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What is email marketing? 

Email is a form of direct marketing. It is the oldest form of digital communication and the most effective way to sell today, even better than social media, which allows you to send targeted and customized information to subscribers.

HubSpot says that four out of five marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing despite the perception that may be outdated.

Businesses use email marketing to connect with their customers, make new relationships, and promote engagement. This method enables businesses to provide personalized content, promotional offers, updates, and useful information straight to users’ inboxes.

Effective email marketing includes things like writing catchy subject lines, interesting content, dividing the audience into groups for more targeted messages, and looking at statistics to make campaigns even better.

Businesses can still use email as a cost-effective and flexible way to reach their audience, build brand trust, and increase sales by taking advantage of the personal and direct nature of email conversation.

The Fundamentals of Email Marketing

When it comes to email marketing, the most important thing is to stay real. It is challenging to get ahead in email marketing because it is so popular. To stand out and build a strong relationship with your followers, just be yourself. Talk to them as you are, use their names, and show them that your brand or business has a human side.

Don’t spam your list by sending them too many useless emails. Believe in sending them useful emails, and always think about how your business can help them solve their problems. Engage with them, and let them know that you are there to serve them.

Keep your letters short and to the point if you can, because most people read them on their phones. If you want to give them more value or information, you can send them the longer version of your email through a blog post or landing page.

Be sure to include clear calls to action (CTAs) throughout your emails. There are different opinions on where is the best place to put them, but being honest, I can’t tell you the exact place to add them. It all depends on your business, the type of email you send, and what type of audience you have. Test different places to find out what works best for you.

Don’t forget that you are just a guest in their email. This way of thinking might help you: they let you send them emails, so the least you can do is be polite.

How do you do that, though? Respect them, don’t spam their inbox, and don’t mislead with the subject line. There are some ways to get their attention with the subject line, but don’t use that as a reason to trick them.

Remember that the writing is for the reader, not you. It’s about what you can do for your customer that will make them happy and what value you can bring them.

Why use email marketing, and why is it important?

Email marketing gives your business the power to communicate directly with your customers or prospects, build rapport, nurture your audience, share valuable content, promote services or products, listen to your audience, and get to know them better.

Email marketing is still one of the best ways for businesses to market because it is stable, easy to control, and stays within their budget.

It is a form of owned media that gives marketers more control over what they say and how many people they reach.

Trendy marketing ideas like influencer marketing can help you connect with your customers online, but it cost a lot more to use in your digital marketing plan, and you can’t be sure you’ll reach enough people to make a big difference in sales.

Email marketing gives you more chances to meet and interact with customers for less money, since according to HubSpot stats, 4 billion people use email every day. Even more, most customers like email better than other ways of communicating with businesses. 

Email marketing has also continued to have one of the best return on investments (ROIs) of all marketing platforms, and new automatic tools have made it easier to make email campaigns.

What is an email marketing campaign?

An Email Marketing Campaign is a series of emails you send to your audience to take them on a journey  with the goal of achieving a certain outcome.

This outcome could be anything from selling products, build brand awareness to getting more website visitors.

The campaigns can be one-off like newsletters, recurring, triggered, or automated emails. 

A way to measure the success of an email campaign is through Click-through rate (CTR). 

CTR is the percentage of people that click one or more links in your emails. A good CTR for emails is between 2% to 5%, depending on your industry. 

How To Get Started With Email Marketing

Creating an Email Marketing Strategy. 

First of all, create a sequence map. You do it by defining your audience, setting a goal for your email campaign, thinking about how long the emails are going to be, how many emails the sequence is going to have, the frequency of the emails, are you going to sent them daily, every other day, weekly or monthly? how are you going to segment your list? based on which behaviors? are you going to link them to a new campaign depending on the actions they take on your first campaign? 

1. Define your audience.

1. The most important is to identify their psychographic. What is your customer’s archetype? Define their core values, desires, drives, fears, dreams, goals challenges or problems. You can use Jung’s archetypes to help you with this.

