Email Marketing 101: Winning the Inbox
Email marketing is a valuable and direct communication channel that allows marketers to deliver engaging content to past, current and prospective customers.
Well-designed
- drip campaigns
- personalized email newsletters
provide an exceptional return on investment, nurture customer relationships and keep brands top-of-mind.
What’s email marketing doing for your organization? Here’s what it should look like …
First, What Is Email Marketing?
Effective email marketing campaigns deliver personalized marketing messages to the right user at the right time. Different types of emails accomplish valuable marketing objectives like …
- building new relationships
- reestablishing previous connections
- positioning the brand as a trustworthy resource
Email marketing is dynamic, too.
Whether you’re …
- creating audience-specific email marketing campaigns
- building demographic or behavior-based email automations
email marketing tools offer endless opportunities to maximize impact by delivering engaging content to the right subscriber.
These tools are so important that finding the email marketing software to suit your needs and industry is vital.
Choosing Email Marketing Software
There are dozens of email marketing management tools available. Most require a monthly subscription, with pricing based on the number of subscribers and other nice-to-have features like audience segmentation.
Some offerings are industry-specific. For example. Emma’s segmentation tool is ideal for multi-location franchise organizations or Emurcury’s support of cannabis businesses.
These are some of the most popular email marketing solutions:
Check it out: We compared two of our favorite email marketing platforms, and for the record, we use HubSpot for our (dare we say, popular) weekly Digital Digest email.
No matter your platform, the opportunity to grow your business is endless.
What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?
Email marketing allows brands to leverage first-party data to reach the right audience. Changing third-party cookie regulations and consumer privacy laws may make this even more important.
The Inbox Is a Safe Space
Unlike social media’s chaotic, scroll-happy world, email is a quiet, intimate and direct form of communication. While social media is a great place to deliver content, it’s dominated by ads, constantly changing algorithms and less-than-savory posts and opinions. It’s also fleeting, making it difficult for users to return to something they found interesting but couldn’t get to immediately.
Subscribers Want to Hear from You
No matter how well-targeted that social media ad is, the user didn’t ask for the information or tell the advertiser they wanted to hear from them. That’s where email marketing has an advantage – your customer signed up to receive your message. Further, you’ll potentially reach more and different people on a slice of the 4.6 billion daily email users forecasted by 2025.
Email is where your customer wants to hear from you. Roughly 55% of consumers say email marketing is their preferred way of receiving marketing messages.
Email Is Measurable
Marketers need to be able to track results to determine a campaign’s success. It’s extremely difficult to measure the efficacy of TV ads, billboards or direct mail pieces; it’s very easy to see the performance of an email marketing campaign. Many email services offer unique insights into the …
- open rate
- clickthrough rate
- bounce rate
- conversion rate
that allow campaigns to be …
- tested
- measured
- improved
- re-tested
An Excellent Return on Investment
Email is highly cost-effective. The most recent data puts the ROI of email marketing at $36 in revenue for every $1 spent. Maintaining a consistent email marketing strategy can also improve operations in others, including regulating inventory to maintain a healthy bottom line.
Make It Personal
Email allows marketers to deliver highly personalized, relevant messages to their customers. While other marketing mediums are typically more of a broadcast, email speaks directly to the user.
With email, you can:
- Greet customers by name.
- Serve them a photo of a product they recently browsed, purchased or placed in their shopping cart.
- Present an offer based on their previous behavior as a customer.
- And more!
If you have the data handy, you can also segment users based on …
- expressed interests
- when they became subscribers
- where they live
Delivering personalized content takes a little more effort upfront, but can result in higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and increased revenue.
It’s easy to see why email is such a popular marketing platform. When it comes to keeping costs low and measuring success, email is a very powerful way to market to customers.
What Are Email Campaigns?
An email campaign is any email sent to segmented audiences with a focused message or call to action, whether it’s sent manually or automatically. Campaigns often serve a particular purpose, such as …
- promoting a sale
- launching a new product
- reintroducing your brand to previous customers
Most non-automated emails you send are considered campaigns within email marketing tools like Mailchimp. In most cases, each campaign will also have its own reporting (to compare it against other efforts or your email list’s average).
For more about email campaigns, get in touch with one of our email marketing specialists!
The Most Effective Types of Email Marketing
Different email formats and strategies can improve email marketing’s effectiveness in the near and long term. Oneupweb’s team can help you concept and design different types of emails to see what works and what needs tweaking.
