With so many ways to reach and engage your customers nowadays, you may be wondering whether you really need to invest your time, money and efforts in email marketing—the short answer is yes.
Email marketing is a powerful marketing strategy to reach your target audience and customers at a fraction of the cost of other digital marketing channels. To paint a clearer picture of just how effective email marketing is, let’s take a look at some of the latest stats:
- For every $1 you spend on email marketing, the average return on investment (ROI) of $42 (DMA, 2019)
- For 85% of SMEs, email is the primary channel for customer acquisition, and 80% for customer retention (Emarsys, 2018)
- 49% of customers said they would like to receive weekly promotional emails from their favourite brands.
- 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the most effective way to nurture leads (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)
In this small business guide to email marketing, we’ll help you understand what email marketing is, why it’s effective, how to get started and some of the different types of email campaigns to send. We’ll also share some of the do’s and don’ts of email marketing to help get the most out of your efforts.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails and/or marketing materials to existing customers or prospects to inform, educate, sell and nurture customer relationships. Email marketing is just one piece of the digital marketing puzzle along with social media marketing, content marketing, paid search, SEO and more. A successful email marketing strategy is well-rounded and factors in all channels to increase your brand’s visibility, extend your reach and boost conversion.
Common types of email marketing include:
- Promotional deals and offers
- Lead nurturing emails
- Welcome emails
- Newsletters
- Press releases
- Blogs
- Other business updates
So what’s the hype surrounding email marketing? What makes it such a popular strategy for both large and small businesses?
What are the benefits of email marketing?
The answer to this question lies in the versatility of email marketing—from customer updates and flash sales to personalised birthday discounts and abandoned cart notifications. Below are some of the benefits of email marketing:
- Low cost: One of the biggest perks of email marketing is how affordable it is compared to other channels. There are a few costs involved (like paying a monthly subscription for an email marketing platform) but these are very affordable.
- Drive more sales: Email is a powerful channel to drive revenue that generates around $29 billion in retail sales annually (Marketing Week). You’re usually sending emails to customers who are already interested in your business as they’ve signed up to receive emails.
- Build strong customer relationships: Emails are one of the best ways to build and strengthen your relationships with both prospects, new customers and loyal customers. By sending a variety of content that is valuable, informative and useful, you’ll begin to build more credibility.
- Create targeted and personalised content: Unlike other marketing channels, email marketing gives you a chance to customise emails based on a customer’s first name, geographical location or interests. This makes your emails more relevant to specific customers and boosts engagement.
- Easy to measure: Email marketing software makes it easy to measure key metrics like click-through-rate (CTR), bounce rate and engagement levels. This means you can keep refining your strategy to improve results with each campaign.
Now we’ve established the benefits of email marketing, let’s take a closer look at how to get started.
How do I get started with email marketing?
Before you do anything, it’s important to create an email marketing strategy to underline your what and how. In other words, what is the purpose of your email marketing strategy (i.e. your goals) and how are you going to achieve it (i.e. the type of campaigns you’ll use). Just think about how many emails can clutter your inbox on a daily basis—how will you ensure your emails will actually be opened and not sent to the spam folder?
In order to create an email marketing strategy you need to:
- Determine your goals and objectives
- Define your target audience
- Build an email list
- Choose your email marketing tools.
- Set your key performance metrics
1. Determine your goals and objectives
The first step is identifying what you want to achieve from email marketing. This will give you a sense of direction and make it easier to plan campaigns and track performance. Every business has different goals, but some examples include:
- Increasing sales
- Driving more website visitors and/or in-store foot traffic
- Shortening a sales cycle
- Increasing brand loyalty
2. Define your target audience
In order to do email marketing, you need a customer list. The first step to building a customer list is identifying your target audience (i.e. the people you want to promote your business via email marketing). To identify your target audience ask questions such as:
- Who is our existing customer base?
- What are the common demographics or qualities in our existing customers?
- Why do these customers come to us instead of our customers?
- Are there any trends in online reviews/feedback?
- Once you know who your target audience is you can create buyer personas that illustrate where you can expect to reach your customers (e.g. on social media) and how you can persuade them to sign up and join your email list.