In the wheel above, the grey inner-circle describes a motivation, the rainbow-colored in the middle describes their primary value, and the words in the outer layer describes the names. You can rename the archetype’s titles as your convenience, for example, for controlling ruler you can use ambitious leader.

To give you an idea of how to use Jung’s archetypes, here is an example: 

The innocent

• core value: safety
• Desire: be happy
• Drives: be positive, do the right thing
• Greatest fear: to be punish for doing something bad or wrong
• Example: Coca Cola, Dove, Mc Donald’s

2. What are their demographics? consider age, location, gender, occupation, interests.

3. What stage of their buyer’s journey are they? 

1. Discovery. Prospects know they have a problem.
   1. Unaware. focus on problems, share stories and secrets. 
   2. Problem Aware. Focus on solutions, talk about benefits
2. Consideration. They search for solution.
   1. Solution aware. claims and proofs
   2. Product aware. discounts and deals
3. Decision. Ready to purchase a solution. Most aware. show them the product and the price.

2. Establish your email marketing goals.

Once you figure out who you are speaking to. Establishing your goals is an essential step to take when creating a successful email marketing strategy. Your goals will guide the strategies you use to reach them and keep you on-track towards achieving them.

There are many potential objectives for your email marketing initiatives, but one of them is nurturing leads. When a user opts in and gives you their email address, they become a lead and they can be further educated about your brand and products through targeted emails. With the right content, carefully crafted with well researched keywords, you can nurture this lead into becoming a customer who may help grow your business in the long run. Using data from all your references such as social media interactions or website visits could give you better insights as to what needs to be in each of these emails so that it resonates with the user better.

The most common goals of an email marketing campaign are: 

• Nurture leads
• Boost web traffic
• Increase Open Rate
• Build loyalty
• Increase sales
• Boost other marketing channels

Whatever your desired outcome may be, it’s important that the metrics selected are tracked and measured regularly so we can see if our efforts are helping reach the ultimate goal.

3. Choose an Email Marketing Platform

Choosing an email platform is one of the most important decisions you will make when it comes to your email marketing efforts. It will be the tool you use to create campaigns, send emails, track results and provide insights. 

An ESP (Email Service Provider), also known as an email marketing platform is a software that helps you manage, control and deliver automated campaigns to your readers. 

Some aspects to consider when choosing for an ESP are:

• A/B testing. it means to send 2 versions of an email with diferrent components, for example, different subject lines with the goal to compare and measure their performance.
• HTML. Not all providers give you access to edit the emails in html. Pay attention to this if you plan to edit your email’s code.
• Templates. You might want an app with a good template library if you like to use themes to make your emails. You’ll have more choices when you want to change the look or style of an email.
• Industry-specific. Most of the ESP work for any industry, but some focus on only one niche because they provide specific features for that industry. Make sure the software you use, fits your niche. 
• Email Volume. Most ESP base their charge on how many emails a user sends. Make sure your app can grow with you at a cost that suits your business, especially if you send a lot of emails or have a big contact list.
• Customer Service. It’s important that the provider has a great customer service, especially for any last-minute inconvenience you can present in the middle of a big campaign. You don’t want to lose sales because they couldn’t help you solve your problems as soon as possible or not give you the option to talk to a real person. 

4. Build your email list.

Here are 3 different ways to build and grow your email list:

1. Use lead magnets. Lead magnets are gifts like cheat sheets, free guides, eBooks, discount codes, or anything useful that captures someone’s interest or any other kind of valuable information that you give to your readers in exchange of their email address. 
2. Quiz and Survey. Quizzes or surveys are great because they’re fun and keep people interested. When someone takes a quiz or survey, they often need to give their email address to get their results or see the full answers. This is where you can collect the email addresses! At the same time, quizzes help your business learn more about what your customers want or need. It’s a win-win! People enjoy the quiz or survey, and you as a businesses get the chance to connect with your audience.
3. Use opt-in form. An opt-in form is a little box where you ask for at least an email address. It depend on your business, sometimes you can ask for more information such as name, last name, phone number, and zip code. One way to use opt-in form is to offer a lead magnet. Another way is just to ask your readers to join your email list or newsletter.

