All You Need to Know About Email Marketing For Your Online Business

Introduction 

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most powerful forms of digital marketing. It allows you to communicate with your audience, build trust, and increase sales. According to a report by Statista, there are over 4.26 billion email users worldwide, making email the largest and most accessible marketing channel. Moreover, email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent, which is higher than any other digital marketing channel. That’s why, as an online business owner, you need to master the art of email marketing.

Email marketing is the process of sending promotional messages to a group of people via email. You can use email marketing to achieve various goals, such as sharing valuable content, generating leads, nurturing prospects, announcing offers, and driving conversions. If you check your inbox right now, you will probably see many emails from businesses that you have interacted with in the past.

In this guide, we will cover everything you need to know about email marketing for your online business, including how it works, how to create effective campaigns, how to ensure deliverability, and how to measure your results.

Why should you consider email marketing? 

Email marketing is not just a convenient way to communicate with your customers directly, but also a strategic way to grow your online business. Below, we explore five reasons email marketing is crucial for online businesses.

1. Almost everyone uses email: According to a Hubspot survey, 91% of consumers have and use their email accounts. This means that email gives you a tremendous opportunity to connect with your potential and existing customers. In the B2B space, email is even the most preferred form of communication for many professionals.

You can share with them valuable content, discounts, new products etc., and they can forward those emails to anyone they want. Infact, one of the best email marketing strategies is creating referral programs that reward your customers for spreading the word about your business. 

2. Email campaigns are cost-effective: Email marketing is one of the most affordable ways to reach your target audience and promote your online business. Unlike traditional marketing methods, such as direct mail or print ads, that require a lot of resources and time, email marketing can be done with minimal costs and effort. You don’t need to hire a professional photographer, a makeup artist, or a printing company. You only need a copywriter and a graphic designer (or you can use stock images) to create engaging and attractive emails for your subscribers. You can also send out emails faster and more frequently than print campaigns, which means you can stay in touch with your customers and prospects more often. 

3. It saves time: Email marketing can help you save time by allowing you to automate and schedule your campaigns in advance. You can create personalized and targeted emails that are triggered by specific actions or events of your subscribers. For example, you can send a welcome email to new subscribers, a thank you email to customers who made a purchase, or a reminder email to customers who abandoned their carts. These emails can run in the background, while you focus on other aspects of your online business.

4. Your efforts are easy to measure: Compared to other digital marketing strategies, email marketing is easy to measure. Many email marketing platforms help you track key metrics after you have sent out your email campaign. You can look at open rates, delivery rates, unsubscribe rates, and click-through rates. These metrics can help you understand how effective your email strategy is, and what areas you need to improve or change. You can also compare different campaigns and see what works best for your online business.

5. You can collect feedback and surveys: Email marketing can help you understand your customers better, which is crucial if you want them to keep engaging with your content and buying from your brand. For instance, you can send customer satisfaction surveys via emails to get their feedback. You can also use the surveys to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric that indicates how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to others. With these insights, you can develop strategies to improve customer experience, ultimately building trust and loyalty.

6. Email drives traffic to your site: Email marketing can help you attract more visitors to your website and boost your SEO. You can send emails with valuable and relevant content to your audience and a call to action (CTA), such as a button or a link, that invites your readers to click and visit your website. This way, you can direct them to your landing pages, blog posts, product pages, or any other content that you want them to see. 

Getting started with your email campaign 

Before you can start sending marketing emails, you need to have a list of people who want to wear from you. You can build your email list by: 

• Offering incentives: You can ask people to subscribe to your email list by giving them something valuable in exchange for their email address, such as a discount code, a free ebook, or a useful resource.

• Encouraging referrals: You can include a CTA that prompts your current subscribers to forward the email to others at the end of each email. If your content is engaging enough, they'll subscribe as well.

Your email list should only include subscribers who have opted to receive email communication from you. You don’t want to be the company/brand that sends unsolicited emails—no one likes spammers. 

Now that you’ve created your email list, you can get started with your email campaign by taking the following steps:

1. Set your marketing goals: Before you start sending emails to your potential customers, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish with your email campaign. Your email marketing goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). They should also align with your overall business goals and strategy. Some examples of email marketing goals are increasing brand awareness, generating leads, boosting sales, improving customer loyalty, etc.

