Email is as a highly effective direct marketing channel and could be considered the modern version of direct response marketing.
Email marketing campaigns are core strategies in modern digital marketing, with entire businesses successfully built on the communication channel.
The real benefit of email marketing is the direct relationship you can build with your audience that you can control without the threat of a third party closing an account. A qualified email marketing list is priceless!
At a time when search platforms are getting more aggressive with advertising, generative AI is taking away organic traffic and some social media platforms are unstable, email is a way that brands can engage with their users and nurture trusted relationships.
Keep reading to understand how you can use email marketing to connect with your audience.
What Makes Email Such An Effective Marketing Channel?
Email marketing can be highly effective due to a variety of factors:
Opt-in: Because automated emails must be opt-in and have opt-out options, email audiences are often highly engaged.
Engagement data and segmentation: With the right email marketing platform, you can leverage data to improve how you create and target emails. You can also ask users for their preferences and organize campaigns around responses.
Push marketing: Rather than waiting for users to input keywords, you can deliver experiences to them based on their activity history or a set of stated preferences.
Personal and professional distinction: People will often sign up for emails using the most appropriate email address for the use case. This is great for B2B businesses because it enables you to reach people while they’re in a professional environment and mindset.
Advanced automation: Email marketing platforms can help you create automated campaigns and customized experiences based on what you know about your customers. You can deliver different communications and email types to different user groups and move users into different automated tracks based on their behavior.
Testing: It’s incredibly easy to test messaging, subject lines, segmentation, etc., with email marketing platforms.
This combination of advanced functionality and a strong connection between your audiences and your brand enables powerful marketing campaigns for many different types of businesses, whether you’re a publisher or an ecommerce store.
How Email Marketing Fits Into Your Campaigns
Email is one channel among many. Even email-only newsletters need other channels to acquire subscribers.
Generally, email is a channel for audiences who are aware of you in some way. They might have purchased a product, downloaded a document, signed up for a free trial, signed up for a newsletter, or set an alert.
Email audiences have usually taken action to end up on your mailing list. This makes it a critical channel for cultivating relationships, moving users through consideration stages in a sales process, or re-engaging users who took previous actions.
In combination with organic discovery strategies like social media, SEO, and paid advertising like search engine marketing, email campaigns can improve how well you can reach and convert audiences.
Building An Email Marketing Campaign
Your email list is a powerful tool. If you use the opportunities it presents you, you can enhance not only your marketing campaigns but how well you understand your audience and the effectiveness of your tactics.
With an email list and the right platform, you have access to:
Information that people give you about themselves when signing up for offers or curating their experiences.
Information about the emails they open and actions they take in those emails.
The ability to connect actions that people take on your website to their email so that you can understand their needs and motivations, follow up on incomplete actions, and provide personalized experiences.
The ability to segment your audience into personas and tag them based on specific needs, situations, and demographic information.
Email campaigns are your opportunity to put timely and focused offers in front of the right people at the right time, as well as cultivate their interest and trust.
For a campaign to be successful, you need to know what you want from your audience and what problems they come to you to solve. To build an effective email campaign, you need:
1. A compelling offer to sign up for emails and provide you with information.
To find this compelling offer, you need to know what offer is valuable enough to trade for information and inbox access. This could be:
A downloadable report.
A newsletter.
The opportunity for exclusive or unique offers.
Updates on a specific product or release.
2. Tracking and tagging. Tagging is the true power of email marketing.
Ask people to submit basic information like their age, interests, or company size when they sign up.
But you should also look for an email platform that allows automated tagging, for example when someone completes or begins but does not complete an action on your website.
3. Custom campaigns and “tracks” based on information and behavior.
Based on the data you gather, you can create custom campaigns for different types of users. This should include:
Different email cadences are based on their level of engagement so that you don’t risk turning people off by communicating too frequently or too little.
Customized offers and reminders based on interests and behavior.
Unique content for different segments of your audience to focus on their specific needs.
Automated responses to action and inaction that change a user’s experience. For example, moving users who don’t open emails to a specific campaign designed to reengage them.
4. Testing and experimentation. Email is one of the best ways to test your messaging.
You can test subject lines, different offers, and ads, your conversion optimization, etc., and the right platform will give you all the engagement data you need to refine your campaigns.
Separate a group into different test campaigns to compare performance so that you’re always improving and gaining insights about your audience.
Email mailing lists are your engaged audience. Take the opportunity to get to know them.
Different Types Of Emails In Email Marketing
Depending on your business model and your audience, you may need different types of emails – and different combinations – in your campaigns.
Some campaigns will be more directly promotional, while others will focus on information.
You need to understand why someone signed up to receive emails in the first place to determine what kinds of emails to send them. You can do that by tracking how they signed up. Was it through an offer page? A digital download? A social media promotion?
You should also collect people’s preferences as they sign up and through welcome emails to better understand their needs.
Once you understand the intent behind an email signup and the user’s preferences, you can choose the best types of emails to send.
An email marketing platform should be able to do this for you automatically, entering users into different segments to receive types of emails based on their preferences.
Promotional Emails
Promotional emails are focused on conversions. They’re for audience segments that you’ve identified as likely to make a purchase but maybe need a little more enticing.
For example, it might be a user who has items in their cart but didn’t make a purchase. Or a user who went through the process of customizing a product but didn’t add it to their cart.
You might have identified them as someone waiting for a sale or shopping around.
It’s helpful to add incentives to promotional emails so that users get additional value for being on the mailing list.
Remind them of a discount code, or reward them for following through on an abandoned purchase by promising a future discount.
It’s important to be careful and intentional with these emails because they often get shunted into promotion-specific inboxes and lost in a sea of other promotions.
Running a nurture campaign to convince audiences to whitelist these emails could be an effective tactic.