Email marketing is a vital tool for connecting with your audience and driving conversions. The ability to reach out directly to your customers’ inboxes is powerful. Yet, many entrepreneurs are unsure of how to leverage it effectively.
With this in mind, we’ve put together an email marketing guide for beginners to help businesses looking to get started. Read on to discover the essential knowledge and key strategies needed to launch successful email marketing campaigns.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing uses emails as a communication channel to promote a business’s products or services. The digital equivalent of direct mail campagnes, email marketing, allows companies to communicate directly with a list of interested consumers.
While digital advertising has many avenues to pursue, from social media marketing and influencer campaigns to search engine optimization and content marketing, the tried and tested method of sending promotional emails isn’t going anywhere. The global market for email marketing is expected to more than double from $8.3 billion in 2023 to $18.9 billion by 2028.
Getting started with email marketing allows you to foster relationships with potential customers, keep current clients informed about your brand, and even offer discounts to encourage repeat business and generate customer loyalty.
Email Marketing Benefits
Including email marketing as a key component of your overarching strategy can yield multiple benefits. The three primary advantages of email marketing are its high ROI, its ability to target specific people, and its easily measurable results.
High Return on Investment (ROI)
Compared to other marketing channels, email marketing is cost-effective, offering a high return on investment. It is a valuable tool for both small and large businesses due to its affordability and effectiveness.
While ROI will depend on implementation and the specifics of your business, studies show that, on average, email marketing returns $36 for every $1 spent.
Personalization and Audience Segmentation
Email marketing allows businesses to deliver personalized content to specific segments of their audience, ensuring that messages are highly relevant to recipients’ needs and interests. This boosts engagement and enhances the customer experience.
Measurable Results
Email marketing provides measurable results in real time through metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This allows marketers to assess the effectiveness of campaigns and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.
Getting Started with Email Marketing
Define Your Goals
When integrating email campaigns into your marketing strategy, it is crucial to have a plan with clearly defined goals. What do you hope to achieve through email marketing?
Whatever it is, you need to set it out from the start to inform the rest of your decision-making. For example, email marketing is particularly effective when launching new products or services, delivering the essential information consumers need to know directly in their inboxes.
Identify Your Target Audience
Once you have a goal in mind, you can start to identify the target audience needed to achieve it. You can’t develop your email list, craft email copy and designs, or test different strategies without first finding the right people to communicate with.
There are many ways to identify and analyze your intended audience. Key factors to consider are your existing customer base and the broader market, including your competitors.
A helpful marketing tactic is condensing your target audience into a series of ideal customer personas. This puts a human face on your audience while enabling you to develop an effective email campaign that matches their wants and needs.
Choose an Email Marketing Platform
A vital aspect contributing to any email marketing strategy’s success is choosing appropriate email service providers. These providers offer the necessary tools and features to manage and send emails to your customers effectively.
The market is awash with a variety of options, each boasting its own distinct advantages and features. Popular choices include MailChimp, SendinBlue, and Constant Contact.
Your final decision should be based on the functionality provided and how it matches your needs, as well as budgetary constraints. Functionality to consider includes automation capabilities, analytics insights, and user-friendly email templates.
How to Build an Email List
An integral part of launching any successful email marketing campaign is getting an email list of individuals interested in receiving communications from you. There are a number of ways of building out your email list, and it’s not as simple as just adding a “Sign Up” button on your website.
Start by creating valuable content that attracts potential subscribers, such as blog posts, eBooks, or exclusive guides, and offer them as gated content in exchange for email addresses. Using social media channels to promote these lead magnets can also motivate your followers to join your mailing list by highlighting the benefits of being a subscriber.
Lastly, always prioritize providing value through your communications, as this encourages organic growth through word-of-mouth and increased retention rates. Learn more about how to create an email list here.
How to Email Marketing For Your Business
Much of the success of email marketing campaigns comes down to getting customers to open and read your communications. With that in mind, here are six things to consider when crafting your campaign:
1. Choosing the Right Format
With many different types of marketing emails, the first step is finding the right format for the goals of your campaign. Examples include:
- Welcome emails: Sent to first time sign-ups or purchasers, or to drive interested individuals to make a purchase.
- Newsletters: Designed to keep customers up to date with your company, perhaps directing them to specific products or other pieces of content on the website.
- Product launches: Inform customers about the new product and why it could be for them.
- Promotional offers: Deliver discounts or other incentives for people on the email list to make a purchase.
