The first email ever was a short test email sent in 1971 from one computer to another one that was in the same room. Now, our emails can cross the globe and even reach into space in an instant. The use of email has become so ubiquitous that by this year, as many as 4.03 billion people are considered active email users.
Because of this, email marketing has become a necessary part of almost any digital marketing plan. In 2021, email was the 2nd most-used channel for B2B digital marketers with an 87% usage rate, just behind social media’s 89%. It has incredible reach and can be used in multiple parts of the sales funnel from generating leads to converting them to sales.
It is such a powerful tool in your digital marketing toolkit that you’d be missing out on a lot by not utilizing it.
What is Email Marketing?
If you think email marketing is all about spamming generic emails to a long list of email addresses, you may have encountered a possibly outdated or ineffective email campaign. Email marketing is currently defined as the use of email to send information about your business to people who have opted to receive email communications from you.
The content of the email could include details about your company, promotions, informative and valuable information that the people on your mailing list might find useful, or anything that would engage with your client and help with your conversion rate.
Nowadays, email marketing has steered away from impersonal and mass-produced template-like emails. The current practice focuses more on consent, personalization, segmentation, and putting more thought into making sure the emails you send are something your mailing list would be interested to open.
What Kinds of Email Marketing Can I Use?
Since it’s a very versatile digital marketing strategy, there can be many ways to use email marketing to fit your goals and the different interests of your clients. Here are some examples of how you can use email marketing:
- To provide information – This usually includes informative pieces like useful articles or blogs or your company newsletter. This is a way of providing useful information to keep your clients engaged with your business and generate goodwill and trust with them.
- For promotions – This is a bit more straightforward. Email can be one of the channels wherein you want to let your clients know that you are having a promotion or event involving your business. It can drum up interest and entice them to visit your site.
- For research – Some businesses use email as a way of getting to know their client base. You can send surveys and questionnaires for your clients to fill up that can give you valuable data that you can then use to inform your business decisions.
- Engagement/re-engagement includes more personal emails that may not specifically showcase your business or products but can keep your clients engaged or bring them back from inactivity. This can include checkup emails, birthday or anniversary messages, or giving them updates on your products or services.
How can I Get My Email Marketing Campaign Started?
To get an email marketing campaign going, you’ll need to do a few things:
- Set a specific goal – It is important to set a goal before embarking on an email campaign. It could be about letting your clients know about an upcoming promotion, it could be sending them a survey, or it could be just for engagement. Either way, setting a goal gives you a direction for the rest of the campaign and will be useful at the end when you assess its effectiveness.
- Generate a mailing list – As stated earlier, email marketing is no longer about just sending out emails to just anyone whose email you could get your hands on. We need to give this some thought and make sure the content we send to our recipients is valuable to them. This is where segmenting the mailing list comes in. We identify recipients in our mailing list that have something in common so we can send them relatable and appropriate email content.
- Get an email marketing service – This should be done with your goals in mind. Among the email marketing services to consider, find one that fits with your business needs and goals, has the features you’d want, and can handle the number of emails for your business.
- Craft compelling and enticing emails – Creating good email copy needs a lot of consideration. Just like SEO marketing, we are trying to stand out among hundreds of emails when our recipients skim over their inboxes. This includes thinking about things like the tone and content of your email but also thinking about eye-catching subject lines or subheadings. Once we get them to open our emails, we’d also want to add a good call to action to drive them toward visiting our site, responding to our survey, or taking advantage of our promotion.
- Use tracking and analytics to assess your campaign – This is how you get to maximize your email campaign. By checking on metrics like open rate, click-through rate, response rate, and others, you’ll be able to gain information from your email campaign and determine how successful it was.
If that sounds a bit like a lot to set up, you don’t need to worry about a single thing. We here at Synergy Advantage are experts in Digital Marketing, including using email marketing as a tactic to help you and your business grow. We can help you with your mailing list, creating your content, and up to assess the success of the campaign with our team of digital marketing specialists.
What are you waiting for? Know your advantage with Synergy Advantage! Call us at 1-855-534-6273 today!