What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most crucial steps when it comes to marketing your business. According to HubSpot, email marketing is defined as, “the process of targeting your audience and customers through email. It helps you boost conversions and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help achieve their goals.”
Not only does email marketing help to provide information to potential customers or clients, but it also aids in building relationships, boosts brand awareness, enhances content promotion, increases lead generation, and strengthens product marketing.
Benefits and statistics of email marketing from HubSpot and Kinsta include:
- 4.03 billion people use email in 2021. This is expected to increase to 4.48 billion by 2024.
- Emails have a 90.3% market penetration rate for internet users in the U.S.
- Marketing via email generates a revenue of $42 per dollar spent.
- Over 90% of consumers check their emails daily.
9 Types of Email Marketing
There are a few different ways that email development can find a place in your marketing campaigns:
1. Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are a great way to introduce your brand and promote campaigns, services, and content that is available. These types of emails can help to establish a connection between you and your client. Including personalization can encourage your prospect or customer to respond and ask questions. Welcome emails can also include discounts or deals as a thank you for joining the email list. This type is a great way of boosting click rates, too.
2. Newsletter Emails
Newsletter emails are a great way to update all of your subscribers on a regular basis and remain a “familiar face” in their inbox. These updates can include new clients, new business developments, links to new blog posts, social media content, and more. They can also serve as a way to spread the word about upcoming discounts and deals to incentivize your prospects to want to work with your company.
3. Dedicated Emails
Utilizing dedicated emails is a great way to promote an event that your company is a part of or a new piece of content. By sending emails to clients that are in specific industries or fields, you can ensure that the dedicated email reaches your intended audience.
4. Lead Nurturing Emails
It’s important to not ask too much of a new lead right away. Email is a reliable form of nurturing your leads to push them closer and closer to a bottom-of-funnel action, such as scheduling a demo. Offering free resources, on a regular basis, positions your brand as a helpful resource.
5. Sponsorship Emails
Sponsorship emails are utilized when a company pays to be in another company’s emails as a sponsor, usually in the form of an advertisement such as pay-per-click (PPC). Sponsorship emails are a great way to extend your company’s reach and bring more traffic to your website or campaign.
6. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are a sound way to ensure email engagement. Transactional emails can act as ‘thank you’ emails after your customer has made a purchase in B2C marketing or registered for an event in B2B marketing.
7. Re-Engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails are a way to check on the engagement of your email list. It’s common to include a call-to-action by asking the reader to either respond that they’re interested in continuing to receive correspondence from your company or if they would like to opt out of receiving emails. If they respond that they’d like to stay on the mailing list, it’s a good idea to respond back and build a rapport.
8. Brand Story Emails
Brand story emails provide the chance to cast a bright light on your company and its history. In this type of email, you can give background information on when your company was founded, who is the founder (their background), the progress your company has made, the next steps or goals, and more. Brand story emails pave the way for you to get personal with your email list. They can help the person receiving the email get a better understanding of what the company is and what it does, who’s behind it, and how your brand’s product or service can help them.
9. Review Request Emails
Review request emails do just as the name suggests—they request a customer or client to submit a review of the service or product that was offered. This shows your customers that you value their input and, in turn, value them. These can also aid in presenting suggested improvements for your company.
5-Step Email Marketing Plan
To get started on reaping the benefits of a top-notch email marketing campaign, here are five steps to develop a reliable plan:
Step 1: Identify the goals associated with your email marketing plan.
Establish goals for the end of your email marketing plan or campaign. These should be measurable in order to measure your success throughout and make adjustments as needed. This will also help direct the copywriting process in the emails.
Step 2: Build and segment a specific email list.
List segmentation of your audience is very important. Tailoring each email you send to a specific group of prospects or customers will increase engagement levels and be more easily relatable for your recipients.
Step 3: Design email templates.
It’s imperative that your emails are professional, uniform and represent your brand standards. Having a template to use for your campaigns ensures all emails are created to meet these requirements.
Step 4: Optimize email content.
Make sure the content of your email is as effective as possible. Effective emails should be able to grab the attention of the reader from the subject line and/or preview of the email, so they’re urged to open the email and read more, as well as keep them engaged until they get to the call-to-action.
A few other tips include:
- Stay concise
- Use personalization where possible
- Include a clear button for a call-to-action
Step 5: Watch your email campaign closely.
Monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of your email marketing plan and your audience’s response is imperative to ensuring its success. Most likely, you’ll have to make adjustments along the way and test different tactics (i.e. subject lines, buttons, designs, etc.) to see what is resonating the most with your segmented audiences.
Send Emails That Generate Results
Are you ready to get a high ROI on your email marketing campaign? Our experts are ready to help get you started. Schedule your free, 30-minute strategy call with Uncommon Marketing Works today, and let’s devise a plan.