5. Select the type of email campaigns you want to send.

The type of email campaign you are going to choose really depends on the goal you have for your business or for that specific task. For example you need to think if you want your campaign be informational, transactional or promotional or a combination of them. Here is a list of the most typical types of campaigns:

1. Newsletter. This kind of campaign is to stay in touch with your list and keep your business and products/services top of mind. 
2. Autoresponder sequence.  It is when someone opt-in to the free thing you are giving away and then, immediately, receives the first email. The goal of an autoresponder is to accelerate the know-like-trust process.  And of course, the aim is to sell without being salesy.
3. Launch sequences. It doesn’t have too much difference from the autoresponder. One difference is that you don’t need to do the bond-building stuff as much, and you can intensify the sense of scarcity and urgency a bit more at the end. But the main difference is that it’s important to get people excited about what you’re selling BEFORE you give them access to it. As an example, you can schedule emails for a period of 2-4 days leading up the excitement, followed by 3-5 days of cart opening. After that, you can send several final-day emails and potentially a re-open cart at the end of your sequence.
4. Broadcast emails. Is there a difference with autoresponders? Yes! Writing broadcast emails is usually simpler than writing sequences. These emails are meant to have less structure and focus on general stuff like bond-building, relationships, storytelling, positioning, and social proof. Yes, you can add a CTA (Call to Action) but don’t go too hard on the selling. Try to focus on storytelling and positioning.

6. Create your campaign

1. Structure the campaign for easy reading. Avoid writing long blocks of text; keep it simple. Even though you can add HTML to format your emails and add images, only text works best. Write one or two sentences at a time, use simple sentences, and use bullets. 
2. Personalize your emails and build trust. Use jargon that the subscriber is familiar with, use their name in the emails and if possible in the subject line. When you can personalize content and make it more relevant to a certain group you improve response rates.
3. Create eye-catching subject lines. The subject line is the most important part of the email. if it is not strong enough, your subscribers will never open the email. It may seem something easy, but pay special attention to it. Sometimes it can take up to 80% of your time to work only in the subject line.  
4. Make sure the content is relevant to the subscribers. By segmenting your list, you know what type of content to send to each subscriber. It depends on where your subscriber is in their journey and the type of email you are going to send them.
5. Diversify the types of content. Don’t send only promotional content. I know some marketers send emails to sell every single time. I know because I used to do that when I started with email marketing. My “coach” told me I needed to send sales email 4 to 5 times a day on a daily basis. At the end, I stopped it because I didn’t feel comfortable doing it and because I felt it wasn’t a good strategy for a long-term business. That approach was more just to make quick money, but if you really care about your subscribers, you should not only promote our products or services. Lead with value, educate your audience, ask them questions, engage with them, and build a great relationship first. 
6. Make a schedule for sending you emails.  follow a calendar and test different times, to see when your audience engage more with your emails. Remember, frequency matters, and how often you send your emails, and the consistency have a great impact in your list including unsubscribe rates.

7. Test and Measure results

1. Increase Open Rate through split testing subject lines. Monitoring the open rates of your campaigns is important in order to evaluate their effectiveness. You can make slight adjustments to your subject line or conduct an A/B split test. Please ensure that all other parts of the email remain unchanged, except for the subject line. There are different ways to test them. You can change the lengths of the text, use different power words, use generic or specific subject lines. 
2. Improve CTR for your email campaign. The purpose of your emails depends on the type of campaign you are running. One of the objectives is directing subscribers towards your landing page, ensuring that they are prepared for a purchase or are at the appropriate stage as intended by your email. Make sure you have a clear CTA (call to action), continually tweak your emails to improve the CTR (click through rate), enhance the layout, and ensure readability by utilizing simple sentences. Additionally, please test the placement of your CTAs. For example, you can add more links or adjust the location of the links within the email.

