Email marketing: What is it and why is it important

Email marketing is one of the most reliable, easily measurable and economical services in digital marketing, bringing you closer to your audience and increasing your sales.

Let's see below what email marketing is, what it offers you and how you can make the most of it in a successful marketing strategy.

Email marketing – What is it

Email marketing is part of digital marketing and is the service that uses emails to attract the business audience.

An email campaign has clear advantages in terms of return on investment as well as increased sales, as described immediately below.

Advantages of Email marketing

The marketing campaign that relies on sending targeted emails to various recipients has significant advantages, the most important of which are:

• High ROI: According to the UK’s Data & Marketing Association, the average return on investment is over 40 times.
  That is, for every 1 euro you invest in promoting your business through email, you earn 40 through new and established customers.
• Ease of use: Email marketing is one of the simplest and easiest forms of digital marketing, provided, of course, a proper and well-structured design.
• Personalized communication with your audience:  As you build your email list, you can collect information from subscribers during the registration process and use it to tailor communication to your potential customer needs and preferences.
  Thus, each message will be targeted and will perform better.
• Easy metrics: With various analytics tools, it's easy to check the performance of each campaign and make the necessary adjustments.
• Mobile friendly: While other forms of digital marketing require major interventions to bring positive results to mobile devices, in email marketing all you have to do is make sure that each email is designed for mobile screens as well.
• Achieving a variety of goals: Businesses use email marketing not only to increase their sales, but also for other purposes, such as brand awareness and increasing a target group's loyalty.

Basic Types

Although we have given an answer as to what email marketing is, there are many types of it, so in the end the general definition has several differentiations.

Thus, email marketing, according to its goals is divided into the following types:

• Informative: An email group can be created to a newsletter, in order to inform your audience about the company's actions or to offer them useful knowledge and tips in the context of the content marketing.
• Customer acquisition: Sales via email can be done by sending messages aimed at converting subscribers into customers through attractive offers and informative content. Effective copywriting with the aim of selling will also help in this.
• Retention: Advertising marketing emails can also be sent to subscribers who are already customers, in order to motivate them to return. The email chains used purposefully, such as those utilized by Wizard,  contribute significantly to this goal.

How to do email marketing

 Create an email list

Naturally, you want a large contact list, but it is important that it is made up of users who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer and are likely to become your customers.

The key is to avoid ready-made, paid or free email lists and build your own personalized and well-structured list, through practices such as:

• Contact with your audience through social media.
• Contact information gathering at events, conferences and other events that give you the opportunity to get in touch with your audience.
• Subscription forms on your site.

The key is to persuade users to give you their email address through incentives such as sending useful content, ebooks, contests, etc.

Choose the ideal email marketing platform

There are several platforms to help you manage your contacts and send bulk emails, such as Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Aweber and HubSpot.

Which one you will ultimately choose has to do with templates, pricing and other features, such as whether it is a B2B campaign, whether it best serves a large or small business, etc.

Start sending emails

Depending on the goal of each campaign, you will also choose the type of email you will send.

Creating an effective email with attention to copywriting of both the subject and the main text plays a big role in the success of the campaign.

Sending emails should be based on an automation cycle that will send the right messages to the right people at the right time.

You can do this through the platform you have chosen and based on strict criteria that categorize users according to their characteristics.

The use of email chains, which are specially designed to revive customer interest:

It is especially useful to reach not only existing customers, but also those who filled their cart without buying or engaging with your page.

Points of caution in Email Marketing

GDRP

The European General Data Protection Regulation requires the written consent of the user, so that his data can be used to receive email.

It is therefore important to pay attention to compliance with the GDPR. Because non-compliance does not just mean that email will be categorized as spam, but also that you can be fined heavily.

Double opt-in

The term "opt-in" refers to the registration process and can occur in two ways.

Either the subscriber is added to the email list as soon as he / she submits the registration form (single opt-in) or he / she is required to receive a confirmation email and click on the link to complete his / her registration (double opt-in).

The double opt-in has the disadvantage of adding an extra step to the process.

However, this way you can check that the email address is correct, and also have proof of the subscriber's consent under the GDPR.

Metrics

The final but perhaps most important step to a successful email marketing strategy is to monitor the performance of each action.

This is what marketers do by tracking specific performance indicators (KPIs).

In addition to the return on investment (ROI), other such indicators are the size of the email list, the percentage of users who opened the email (open rate), the percentage of users who clicked on the link in the email (Click-through-rate) , but also how many users eventually became customers (conversion rate).

Personalized emails

Personalized emails offer higher engagement and have a higher open rate than standard ones.

This is the reason why the Wizard, as a marketing agency that places special emphasis on the maximum performance of each campaign, utilizes the power of personalization and avoids generalized emails.

Of course, a basic condition for this to happen is that sufficient data has been collected from the subscribers and that they have been grouped into categories according to their characteristics.

Email marketing – Examples

A classic and proven way to reach your audience is to use email marketing to send a newsletter that will help in brand recognition and gaining relationships with the audience.

For example, in the newsletter you can mention a partnership  with a new brand of innovative products or  the release of a free ebook with your signature on a topic of interest to your audience or an online seminar.

On the otherhand:

A customer acquisition campaign will include email for a limited time offer on specific products.

Or it may be aimed at users who have filled their cart with products but ultimately did not proceed with the purchase, giving them, for example, an additional 10% discount.

Email marketing – Cost

In general, the cost of email marketing is low, especially in relation to the return on investment it offers.

The cost of a campaign consists of subscribing to the platform of your choice and of the marketing agency that will set up and monitor your email marketing strategy.

Both depend on a variety of factors:

Such as the number of contacts and the goals of each campaign, possible benefits such as auto-reply, whether the method of paid ads will be chosen to build the email list, the number of emails that will be sent on a daily or weekly basis and more.

If you want to know more about what email marketing is and how the tried and tested email marketing strategy of Wizard can help you, contact us.