on the site is generated by users, meaning it is created, edited, and organized by the same people that use the website. Your account is set up to receive emails of questions you might like or might be able to answer.
#4. Quickteller
Quickteller is a robust consumer services platform for convenient airtime recharge, funds Transfer, and Bill Payments and does a lot of its marketing through emails to those on their email database.
Top 5 Email Marketing Tools Every Marketer Should Know
#1. MailChimp
MailChimp made a name for itself in the email marketing world a long time ago, in part because it’s free to use.
This platform is super effective and easy to use, making it convenient for beginners, and with it, you can create lists from scratch, import subscribers, customize your emails, and track them all in one and the same platform.
#2. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing software with features such as email marketing, marketing automation, SMS, Chat, CRM, Landing Pages, and Shared Inbox.
You can store unlimited contacts and send up to 300 emails per day using the forever-free plan, or go further with a simple pricing model based on the monthly email volume.
Plus, you can cover your entire marketing funnel in one place.
#3. EasySendy
EasySendy is hybrid email marketing software. It allows you to build and run regular campaigns, auto-responder campaigns, and even drip email campaigns.
As with other email marketing tools, it has a drag-and-drop editor, email list management, segmentation, and a variety of email templates.
#4. SendPulse
This is a sort of marketing automation powerhouse. Apart from the core marketing email toolset, SendPulse helps to automate SMS and Web Push notifications and messenger chatbot campaigns.
With SendPulse, you can design custom subscription forms, create email templates, run A/B tests, segment your subscribers, and much more, even with a free plan.
#5. Omnisend
Omnisend is one of the more robust email marketing tools on this list, but it doesn’t sacrifice user-friendliness.
Omnisend offers a full suite of email marketing features, including a drag-and-drop visual builder, email capture tools, and tons of templates for both email and automation workflows.
Conclusion.
Email marketing is inexpensive; 99% of consumers check email at least once a day; easy to track ROI; Email marketing returns $42 for every $1 spent; 59% of users say email influences their purchase decisions.
Also, Email marketing has a conversion rate of 2.3%, compared to 1% for social media; Email marketing platforms are easy to use and can reach a select audience at a very good speed. So with email marketing, there’s really nothing to lose and so much to gain.
Get started perfecting your email marketing strategies today and stay ahead of the game. You and your customers will be glad you did.
