Email
marketing has become an essential tool for business ever since the introduction
of the Internet to the world, however, some campaigns that make it through to
our inboxes are absolute rubbish that we don’t take any notice of. This article
seeks to explain what email marketing really is, why companies should use it,
and how they should go about doing so.
So what is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:
- Sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
- Sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
- Adding advertisements to emails sent by other companies to their customers.
- An exact return on investment can be tracked and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
- Over half of all Internet users check or send an email on a typical day.
- Email allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.
- Transactional emails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.
The disadvantages of email marketing surround the rejection/spam rate of the emails by the consumers’ email program, negatively affecting the delivery rate of the emails. This has somewhat been eliminated with the idea of “Opt-in” emailing, where the consumer consents to receiving the emails and therefore eliminates the idea of receiving unsolicited emails – Ideally maintaining emails that are relevant and appropriate to each individual recipient.
Types of Email campaigns:
1. Transactional Email
These emails arrive
at a customer’s inbox once they’ve done business with a merchant. These emails
are what guide the customer through their purchase of a product or service, or
to complete or confirm a transaction they made with the sender. An example of
these transactional messages are purchase order or return confirmations, order
statuses, and electronic or email receipts
2. Direct Email
The purposes of these
emails is solely to present promotional material such as announcements, special
offers, discounts, or maybe a glimpse of a product catalog available online.
3. ‘Welcome!’ Email
These emails are what customers receive when they sign
up for a mailing list. This is what starts the establishment of trust with the
customer, the enhancement of the brand, and to show the credibility of a
company.
4. Newsletter Email
The purpose of these emails is to give customers the gist of
products a company has on a regular basis. However, a marketer has to know what
the goal of the newsletter is, such as an increase in social sharing,
strengthen the image of the brand, or maybe nurture the company’s relationship
with an existing customer.
So the question is why should one go about
email marketing? Well here are a few thoughts on the matter:
- Cost
– Email marketing is CHEAP, there are no two ways about it.
Whether you do it yourself, or through an email marketing agency,
marketing to hundreds of consumers via email is going to cost you
tiddlywinks compared to other channels of advertising.
- Success
– Emails can be targeting specifically to the ideal consumer.
With this concept in mind, along with email cost-effectiveness, it’s no
wonder that email marketing’s ROI often blows other direct marketing
strategies out of the water – The trick is that you have to get it right!
- Measurability and Flexibility – With the analytics available today it’s easy to track responses to your emails exactly, in order to work out what parts of your campaign are working and what parts aren’t. With this knowledge, you can then react instantly to modify your campaign strategy if need be.
- An
exact return on investment can be tracked. It has been proven to be high
when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to
search marketing as the most effective marketing tactic.
- Compared
to traditional mail, email marketing is cheaper and faster than
traditional mail. Traditional mail requires time for producing the
artwork, printing, addressing, and mailing.
- Email
provides a cost-effective method to test a variety of marketing content.
This includes visual creative, marketing copy and multimedia assets. The
data gathered by testing in the email channel can then be used across all
channels of both print and digital marketing campaigns.
- Advertisers
can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who chose to receive
email communications on subjects of interest to them.
- If compared to standard email, direct email marketing produces higher response rate and higher average order value for e-commerce business.
- The
mail can be classified as spam. People’s inboxes get inundated
with email, both solicited and unsolicited. Many servers have filters in
place to cut down the amount of unwanted emails. People can also further
adjust their email filters to their own tastes. This could result to the
email to land in a spam folder and never get viewed.
- Email marketing requires constant tweaking to keep the subscribers engaged. The marketer must work to maintain a level of engagement to keep the reader from unsubscribing. Another thing to work on is to carefully craft the email marketing to look exactly the marketer envisioned it.
Why Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service is Important?
What to Look for in a Good Email Marketing Tool?
You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation.
Aside from that, your email marketing service must make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Most importantly, a good email service provider ensures that your email campaigns do not end up in the spam folder.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the most popular email marketing service providers.
1. SendinBlue
It is an extremely easy to use platform
with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their
simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience
in email marketing.
SendinBlue includes
beginner-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send
transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and
segment users. It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using their
AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
SendinBlue offer a
completely free email marketing plan that lets you send up to 300 emails per
day, but all your emails will have their branding. Paid plans start from $25
per month. You can also include SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary
based on your sending requirements.
They have improved their premium
plan to recently include more advanced features like landing page builder, live
chat, CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means users now get more value
for the same price.
SendinBlue also offers a separate
SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or
transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email
marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice to have feature if you have a large
website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.
2. AWeber
AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.
You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.
Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-to and tutorials.
AWeber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.
3. GetResponse
GetResponse is another very popular email marketing solution. It is extremely easy to use and simplifies email marketing for small businesses.
It comes with some amazing marketing automation tools which allow you to create smart automated campaigns.
With their drag and drop builder, you can create campaigns, segment contacts, and send any number of emails designed for specific groups. These tools help you create effective email campaigns to boost your profits.
GetResponse comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, unsubscribe tracking, and autoresponders. It also integrates with third party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc.
Support is provided by phone, live chat, and email. Their help section is full of free learning material including videos, webinars, how-tos, guides, etc.
GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial. Their pricing starts at $15/month
To see a detailed review of GetResponse CLICK HERE
4. MailChimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s time zones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.
You can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms.
When it comes to marketing automation features, Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers such as Drip or ConvertKit.
In the recent years, Mailchimp has attempted to add many of the “advanced” features, but having tested many of these, they’re not truly advanced.
Mailchimp support is offered by email, live chat, and a large tutorials knowledge-base. However their support is often slow and no match to the quality of service that you get from Constant Contact.
Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variety testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but as a serious business, you need reliable support that you can count on.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers
5. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
ConvertKit’s unique feature is that allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service.
With ConvertKit, you can easily segment subscribers into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing.
ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material.
A lot of ConvertKit features are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers that’s why we rate them the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.
ConvertKit offers a 14-day free trial, and their pricing starts from $29/month. They also offer a 30-day refund policy.
Closing thoughts
Getting started with your own email marketing is easy – all you have to do is sign up for either Aweber or GetResponse since they offer freemium accounts; that’s great for people who are starting out
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