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What is Email Marketing, and How does it Work?

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Email marketing is a marketing tactic that has been in use for a long time. With advances in technology and the internet, marketers have been rediscovering email marketing and developing new ways to make this work for them. 

To understand what email marketing is, you need to understand the end goal of an email campaign. This blog will look at the significant benefits of email marketing and how it works.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of marketing communication where businesses send advertisements, updates, and promotions to their customers and subscribers via email. 

But why do you need to use email marketing?

It is an inexpensive marketing strategy and a powerful channel for direct interaction, which is one of the reasons it is often used. It is a way to stay in touch with potential customers and maintain a long-lasting relationship with customers.

Using email marketing, you can also keep your customers informed about new products and services and remind them about the current services.

What Kind of Content Should be in Emails?

Content is king. 

You must realize that people don’t read your emails word for word. Most of the time, people scan your emails for a few main reasons. They are looking for the main headlines and the main point. They are looking for the main reason why they should read your email. 

Is it a sale? Is it a contest? Is it a coupon? Is it a deal? They are looking for that main point. Once they find it, they will usually read it, but they will not read every single letter and number. That’s how you get people to read your emails — by giving them the main point and making sure they see it first.

So, the most important thing to remember when doing email marketing is that you should respect your audience. Your customers sign up for your emails because they want to hear from you. If you send irrelevant information, they will unsubscribe, and you will have to work hard to get them back.

What are the Benefits of Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a powerful tool to build relationships, communicate with your audience, and drive sales. It is rewarding to see your subscriber list grow and nurture your leads by sending out targeted email campaigns. 

There are many reasons why email marketing can help businesses succeed online, including:

  1. Bulk emailing for more traffic
  2. Send out quick updates about a new product or service
  3. Send discount codes or coupons through an email to increase sales
  4. Keep customers updated

Not only these reasons, but email marketing is also one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business. It works for ecommerce, affiliate marketers, and small businesses of all kinds. Now, let’s look at the top 8 benefits of email marketing.

8 Benefits of Email Marketing

1. Build Brand Credibility

Email marketing is an excellent way to get eyes on your brand and your content. It’s a cheap and effective way to send relevant content to people interested in it. This can help you build your brand credibility and build on your reputation.

You can use email marketing to reach out to previous customers, you can announce new products, or you can encourage people to share your content on social media. You can also send out just about anything, including funny content or sales pitches for your business.

2. Create Targeted And Personalized Content

As a part of email marketing, personalization is an essential technique for segmenting your target audience. You can create personalized content using this technique.

The process involves creating a list of prospects and then using many ways to collect and collate information about your prospects. Next, you send out messages to this audience containing content that is relevant to them. The best part is that you have complete control over the content sent out.

3. Boost Sales

Email marketing is a powerful tool for customer acquisition and retention. It helps companies create relationships with their customers, generate leads, and nurture prospects into sales.

Email marketing is the most effective channel for generating leads. Almost 80% of marketers use email to generate leads and increase sales. If you are not using email marketing yet, you miss out on a significant opportunity to boost your business growth.

4. Optimize Time And Budget

Email marketing is a great way to optimize your time and budget, but only if you know what you’re doing. You need to have a plan in place, or your email marketing efforts will be wasted.

Because it is one of the best methods that can be used to bring your business to a higher level, it is a much-relied upon tool by organizations around the world. It is less expensive than traditional media and proves to be a more effective medium, making it an obvious choice.

5. Generate Traffic To Site

Today, email marketing is even used to generate traffic to a site. Businesses use email marketing to contact customers and inform them about specials or new products that they may be interested in.

How? Businesses own the database, and they can reach out to people who have already expressed an interest in their product or service. So, the objective of email marketing is to increase visibility by delivering a message to the inboxes of those people.

The best time to send an email is late evening or early morning, when people are most likely to have time to read it. And don’t forget that you may need to include a link at the end of your email that will take your audience back to your website where they can learn more information.

Learn more about The best time to send an email!

6. Collect Feedback And Surveys

The purpose of email marketing is to generate revenue, build a database of customers and collect feedback.

Because it’s the only digital communication that most people check every single day. But that doesn’t mean you should just send out sales pitches and special offers in your email newsletters.

Instead, use your email newsletter to collect feedback and surveys from your customers. It will give you insight into what they like, don’t like, and why they make their purchasing decisions. And with this information, you can improve your sales process and create products that better serve their needs.

7. Strengthen Customer Relationships

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to strengthen relationships with your customers and boost revenue.

