General News
What is email marketing and how to get started? 📧
You may have come across the misconception that email marketing is no longer effective, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Hubspot reports that 38 percent of businesses are boosting their email marketing budgets in 2024, and the reasons are compelling. For any business, email marketing holds immense potential and offers numerous opportunities.
Getting started with email marketing can sometimes pose a challenge, but fear not, we’re here to lend you a hand! Let’s delve into why businesses embrace email marketing, its advantages, and some practical steps to kickstart your journey.
What is email marketing? 📈
We get it – many people are already familiar with the method of email marketing, but just in case you need a refresher, we’ve broken it down for you 👇.
Quite simply, email marketing involves sending commercial messages via email. It’s a robust tool for enhancing brand awareness, promoting products or services, and driving revenue.
And, perhaps quite obviously, it’s a way of contacting, communicating and engaging with your audience in one of the most direct formats.
Your email marketing goals may vary depending on your business and target audience. However, the optimum aim of any campaign is to convert potential customers and maintain engagement with existing ones.
Benefits of email marketing 💪
When executed effectively, email marketing offers a range of benefits, including: 👇
- Nurturing your audience through personalised content, which is particularly crucial in the current landscape where personalisation is key.
- Promoting your products and/or services effectively.
- Providing a cost-effective means of communication with your audience on a broader scale.
- Enabling you to gather valuable feedback from your audience.
- Serving as a measurable marketing tactic that can significantly contribute to a higher ROI.
- Enhancing brand awareness and engagement.
Where to begin with email marketing? 🎬
- Define your email marketing goals
Before diving in, it’s essential to consider what you aim to achieve through your email marketing efforts. Understanding your objectives will guide you in determining the most effective types of campaigns and content, as well as identifying your target audience.
Really ask yourself, ‘what do I want to get out of this?’ before doing anything else.
- Grow your email mailing list.
To incorporate email marketing into your strategy, you’ll need to expand your mailing list.
A mailing list comprises email addresses belonging to consumers, partners, or website visitors. Be careful here; you need to ensure that everyone has explicitly ‘opted in’ to comply with GDPR and CAN-SPAM – it also means you can rest assured you’re targeting the ‘right’ people who want to see your content.
Start by integrating an optimised signup form into your website – typically located in the header and/or footer (and one that is easy to find and fill out!). This allows potential subscribers to easily sign up without extensive effort. Also remember to make them mobile friendly as many people will open their email, or will sign up, on their phone.
You could also offer incentives to attract subscribers and can encourage sharing by including links on various platforms or on the emails themselves so they can be forwarded on to others who may be interested in signing up.
You can even segment your list based on demographics, interests or engagement level so you can create targeted and personalised emails.
Consider the types of email campaigns you want to send! 🥊
An email marketing campaign is a single or sequence of emails created to meet a marketing objective.
There are several types of email campaigns you could send:
- Onboarding email campaigns.
- Discount or sale offer campaigns.
- Product launch or announcement campaigns
- Event-based campaigns.
- Promote a product or service, share valuable content, and connect with your audience.
Depending on its purpose an email campaign may be made up of one, or multiple, emails.
Choosing your email marketing platform 🫵
Establishing a solid infrastructure for your email marketing efforts is crucial. Without it, you’ll struggle to engage your audience effectively and drive revenue. That’s why selecting the right email marketing platform is vital.
An email marketing platform allows you to create, send, and track emails, making it essential for your marketing strategy. Popular platforms like Mailchimp, Mailerlite, and Hubspot offer various features tailored to different business needs.
Your chosen platform should enable you to:
- Design engaging content.
- Manage your email list.
- Track key metrics.
- Conduct A/B testing.
- Segment and personalise content.
- Automate email campaigns.
You now know where to start with email marketing, but how do you stand out from the crowd?
We’re here to help you learn how to build a successful email strategy, create killer content, and keep your subscribers coming back for more.
Get in touch today!
