The first email was sent in 1971, and it permanently changed how we communicate with one another. Today, businesses use email to connect with their audience, build credibility in their industry, gain subscribers, and increase sales.
If you’re new to email marketing, it’s easy to get started. And your business can start seeing results immediately if you learn how to ensure it works for your business.
Table of Contents
- What Is Email Marketing at Its Core?
- What Makes Up Email Marketing?
- How Email Marketing Campaigns Are Beneficial to Businesses
- How to Maximize the Benefits of Your Marketing Emails
- How to Get Started with Email Marketing
- What Types of Businesses Can Email Marketing Help?
- What's Next in Marketing with Emails?
What Is Email Marketing at Its Core?
Email can be simple at first glance. You send emails and hope people open them. But there's more to efficient email marketing.
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that involves sending emails to your target audience. It’s one of the best ways to turn prospects into buyers and one-off customers into engaged and loyal customers.
Your email marketing strategy can encompass sending weekly newsletters, promotional emails, and special deals for customers. It allows you to create a relationship with your audience and steadily build loyalty to your brand.
What Makes Up Email Marketing?
TruVISIBILITY's Messaging app is filled with every feature offered in email software today. So, what email marketing tools can a business expect to see when creating an email marketing strategy?
- Images and videos
- Contact list organization
- Data analytics
- Drag and drop blocks
- Text and header font, size, color options
- Ability to save brand colors, designs, etc.
These are a few tools that your business should not overlook. They will help more than you know, even if you think you won't use special colors for your font. TruVISIBILITY can make the process of creating email campaigns quick with templates already made for high converting. So, go ahead and grab some inspiration!
What else makes up email marketing? The main focuses our platform focuses on can be explained below.
Email Campaign Design
The design of your email campaign is almost a marketing strategy all on its own. To grow brand awareness, you need a catchy or stable design that is consistent with your brand and message.
Making more than one marketing campaign at a time? The design should be similar. For example, does Sephora often have email marketing that doesn't showcase or begin with the image of their staple and recognizable white and black stripes? They never do. The branding is often clear throughout the email so audiences never forget whose email they are reading.
Email Marketing Strategy
What are some aspects of email marketing? Social media, imagery, timing, consistency of sending, etc. are all things to consider when planning your marketing strategy. The top questions your business should ask themselves in order to start an email marketing plan are:
- What type of audience are you targeting?
- Does this email campaign help people or give value?
- Can your business spend time doing A/B testing on a campaign?
- How many emails can you send? How many do you want to send?
- What ROI do you want or expect to see?
- How do you want your newsletter, or other content in your campaigns to look?
Small businesses in particular shouldn't be blind to the fact that adjusting the email marketing strategy in terms of how much you send and what time or days should be done from time to time to ensure the best possible results. The most important thing to keep in mind when advertising or sending campaigns is: what do you want out of the email?
Email Marketing List
Ah, the contact list. It shouldn't sound new, even to small businesses. You like get eyes on your profile one way or another (* cough * landing pages) and when people recognize and like your brand, you get contacts.
You email list can (and should) be segmented by how you'll want to send emails. Our software can help segment contact lists into as many different groups as your business needs. TruVISIBILITY suggests groups like "New Contacts" or even segmenting into different languages, such as "Spanish Speakers" and "English Speakers".
Segmenting can ensure that people going to see the value you promise online actually speak the language, find the value relevant to them, and can recognize and remember your brand.
How Email Marketing Campaigns Are Beneficial to Businesses
Sure, your business can get people to recognize your brand in any number of ways. And you can collect emails from people with landing pages and advertising and a number of different ways. Email marketing offers a different kind of help to businesses.
1) Save Valuable Dollars
Save money and some trees! By going digital, you’ll avoid printing, paper, envelopes, mail handling, and postage costs. Plus, with an email newsletter you can work with a designer to design a custom newsletter template you can use over and over again, and get your message out much faster than good old snail mail.
2) Increase Brand Recognition and Credibility
Get your brand image and name in front of your audience more often by including your logo, tagline, color palette, and brand graphics in the template design of your email communications. Seeing your brand elements in every issue will build brand awareness and recognition even if they old see it for a second.