2. Choose your preferred campaign type: An email marketing campaign takes different forms, such as newsletters, promotional emails, surveys, and so on. The campaign you choose depends on your marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you could focus on sending newsletters. However, if your goal is to increase sales, you may want to send promotional emails instead. Whatever campaign type you choose, make sure to include clear and compelling CTAs that can increase your click-through rates and generate leads.

3. Create your first email campaign: You can either use a template or create your email from scratch. To design effective and appealing emails, follow these tips:

• Use simple and clear language that your audience can understand

• Add images and visuals to engage your readers

• Personalize your emails based on the groups or specific individuals you’re targeting

• Ensure your email campaign is responsive and can be viewed on all devices

• Plan your campaigns strategically and align them with your goals

4. Monitor the campaign’s performance: To measure the effectiveness of your email marketing, you need to track various metrics that reflect how your audience interacts with your emails. Depending on the email marketing service you use, you can access data such as bounces, open rates, unsent emails, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, shares, and spam complaints. These metrics can help you identify what works and what doesn’t in your email campaign, allowing you to optimize it accordingly.

5. Clean your email list: Most of your email subscribers will be inactive, that is, they won’t open your emails. This is perfectly normal, as the average open rate for any email campaign is around 20%. However, frequently sending emails to a large list of inactive subscribers can damage your sender reputation and reduce your reach.  To avoid this, you should clean up your email list and remove inactive subscribers periodically. It’s better to have a smaller list with active subscribers than a big list of inactive subscribers.

To get started on email marketing as a new business owner, you can check out Bumpa’s messaging tool where you get to write & send personalized emails to your customers whatever relevant business information you have for them from the app.

Tips to ensure successful delivery of emails

Email deliverability is the measure of how successfully your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes. When email deliverability fails, emails can either bounce (that is, they are not delivered at all) or land in the spam folder. But you can avoid this by following best practices.

Below are tips you need to follow to ensure successful delivery of emails:

1. Avoid spammy subject lines: Your email subject lines are crucial for attracting your subscribers’ attention and persuading them to open your messages. However, some words and phrases can trigger spam filters and lower your deliverability. A subject line could be flagged as spam if it uses all caps, excessive exclamation marks, or misleading claims. For example, avoid words like “FREE!!!”

There is no definitive list of words or phrases that will guarantee your emails will land in the inbox. In fact, some legitimate emails may use the terms mentioned above. However, you should avoid being too aggressive or promotional when crafting your subject lines and focus on the genuine value of your content.

2. Clean your list regularly: You run a greater risk of harming your reputation and deliverability rates the longer you have inactive and unengaged users on your email list. Offering a simple and obvious option for users to unsubscribe from your emails automates the process, but it's also crucial to regularly clean your list to ensure that it only contains individuals who interact with your emails.

3. Have a consistent sending schedule: One reason for a lower sender score and IP rejection is random and erratic broadcast activity. If you are not maintaining a regular schedule with your emails, it creates sending spikes. Do your best to stick to a consistent email-sending schedule.

4. Personalize your emails: Your subscribers may consider your email as spam if they are not relevant to their needs, interests, and goals. So, you should tailor your content to suit their profiles, behaviours, and preferences. You can personalize your emails by segmenting your list into specific groups based on preferences, demographics, or behaviour. Sending your customers emails that resonate with them won’t only positively impact your deliverability, but also your reader engagement.

5. Ensure your emails are legally compliant: Most email marketing software ensures that emails comply with digital regulations like the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) Act by providing opt-in forms and unsubscribe links. But if you’re creating emails from scratch instead of using templates, you should confirm that you are not infringing any laws. 

Email marketing campaign ideas to engage customers

Email marketing offers a variety of ways to communicate with your audience and achieve different objectives. Below, we share some email marketing campaign ideas you can use for your business:

1. Welcome emails: These are the first emails you send to your new subscribers or customers to introduce them to your business and make a good impression. You can use welcome emails to offer a special deal for a new product, to highlight the benefits of your product or service, or to share some valuable content that can help them solve their problems. Most importantly, don’t forget to thank them for joining your email list.

