Email Marketing Tutorial
Email marketing is one of the most successful types of business promotion on the Internet. This increases customer loyalty, increases the volume of both new and repeat sales, and also maintains constant communication with the consumer audience. You can directly contact potential or existing customers for goods and services.
Email marketing features
Some people do not know exactly what email marketing is. There is a misconception that it is spamming. No one likes to rake the piles of pesky advertising in the mailbox. However, in this case, the letters are sent without any violation of the law and with the preliminary consent of the subscribers, and not against their will.
In addition, it is believed that sending emails is all limited. This is just one of the tools of a multi-stage strategy. Properly approaching its development, you will receive an effective channel of interaction with customers, establish long-term and reliable relationships with them.
It is worth highlighting 5 characteristic features of email marketing:
1. An important advantage is the low level of costs compared to other advertising moves. To increase sales through contextual advertising will have to spend much more money.
2. Availability of a database of active and potential customers.
3. There is a long dialogue between consumers and the company.
4. Subscribers are pushed to specific target actions. This may be a comment, ordering, as well as downloading any material from the site.
How to start development in email marketing?
Having understood what email marketing is for, it is worth understanding the actions that need to be taken on the way to the desired result. First you need to build a base of subscribers , which in the future may become your customers. There are several ways to accomplish this task.
Most companies post on their sites a subscription form. Location and design in this case play an important role. There are several recommendations on how to make it visible:
1. The design of this element should be different from the site design. You can highlight its bright colors that attract attention.
2. Important simplicity and the absence of unnecessary details. If nothing distracts the guest’s attention, then the probability of a subscription will increase.
3. Animated details, as well as pointers in the form of arrows, look winning. It is necessary to adhere to the golden mean, so that the form does not irritate with obsession.
4. It is advisable not to use the word “mailing”. Guests immediately represent the mountains of useless spam.
5. Think of various bonuses and free subscription rewards.
6. The first materials should come to the box within an hour.
Also forms are placed in the communities of companies in social networks. You can use the addresses of customers saved when buying in the online store. It is important to get their consent so that your advertising campaign does not turn into the same spam. Maintain communication and constantly monitor the quality of the base.
Types of letters in email marketing
Since the main tools for email marketing are letters, it is worth considering their varieties in detail. Transactional emails serve as a response to certain actions performed on the site (purchase, add goods to the basket). They increase the average check, help build up additional sales, make the brand recognizable, and also increase customer loyalty. There are convenient services for automating the distribution of such letters, for example, UniOne is a service of transactional letters .
Logos, company colors and other elements are introduced into the templates of transactional letters, which gradually become recognizable and beloved. Such decorations should complement useful information, for example, regarding the conditions of delivery or warranty service.
Announcements notify subscribers of all sorts of interesting events and news of a global or local nature. Do not overload such messages with advertising. Better focus on useful data. The final touch should be a call to action (share the news with friends or participate in the upcoming event).
To increase the volume of direct sales in email marketing, promotional letters are used. They contain commercial information regarding stocks, a selection of products that may be useful to the client, as well as a description of the advantages of the company and its services. Such emails should be given special attention. An overly aggressive and obsessive text causes hostility. Because of him, the ranks of subscribers may be significantly thinner, and a large and ugly spot will appear on the reputation of the online store.
Triggers , also called autoresponders, serve as a response to the actions of site visitors. Similar series of letters are sent sequentially after subscription. This is usually not a sale of a particular service or product. The purpose of the messages is the acquaintance of the buyer with the company, as well as the provision of interesting information.
Mailing may be adjusted depending on the reaction of the user. So you can create the most comfortable conditions for potential customers, increase loyalty and attract more attention to content. The reader will have a desire to further make orders in your online store.
Informational emails are used in email marketing to maintain and enhance sympathy for the sender. Submissions are subject to extremely useful and relevant notes.
Email marketing: performance measurement
1. The number of subscriptions . Subscriber base size – the larger the target recipients base, the more profit email marketing brings. To collect a subscriber base, a variety of strategies are used, the most famous of which is a kind of exchange of the recipient’s email address for a valuable offer: for example, free useful content, a discount coupon, a place on a webinar, etc.
2. Open Rate. The main methods of increasing this metric is constant testing and optimization of headings and content. It is important to note that an interesting and attractive email feed arouses interest among recipients and contributes to the discovery, but displaying the value of the content is key to the effectiveness of the message in terms of sales / execution of targeted actions.
3. Click Through Rate. This metric shows how many recipients who opened the message performed the target action. The main factors affecting this indicator are design and content – this is about both the content and the design of the letter, the color scheme and so on.
4. The number of replies and messages marked as spam. Quality email marketing assumes a percentage of optics of 1-2% – this indicator is considered to be the norm for the subscription base of commercial mailings. Speaking about getting messages into spam, this phenomenon is much less common (if we are talking about legitimate commercial messages), however, if messages get into the SPAM folder often, the email service provider is more likely to block the sender’s account, following international anti-spam law .
5. Recipient conversion rate. The ratio of purchases made by recipients after clicking on a link to a resource with an advertised offer. This coefficient depends both on the quality of the message and on the efficiency of the company’s resource / landing in terms of transformation.