Email Marketing

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Introduction to Email Marketing

Promoting a business by sending emails and newsletters is what we call email marketing. Today’s marketers need to do more with less. They need to connect with their audience in a highly personalized way, while staying on budget. Marketers who are good at email marketing can connect with their customers in a highly targeted way. They will be successful in delivering ROI and revenue back to the business. No marketing category has the longevity of email marketing. While some marketing trends come and go, email remains the most powerful channel available to the modern marketer.

Need of Email Marketing

Email is a tool that nearly everyone uses today, and it continues to grow and be more prevalent in the lives of people around the world. There are three times more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined. Many of the top marketers from some of the most successful companies across the world believe email is the #1 channel for growing your business. As a marketer, you have many channels available to reach your audience, but with limited time and resources, you need to prioritize your efforts. Email Marketing is by far the most effective channel to attract, engage and connect with an audience to drive sales and revenue for your business.

Advantages and disadvantages of email marketing

Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers by encouraging repeat website visits. It is important not to overuse email marketing. Receiving marketing emails can irritate people if it is irrelevant, too frequent or unwanted.

Advantages of email marketing

Cost-effective

The costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs.

Permission-based

Your marketing list will be made up of people who have actively chosen to receive email communications from you. Customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business.

Flexible design

You can send plain text, graphics or attach files - whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding and make your email visually appealing.

Scalable

Email marketing can be used to reach large audiences or smaller targeted lists.

Personalisation and segmentation

You can integrate your email marketing with your customer relati onship management (CRM) system to help you personalise messages. You can include your customer's name or past purchases to build meaningful relationships. You can also segment your marketing list so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in to help boost their engagement with you.

Shareable

It's easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.

Conversions and increased sales

If you have a new promotion people can click on links and follow your call-to-action immediately. 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.

Measurable

You can evaluate the success of a campaign by tracking bounced emails, open rates, and click-through-rates. You can easily test different copy, subject lines and designs to see which is most effective. This allows you to optimise future campaigns.

Benchmark

You can compare your results against others in your industry. There are many free email marketing benchmarking reports available - you will find these by searching online. Benchmarking data can help you to evaluate and prioritise improvement opportunities.

Test before you send

A/B testing of subject lines, calls-to-action, personalisation, email copy, images or messages ensure your email content is as effective as it can be before you send it.

Less intrusive

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.

Environmentally-friendly

Email marketing is better for the environm ent than direct marketing by postal mail because nothing is printed.

Time-saving

Through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website - eg. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if the user abandons an online shopping cart. Once you have developed a template you can reuse it for numerous email campaigns.

Real-time marketing

Through email marketing you can connect with customers in real time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchases or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and with the right offer. From the desk of Mr. Manjunath Balluli, Dept. of CS Page 3 of 22

Disadvantages of email marketing

Some of the potential problems of email marketing include:

Spam

Spam is a term for sending unwanted messages to a large number of recipients, usually for commercial purposes. Spam can be sent via email, text message, social media, or phone call. Spam can be annoying and can overwhelm email systems, making them slow and inboxes clogged. Spam can also be dangerous if it contains malicious links that can infect a computer with malware.

Commercial email or 'spam' irritates consumers. If your messages aren't targeted to the right people, the recipient may delete your email or unsubscribe. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is properly targeted at people who want to receive it. The 'click through rate' for untargeted emails is likely to be very low.

Undelivered emails

Poorly designed emails may not get delivered. Emails that use certain spam keywords or characters in the subject heading or content of the email are likely to be filtered out by email software and internet service providers. If you don't keep your marketing lists up to date, you will find incorrect email addresses mean your messages won't reach the right person.

Design problems

Your email must be designed so that it appears as it should across multiple devices and email providers. You may encounter a trade-off between design and functionality. Some people opt to receive text-only emails, consider how your message will look if this is the case.

Size issues

Files need to be small enough to download quickly. Emails containing many images may take too long to load, frustrating your audience and losing their interest.

Resources and skills

For a successful email campaign you must ensure that you have the right copy, design and marketing list. If you don't have the time or skills in-house, consider outsourcing some of these elements.

Here are some terms that you need to know when it comes to email marketing:

v  Subscribers – these are the people that sign up to receive emails from you.

v  Email list – this is a list of all your subscribers.

v  Email service providers (ESPs) – these are platforms that you can use to send your marketing emails. Some website platforms have built in email tools, or you may choose to use an external ESP such as Mail chimp.

v  Opt-in and permission-based marketing – opting-in is when a subscribers gives you permission to send them emails, permission-based marketing is simply marketing to those who have given you permission to do so.

v  Email campaigns – email campaigns is the term used to describe sending several related marketing emails to your email list or a segment of your list

v  Automation – email automation is when your email campaigns are set up to send automatically based on a particular trigger (such as a new subscriber).