2. Newsletter emails: These are regular emails that you send to your subscribers to keep them updated on your latest news, products, and services. You can use newsletter emails to share valuable content that educates your audience on topics related to your field. You can also use them to collect feedback from your customers and improve your offerings. You should always include a call to action that encourages your reader to take the next step, such as reading another blog post, checking out a new product, or signing up for a webinar.

3. Order confirmation emails: These are emails you send to your customers after they’ve purchased an item on your website. They serve to acknowledge their order and provide them with relevant information, such as the order number and delivery date. Order confirmation emails show your professionalism and attention to detail, and can help to increase customer loyalty.  

4. Invitation/Promotional emails: These types of emails inform customers about upcoming events, new product launches, and webinars/seminars that you’re hosting or participating in. You can use these emails to generate excitement and interest in your special offers and activities. You should include a clear and compelling call to action that invites your customers to register, attend, or buy your products. 

5. Survey email: Sending out survey emails shows your customers that you care about their opinions and want to improve your products, services, or experiences based on their needs and preferences. You can also use the data from the surveys to enhance your offerings and create more customer satisfaction. Survey emails should be short, simple, and engaging.

6. Seasonal/holiday emails: People love celebrating holidays and special occasions, and you can take advantage of these periods to reach out to customers with special offers and discounts. Popular holidays and occasions for email marketing campaigns include Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Black Friday. You should plan your campaign ahead of time and start sending your emails at least a week before the holiday. Then, you can increase the frequency and urgency of your emails as the holiday date gets closer.

6 email marketing metrics you should track

How do you know if your email campaigns are effective? You need to track the right metrics. Metrics are indicators of how people engage with your email. They help you measure the performance of your email marketing strategy, and identify areas for improvement. In this section, we will discuss six email marketing metrics that you should monitor:

1. Unsubscribe Rate: This is the percentage of email users that unsubscribe from your email list after opening your email. It shows how well your email content matches your subscribers’ expectations and preferences. However, the unsubscribe rate is not a reliable indicator of your email list health, because some subscribers may lose interest without bothering to unsubscribe. They may simply ignore or delete your emails. That’s why you should also track other metrics that measure subscriber engagement, such as clickthrough rates and conversion rates. Although the unsubscribe rate is not directly related to your email marketing goals, it is useful for calculating your overall list growth rate.

2. Conversion rate: This is the percentage of your email recipients who take your desired action after opening your email. For example, if you ask subscribers to sign up for a webinar, the conversion rate would be the percentage of subscribers who click the link and sign up. Tracking conversation rates helps you assess the overall effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

3. Open Rate: This is the percentage of email subscribers who open a particular email. It is an indicator of how well your subject line, preheader, and sender name attract your audience’s attention. Open rates are not as helpful as clickthrough rates when it comes to measuring your campaign success, because they’re not always accurate. 

However, you can get some value out of open rates if you use them as a comparative metric, to see how different subject lines, sender names, or sending times affect your audience’s interest. For example, you can compare this week’s open rate to last week’s, and see if there is any significant change due to the changes you made.

1. Click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of email recipients who click on at least one link within a particular email. This metric is a better indicator of engagement than open rates because it shows that people are interested in what you have to offer. A high click-through rate indicates that your email content is engaging and your call-to-action resonates with your audience. 

2. Return on investment (ROI): This metric measures the profitability of an investment relative to its cost. It's used to measure how effective your email campaigns are and whether they are generating a positive return for your business. For instance, if you made $20,000 from a $2,000 effort, your return on investment (ROI) would be 0.9, or 90%. If your campaign's aim is profit, calculating ROI is very important.

3. Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of your sent emails that was not successfully delivered to your recipients’ inbox. There are two kinds of bounces: soft bounces and hard bounces. Soft bounces are caused by temporary issues like a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. You can retry sending your email to these addresses, as they may be resolved later. On the other hand, Hard bounces are caused by permanent issues, such as an invalid or non-existent email address. You should remove these addresses from your email list, as they can harm your sender reputation and affect your future email deliverability.

Conclusion 

Email marketing should be an essential part of your marketing strategy, as it is an affordable, effective, and distinctive strategy. It can produce amazing results with minimal cost, learning, and effort. Email marketing can help you increase brand awareness, build customer loyalty, boost sales, and enhance customer satisfaction, as long as you keep delivering fresh, engaging, and relevant content to your audience.

• Marketing