Email Marketing
Email marketing is a strategic digital marketing tactic of sending emails to potential customers. Effective marketing emails convert clicks into customers and will hopefully let you turn those one-time buyers into loyal returning customers. Many people today think that email is dead, but that’s completely false. Email still remains the most effective way to take leads and turn them into customers. Even though we are living in a digital age full of social media, about 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis making email a perfect platform to use digital marketing. Consumers who get an email are more likely to purchase the product versus a normal social media advertisement. The return on investment with email is a lot greater. To start email marketing, you want grow your email list. Using a good lead to get the consumers email address is key. For example, giving someone a free book download in exchange for their email address. Once you build your email list, you can start dividing your list into segments. Some examples are: inactivity, shopping cart abandonment, or new subscribers. With inactivity, emails are sent to subscribers who haven’t engaged for a while. Shopping card abandonment sends emails to remind the customer about their items in their cart that they didn’t purchase. And with new subscribers, emails are sent to welcome new customers. Email marketing has a lot more to offer and to keep track of your email marketing you can use sites like Constant Contact and Mailchimp to keep track of your email marketing.
Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp
Constant Contact and Mailchimp are both websites that let you keep track of your email marketing. With both companies, you are able to manage your subscribers and create professional looking emails with their templates. You can also set up automated emails, so emails are sent out automatically to your different subscriber segments. With Constant Contact, you have the option for a free trial and plans start at $20 and depends on how many subscribers you have. Mailchimp is similar to Constant Contact, but it is very easy to set up and use which is great for people who are new to email marketing. Mailchimp offers a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers, but like Constant Contact the more subscribers you have the more you are going to pay. Both of these sites are great platforms to help you take control of your email marketing and help you create the most professional looking emails. They both also offer analytics, letting you see how much revenue you have generated and how many people interacted with the campaign. Overall, Mailchimp is for the user who is newer to email marketing since it has a cleaner and easier to use platform making email marketing that much better!
Marketing Automation and Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to create emails and send them to a subscriber list. Like I said earlier, email marketing has a great ROI. For every dollar invested in email marketing, it can give you about $40 of revenue in return. Without marketing automation, you end up just sending the same email to everyone in your subscriber list. You want to make sure all of your emails are relevant to the specific subscriber receiving the email. With marketing automation, you can add so much more to your email marketing. According to Hub-spot, “marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions”. You are able to automate which segment of the subscriber list receive the email, so it is most relevant to that recipient.
Best Practices for Marketing Automation
- With marketing automation, it is important to plan out your goals. You want to know what you want to achieve in the end through the marketing automation.
- You always want to include a welcoming email so you leave a great first impression with your lead. A welcoming email is one of the most effective and important type of marketing automation.
- Always make sure you are sending the most relevant email to your subscribers. You can achieve this by making sure you split your subscriber list into segments based on purchase behavior.
- By keeping track of your less engaged customers, you can send out messages to hopefully bring them back and get them engaged with your site.
With sites like Constant Contact and Mailchimp, almost anyone can do email marketing. Email is nowhere near gone, so being able to know how to use email marketing is a great skill to have today.