Consistent, quality email marketing that is relevant, on-topic, and full of value will help you earn and grow the trust of your target market making it much easier for you to then promote and sell your products and services.
3) Connect with Your Target Audience
Email marketing helps you stay in touch with your audience on a regular basis, keeping you top of mind and at the tip of their tongue. This ensures that when your services, products, or programs are needed, they will buy from you or refer their friends, family, peers, and contacts to you.
4) Inform or Educate Audience
Your email newsletter is a great place to keep your clients up to date with what’s news in your business. By sharing what you’re working on and what’s going on, you can also keep them informed of the products, services, and programs you have available for them... and maybe entice them to hire you or buy from you again.
5) Attract New Opportunities
Publishing an email newsletter can help you generate new opportunities such as strategic partnerships, joint ventures, media interviews, speaking engagements, and more. All it takes in the right person to see your message at the right time, and the opportunity may not even come from a subscriber, but from someone your newsletter was forwarded to.
6) Create Other Streams of Income
You can use your email newsletter to recommend as an affiliate, products, programs, and services you have used yourself or truly believe in and earn commissions on any sales made from your referrals. Once your list grows quite large, you can also sell ad space in your newsletter, page, etc.
7) Expand Your Network
Email marketing helps you grow your network and build your list by allowing you to capture the email address through a website opt-in box. By entering their name and email, visitors give you permission to market to them by email and make offers to them by email. Remember to promote your email newsletter via social media, on your website, when speaking, in products, and even in your email signature.
8) Gain Followers
One of the downsides of social media marketing is that you don’t own your followers or subscribers. If your Facebook Business page is unexpectedly shut down, you’ll lose access to the following you’ve spent months or even years building.
That’s why it’s important to build an email list. You have a valuable list of customers and a way to contact those customers. Even if you switch email providers, you own the list of your contacts. These subscribers need the right kind of communication. This is why it's important to segment your email list, which we'll cover a little later in our article.
How to Maximize the Benefits of Your Marketing Emails
Get the most out of your email marketing by giving the people what they want. Unsure how to do it? Here are some tips to learn.
9) A/B Testing
What's the best way to make sure marketing with emails is the best way to build relationships with subscribers? With our Messaging app, every account gives users accessible data to their email campaigns. Oftentime, such as with Hubspot for example, the pricing will increase as you create more similar emails. TruVISIBILITY's service promises businesses thorough A/B testing with data included for free.
Some ideas to improve your A/B testing include:
- Use templates (see TruVISIBILITY's template options here)
- Change only the headers, subheaders, or both
- Have emails with different imagery
- Send emails with different advertising altogether (offer different discount, download, etc.)
- Change up imagery
- Send emails with different topics in the subject line
- Personalize the subject line (using a customer's name)
After analyzing which emails had a better conversion rate or click-through rate, you can find the right way to send the best email for your business. Perhaps all you need is to change the colors of your email campaigns... who knows! Just don't shy away from testing. This will help keep subscribers and improve future understanding of your emails.
10) Track Analytics
Finally, one of the most important aspects of email marketing is tracking your results. Tracking your analytics helps you figure out what resonates with your audience.
One of the first analytics you want to look at is your open rate. Typically, a good email open rate ranges from 15 to 25%.
If you have an open rate under 15%, it could indicate that your subject lines need revising. However, as your email list grows, your open rate will most likely fall.
The next analytic is your click-through rate.
There is a learning curve when you’re getting started with email marketing, but by following the tips in the article and adjusting your strategies as your list grows and you become more comfortable with email marketing (and email marketing software), you’ll find that the benefits are well worth it.
Did you know you can track social campaigns as well? Check out more on how to track landing page results and how they are connected to social channels and... your email marketing here.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
Now that you know what most people get out of email marketing, how do you get and keep customers? Let's start with how you begin email marketing.