Email Marketing Strategies

While email marketing is simple to launch and administer, developing a goal- centered strategy creates results.

Define KPIs

Define your KPIs. What is your clickthrough rate, the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email? Or the conversion rate, the percentage of recipients who proceeded to purchase a product or complete a form requesting more information? Your open rate? Even the unsubscribe rate and the list growth rate provide insights into your email effectiveness.

Segment Audiences

Different subscribers and customers need approaches designed for their unique needs. Segmenting your email marketing by recipient type at a minimum. Likely customers, new customers, and ongoing customers all need a different message and touch. Beyond segmentation, message personalization increases relevance, driving mail opens and engagement with your brand.

Use Your CRM

An integrated CRM can manage contacts, distribution lists, and campaigns, making it easier to segment,  personalize, and measure. If you have an existing Marketing Automation system or even a CRM with automation

features, use the email marketing engine to automate your initiatives.

Expanding Your Content Marketing Strategy

Regardless of a business’s size and industry, emails can present several business opportunities from lead generation to customer engagement. Of course, email marketing is flexible and scalable enough to achieve complex marketing goals depending on your needs, your infrastructure, and the organization's capability.

Often a first step in a marketing mix, email marketing allows brands to begin to grow capability as their technology and organizational maturity continue to evolve.

E-Mail Marketing Platforms

E-Mail marketing platforms are comprehensive software solutions that facilitate the planning, execution and analysis of email marketing campaigns. These platforms serve as central hubs where businesses can manage their email lists, design visually appealing emails, automate workflows and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Features of E-Mail Marketing Platforms

1. Easy-To-Use Interface

The goal of email marketing platforms should be to simplify the job of email marketers. To guarantee that you can use all the functions you require quickly and simply, look for an email marketing platform with an intuitive UI and a minimal learning curve. An email editor with drag-and-drop functionality is a fantastic addition. Furthermore, if you employ email designers, you should pick a platform that supports HTML email templates. Make sure the email marketing platform you select includes a library of templates you can alter to produce emails that showcase your brand if you don't have any designers on staff.

2. Email Segmentation

The ROI of email campaigns increases significantly by email segmentation. Based on demographics, location, behavior, and other factors, you may design customized marketing campaigns and promotional emails for the particular audiences who will be most interested in them. Some email marketing platforms even utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze user behavior in real time and adjust your email messages as

you go.

3. Email Personalization

If you want to personalize your email marketing campaigns, segmentation is crucial. Additionally, it is imperative that you customize your email marketing efforts. Find an email marketing platform that supports merge tags to make it simple to customize both the email copy and the email subject lines. In some email marketing platforms, you can even produce and send a single email that automatically incorporates specific content based on the segment it is being sent to. These platforms use dynamic content.

4. Email Automation

There are many moving components in email marketing, many of which are labor-intensive, repetitive manual operations. Fortunately, many of the top email marketing platforms have automation tools that can save you a tonne of work. Email automation covers a range of features, including email scheduling, delivery confirmations, engagement tracking, text analytics, role-based account access for your marketing team, and even intelligent

segmentation/re-segmentation based on the results of your email marketing campaigns.

5. Testing

Testing is one of the most crucial things you can take to make sure your email marketing initiatives are getting the optimum ROI. A/B and split testing features are found in many of the top email marketing platforms, allowing you to compare various aspects of your marketing emails to make sure you have the most effective possible set of subject lines, copy, calls to action, email design, and format.

6. Analytics and Reports

To make sure your email marketing is accomplishing your objectives, you should monitor a number of benchmarks. However, manually keeping track of this data might be a full-time job. To track open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and other metrics pick an email marketing platform that offers reporting and analytics.

7.Integration Capabilities

Many email marketing platforms offer integrations with other tools and systems, such as CRM software, e-commerce platforms, and analytics tools. These integrations enhance the functionality of the email marketing platform by enabling seamless data exchange and streamlining marketing efforts.

E-Mail Marketing Platforms

E-mail list

An email list is a record of email addresses that organizations or individuals have gathered from prospects and potential customers with their permission. They are people who would like to get announcements, updates, bargains, and other attributes about your organization mailed to their email inbox.

Why should you have an email list?

There are several reasons why having an e mail list will always be beneficial to your organization. Here they are:

v  You can use emails to help you with your narrative, promote your brand, and show off your product or services.

v  With an email list you can send your subscribers emails to nurture your leads and convert them into paying clients.

v  You will always have the subscriber’s information when you build your email list. Unlike in social media, where it can shut down or your account can get deleted anytime, in which case you lose all your potential prospects.

v  You can ensure that every one of your subscribe is will receive the emails, unlike other forms of digital marketing where the platform decides who to show your content.