Virtually every business owner uses email marketing, but few can do it well. Some marketers ignore their email lists, while others send irrelevant information. And still, others use it just for sales and promotions.

With the right strategy, email marketing can be more than an afterthought. It can build trust with your customers and help you earn their loyalty.

8. Establish Authority

Email marketing is much more than just sending out emails. The fact is that email marketing is huge for every business in this day and age. Your business can make a lasting impression on your customers by sending them emails with timely offers and exciting content. 

Email marketing is a very active form of marketing that requires constant monitoring and adjustments. Companies of all sizes use email marketing to increase sales, generate more leads, and establish their brand authority.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience and build trust with them. 

We will cover how email marketing works, from choosing your email marketing software to creating effective emails, in addition to automated emails.

1. Choose your email marketing software

There are tons of email marketing software out there for you to choose from. But how do you select the right one that best fits your needs?

The most important thing to remember is that email marketing software isn’t a do-it-all tool. You need to know what each application does best and find the right fit for your business and budget.

For instance, BayEngage is an excellent solution if you have a small business. It has a low cost of entry and offers features for companies of all sizes. BayEngage is easy to use, it’s simple to set up, and it comes with plenty of features. It’s completely free for small businesses to start their email marketing journey. 

Explore our Top 20 Email Marketing Software For 2021!

2. Build your email list

The most crucial part of an email list strategy is to build an opt-in that is simple, direct, and has a clear value proposition. The more people join your list, the more likely they will trust you. 

To build a mailing list, you first need to ask for it. And a lead magnet is one of the best ways to encourage your audience to subscribe.

A lead magnet is a piece of content that you give away in exchange for an email address, and it serves as a way to create a relationship with your audience immediately. 

Lead magnets can be blog posts, videos, PDFs, or even ebooks related to your business focus.

Using the right lead magnet strategy, you can grow your email list as fast as possible.

3. Define your goal for your email marketing campaign

When planning a campaign, it’s essential to set goals to track and measure the success of your campaign.

The three most important things to consider in the goal-setting process are: 

  1. Identify the metrics that matter most to you
  2. Understand how each campaign activity contributes to your overall goal
  3. Assess if you have the appropriate activities to reach your goal.

So, before you design a campaign that will achieve your specific goals, define what success looks like for your email marketing campaign.

4. Build your responsive email 

An email is a lot more effective than social media, and it has a higher engagement rate. But not all email marketing campaigns are created equally.

Some businesses still have fixed width images in their emails. This can make your email look horrible on mobile devices. Your conversions will drop when you send out an email designed for desktop viewers but look terrible on mobile devices.

Responsive design is an essential part of any digital marketing campaign, regardless of whether you use email or social media. Mobile-ready

However, you need a responsive email template if you want your message to be read. You can get your hands on the highest quality responsive email templates from BayEngage. They offer a variety of designs for different business niches and purposes.

5. Optimize it for open, clicks, and conversions

If you’re sending marketing emails to your customers, these emails must be designed for maximum impact. You only have a few seconds to grab your customer’s attention and convince them to read the email, let alone click-through or convert.

The subject line is an essential part of an email. It needs to be clear, concise, and relevant for people to see it. You also need a strong call-to-action message that tells subscribers what you want them to do.

So ensure that you optimize your email subject lines, content, calls-to-action, and personalization elements before sending them.

6. A/B test your emails

A/B testing is a simple process to increase conversions and sales on your email list. When you A/B test, you’re sending two different versions of an email to your list and then measuring which one performs better.

Moreover, A/B testing is essential in optimizing your emails, resulting in more sales, conversions, and ultimately more money for your business.

Most businesses don’t even bother A/B testing their email content because they think it’s hard. So, when you’re ready to get started on your A/B tests, you can consider tools like BayEngage.

BayEngage is an excellent email marketing tool for more serious marketers looking to grow their list. It comes with all the tools you need to run successful email campaigns and includes easy-to-use interfaces for creating, A/B testing, and sending emails.

7. Monitor your campaigns

Monitoring email campaigns is essential because you want to see what people are responding to and not. For example, you might be receiving a lot of clicks on a link that is not converting well or getting any new subscribers. Monitoring can help you figure out if the issue is with the content or an error in the code.

Monitoring can also allow you to see how many people view your email campaign, which gives you how much exposure your campaign is getting. Moreover, It’s essential to have a goal for this number to know when it has been reached. 

Best practices for email marketing

Email marketing is a necessity for any business – big or small. But with so much going on in your day-to-day work schedule, it’s easy to get off track and lose the momentum you’ve built.

