Lots of people think that e-mail marketing is not very effective today. And those people are wrong. E-mail marketing can give you great benefits if you use it right. There are some rules you should always follow when creating some e-mail marketing campaign. Want to know which rules are that? Keep reading to find out.
First, let’s say something about e-mail marketing. It is, like the name says, a type of marketing that uses e-mails to communicate with customers. Those can be a different types of e-mail marketing. They can send some promotions with them to get new customers or to give customers some offers to make them buy product or service. Other type of e-mail is one that will try to increase trust with customers and create or improve relationship with them. You can also include some advertisements from other people in your e-mails or pay someone to include your message into their e-mail newsletter. As you can see, I divided types of e-mail marketing into three different categories.
- Direct e-mail
Direct e-mails are simple messages that will get customers to do some action. Direct e-mails mostly offer some promotions and special messages. The good thing about direct e-mails is that you can buy the list of e-mail addresses and then target people by location, their interests or similar stuff.
- Loyalty e-mails
These e-mails are not sent to give some promotion or special offer and make people do some action. Instead of that, the main goal of this e-mail should be to improve your relationship with customers. Give them some information that will create some interest with them or tech them something useful.
- Advertising e-mails
You don’t have to go through all the trouble of creating your own newsletter to reach some people over e-mail. You can pay some company to include your own advertisement to their newsletter. Very simple, and often very effective.
Is e-mail marketing dead?
The answer to this question would be NO. You could figure that out from some things I mentioned above. But why is it still alive? What can you get from creating some e-mail campaign? Making a good and successful e-mail campaign can get you large number of different benefits that will surely expand your business and give you more profit. Some of the biggest advantages of e-mail marketing are:
- Audience
Do you know how many people use e-mail today? Well, almost everyone who uses internet, especially people who use it for business. In 2013 number of e-mail accounts was about 4 billion, compared to 1 billion users on Facebook. That number can sound weird at first but think about it. 90% of websites ask you to enter e-mail address when you are registering. Another good thing is that people can easily create e-mail account and answer mails.
- Conversions
Conversions are what you want with every marketing campaign. The same thing counts with e-mail too. For example, CTR (click-through rate) with a single tweet on Twitter is only about 0.5%. And for e-mail campaign, an average CTR is about 3%. This number means that about 3% of recipients will do some action when they receive your newsletter. That doesn’t seem much, but in marketing it is.
- ROI
Part that follows conversion is ROI (return on investment). If you invest some money into e-mail campaign you obviously expect to get that money back. The average percentage of ROI for business is about 3.8%. Of course, ROI will largely depend on how you design and send that e-mails.
- Brand
If you design a perfect newsletter and include your logo and messages in it then it will help you to increase the awareness of your brand and product.
- Customization and statistics
You can easily track everything about e-mails you send. Track views, clicks, actions, check which country made more clicks and which country is not bringing you much effect and much more. And you can easily customize the newsletter you design and make it better every time you send it.
You could notice that lots of benefits depend on how you design the newsletter. There are lots of other reasons why design of newsletter is very important. To inform yourself more about it and the design itself check my article – “Why is good design of newsletter so important?”
What are segmented mails?
To learn about segmented mails you have to know what segmentation is. Segmentation can be defined as process of dividing some list into more groups. In e-mail marketing it means sending targeted newsletter to different groups of people. You can figure out the main benefits of segmented e-mail list. Here are some main benefits of segmented mails and some tips about using them.
- Targeting new people to buy your products. If you send the same newsletter to everyone then you could end up offering some product or service to people who already bought it. That could lead to them unsubscribing from your newsletter and losing trust in you.
- Targeting buyers and teach them more about your product. You probably don’t want to send tutorials about using your product and extra items for it to people who didn’t buy that product. That’s why you can use segmented e-mails to target only the people who already bought it.
- Segmented e-mails are more effective than the non-segmented ones.
- If you send just one newsletter for more products then some people could be interested in just one of those products and could unsubscribe from your newsletter because they don’t want to get information about other ones. You can avoid that problems with segmented e-mails.
- You are able to send people mails just based on their location. For example, if you are holding some presentation in New York then you probably don’t want to inform people in China about that, the surely won’t come. Use a list segmentation to send that newsletter only to people in New York and around. You also shouldn’t send newsletter about cold and refreshing drinks to locations where is currently winter. Use a list segmentation and send information about cold drinks to areas where the temperature is high and warm drinks to areas where the temperature is low.
- The important thing you must remember is that you can put someone into more than just one list. Don’t send them 10 e-mails at a time, but if they fit into two categories then place them there.
So, now you understand what e-mail segmentation is? Good, I hope you will be using it in your next e-mail marketing campaign.
If you need more convincing about that part I suggest reading the results of a research done by MailChimp where they compared results of segmented and non-segmented campaigns.
E-mail marketing tips
On to the part where you will learn everything about creating a successful e-mail marketing campaign. Okay, you won’t exactly learn how to create everything about it but you will be able to include these tips into the next campaign you create or to improve the one you already have.
- Subscription – if you don’t have any plans to buy some e-mail list then the only way to get people for your newsletter is to make them subscribe. You have to create a well-designed signup form and place it on some visible spot. Some pages put it into popup window which shows up when someone enters the page. Place some attractive option for everyone who signs up (a chance to win something, free gift, special promotion and similar stuff) and don’t make that form too long.
- Welcome! – when someone signs up they should get an e-mail that is welcoming them to your network. You can even send them some special offers or promotions as a thank you for subscribing to the list.
- Design – if you read my article about the importance of design then you understand why it has to be good and must match the look of your company and brand. There are lots of finished templates for newsletter and you can use them and simply customize them to fit your needs and your company. Or pay a professional to design a newsletter that will be perfect for your brand.
- Easy to read – don’t just write a bunch of text, place some images and think that everyone will read it. Try to divide text into paragraphs, use bullets and include tittles and subtitles because it will look much more attractive and will be easier to read.
- Testing – test your e-mail newsletter on different devices and clients. Your e-mail can look a lot different on other clients and it is important to fix everything before you start with the campaign. Testing phase includes making your campaign mobile friendly because lots of people read e-mails with different mobile devices and your newsletter must look good on them too.
- Spam – everyone hates spam and if you don’t include something useful into your newsletter then it’s over. Don’t place yourself into spam mail.
- Benefits – if you are not completely sure if your e-mail is recognized as a spam then include some benefits into it. Always make sure that people will get something useful from your e-mail. That can be some reward, useful advice, a compliment and similar.
- Questions – when creating some newsletter try to ask your subscribers some questions. It will make them feel important and valuable.
- Short and simple – long e-mails are boring. Keep them short and try to put everything important into small amount of text.
- Personality and writing style – always be personal. Use word “you” a lot, don’t use same greeting and expression in every mail and just be a human. Remember that you are communicating so try to write just like you would talk with customers.
To be honest, there are really lots of tips about e-mail marketing and it would simply take too much time for you to read (and for me to write) about everything so I’ll just end this here. Maybe I could write about every e-mail marketing rule and advice in some other article. Until then, good luck.
