What is email marketing in digital marketing?
Email marketing: A complete beginners guide
Email marketing is a type of digital marketing that involves sending commercial or promotional messages to a group of people via email. The goal of email marketing is to build relationships with customers or potential customers, promote brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales.
Email marketing, if used correctly and following certain rules, can bring incredible results in the marketing world to promote your product or services online. In fact, it is an essential marketing tool that every marketer needs to master for effective results.
Email marketing can take many forms, including newsletters, promotional emails, event invitations, and transactional emails. These emails can be sent to a variety of audiences, including current customers, leads, and subscribers who have opted in to receive messages from the business.
Effective email marketing often involves segmenting email lists based on factors such as demographics, interests, and past behaviour. This allows businesses to send more targeted and personalized messages to their subscribers.
Email marketing platforms often provide tools for businesses to design and send emails, track their performance, and automate certain aspects of the process. Of course, this makes it easier for businesses to reach their audience with relevant and engaging content while also saving time and effort.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
Benefits of email marketing
It is beyond doubt that email marketing offers many benefits to businesses. A few are listed below:
1. Cost-effective
Email marketing is generally one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. The cost of sending an email is relatively low, and it can reach a large number of people at once.
2. Targeted
Email marketing allows businessmen to target their messages to specific groups of people. By segmenting their email lists based on factors such as demographics, interests, and past behaviour, businesses can send more relevant messages to their subscribers.
3. Measurable
Email marketing is highly measurable, allowing businesses to track open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Hence, this enables businesses to optimize their email campaigns over time and improve their performance.
4. Personalized
Email marketing allows businesses to personalize their messages based on subscriber data. By including personalized content and offers, businesses can increase engagement and build stronger relationships with their subscribers.
5. Increases customer loyalty
Email marketing can help businesses build stronger relationships with their subscribers by providing valuable content and offers.
6. Automation: Email marketing platforms often include automation features that allow businesses to send targeted messages at specific times, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and birthday offers. This saves time and effort for businesses while still providing a personalized experience for subscribers.
Conclusively, email marketing is a potent instrument for companies seeking to connect with and interact with their audience in a focused, affordable, and quantifiable manner.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
E-mail capture Page, landing page or squeeze page
An e-mail capturing page also called a landing page or a squeeze page is used by all successful Internet marketers. Its objective is to capture visitors’ names and e-mail addresses while giving away some free products or newsletters.
It is a beautifully designed small page that appears on the desktop in front of the website when a page loads in a browser. After capturing visitors’ names & e-mail addresses, Internet marketers give out some quality free products, a discount code, a webinar registration or newsletters on a specific chapter.
Remember products or newsletter articles should be quality ones to make the visitors stay subscribed to your opt-in e-mail list. This way you may follow your subscribers, later on, to sell your products through your URL or affiliate links.
Lead generation process
Email leads are a group of individuals or businesses who have provided their email addresses to a company or organization, either voluntarily or through some form of lead generation strategy.
These email addresses can be collected through various means such as website sign-ups, opt-in forms, social media lead-generation campaigns, or purchased email lists.
Actually, email leads are used for email marketing campaigns to promote products or services, build brand awareness, and generate sales.
Companies may also use email leads to nurture leads through targeted email campaigns and build relationships with potential customers.
Do people usually think if the free product is such a useful gift what would be the paid product or service? The answer is “yes.”
They start believing in you and make purchases from you. The system works like that. So, please take note.
Email-capturing pages find their use in email marketing campaigns to help businessmen grow their email lists. Also, this helps them in building relationships with their subscribers. By capturing the email addresses of interested visitors, businessmen can continue to communicate with these potential customers via email and promote their products or services over time.
An Autoresponder set-and-forget technology sends follow-up messages automatically. You fix the number of days between the e-mails and the system works on its own without doing anything further.
To be effective, email-capturing pages usually have a simple and visually appealing design. Also, it have a clear and compelling headline, persuasive copy, a prominent call-to-action (CTA), and a form for visitors to enter their contact information. Additionally, email-capturing pages may include social proof elements, such as customer testimonials or trust badges, to increase visitors’ confidence in the offer.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
How to write an e-mail capture page for better conversions?
Most people do not know how to write an effective e-mail capturing page. They write it without any winning strategy and hence few or none subscribe to it.
Some secrets to making e-mail capturing page work better and get maximum subscribers are listed as:-
1. Use bold and attention-grabbing headlines. The “question headline”, “how headline”, “numbered headline” and “testimonial headline” works great. Provide your photograph in the e-mail capturing page & add your signature at the bottom of the page. Undoubtedly, by adding your photo and signature you gain in your visitor’s trust and he/she starts believing in you.
