Email Marketing- Why is it important?

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. It is the broadest sense; every email sent to a potential, or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations.

Email Marketing Plan:

• Define your audience:?No matter what you are selling, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is to communicate with them effectively. This might be one of the most manageable parts of creating the campaign. A business may have customers who are only interested in receiving an email when there’s a sale on a specific group of products or subscribers who would prefer biweekly updates to weekly ones.
• Signup sources:?One of the most valuable data your signup form has to offer is how and where subscribers sign up for your list. If you’re an e-commerce business with your store connected to Mailchimp, knowing where your customers joined your list can give you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your marketing efforts in the future.
• Segments and groups:?With smaller collections of people within your larger audience, you’ll be able to create groups and segments to send more relevant campaigns to the recipients. Groups are an easy way to organize your list into categories so that you only need to maintain a single list in your account.
• Decide what to write:?Now that you know who you will report seeing, you need to decide on the content you want to share with your audience. You want to send emails with a purpose that speaks to your subscribers, so always keep in mind what they signed up for. It might be helpful to outline some general content types you can induce in your campaigns, so you can refer to them when designing your emails.
• Establish your sending frequency and goals:?There is no set-in-stone about how often you should email your customers, but if you send too often, your subscribers are likely to turn out what you have to say or unsubscribe altogether. It is suggested that you send an email at least one month to keep your subscribers engaged, but don’t feel you need to commit to this immediately.?
• Make a schedule:?Not everyone has a set schedule for sending out campaigns. One way to make sure you’re staying on track is to create a content calendar to schedule your campaigns, blog posts, social media posts, and more. An example of a schedule is?DAY 1:?Jot down content topics, art ideas, and other fundamental elements for the upcoming campaigns.?DAY 2:?Write out what you’d like to say about each topic and pull any photos or artwork you’d like to use into a folder.?DAY 3:?Use an email service to create your campaign. Be sure to proofread for any errors and grammar and send a few test campaigns to make sure everything is just right. Day 4: Send you the campaign. It is essential to split the campaign prep over multiple days to ensure that everything is completed correctly.

Common Mistake to Avoid:

• Unrecognizable ‘from’ name
• Unrecognizable reply email
• Subject line errors
• Irrelevant preheader text
• Messed up merge fields
• Too much focus on product instead of customers
• Too many CTAs (call to action)
• Broken links and promo codes
• Too much content
• Faulty segmentation
• Accidental test email
• Typos and faulty grammar

Why should companies use email software to manage their email campaigns?

Email marketing software and automation tools make sending and monitoring email campaigns easier. Using email software is easier for companies with less time to keep track of every little detail of their email campaigns. Also, using these services, you will be able to track analytics that you couldn’t track just by sending a “normal” email—these analytics include click-through rates, deliverability, open rates, bounce rates, and conversation rates. Advanced platforms allow you to automate sends based on user behavior, increasing engagement likelihood since the email is more personalized to their interests.

Compare and contrast Constant Contact and Mailchimp

• Automation:?Email automation helps you create and send your emails to a whole list of recipients in one go. It uses set triggers to determine the type of email sent. Mailchimp has excellent automation features that enable users to send personalized product recommendations and purchase follow-ups. Constant Contact lets you set up autoresponders and personalized email; however, it has limited automation capabilities.
• Deliverability:?Mailchimp ensures that users distribute appropriate content. They have software that predicts unethical practices in email campaigns before they are distributed. Constant Contact adheres to best practices and utilizes a spam check tool. This helps predict whether your email campaign will experience any deliverable issues.
• Registration Forms:?This is a great way to check on people’s interest in your offers on your website. Mailchimp provides many options from custom fields, drag, and drop features. It has excellent opt-in messages that you can customize based on your preferences. Constant Contact also lets you change different colors and fonts. However, its fields only offer the standard tick boxes for first name, company name, etc.
• A/B Testing:?Email marketing lets you test different variations of your email to find out what resonates best with your recipients. You can try the subject lines, email content, images, call to action, and send time. Mailchimp provides three variations in its free plan. This allows you to send emails to a small segment to determine which variation worked best. Constant Contact doesn’t provide the small ability for automating tests. You will have to choose between sending one version to your recipients or spending some hours setting up multiple versions of the same email.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to market on multiple channels online more effectively and automate repetitive tasks. It can also be described as a deeper understanding of marketing automation and how marketing departments are using its tools to enable modern business processes, spending less time executing tasks and more time on marketing strategy and planning.

How to use Marketing Automation?

Thousands of marketers today rely on email marketing to generate results. They send blast email after blast email to their entire list of prospects and customers, hoping the message resonates with some of them and gets them to purchase. Marketing automation allows you to nurture your leads through the entire buying process, delivering highly targeted, personalized messages that address their specific barriers to purchase.

Dos and Don’ts of Marketing Automation?

• Don’t just automate your current process without revisiting your goals
• Do integrate marketing automation with you inbound marketing strategy
• Don’t just blast or broadcast general messages
• Do send highly targeted and specific content to a narrowed audience
• Don’t forget about your customers
• Do set up customer engagement campaigns to keep your current customers happy and coming back for more

What are some best practices regarding marketing automation?

1. Define Your Personas:?Despite the fact new strategies and channels have appeared in the past few years, the foundations of marketing haven’t changed. One of the fundamentals of marketing is a deep understanding of the buyer on a human level. The first step of planning marketing automation implementation should focus on developing a buyer persona.
2. Map Your Flow Based on the Buyer’s Journey:?Once you have developed your ideal buyer, you’ll discover each has a unique set of needs and problems. You will need to create a flow that converts leads into customers. You need to define each step in the buyer journey.

1. Offer Great Value to Attract Leads:?Companies must excel in providing high-value content. Whether your offer is an eBook, a webinar, or even a simple article, the offering must appeal to the carefully outlined buyer. Unbounce, the landing page creation, and the A/B testing tool stand out as a company offering great value to prospective leads.
2. Collect the Right Information from Your Leads:?Marketers can collect a great amount of information from their leads. While pursuing leads effectively requires some data collection, what you ask depends on what you need. Marketing software companies allow marketers to inundate potential buyers with questions, but this does not mean quantity is quality.

Describe the difference between marketing automation and email marketing.

• Email Behavior Tracking vs. Web Behavior Tracking:?Email marketing automation tools track a recipient’s behavior within your email campaign. With marketing automation, you get that email data plus much more. A lead’s behavior can be tracked everywhere they interact with your company on the web
• Single Path vs. Adaptive, Customer-Centered Messaging:?Email marketing requires a significant investment of time on the front end from creating emails to list segments and pose-delivery analytics. Depending on the sophistication of the email marketing automation tool, you might be able to send the same email to different segments of your list. Marketing automation also requires lots of hands-on work upfront, but you get more for your effort. You must create emails, plan the campaign, and segment your email list, but you can also build automated programs with more choices and options.
• Simple Automation vs. Intelligent Follow-Up: Most?modern tools offer automation components, but the capabilities depend on the platform you are using. In more advanced marketing automation platforms, you also get transactional triggers, the ability to apply segmentation rules, and sending by time zone. Some marketing automation systems facilitate account-based marketing, in which marketers can coordinate and manage their communications with multiple stakeholders inside the same company.