The Benefits of Email Marketing

One of the main benefits of email marketing is to improve engagement with with audience by sending relevant and educational content, product updates, news, and encourage interaction with your business.

Another benefit is its ability to improve the conversion rate. One method is to segment your audience based on behaviors or preferences, allowing you to customize your email messages to better suit their needs. This approach leads to higher conversion rates because subscribers are more likely to engage and take actions with emails that resonate with them. Another way to optimize your campaigns is by tracking and analyzing their behaviors.

Customer loyalty. Emails are an effective method for nurturing relationships with your audience and establishing long-term connections with them. To maintain a strong connection with customers or prospects, consistently engage with them through personalized emails containing content, promotions, or updates.

Flexibility. Testing emails is a cost-effective, efficient, and easy implementation process. By conducting tests on subject lines, templates, or types of campaigns, you can ensure the flexibility to optimize your marketing strategies for maximum impact.

Advantages of Email Marketing 

1. You own it. You own the list and the connections. You don’t have to worry about algorithm changes, suddenly closed social media accounts, platforms banning you for no reason, or closing your site just because.
2. Cost effective. After spending money and time acquiring a subscriber, the only extra cost is going to be the ESP (Email Service Provider), like Aweber. It is way cheaper that keep running ads.
3. Build brand awareness and trust with your target audience. Emails give you a great oportunity to showcase your brand personality and values, share stories, and communicate with your subscribers in a way that humanizes your brand and builds a deeper connection, trust and loyalty.
4. It has a high ROI. It is well known in the email marketing space that the average ROI through email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent. Simply put, you invest a dollar and, in return, receive 36 times from it.
5. it is easily measurable. Measuring the success of campaigns is quite easy in email marketing, thanks to the built-in analytics provided by most email marketing platforms. Through these analytics, you can see the open rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, and number of emails that unsubscribe that occurred after the email was delivered, number of clicks the links/CTAs within an email received, your email marketing campaign’s CPM, and much more.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

1. Dealing with high competition. Subscribers receive lots of email per day. So, you need to be creative with your subject lines to get their attention.
2. Getting sent to the spam folder. This is often because you bought an email list and the subscribers don’t know you or because your email are spammy. To avoid  going to the spam folder, always ask your subscribers to confirm their email by doing double opt-in.
3. Burning out your email subscriber list. Launching email campaigns that are not well-thought-out one after the other could cost you one of your most valuable assets – your email subscriber list.

7 tips for email marketing success

1. Never buy email lists. First of all, you will be in violation of GDPR consent rules. Secondly, the people on that list don’t know you. Also, your ESP (Email Service Provider) can penalize you. And remember, good email addresses lists are NOT for sale, the owner keeps them for themselves and for his business. Don’t be lazy, just build your own email list.

2. Use double opt-in. By asking your subscribers to confirm their email address, you are making sure your emails don’t go to the spam or promo folder. 

3. Segment your mailing list. It is a good practice to divide your list into smaller, targeted groups based on their behaviors, interests, or demographics, so you can send them more customized and relevant information. This helps your campaigns be more focused and, for instance, connect better with your audience.

4. Personalization. This goes hand in hand with segmentation. Once your list is segmented in small groups,  it will be easier to craft different campaigns for each group, that way, the emails will resonate with them. 

5. A/B test your email marketing content. Make slight adjustments to your subject line or conduct an A/B split test, also test the placements of your CTA’s and frequency of emails sent.

6. Optimize email deliverability.  It is the ability to land in the inbox, rather than the spam folder. Some steps you can take to optimize deliverability is write great subject lines, clean your list, set up double opt-in to avoid high bounce rates, and stick to a consistent send schedule. 

7. Clean your email list regularly.  How often should you clean your list? At least once every 6 months. Say good-bye to inactive subscribers. It is better to have a small list of very engaging readers. I know it’s hard to let go of subscribers you have spend time and money to acquire, but always choose quality over quantity. 

Email Regulations You Should Know

• CAN-SPAM Compliance
• GDPR Compliance
• Avoid Spam Filters

In Conclusion