According to HubSpot - Email Marketing is a type of digital marketing which involves sending newsletters and promotional messages to a list of subscribers via email.
Email marketing campaigns aim to build relationships with subscribers, promote products and services, and increase brand awareness, resulting in driving sales. If implemented correctly, an Email Marketing campaign will be a valuable part of your Content Marketing Strategy.
Before you can start an email campaign, you will need to gain subscribers. It is a legal requirement that you get permission before you start sending email marketing material to someone, so people need to give their consent to receive your emails.
If your website receives some traffic, you can get people to subscribe to your emails by offering them a Lead Magnet, which is relevant to your business or industry and offers value. Your visitors land on your website because they have a certain goal or a problem they need to find a solution for. You need to offer them something that will help them achieve their goal or solve their problem.
For example, if you offer SEO services, your Lead Magnet could be a free report or an eBook about Content Marketing. Or, if you have an eCommerce store, your lead Magnet could be a discount code.
Once you have your Lead Magnet, you need to add a pop-up form to your website, allowing visitors to enter their email addresses in order to receive the Lead Magnet. Don't set up the pop-up to show right away, as it could frustrate your website visitors. According to a Digital Marketing Agency course by Robin & Jasper on Udemy, a good time for a pop-up to appear is 10 – 20 seconds after the visitor lands on the page. They also recommend setting up cookie expiration for your pop-up so it does not appear every time the same visitor lands on the page.
Ensure that your website visitors will see that the Magnet is going to be valuable to them. The name and the description have to let them know that they will get immediate value. It could say something like: ‘Download your Free Content Marketing eBook here,’ or, ‘Sign Up to Receive 10 Percent Off your next purchase’.
Choose how much information you want your subscribers to fill in. In his best-selling book - Email Persuasion, the author – Ian Brodie explains that the more information you ask potential subscribers to fill in, the more complicated it will seem to them. When they are mentally balancing between the value they will get from subscribing and the effort they put in to fill in the form, they might end up concluding that it’s not worth it. You will obviously need their email address. But other than that, depending on your industry, you could need as little as their first name so you can personalise the emails you send them.
Finally, to comply with the law, your subscribers must understand that they are giving permission for you to send them emails. Therefore, you must have a visible, unchecked box in your form where they can give consent.
Now that you have built a list of subscribers, you need to build a relationship with them by sending relevant emails.
Only send emails that are relevant to your subscribers, as that is what they signed up for and what they are expecting. If you are offering SEO services, you could send emails that will direct your subscriber to your most recent blogs about effective SEO strategies, content and social media marketing. If you are selling fashion, a good topic for a newsletter would be fashion trends of the week. You can also inform your readers about new products or discounts and promotions. Try finding the right balance between promotional emails and valuable content, as over-promoting your brand could appear spammy to the subscriber.
You have around three seconds from when the reader opens the email to capture their attention. If you don't offer something of interest to the reader within this time, they will likely leave. Use a catchy subject line to let your subscribers know they will benefit from reading your email. For example, if you offer SEO services, your subject line could ask: 'Is your website failing to attract traffic?' Better still, you could raise the reader's curiosity by adding something surprising about the topic, such as: 'Why using too many keywords could diminish your website traffic.'
High-quality, relevant images will make your emails more attractive and relatable to the readers. Email images are especially important if you have an e-commerce store, as they can instantly promote your products and direct the reader to your website with just a click on the image. If you don't yet have enough high-quality images, you can download Royalty free images from sites such as Pixaby, Unsplash or FavPng.
Make sure the images are correctly sized and compressed. They will take too long to load if they are too large, but if they are too small, they won't look good. As a guide, 700 pixels should be sufficient for a half-screen-width image. You can use free editing tools, such as Microsoft Paint, to resize your images. You can then compress your images with free online tools, such as TinyPNG, to reduce the image size without a noticeable loss of quality.
The reason you are sending email marketing material is that you want to convert your subscribers to customers. To achieve this, you will need to direct them to your website. For that, your email needs to include a Call to Action button. Depending on your goal, this button could direct the subscriber to a product page or a blog post. Make sure the Call to Action button is clearly visible and communicates urgency. It could say something like: ‘Save Today,’ ‘Last Chance to Buy,’ or ‘Find out More.’
Just like websites, emails need to have the ability to adapt to any screen size, as many of your subscribers will open your emails on mobile devices. You can use an email marketing and automation platform like Mailchimp for your email campaign. All their drag-and-drop templates have responsive designs, so you won't have to optimise your emails for mobile devices yourself.
Not only it’s against the law to send marketing emails to people who haven’t given their permission to receive them, but they would also likely never end up being read. They could also be marked as spam. If too many people report your emails as spam, your email address might get flagged for spamming. In the worst scenario, this could result in your email address being deactivated.
According to survey-based research by Cint (Data Published in an article Why Consumers Subscribe and Unsubscribe from Email by HubSpot), the number one reason people unsubscribe from marketing emails is that they receive too many emails from the brand or business. You shouldn’t send more than two newsletters a week, with one newsletter a week being ideal, according to Campaign Monitor.
No matter how interesting and factual your article is, if it has a lot of grammatical errors or typos, it will appear unprofessional. It is difficult to spot your own mistakes, so ask someone to proofread the article for you. You can also use Grammarly typing assistant to scan your article for mistakes. While it’s not always one hundred per cent accurate, it helps you identify and correct most errors.