2. Use black text or a white layout on your page. This works well. Keep the colour of the landing page designs the same as that of your website. Put the contents of your e-mail capturing page inside a table and align it centrally.
3. Give out some quality products for free.
4. Include some important emotional words in the text of your page such as outrageous or technically proved. This would make your visitors give out their name and e-mail instantly to receive what you have to offer for free.
Use some common sense to make eager your visitor get the free product. Tell the visitor what the benefits are for him in the free product or newsletter. Use bullets to list the benefits of the product or service.
5. Include at the bottom of the e-mail capturing page that you will never sell the visitor’s name and e-mail for any marketing purpose to any third party or spammers. And, in actual practice, you should never do it. Be honest with your subscribers to win over their hearts and build credibility which is a must for any online business to achieve long-term income success.
6. Be specific
Be specific while writing your e-mail capturing page about the free quality product or newsletter you give out upon joining i.e., when a visitor gives away his name and e-mail address. You need to be highly focused in your approach.
7. Include the picture of the free product on your squeeze page.
8. Test what will work for you a short squeeze page or a long one and continue on that. Be focused, dedicated, honest and clear in your approach.
9. Design your squeeze page well with good graphics. In case, you can not yourself, put an expert on the job.
10. When a visitor subscribes to your e-mail list, take them to a one-time offer web page to sell something hot to them (usually more quality products for less price). Also, include a “No thanks link” at the bottom of the web page to take them to a download page. Accordingly, this would enable them to get their free product as promised in the e-mail capturing page, if they are not interested in buying at that time from you.
By taking them to one time offer web page before the free product web page, chances are that they may buy from you. The one-time offer web page mentions it clearly that you are not going to see this page again if you click the “No thanks link” to get your free product. This creates some urgency and temptation in the visitors and chances are you will generate an online sale.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
How to write effective emails that work round the clock: Secrets of email marketing
Educate yourself on the following few secrets of email marketing before you market your message to the masses to achieve the desired results. If you understand these secrets, you will get more people to read your emails and more people to respond to your email messages.
1. Send your message to the target market that has expressed interest in it. Keep messaging the people who have subscribed willingly to your newsletter, free e-books, etc. Avoid spamming, which is sending your marketing messages to those who have not requested it or, in other words, have not granted you permission for it. Do not thrust your message upon unwilling people even if you know their email ID. You will be more harm than good in the process, and you will be penalised for spamming.
2. Always keep an unsubscribe/change address link at the end of every e-mail you send using an autoresponder. Surely, this will make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe from your newsletter or change their email ID at any time. Make everything possible with a single click.
3. Set up your autoresponder, keeping a gap of days between the messages. Some marketers get the best results by messaging their subscribers daily, and some after five days. Nothing is fixed as such. Try to do your research to see what works and focus on that. A gap of 1 day is found to be ideal.
Your first message should go out immediately upon confirmation of e-mail.
Second, third, and fourth mail must go on the second, third, and fourth days, respectively, because the prospect is hot and might be looking for the information or the product. Provide a quality solution to generate a sale.
Further follow-up messages should be more than a day apart. Always keep one thing in mind, If you provide quality and informative messages, you will certainly generate sales.
Also when someone buys from you, do ask him what was that made him buy. Note the answer and keep it working for you.
Write each message on a different aspect or feature of your product or service, using a different subject line. Do not repeat the follow-up messages or else your prospect may unsubscribe. Focus your follow-up emails on the same product or offer and not on multiple products or services. Do not confuse your subscriber.
Provide a risk-free, unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee to your prospects, and do remind them about it in the follow-up messages. Also, mention real testimonials regarding your product in the follow-ups.
Include FAQs in the last follow-up to make your prospect read all the possible queries about your product. If a prospect asks a question that is not in the FAQ, answer it satisfactorily and include it in the FAQ.
4. Write quality content in your messages.
Try to educate people about what you offer for free. Do not attempt to sell directly to your subscribers. No one is bothering about you or your sales. People are looking for their own benefits, not your business.
Build your credibility and gain their trust by offering some quality free services. This may include a newsletter or free e-books, or something else you feel will help the people.
Make them read your message and act upon it by keeping your link at the end of every e-mail. If you help your subscribers in any way, chances are that they will buy from you.
So, first build a relationship with your subscribers, win their hearts, and then turn them into regular customers.
In the first email, introduce yourself and let your subscribers know what they will receive from you. Put emphasis on your product or service being unique, crucial, and the best solution to their problems.
Highlight benefits
In the next few e-mails, besides giving some important information to the subscribers, highlight the benefits of your product or services using bullets.