3. Build an email list
The next step is choosing a way for people to opt-in to receive your emails. There are many ways to attract customers and get them to join your email list, and what works best depends on your target audience. Here are some ideas to help you:
- Offer downloadable templates, ebooks or PDFs that offers more valuable content than simply browsing your website
- Giveaways
- Optimise your website for opt-ins and newsletter subscriptions
- Set up a lightbox to appear when website visitors are about to leave your site
- Take advantage of ‘subscriber only’ content, deals and offers
- Offer different subscription options
4. Choose your email marketing tools
If you want to succeed with email marketing you’ll need the right tools. A good email marketing platform streamlines everything from building and segmenting your lists, designing and customising templates, automation, split testing and analytics. There are loads of free and paid tools available for small businesses to suit your goals and budget. You can learn more about email marketing software and tools in our guide.
6. Set your key performance metrics to measure
Measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns against key metrics is vital—in fact, your efforts will be wasted if you don’t. There are a number key metrics to understand:
- Click-through-rate (CTR): The percentage of people that clicked on your CTAs
- Open rate: The percentage of people that open your email
- Conversion rate: The percentage of people that clicked on a CTA and then completed the desired action
- Bounce rate: The percentage of people that did not receive your email
- Unsubscribes: The number of people that opt-out of your email list when they receive an email from you
- Deliverability: The percentage of emails that were successfully delivered to your intended recipients
Once you’ve gone through the above steps, you can start to think about the type of campaigns to send.
What are the different types of email marketing campaigns?
Successful email marketing requires you to understand the different types of email campaigns and when to send them. Sending irrelevant or untimely emails can have the opposite effect and lead your customers to unsubscribe. Email marketing campaigns generally fall into three categories:
- Promotional emails
- Transactional emails
- Lifecycle emails
What are promotional emails?
Promotional emails are used to promote your products or services, special offers and limited deals. Examples of promotional emails include:
- Sales promotion emails
- New arrival emails
- Product launch emails
- Limited time offers
- Subscribers-only offers
- Giveaway emails
- Seasonal offers
What are transactional emails?
Transactional emails are usually automated emails that facilitate a transaction or action that has been requested by your customers. Examples of transactional emails include:
- Registration emails
- Confirmation emails
- Notification emails
- Feedback email
- Shopping cart abandonment email
What are lifecycle emails?
Lifecycle emails are all about segmenting your emails to align with different stages of the customer journey (early, middle and late-stage) and move your customers forward (although you can also move them backwards!) For example, early-stage emails could include product education and onboarding emails, while middle stage emails could be birthday messages and new product notifications.
What are email marketing best practices?
Email marketing is not prescriptive, but there are some universal do’s, don’ts and best practices you should take note of:
- Follow the law: Most countries have different laws and regulations that govern the use of email marketing. While these laws are pretty straightforward, there are some loopholes so it’s worth taking note of the laws and rules that apply in your country to avoid large fines.
- Don’t spam your audience: Sending too many emails or sending emails with irrelevant content can annoy your audience and lead them to unsubscribe.
- Follow a schedule: Plan your email campaigns for the next month or a couple of weeks ahead so you have a clear picture of what you’re sending out. This makes things much more organised but it also gives you time to make any adjustments if necessary.
- Optimise for mobile: It would be a shame to spend time making an email campaign pretty only for it to not open properly on a mobile device. Ensure your campaigns are optimised for mobile devices.
- Measure your results: Track how well your campaigns are performing so you can keep improving. How many people are opening your emails? What is the average bounce rate? What links are they clicking on? These are all important metrics to track.
- Personalise the greeting: People are more likely to open and engage with an email that uses their first name than those with a generic greeting.
- Use a clear call to action (CTA): Your customers should know exactly what you want them to do next, e.g. “Register for the webinar using this link”. Ensure your CTAs are as clear as day to maximise conversion.
We hope this guide has given you a good understanding of the basics of email marketing, the steps you need to take to get started and some of the best practices to help you set off on the right tracks. Developing your strategy and rolling out your first campaign may seem like a lot of work initially, but it’s much easier to get started with email marketing thanks to the range of tools and resources available—many of which you can find on SavvySME.
How do I get started with email marketing?
If you have the time and resources to do your own email marketing - great! There are plenty of articles, guides and tips to help you here on SavvySME. If you’re short on expertise, time or want to get top results, you should consider hiring an email marketing agency. This is a great option if:
- You want to create a solid email marketing strategy
- You want to build large email lists
- You want to design a range of custom templates
- You have limited time but know that email marketing could crack open a wedge of new opportunities
Learn more about email marketing agencies and the services they offer and get connected to the right professionals.
