Email marketing plays a pivotal role in modern marketing strategies owing to its cost-effectiveness, wide reach, and personalized communication capabilities. Through segmentation and automation, marketers can deliver targeted messages at scale while measuring performance metrics for optimization. Email campaigns facilitate ongoing customer engagement, driving sales and nurturing relationships over time.
Integration with other marketing channels and mobile optimization further enhance its effectiveness. Compliance with regulatory standards ensures trust and legal adherence. Overall, email marketing remains a cornerstone of successful marketing tactics, offering unparalleled opportunities for direct and impactful communication with audiences.
It’s old, but it is still a thing for a very good reason!
Why do we use it?
Start from Goals: As always, we need to start from our goals and overarching strategy.
Building an Email List: Marketers collect email addresses through various means, such as website sign-up forms, social media, events, or lead magnets (e.g., free downloads, discounts).
Segmentation: The collected email addresses are segmented based on factors like demographics, behaviors, purchase history, or interests. This segmentation allows for targeted and personalized messaging.
Creating Email Content: Marketers craft engaging and relevant content for their email campaigns, including text, images, and links. The content may include newsletters, promotional offers, product updates, or educational resources.
Designing Email Templates: Email templates are designed to ensure consistency in branding and layout across different campaigns. Templates can be customized to match the brand’s visual identity and optimized for mobile responsiveness.
Sending Emails: Using an email marketing platform or software, marketers schedule and send emails to their segmented lists. They can choose specific times and dates for delivery to optimize open and click-through rates.
Automation: Marketers utilize automation tools to set up automated email sequences triggered by specific actions or events, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, or birthday greetings.
Monitoring and Optimization: Marketers monitor the performance of their email campaigns using analytics provided by their email marketing software. Key metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Optimization: Based on the insights gathered from analytics, marketers continuously optimize their email campaigns by testing different subject lines, content formats, sending times, and calls to action to improve results.
Compliance: Marketers ensure compliance with relevant regulations such as GDPR or CAN-SPAM Act by providing recipients with clear options to unsubscribe and honoring their preferences. They also maintain data security and privacy practices to protect subscriber information.
Reporting: Marketers can build out custom reporting based on results to share with other members of an organization.
Email campaigns are an important part of inbound marketing, an ongoing process and philosophy (coined by HubSpot in its early days) where marketers meet buyers in whatever stage of the journey they’re in.
More direct explanation, inbound refers to marketing that draws in potential consumers to encourage purchase through means like quality content. Whereas outbound focuses more on initiating contact with individuals directly, through traditional or digital means.
Coined by Seth Godin, Permission-based marketing, also known as permission marketing, is a strategy where businesses seek consent from individuals before sending them promotional messages or communications. In this approach, recipients voluntarily opt-in to receive marketing materials, giving explicit permission for businesses to contact them..
Newsletters are a popular means of communication used by organizations, businesses, and individuals to deliver curated content, updates, promotions, or insights to subscribers via email. They serve as a direct channel for engaging with an audience and can be tailored to specific interests or topics.
Highlight the importance of email newsletters in building and nurturing relationships with subscribers, driving engagement, and achieving marketing goals.
Discuss the importance of defining clear goals for the newsletter, whether it’s driving traffic to a website, promoting products or services, providing valuable content, or increasing brand awareness.
Teach how to identify and understand the target audience’s preferences, interests, and pain points to tailor the newsletter content effectively.
Dedicated emails, also known as eblasts, are a type of email marketing campaign where a single promotional message is sent to a targeted list of recipients.
Unlike newsletters or automated sequences, which may contain a variety of content and are sent on a regular schedule, dedicated emails are focused solely on delivering a specific message or offer to the audience.
Highlight the purpose of eBlasts, which is typically to promote products or services, announce events or offers, or deliver important updates to subscribers.
Emphasize the importance of defining clear objectives for eBlasts, such as driving website traffic, generating leads, increasing sales, or raising brand awareness.
Nurturing emails, also known as drip campaigns or automated email sequences, are a series of targeted and automated emails sent to subscribers over a specified period.
The primary goal of nurturing emails is to build and maintain relationships with leads or customers by providing valuable content, guidance, and incentives at different stages of the customer journey.
Transactional emails are automated messages sent to individuals in response to a specific action or transaction they have taken with a company or service. Unlike promotional emails, which are primarily focused on marketing or advertising, transactional emails are triggered by user interactions and provide essential information related to that interaction.