In the next few follow-ups, again stress your product or service and highlight the benefits the subscribers will be getting.
Create some urgency in your next few emails. You can add one more bonus or offer some discounts.
In the last couple of your messages, ask your subscribers to let you know why they have not ordered. Stress them out to reply back and come up with the reasons for not buying.
This strategy will tell you what the main reason is that your subscribers have not bought from you. This information may be used to change your sales copy, adjust the product price, or come up with something else for an overall improvement of your business, if not money this time.
Never give up and try again. Follow the subscribers with an alternate solution or more good content and information to help them succeed in the long run.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
5. Write attention-grabbing headlines for your outgoing messages.
Write something that works like a magnet but is true. Do not mislead or deceive your customers.
Use the subscriber’s first name in the subject line. Test which subject line will work better, and work on others to produce the same results.
6. Keep only 9–10 words per line. Write short paragraphs, 2-3 sentences long. Your sentences must also be short and to the point. Try to keep 1–5 lines per paragraph. Keep your overall message confined to 5–10 paragraphs until it is necessary to elaborate on it.
Your entire ad copy should be targeted, attention-grabbing, highly focused, and interesting.
If it is necessary to deliver long and descriptive information to your subscriber, do not provide it in the email message directly. Instead, provide a downloadable link to the information (a PDF document) in your message.
This has two benefits
Firstly, it makes it less likely that a poorly worded message will be deleted by the spam filters. Secondly, downloadable e-mails are stored on PCs and have a longer life than simple e-mail messages that are deleted soon. This concept has been tested and works great at bringing extremely effective results.
Accordingly, if you have to send a course or lessons on a particular topic to your subscribers, make a downloadable link in PDF format separately for each lesson and send it to them. Do not send the whole lesson or course in the message. Many Internet marketers are not aware of this strategy. So take advantage of this, stay unique in the crowd, and beat your competition.
More effective than this is to provide your website link in the e-mail, which should lead to a downloadable PDF document of your newsletter lesson or course.
Here, the secret is to get more exposure to your website’s product or service. On this site page, you may put your other products, etc., or show a one-time offer for one or more (in number) before your subscribers download the document, lesson, or course in PDF format.
Make the downloadable links for each lesson altogether different. For example, if you are sending a four-day course, your downloadable pages should not look identical to these:
http://www.yourdomain.com/part-1.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/part-2.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/part-3.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/part-4.html
When your first lesson arrives, it is easy to expect the downloadable link to other lessons, and all lessons can be downloaded ahead of time.
Use keyphrases wisely while naming the files
Also, choose wisely the keyphrase file names of your downloadable messages. Do not choose lesson 1. pdf. Instead, keep it like this: 5 ways to get instant traffic.pdf The file name should immediately reveal what is inside.
Following this strategy, it is easy to recognise the file once it is stored on the hard drive of the PC.
7. Double-check your spelling and grammar in the body contents. Rectify the faults, if any.
8. Testing is important
Before sending out the messages to subscribers, test all the e-mails saved in the autoresponders. Send all the messages to your inbox to see how they are looking and what improvements, if any, are needed.
9. Send your e-mails more during holidays and festivals when people spend more time on the internet and are willing to make purchases.
10. Keep a separate support form on your website to exactly track what your subscribers want to know from you and provide quality solutions. Include the support link in every e-mail that your autoresponder sends out on your behalf.
11. Know and follow all the rules and regulations that govern email marketing.
12. Do not underestimate the potential of any email IDs in the subscription list. Email the list regularly and consistently to make new sales. Do not drop your prospect halfway. About 14 e-mails are required to warm up your subscriber enough to make him believe you and buy from you. Ask questions in your later messages.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
13.Build your own e-mail list
Build your own e-mail list and never buy any so-called opt-in e-mail list available on the Internet. You may be accused of spamming, if you market your product to people who have not requested it. Sellers called the email list an opt-in list, they have harvested online using various e-mail harvesting tools, but I never believed them. They often lie and may put you in trouble.
14. Watch closely which emails are bringing in the desired results and focus more on those when selling your product or services.
15. Your newsletter should be related to your product or services as much as possible. If you sell mobile phones and your newsletter is about ready-made garments, do you think your subscribers will buy garments from you when they are interested in knowing about mobile phones?
Your newsletter should be about what to do, and your product should be about how to do it. This concept works great.
16. Use your name in e-mails you send
Use your name in the e-mail ID rather than making it like [email protected]. In fact, you must use your actual name in place of the mailer. People trust a name more than a robot sending them a message.
17. Test all the links in your e-mail campaign and make sure every link is working, or else your efforts in e-mail marketing will go to waste.
