March 21, 2024
Excel with your email marketing plan
Last updated: November 17, 2023
Written by:
Sylwester Karnuszewicz
Sylwester Karnuszewicz
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Building relationship with your potential customers has become essential these days. In today’s digital marketing world it is literally on the lips of every single advertiser or marketing guru. One of the most promising tools that can assist you in planting roots and maintaining customer-entrepreneur relation is a relevant and well-thought email marketing strategy.
Frankly speaking, email marketing can truly work miracles for your online business. According to Hubspot, “It’s estimated that the U.S. will spend over 350 million dollars on email advertising in 2019”. However, if the concept is brand new for you, it is advisable to master the basics in the first place and then move on to more compound issues.
Once you read this article you will know:
- what email marketing exactly is,
- what are the main benefits of email marketing,
- why an email marketing strategy is important,
- what are the keys of stellar email marketing strategy,
- what is an email marketing campaign.
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What email marketing exactly is?
In most simple words, email marketing is the whole of the activities enabling you to build a relationship with your leads through emails. Once you have the best email marketing communication plan, you are able to send appropriate information to the right people and to convert potentially interested or still-hesitating visitors into your customers.
All the visitors of your homepage or landing page that become interested in your product or service may sign up for your email marketing list and, thanks to the communication you prepare on regular basis, get all the information to make a well-thought decision and to purchase from you in the future.
If you make sure your email communication list is built with your target audience (people who are potentially interested in your product or service), there is a high possibility that these people will purchase from you and contribute to the benefit of your company. However, it only works this way once your email list consists exclusively of people interested in your product, not just free giveaways or other things you distribute.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Email marketing does take time and require effort, but let me assure you that it is absolutely worth implementing as the advantages undoubtedly outnumber the odds. Moreover, they have much more to offer besides generating leads for your business.
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Source: http://www.nancylee.net/
Full control
Once you master whole basic knowledge vital to create your own email marketing strategy, you can be sure that you possess full control over the process and its final tone will be fully dependent on your ideas, actions and whims.
In email marketing you are able to:
- create landing pages, forms, email newsletters,
- make decisions based upon email marketing campaigns you run,
- group your audience and send them personalised and accurate messages (which is absolutely necessary as, according to Hubspot study, “marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue,”
- create cycles of email marketing depending on your business goals.
You don’t need a gang of marketing experts to implement changes in your email campaigns. It’s even better to prepare your emails by yourself. This way you seem more authentic and humane to your target audience – and these days authenticity is more appreciated than any other value in online business world.
Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
Low costs
As mentioned, all you need to know and to prepare if you think about running email marketing campaigns is your brain and one solid tool to handle emails and send them to your recipients. The majority of email marketing platforms start to charge you only when your email list members amount to a specific number (for example, 2000). Therefore, at the beginning there are no costs at all. And even when you exceed this magic limit number, there are a few plans to choose from, so the costs are not really that dramatic ?
Easiness of implementing and measuring
Moreover, email marketing is truly simple to implement and pleasant to use. You can easily design templates of your messages, landing pages or automation cycles in builders designed for that (like, for example, landing page builders).
Another great thing about email marketing is the easiness of measuring. It is a piece of cake to track the efficiency of your email marketing campaigns, as such platforms always provide you with the most important statistics: the number of openings, clicks and conversions. You are also given an option to integrate your email communication platform with online analytics tools like Google Analytics and this way track the visitors’ behaviour on your website.
Why email marketing strategy is important?
As mentioned before, email marketing strategy is the key to building strong and trust-based relationship with your customers. Since you are an online business owner you have to communicate with your visitors from the moment they decide to subscribe up until they become regular customers.
Needless to say, authenticity and trust are most frequently brought up qualities when speaking about highly appreciated values in online businesses. Because of it you need to show your target audience that behind great products and services there is a human being who is trustworthy, honest and doesn’t try to sell them a pig in a poke.
Email marketing can be used on every single stage of the widely known marketing funnel:
- awareness – using landing pages and build-in forms to reach visitors and encourage them to sign up for an email marketing list,
- interest – sending engaging and useful newsletter that upholds the interest of leads,
- desire – providing product updates in a newsletter to make your subscribers absolutely yearning for your solution,
- action – enabling your target audience to purchase your product. You can send an email with a link or a direct button to allow this,
- post-purchase – selling is not the last phase. Every reasonable online business owner needs to take care of customer retention. With a short follow-up email you can stay in touch with your customers and get useful feedback from them, which can also come in handy when it’s time to prepare your next product or improve the existing ones.
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How to create email marketing strategy?
An email marketing strategy is actually more than email marketing itself. It is a broader concept taking into account the long term vision and the future direction of your email marketing actions. Usually, online business owners try to be spontaneous and responsive to current trends, which is a good thing, but to adopt a thoroughly planned email marketing strategy and to implement it consequently is a far more secure solution.
Creating an email marketing strategy is not rocket science, but it is advisable to plan the whole process out taking into consideration:
- long term objectives – think about what you want to achieve with your email marketing and set up a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely), e.g. to increase the subscribers number by 30% within 6 months,
- target audience – make sure you know who exactly they are and what they need. The more you know, the more personalized emails you prepare,
- resources – think about the tools essential to start with your project (in most cases it’s all about choosing the most suitable email communication platform),
- KPIs – define a few KPIs to assist you in making your decisions in a smarter way ex. subscribers number, openings, clicks, conversions,
- tactics – the whole set of actions related to email marketing, such as the way you build your email list, do segmentation, choose content, create user-friendly design, track results, test, optimise and use tools.
What is an email marketing campaign?
Once you plan your email marketing strategy precisely, you are able to prepare an appropriate tactic, tools, and are ready to start with your first email marketing campaign. An email marketing campaign is a well-designed and coordinated series of messages provided to your recipients in defined periods of time aiming at inducing them to take a desired action such as purchasing, subscribing or downloading a file.
As you can see, email marketing is quite a big thing in today’s digital marketing world and it has huge impact on the way your potential customers perceive you as a business owner and how they feel about your product. It can truly work miracles for your online business and assist you in boosting conversion significantly providing you think it through well and adopt an appropriate email marketing strategy.
