You've Got Mail! Email Marketing and Marketing Automation
Email marketing – seems to have been around, forever right? Well, maybe there’s a reason for that. Email marketing seems to have an extremely positive effect on businesses, and here's why:
According to emailisnotdead.com, email is not dead. In fact, there are over 6.32 billion email accounts and about 269 billion emails that are sent out every single day. Also, 81% of online shoppers are more likely to make additional purchases from emails about your buying behaviors or past purchases.
Having a stable, well established email marketing plan can help
- Promote and grow your business
- Increase your company’s revenue
- Sell more of your products/ services and create more awareness
MailChimp and Constant Contact are examples of fairly well-known email marketing tools to help create and grow your email marketing plan. Building a successful email marketing campaign can require a lot of time, effort and preparation and these companies are great tools to help you get started.
So how does email marketing work? What are some of the steps you need to take to run a successful email marketing campaign?
- The first step, before anything else, is defining your audience. Know who you are targeting your emails to. Understand your products target demographics inside and out.
- MailChimp has a cool function called a signup form builder. Using a form builder can help your company build your number of subscribers. First you design the form, then share the form all across your channels – from here you just watch your list grow. It’s really important to be aware and understand how and where your subscribers are signing up. This can help you determine which channels are the best for releasing your signup form.
- From here, we want to identify which audience within your subscribers you want to send your campaigns to. When the campaigns are sent to people that connect more with the email, your company will yield better results.
- Now we have to decide what content to put into our campaign.
- Make sure to stay organized with your frequency and time schedule.
- The last couple of steps include designing your emails, testing your campaigns and measuring your overall performance based on multiple aspects of your campaign.
But is it possible that email is dying among the younger generations?
Nowadays, especially for teens and young adults, email seems to be less and less relevant.
So, are messaging apps replacing the need for email?
Well, as marketers will most often answer: it depends!
But also, not really.
Emails are often required to sign up for social media accounts, subscriptions and even just to get into certain websites you have to enter an email. There is no doubt email is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Marketing Automation is also a valuable tool for marketers.
So, what is it?
Marketing automation is the software that automates your marketing for you. Automation helps you organize and prioritize your marketing tasks efficiently and effectively. Automating some of your marketing tasks gives you more time to reach your goals faster. Marketing takes a lot of time and energy so to be able to organize and automate your work can help you a lot.
You will not be an effective marketer if all you’re doing is sending email after email on blast to anyone and everyone you can get on your email list.
You want the right people. You want the people who are going to want you. Otherwise, you are just wasting valuable time and money. Not to mention, you are annoying your subscriber list, possibly to the point of them unsubscribing to your product or services.
Marketing automation helps you send emails to target people at certain times. It lets you send emails only to the people who are relevant and want to see your content. Marketing automation is a tool that can be extremely valuable to your marketing campaigns throughout your marketing career.
Just remember: We might be so attracted to the idea of automation and want to instantly automate everything. This isn’t bad, but just be aware of your original goals and aspirations for your subscribers.