Here are the best practices for email marketing:

1. Use double opt-in

Double opt-in means subscribers have to confirm their subscription by clicking on a confirmation link sent to their email address. 

This is critical to the security of your email list because it means that you don’t have any subscribers who accidentally subscribed or subscribed without meaning to. The importance of double opt-in is that it reduces the number of fake accounts and increases the engagement rate.

Ensure you have permission from subscribers to send them emails. If they didn’t sign up themselves, they might not be interested in getting your emails. You also must remember that email addresses are public information, and people can see when someone subscribes to your list and unsubscribes as well.

2. Segmentation

Segmentation is critical in email marketing. It allows you to tailor your content for specific groups of people. Without segmentation, you’re just blasting out the same information to all of your contacts, without regard for who they are and what they might be interested in.

Targeted leads can be more helpful because they’re more likely to buy from you. They’re also easier to sell because they have a higher level of interest in what you’re offering.

3. Personalization

Everyone knows that relevance is vital in email marketing. But what does it mean to be relevant? It means that you’re communicating with your audience based on their preferences and interests. 

The best way to do this is by sending personalized emails, which is why more and more businesses are investing in email personalization services to improve open rates.

Personalized emails are more engaging. Customers value this attention, and, in turn, they feel more connected with your brand, which can lead to increased sales. Personalized email marketing campaigns have also been proven to increase revenue.

4. Mobile optimization 

Email marketing is increasingly becoming a mobile-friendly medium. As the number of mobile users increases rapidly, this leads to an increase in the number of emails opened on mobiles every year.

This is evident that more email recipients check their emails on their mobiles. So, email marketers need to optimize their email campaigns to make them mobile-friendly.

The most crucial aspect of mobile optimization is that it should be done in a way that doesn’t compromise the quality of the campaign. To do this, you need to use a responsive design. Responsive design allows you to create an email template that looks great on all devices without creating separate versions for each device.

5. Creating an engaging email design

An engaging email design is the first step in crafting a successful email campaign. Creating an email design that starts a conversation, engages your readers, and converts them into paying customers is crucial.

With the arrival of email marketing services, it is easy to send emails to your subscribers. However, building an engaging email design might be a bit challenging. You need to make sure that your content is presented in the right way.

It is recommended that you test different designs before sending a newsletter out to your audience. This way, you will figure out which design works best for your audience and the types of content they enjoy reading.

6. Clear your list regularly

An email list is a valuable asset and needs regular maintenance. Otherwise, it becomes useless. If you want to create an email marketing strategy that works, you must remove dead emails and unsubscribes from your list. 

Ensure that you remove inactive subscribers from your email database every year. Not only is it essential for maintaining a quality list, but it will also help you avoid any potential spam complaints from ISPs.

If you need to find out how many of your subscribers are active, you can do this by sending them a personalized message once a month. If five or fewer of your subscribers open the email, then you should consider cleaning up your database.

7. A/B test your subject line

A/B testing your subject line is crucial because it allows you to be more specific with what you are trying to sell. A/B testing can be used to create the best-selling subject line for your campaign.

The subject line can convey the tone of your email and make it more interesting. The subject line is the first thing most people will see, so it needs to grab their attention to open your email. A/B testing helps you understand your audience by putting yourself in your customer’s mind.

However, you can do A/B testing in two stages. First, you should test the subject line to see which one converts better. Then you should test the body copy to find out which one gets better click rates.

8. Set up automated email

Automating email marketing is essential to any business’s success. Even though you may think it’s an easy feat, several different steps to get started on the right foot, which can be overwhelming for a new business owner.

So, instead of automating your emails immediately, consider starting with a drip campaign.

A drip campaign is a series of automated emails that send out in a particular order and time frame so that you can guide your email subscribers through your sales funnel and keep them engaged with your brand.

And, it is a great way to keep your customers engaged through email. It makes the customer feel that you care about them, and it is time-saving for the business owner.

Wrapping Up!

Email marketing is a way to reach potential leads and customers through their inboxes. There are a lot of benefits to email marketing, and you can likely find the solution you need.

This article will help you get started with this powerful tool. Once you’ve read it, don’t forget to sign up for the 14-day free trial with BayEngage!

Janani

Janani

Janani H is a Content Marketer at TargetBay, an Ecommerce Marketing Cloud used by thousands of online stores across the globe. She enjoys writing about the power of emails in marketing, and when she isn't writing, she can be found riding the Metro and trying out new local foods.

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