Choosing Marketing Software
The first step is to get an email marketing service provider. When you’re evaluating service providers, consider the following:
- The provider’s deliverability rate
- Whether the provider offers templates and allows you to customize your emails
- Whether the software is intuitive and user-friendly
- Advanced features the service offers, like A/B testing, analytics and segmentation tools
- The level of customer support the company provides
Once you’ve settled on a service provider, sign up for a free trial (which most providers do). That way, you can test the software to ensure it’s the best fit for your needs.
Knowing What Email Marketing Tools to Use
Within your chosen marketing software, there will be features to help you build your email campaigns. Depending on what you want from your audience (such as call to action) you may need to use all of the tools available or very few. Let's go over the most common tools to focus on when creating emails for your contacts.
Email List Management
Business email marketing relies on managing a strong email marketing list. This is the contact list that every business sends email marketing campaigns to. But why manage your contacts?
Each audience member is different from the next, but a few are similar in regards to who you are targeting. Would you want to send an email marketing campaign to teens and pregnant mothers about a skateboard on sale? Not likely. A smart business would segment these types of campaigns to just their teen or young adult contact list.
In any case, it's important to start collecting your leads' information and segmenting them according to either age, gender, shopping interests, region, etc. Any information that can help you segment your list, the better your audience will respond to your different email campaigns targeted to them.
A/B Testing and Analytics
Think of email marketing testing as a case study. In what case will a reader want to learn more from your content? Will it be with more images? Will it be with a different header?
TruVISIBILITY makes it easy to send email marketing campaigns - even the same email marketing campaigns - in different ways if your small business wants to see which emails bring people back to your website.
What's even more is that the clear analytics our platform gives will get you a lot of insight on people - your audience. Once you understand your target people, you can make easy adjustments suggested by TruVISIBILITY's email app. Messaging can get you data on bounce rate, click through rate (CTR), and more. Even in the free account!
What Type of Business Can Email Marketing Help?
Every business owner knows, deep down, their subscribers are a huge part of their sales funnel. Converting leads into customers is vital to making a profit. In that sense, email marketing is for every business. Why? Because nurturing those leads and loyal customer relationships isn't just the right thing to do. It keeps your business relevant! Luckily, nowadays email marketing is for every budget!
Think email marketing won't help you if you have a cooking blog? Wrong. Do you think it just gets in the way of "real" marketing like social media? It only enhances social media! You can redirect people to any page with email marketing. It all depends on the advertising.
What other businesses can find solutions through email campaigns?
- Local contractors
- Real estate agencies
- Social media influencers
- Ecommerce brands
- Small brick and mortar stores
- Enterprises
- Artists (creators for Etsy, painters, etc.)
What kind of campaign can any type of business send?
- Updates on a new product or service
- Deals, discounts, coupons
- Newsletters
- Personalized birthday messages and welcome emails
- Automated thank you and shipping emails
It bears repeating. All of these features should be available and useful to any business with any budget. Yes, even automation can be free. Of course, our favorite feature is TruVISIBILITY's automation, which can be best described here.
How You Know Email Helps Your Industry
You need to give your audience a very good reason why they should join your email list. The best way to incentivize them is by creating a free opt-in.
The type of opt-in you create depends on your customers and their needs. For instance, if you target a B2B audience, you might create an in-depth white paper around a topic they’re interested in.
Once you’ve created your opt-in, you can set up a form on your website. Your audience will sign up with their email address and, from there, they can download your opt-in. You can also promote your opt-in on all of your social media channels to drive more email list sign-ups.
It's simple. If your content helps others or draws them to your business, then email marketing definitely will help bring in new leads and customers.
What's Next in Marketing with Emails?
TruVISIBILITY can help your company with all types of digital marketing - from chatbots to creating a website. Email marketing goes beyond just sending campaigns.
Focusing on the sales funnel is vital for your business, and email marketing can help by connecting it to chatbots, landing pages, forms on your social media pages, etc. Without this integration as an option, you'll find email marketing to be less fruitful.
Great email marketing that gets people to open and click in the campaigns boils down to great content. Need content ideas and want to see how TruVISIBILITY can help ease and quicken the process of creating emails?
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow