These days, businesses are using content marketing to increase awareness and sell products to a broader audience. Email marketing is an essential part of content marketing. It is the most effective form of content marketing and gives 43 USD for every dollar spend.
Email marketing is easy but takes time and sincere effort. However, a few marketers take shortcuts to make a quick gain and give email marketing a bad name, even though most of them use ethical email marketing and do it the right way.
In today’s blog post, we will discuss the following:
2. The benefits of email marketing.
3. How to perform email marketing.
4. Best practices for email marketing.
5. A few email marketing mistakes.
6. A few email marketing tips.
7. Summary
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is digital marketing where you collect the email IDs of your visitors and then send email to convince them to convert into loyal customers.
Note that in email marketing, you send emails to those users who have subscribed to your mailing list and opted to receive your newsletter. Sending emails to random addresses is not email marketing.
Email marketing is a direct way of connecting with your subscribers, providing them with value, and selling your services. The results of email marketing are better than any other form of content marketing. It is highly targeted and effective.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most potent form of marketing used by businesses. The following are a few benefits of email marketing:
1. The Most Effective Channel
Email marketing is the most effective communication channel. You can deliver your message to your subscribers’ inboxes, and over 90% of email users check their email at least once in a day.
The targeting of other marketing channels is not as high as email marketing.
2. You Own Your Subscribers
In other forms of content marketing, you depend on others—for example, Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, etc.
You cannot depend on visitors from these search engines and social media. They change their algorithm often to suit their requirements, and you will suffer. However, with email marketing, you own your subscribers and can communicate as you wish. No one can steal your subscribers from you.
3. It Has the Best Conversion
The return on investment with email marketing is 4300%, which is the highest. Moreover, email marketing converts better than other forms of marketing. For example, conversion on social media is around 1%, while with email marketing, it is 2.3%.No other content marketing performs better than email marketing in terms of conversion. Email marketing has the best conversion rate.
4. Cheaper Than Other Marketing
Email marketing is the cheapest content marketing after SEO.
With a fixed monthly payment, you can send unlimited communications, create automation, and send targeted emails.
The cost of email marketing services is around 50 USD per month for 10,000 subscribers with unlimited emails.
How to Perform Email Marketing
To start email marketing, you need subscribers and their permission to send them your newsletter. You can collect emails in various ways.
The most popular method is to offer a lead magnet on your blog and collect emails. A lead magnet can be an eBook, case study, cheat sheet, checklist, coupon, webinar, etc. You can ask visitors to give you their email ID and permission to send them newsletters, and in return, you will provide them with your lead magnet for free.
You can also collect these leads using Facebook or other social media. That will cost you money, and the results are not as good as you can get from your blog.
Once you collect their emails, you can send your lead magnet and send future emails.
You can start email automation. This automation can be a series of 5 or 10 emails sent on a fixed interval. For example, you can create a quick course on SEO and send it to them for free.
The content should be educational, not promotional. This will help you earn the trust of your subscribers and establish your authority.
After the first workflow automation ends, you can start the second automation.
If you don’t have any further automation, send them emails regularly with informational content, and in between, you can tell them how your product or service can help them.
You should send more informational emails than promotional. Otherwise, you will appear pushy and subscribers will stop opening your emails, unsubscribe, or worse, report you as spam. This will affect your deliverability.
Best Practices for Email Marketing
The following are the best email marketing practices:
1. Visitors subscribe to your blog to get value from you, not for being sold. Provide valuable content to your subscribers. The content should be relevant and solve users’ problems. This will build trust between you and your subscriber, and when you offer a solution to their problem, they will give it serious thought. Your email should be super valuable. These days I am noticing many email marketers send only promotional emails. There is no value in their emails, and all the emails are promotional. I have subscribed to many newsletters, and I found only a few bloggers whose emails are very useful.These bloggers include Pat Flynn, Brian Dean, and Ana Hoffman. They provide valuable tips and tricks in their emails, and subscribers love them. You should do the same.
2. Keep your mailing list healthy. Once your list grows, you will have many subscribers who do not open your emails. You must delete those inactive subscribers. Having inactive subscribers will reduce your reputation, and it will affect your delivery rate. As time passes, these subscribers will forget you and may report you as spam, even though they agreed to receive emails from you. This has happened with us, so we regularly remove inactive subscribers, and our open rate is high and the delivery rate has improved. Remove any subscriber who did not open your email in the last six months. Many experts say that you should try to re-engage them. I have tried it multiple times, and it gives mediocre results. So I don’t recommend you spend time on those subscribers.
3. Email service providers give you a lot of options to design beautiful emails using their drag-and-drop builder. These emails help a little. A text email is a better option unless you’re required to promote a product that has some images, and you need to insert a call to action. Make your email simple to read. Almost 67% of users use mobile devices to read email messages, and text messages have the best user experience on mobile devices.
A Few Email Marketing Mistakes
For better email marketing, avoid the following mistakes:
1. Many bloggers make the mistake of not collecting the email ID at the beginning. We made the same error and did not collect email addresses for our main blog for a few years. Then we published a free eBook and gave it as a direct free download. We still did not collect emails. During the redesigning of the blog, our developer suggested we start email collection, and then we started collecting emails. The results were very motivating as it helped us build a thriving community. I recommend you collect emails from day one. Here on this blog, we are collecting email IDs from day one.
2. We did not create any workflow for new subscribers for a long time. You must create a workflow for new subscribers, starting from the welcome email. If you don’t have any workflow, develop a short course on how to launch a blog and send it to your subscribers. This email course should include at least five emails, and you can send them daily. These emails have a very high open rate, and you can add a call to action in each mail.
3. In the beginning, we did not promote our product to our subscribers. You should not over promote your product, but not promoting it at all is also wrong. We were afraid of being pitchy and losing the trust of our audience. This was an incorrect assumption. Our audience liked it and supported us. Now we occasionally promote the product during our communications. You should not be shy about promoting your product. If your product is useful and solves users’ problems, they will like it.
4. You should not send excessive emails. This strategy is okay for the short term; for example, you can send your subscribers a five-day course for SEO daily. They are expecting this course because they have signed up for it. But once this course ends, send them emails at regular intervals. Sending an excessive amount of emails does not help, even if the content is useful. Subscribers need time to read and digest the messages in your email. Sending an excessive amount of email will cause users to unsubscribe, and some will even report you as spam.
5. You should also not send too few emails. You must send at least one email every month. If you don’t send emails to your subscribers, they might forget you, and your open rate will fall. Later on, these subscribers will start unsubscribing to your newsletter, and some of them may report you as spam.
6. Always preview your emails before sending them, even if you wrote a few lines. While writing an email in the email editor, you may not find some errors. However, when you preview the email, you can find those errors. Likewise, before sending the email campaign, send a test email to your email ID and open it from mobile devices and your desktop. You will be shocked to see how unoptimized your emails may be. This always happens to me. I send test emails to my email ID and open it from different devices and then optimize again.
7. You shouldn’t always send promotional emails. Your subscribers did not sign up just to be sold. No one likes being sold. If you send only promotional content, they will not like it and will leave your list. You should send them educational emails more often than promotional. As a rule of thumb, the ratio should be 80% educational and 20% promotional. I was following a blog, and I subscribed to their mailing list. The moment I subscribed, they started sending me promotional emails to buy their course. Every day they sent me emails. Afterward, they give me a “once in a lifetime” offer with a 75% discount, and the next day again a lifetime offer of 50%, and so on. They were just pushing me to buy their course. I did not like their strategy and left their email list. Please avoid this questionable practice. You should not trick your subscribers with once in a lifetime offers. Creating a new email ID is not too difficult. These false threats affect your authority.
8. Never buy an email list, as it will waste your time and effort. The conversion of these lists is close to zero, and you will ruin your reputation. Your email service may blacklist you. Sending emails to random people who did not sign up for you is unethical. You should collect emails ethically and then send your newsletter.
9. This goes without saying: Never sell your email list. Your subscribers signed up to receive your newsletter and you should not break their trust. Often I receive random emails from marketers whom I did not subscribe to. It infuriates me and I block and unsubscribe them. I don’t know who gave them my email ID, but it is a terrible experience. Don’t make the life of your subscribers difficult.
10. You must include an unsubscribe link in the footer of your email. This will ensure that subscribers can opt-out from your list if they wish to. It is ethically right and a legal requirement in some countries. If you don’t include an unsubscribe link, subscribers mark your email as junk, and it will affect your reputation and deliverability. Also, know that CAN-SPAM law makes sending spam emails illegal in the USA.
A Few Email Marketing Tips
Follow these tips to maximize the return from your email marketing.
- You must segment your list. For example, separate buyers from subscribers, who did not make the purchase yet.
- Send targeted emails. For example, you can convince your subscribers to buy a product, but you should not send the same emails to those who have already bought the product.
- Find the best time to send your emails and follow them. Usually, the best time is on Tuesday between 8 and 9 UTC time. Develop your schedule and be consistent.
- Send mobile-optimized emails. These days, most people use mobile devices to read emails; therefore, your email should be optimized for mobile devices for a better reading experience.
- Always respond to emails you receive. Remember, email marketing is a long-term strategy, and building connections is an essential ingredient. By responding to their emails, you are making them feel connected with you.
Summary
Other marketing strategies are very helpful and bring traffic or increase brand value, but for business growth, email marketing is far ahead of other channels. You must focus on your email marketing from day one of your blog launch. Your email list is your most valuable asset. Treat it well and learn how to help your subscribers and grow your business.
How is email marketing helping you grow your business? Please share your thoughts through the comments section.