Email marketing encompasses various types of emails that can be manipulated in a variety of ways, each serving a unique purpose in engaging and nurturing audiences along their journey. From promotional campaigns to transactional messages, and from nurturing sequences to dedicated eblasts, every type of email plays a vital role in driving customer engagement, conversions, and brand loyalty.
By strategically leveraging these different types of emails, businesses can effectively communicate with their audience, deliver personalized experiences, and ultimately achieve their marketing objectives.
By incorporating some key elements into your email marketing strategy, you can create emails that resonate with your audience, drive engagement, and ultimately achieve your marketing objectives.
A strong, clear, and compelling subject line grabs attention, entices recipients to open the email, and accurately reflects the content inside.
Tailoring the email content to the recipient’s interests, preferences, or behavior increases relevance and engagement. Personalization can include using the recipient’s name, referencing past purchases, or segmenting based on demographics.
Structures of marketing-based emails are built in HTML formatting. Having proper HTML structuring in similar patterns as webpages, including proper headers (h1, h2, etc.) and preheaders, is vital for email success.
Providing valuable information, offers, or solutions to the recipient’s needs or pain points ensures that the email delivers real value. Content should be concise, engaging, and easy to digest.
Every email should have a clear and actionable CTA that prompts recipients to take the desired next step, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for an event, or visiting a website.
Incorporating visually appealing elements such as images (including Alt text), videos, or GIFs can enhance the email’s attractiveness and increase engagement. However, visuals should complement the message and not overshadow the content.
With a significant portion of emails being opened on mobile devices, ensuring that emails are optimized for mobile responsiveness is crucial. Emails should display properly and be easy to read and interact with on smartphones and tablets.
Maintaining consistent branding elements such as logo, colors, fonts, and tone of voice across all emails helps reinforce brand identity and build trust with recipients.
Segmenting email lists based on factors such as demographics, purchase history, or engagement level allows for more targeted and relevant messaging, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Sending emails at the right time and frequency is essential to avoid overwhelming recipients or being ignored. Understanding the preferences and behaviors of your audience can help determine the optimal timing and frequency for your email campaigns.
Regularly testing different elements of your emails (e.g., subject lines, CTAs, content format) and analyzing performance metrics allows for continuous optimization and improvement of email effectiveness.
By following these elements, the right email types, and using common writing for the web/Ad’s principles previously discussed (ACE, clarity, visual attractiveness, HTML structuring, etc.) you can create emails that resonate with your audience, drive engagement, and ultimately achieve your marketing objectives.
Marketing lists are collections of contact information, typically email addresses, of individuals who have opted in to receive communications from a business or organization.
Using permission-based marketing to align your audience with your marketing message and strategy.
Collecting and Organizing Subscriber Data
Improving Relevance and Engagement
Psychographic Characteristics
Lifecycle Stage
Geographic segmentation: Based on geographic location, such as country, region, city, or climate.
Engagement Level
Purchase Frequency
Email Preferences
Customer Feedback
Dynamic fields, also known as merge tags or personalization tags, are placeholders in email content that automatically populate with individual subscriber data, such as first name, last purchase date, or location. Using dynamic fields enhances personalization and customization in email campaigns, increasing recipient engagement and response rates.
They Allow You To Personalize Email Based on Subscriber-Specific Information Like:
Dynamic best practices additional
Once MailChimp has been set up. Your first step for campaign creation is to click on the ‘Create’ Button. (Marketing lists can be created prior or after this step in a separate setup process)
Choose your campaign name or set up for a multivariate test. (For our purposes, name the email)
Your email dashboard will be opened. First selection is recipients. At this point, if you have added subscribers, you can choose your segment. If not, you can add at this time. You can also perform all additional steps and add later.
In this case, we will skip for now and use an old segment of individuals.
Next, you must choose who the email is from. It can be from an individual, department, or the business at large. Usually, it will default to the account creator information.
Next comes your subject line. Grab something catchy and between 30-50 characters for best results. Also add in preview text (generally a company slogan or hook) to help with email clients and how they show email.
Choose your delivery time. It can be scheduled for on-going if automated, in this case it is an individual email so choose the time you want to deliver. We have options with this.
It is time to design your email. Click on the design email button to get started. Then, you can start from scratch, build from templates you have created, code your own, their AI, or choose a template to get started.
Once you choose your design plan, you are ready to get started on design and copywriting! Works much like any CMS system available as emails are built in HTML. Remember to use dynamic fields when appropriate.
When the email is ready, you can send it via test or preview for approval. You can also choose to send via social and attached tracking to the email for monitoring purposes. If all things are good, you can go ahead and schedule it. changes can be made at a later time if needed as well.