18. Use personalization in your e-mail marketing campaign by including the first name of the subscriber at the beginning of the message, like Hello, Mr John. Many autoresponders have this automatic feature of sending the same message to hundreds or thousands of recipients while including the name of each recipient at the beginning of the message. This works great if you write the message for one person and not for a group.
19. Send your newsletter at least once a month to remind people about you and to avoid mass unsubscriptions.
20. When people click the unsubscribe link in your newsletter, include a comments box to know why they decided to unsubscribe. This will help you decrease the frequency of unsubscriptions, thereby keeping people on the list and pulling money out of them.
21. Reply to all the e-mails you get from your subscribers as a result of sending your newsletter, at the most, within 24 hours.
22. Put the newsletter sign-up box on every page of your website.
23. Offer a free bonus with your newsletter signup. This strategy brings in the most traffic and subscribers. But your bonus should be a quality one and related to your newsletter.
24. If possible, use quality sound in your e-mails and provide an easy way to turn them off.
25. People subscribe to your newsletter, and you send out the messages. So you are not spamming. But still, you may be accused of spamming because your ISP may not know about your activities. So inform your ISP that you are carrying out e-mail marketing.
26. Do not use signs like $ in your e-mails. Spammers often use such symbols and are made to go to the trash folder immediately.
27. Do not use exclamation marks in your e-mails.
28. Keep your e-mails in text format, not HTML.
29. Encourage your readers to print out the email to make it 100% possible that your prospects will read the message. Direct them to print the message at the beginning of the message.
30. If you are going to send a four-day course, do remind your subscribers about the previous lesson and put a downloadable link in your next lesson.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
Effective email marketing campaign
To create an effective email marketing campaign, it is important to have a clear understanding of your target audience. Also, you should comprehend the message you want to convey, to get the desired outcome of the campaign. A well-designed email with a clear call-to-action (CTA) can increase engagement and conversions.
The goal of an email marketing campaign is to build relationships with customers, promote products or services, and ultimately generate sales or leads.
Furthermore, comply with anti-spam laws and regulations, such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.
Is email marketing still effective in 2023?
Yes, email marketing is still a highly effective marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. In fact, email marketing continues to be one of the most cost-effective ways to reach and engage with customers.
According to recent studies, email marketing has an average ROI (return on investment) of $42 for every $1 spent. This makes it one of the most lucrative marketing channels available. Additionally, email marketing allows businesses to target specific segments of their audience with personalized and relevant content. This can help increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
What decides effectiveness of email marketing?
However, like any marketing strategy, the effectiveness of email marketing depends on several factors, including the quality of the email list, the relevance and quality of the content, the timing and frequency of emails, and the overall design and messaging of the emails.
To maximize the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, businesses should focus on building a high-quality email list, segmenting their audience, and providing valuable and engaging content that resonates with their target customers. Additionally, they should continually monitor and analyze the performance of their email campaigns to identify areas for improvement and optimize their strategies over time.
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a web-based internet marketing tool that sends away pre-written messages (E-mails) automatically. These messages go on your behalf at the interval fixed by you to the subscribers who gave away their e-mail addresses on the e-mail capturing page.
An autoresponder is used by all successful Internet marketers to make their online business run on autopilot without any extra hard work on their part.
The only work is to write all the e-mails in advance and set a time interval between the messages going out. It works 24 hours for you on its own. It is a 100% automatic message-sending and sales-generating online mechanism working 24 hours for you.
The strategy, here, is writing articles on a particular topic keeping your main URL or an affiliate link at the end of the article. This would remind your subscribers to buy a related product from the link provided.
It has been seen that about 14 e-mails are required to warm up your subscriber through the follow-up messages before he buys from you.
Also, it has been found that one in every three messages goes to the bulk folder and is not read out. This means you have to send 21 messages through your autoresponder to make a sale from your subscriber.
Personalizing e-mail messages
It has been found that personalizing an e-mail message with the subscriber’s name increases the conversion rate dramatically. This is also possible using an autoresponder.
Autoresponders are both free and paid. Paid versions are naturally better and give you a professional look. In free versions, there are some limitations and every time a message goes out, a text link (an ad) is placed on top of the e-mail advertising their business.
I suggest you start with a free autoresponder and once you make some money you can get a paid subscription.
Responsebot http://www.mailerlite.com is the best free autoresponder. You may use it for free without upgrading.
Types of autoresponders
There are several free & paid versions but I prefer the following based on my experience.
Free autoresponders
Paid autoresponders
http://www.constantcontact.com
There are also script-based autoresponders that you can easily install on your website for which there is no monthly fee and a one-time fee only. Here it goes:-
What is email marketing in digital marketing?
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