Almost half a century ago, humanity discovered that email messages can become a marketing tool. It all started in 1971, when MIT graduate Raymond Tomlinson sent the first email in history. Decades later, the engineer himself could not remember the exact contents of this letter, but since then, October 2 has been officially considered Email Day.
That same year, the first program for receiving and sending emails appeared. Its author was Larry Roberts, one of the founders of the Arpanet network, the predecessor of the Internet.
In 1978, Gary Tuerk assessed the marketing potential of emails and sent the first mass mailing. 400 users of the Arpanet network received a message advertising a DEC computer. In the letter, Gary talked about the new invention and invited readers to the presentation. The first promotional mailing in history brought in a profit of 13 million dollars.
Since then, technologies have been constantly evolving, and today email marketing is an integral part of online marketing for companies to promote products and work with audience loyalty. Many predict the fading of this channel, but only because they themselves have not yet had time to appreciate its effectiveness.
goals and objectives of email marketing
Email marketing is a way to interact with a brand’s audience via email to increase sales. Today, it is one of the most effective channels for building relationships with the target audience. According to our agency’s experience, 30% of online sales can come from it. The tasks that email marketing solves:
stimulation of primary sales,
increase in repeat sales,
increasing loyalty,
attracting a new audience,
retention of an existing one,
establishing communication with subscribers.
benefits of email marketing
Email newsletters are a simple and accessible tool for stimulating sales. Attracting new customers through paid channels, such as contextual and targeted advertising, is always more expensive than building the right work with an existing audience using email newsletters. At the same time, the results from implementing email marketing will be no worse, if not more impressive. And this is the first advantage!
What other benefits does email marketing have:
Segmentation and personalization
The target audience can be divided into groups based on gender, age, location, personal preferences and other criteria that are important to your business. In addition, technology allows you to use information about the interests, preferences and actions of subscribers to create personalized offers, which significantly affects brand trust and the formation of strong relationships with the audience.
Guaranteed loyalty
Letters can only be received by those people who have given consent to the mailing, which means they are already inclined to communicate with your brand. But whether the user will unsubscribe or will interact with the brand for many years depends only on you.
CTA or Call-To-Action
Email marketing can ensure a high conversion rate from a reader to a buyer. It is enough to correctly place a call-to-action button inside the letter, make an attractive offer, and the subscriber will be only one click away from an impulsive desire to buy your product to actually buying it.
Simple Performance Evaluation System
There are several key metrics in email marketing that are easily tracked using email automation services (ESP). By constantly analyzing the metrics, you can spot problems in time and make adjustments to your email campaign.
Versatility
When is it worth connecting email marketing? This channel is effective at any time and for any sphere, be it B2B, B2C or e-commerce. Yes, each industry has its own nuances, but we believe that there is no brand for which email communications will be ineffective. The main thing is a professional approach!
There is a myth that email marketing is spam. In reality, it is the other way around: qualified email marketers make sure that subscribers receive only interesting and useful information. Email marketing is a whole system that requires strategy , a competent approach, botim database constant testing of new mechanics and analytics .
how to start email marketing
Email marketing is aimed at attracting new customers, What is structured data and why building long-term relationships with them, and stimulating repeat purchases. To achieve these goals, you need to carefully consider and implement each step.
First of all, develop an email strategy. Define the KPIs and goals you want to achieve. Analyze your competitors. It is important to understand how they communicate with the audience in your market so as not to miss an effective mechanic or, betting email list conversely, to become a pioneer and use a solution that none of your competitors have tried yet. Study your target audience. You must understand what people want, then you will be able to build communication with maximum benefit for yourself and for them. Based on the information received, draw up a detailed action plan for implementing email marketing.
To make regular mass mailings, you will need a special platform that helps automate work with the email address base. Thanks to ESP, you will be able to send letters to several thousand or even millions of users at the same time.You won’t be able to send out newsletters without a database of email addresses of those users who have officially consented to receive communications from your company. Use special services to set up static or pop-up forms for collecting contacts.
Think about incentives for subscribing:
users should understand what benefit they will receive in exchange for an email address — bonuses, gifts, useful content, and special offers. If you already have a client database, for example, from sales managers, you need to process it first:Think about the categories your target audience can be divided into. Describe each segment in detail, as this will determine what types of email newsletters you will use.As a rule, email communications are a mix of several types of email newsletters. The goal of any email marketer is to make interaction with the brand as attractive as possible for subscribers.
Therefore, use several approaches at once so that users do not get bored, receiving the same format of letters, and the communication itself is as useful as possible for both parties. Do not act blindly: make a communications map for each segment of your audience with a list of reasons and scenarios, frequency of interaction, types of letters, etc.When developing a strategy, you didn’t just set KPIs for no reason. You need to constantly monitor statistics to identify ineffective solutions and mechanisms in time. Also, don’t forget to put forward and test hypotheses to improve interaction with subscribers and increase indicators.
conduct the first mailing and invite people to subscribe to further communications from the company.
Important! Your future mailings should be linked to the attraction system. If you promise the user weekly guides and articles, but in reality send only promotional letters, the relationship with the audience will quickly deteriorate.Develop a strategy.
types of email newsletters
As we have already noted, email marketing is often a mix of several types of email newsletters.
Promotional links
Promotional letters tell about new products and special offers, encouraging the subscriber to perform the target action – purchase. It is better to present such information briefly, succinctly and vividly, since people do not like to spend a lot of time on advertising messages, but the brand still needs to capture the attention of the recipient.
Content email newsletters
Content mailings are letters of an entertaining or informational nature. In our agency’s experience, such mailings should not be ignored: they allow you to diversify promotional letters, interest and retain the audience. The forms of content delivery can be very different and are limited only by the creativity of the email marketer and the brand’s area of activity. Here are some options:
Storytelling – informing through a fascinating story or tale / Made in Inbox Marketing
Of course, these are not all possible forms of content delivery. Depending on the specifics of the company’s activities, others can be used. For example, recipes, guides, life hacks, etc.
Trigger communications
Triggered emails are automatic messages based on subscriber behavioral factors. Communication is launched when a person performs or does not perform a certain action. This includes emails with order status, password recovery, subscription or unsubscription confirmation, abandoned cart, viewing a product category, and many other triggers. Each company determines the list of events that launch transactional mailings.
email marketing automation
According to a study by Epsilon Data Management, the click-through rate of trigger mailings is 119% higher than that of promo mailings. There is no doubt that the use of automatic chains has a positive effect on a company’s profit. But to set up sending triggers, primary segmentation of the contact base (by gender, age, geography, etc.) is not enough. The company needs to track user actions on its sites in order to use this data as criteria for segmentation.