Email marketing can take many forms. Here are a few formats/campaigns to consider …
1. Informative email formats
The Newsletter – Newsletters are one of the most common forms of email campaigns. Email newsletters are an opportunity to regularly update your audience about upcoming events, new products, special promotions or events.
Dedicated Email – Like an email newsletter, a dedicated email takes just one topic and informs a brand’s audience with a single-topic send. Events, products, announcements and other single informative updates are well-spotlighted in a dedicated email send, along with a clear, specific call-to-action.
2. Sales-focused emails
Deal/Offer Email – If you’re having a sale, let your customers know! Offering your reader something of value encourages interactions with your products, services or website. These types of emails are focused on conversions.
Use deal or promotional emails to make your subscribers feel special; consider sending email-only deals or launching sales with emails first (before other channels) to make being on your list more valuable.
Abandon Browse/Cart Emails – Your customer shopped, selected your product or service and … left. To encourage the completion of that conversion, give your customer a helpful nudge with an email. Whether it’s a customized email with an image of the item left in their shopping cart or a special offer to entice them to finish their shopping, “abandon browse” emails are incredibly successful campaigns with a 63% higher open rate than traditional emails.
3. Informative email formats
Welcome Emails – As users become new customers or subscribe to your email list, sending them a welcome email is an easy way to set expectations. After receiving a welcome email, your customer knows what your emails will look like and hopefully will recognize your brand look and feel. That first email encourages clicks, averaging an open rate of between 50-86%, depending on the industry.
Welcome emails are easy to automate and are often very successful in establishing your brand in your reader’s inbox.
Nurture Campaigns – As a brand gathers customer behavior data over time, that data can be used to deliver timed and targeted messaging that presents products and offers curated to the customer. While this format is a time-consuming tactic, it can be rewarding for the growing relationship with your customer.
Drip Campaigns – Similar to a nurture campaign, a drip campaign is a series of emails. Unlike a nurture campaign, a drip campaign uses only time-based emails to message prospective customers. Drip campaigns keep your brand top of mind.
Re-engagement Campaigns – When a subscriber stops showing interest, has a decreased clickthrough rate or is not opening emails altogether, it might be time to include them in a re-engagement campaign.
Based on customer behavior, re-engagement emails can highlight products, special offers or messaging to get disengaged customers excited about your brand again.
Anniversary Campaigns – As we discussed earlier, personalization in email campaigns is compelling. That’s why anniversary emails are a great tactic to grow the connection between your brand and your customers. Sending emails around your subscribers’ birthdays or their anniversary of joining your email list shows them that you know them.
Video Emails – Have a great video to share? Send it to your email list! Video content is a great way to inform, compel and engage your customers. A survey found that video emails led to an 86% increase in leads compared to text and image emails. Videos are a quick and easy medium for viewers to consume your product or service. Just be sure to use video in emails the right way.
Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks by Industry
Like any other digital marketing channel, the efficacy of email marketing varies widely by the size of the list, the brand sending the email and the industry. Email marketing statistics and metrics focus on open rate, click rate, conversions and behavior-based metrics.
Average Email Open Rates by Industry
HubSpot used data from several email software companies and billions of campaigns to compile some interesting statistics on open rates. Here are a few that stood out to us:
- Business and Finance – 34.3%
- Ecommerce – 34.2%
- Educational – 37.3%
- Health and Fitness – 34.6%
Across the board, a good email open rate for businesses is 30-50%.
Average Email Click-through Rates by Industry
Click-through rates measure the number of subscribers who open your email and use it to access products, services or additional resources.
- Business and Finance – 2%
- Ecommerce – 1.9%
- Educational – 12.55%
- Health and Fitness – 1.75%
The average click-through rate by industry varies widely, from 1.6% in restaurant and food service to nearly 13% for educational institutions like private schools and higher ed. If your list averages a click-through rate between 1.5% and 3%, you’re likely in a pretty good place!
Why Email Marketing Works
Email marketing works because it checks all the boxes. Brands can mix, match and test different tactics to achieve their short- and long-term marketing goals.
Email campaigns can slowly grow your company’s customer base or turn around a conversion as quickly as a paid ad. While creating effective email flows takes time, consistent testing, timing and tweaking yields excellent results.
Ready to Hit Send? Email Us First!
With a high ROI and easily accessible and accurate metrics, email marketing is exactly what you need to attract new customers and keep existing clients coming back for more.
From designing eye-catching email templates to A/B testing your next campaign, Oneupweb’s integrated team of designers, writers and developers can make your emails irresistibly clickable. Get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 today to get started. (Tomorrow is totally cool, too.)