- Abandoned cart emails: Follow up with people who almost made a purchase on your website.
- Post purchase communications: Develop customer relationships and ask for feedback on their interaction with your company.
2. Writing Compelling Subject Lines
The first thing customers see when they receive your email is the subject line. The right phrase can compel users to open the email. At the same time, a poorly chosen one might see your message sent straight to spam folders.
Email subject lines serve as gatekeepers for your content. Email marketing best practices when it comes to writing subject lines include:
- Maintain brevity: Long titles risk getting cut off by most email service providers. Aim for 50 characters maximum.
- Add personal touches: Use names or other relevant details specific to each recipient where possible.
- Create urgency: Phrases such as “limited time offer” tend to encourage immediate action from subscribers.
- Consider spam filters: Avoid certain words in title lines that trigger spam filters. Examples include ‘free’ and ‘guarantee.’
Finding the right subject lines typically requires significant trial and error. Use A/B testing to identify the most compelling subject lines for your email list.
3. Crafting Engaging Content
Email marketers have long recognized the power of stories as tools for communication due to their ability to engage audiences and create lasting impressions. Stories not only simplify complex ideas but also foster emotional connections between consumers and brands.
Once a customer opens your email, they need to be met with engaging narratives that draw them in and convince them to take action. Use your customer personas to guide your content generation, investigate successful email writing techniques, or even consider hiring an experienced writer with a proven track record.
Here are some tips to seamlessly incorporate stories into your copy:
- Showcase real-life applications to highlight how customers benefit directly from the product—this provides tangible proof of concept.
- Add personal anecdotes linking back to business objectives/values to demonstrate the value of the product.
- Promote testimonials/reviews indicating high levels of satisfaction amongst existing customers.
4. Design and Layout
Compelling subject lines and engaging copy can be undone by poorly designed emails that turn customers away. Ensure your emails are visually appealing and well formatted for a range of devices (phone, laptop, tablet, etc.). Utilize the existing branding of your company and its website to create consistent visuals across every channel of communication.
Email templates can play a crucial role in enhancing the visual appeal of your emails. Many platforms offer pre-designed templates that enable beginners to craft professional-looking emails without requiring design skills. However, remember that while aesthetics do matter, it’s content that truly reigns supreme. Therefore, focus more on delivering valuable information than on creating dazzling designs.
5. Segmenting Your Target Audience for Personalization
Research from HubSpot shows that segmented emails result in 30% more opens and 50% more click throughs compared to unsegmented, blanket emails sent to the entire mailing list.
Segmenting your email list allows you to tailor marketing content for relevance, improving engagement. Segmented emails result in 30% more opens and 50% more click throughs compared to unsegmented emails.
Common segmentation criteria include:
- Demographics: Age, gender, income, education level, occupation, etc.
- Geographics: Location, time zone, language, etc.
- Past behavior: Purchase history, website interactions, email engagement (opens, clicks), product usage, etc.
- Psychographics: Interests, lifestyle, values, personality traits, etc.
- Preferences: Preferred content type, preferred communication frequency, etc.
- Source of Sign-up: Website, social media, in-store, etc.
Generic emails limit the engagement and ROI of marketing campaigns. In contrast, personalization provides customers with more relevant and engaging content. Simple examples of personalization include using customer names in the subject line and email body.
However, modern email marketing campaigns have become much more advanced, enabling companies to offer personalized offers and product recommendations based on past behavior and dynamic content (sections of email text) that changes according to multiple segmentation criteria.
6. Measuring and Analyzing Performance
A key benefit of email marketing is the data you can gather to determine the performance of a specific campaign or strategy. When you send an email, you can track:
- Open rates: percentage of recipients that opened the email
- Clickthrough rates: percentage of recipients that clicked on one or more links in the email
- Conversion rates: percentage of recipients that completed the desired action, for example, making a purchase
- Bounce rate: the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered
- Unsubscribe rates: the percentage of recipients choosing to opt out of your email list
All this data allows you to track and analyze email performance and refine your strategy moving forward. With granular level data related to each email sent, you can perform continuous A/B testing to optimize performance and make data-driven decisions based on evidence, not speculation or personal opinion.
Finding Success With Email Marketing
Finding success with email marketing involves creating a strategic blend of personalization, engaging content, and consistent outreach to connect meaningfully with your audience. But email marketing doesn’t stand alone—it can be amplified when combined with impactful offline solutions.
Integrating email campaigns with offline strategies, like direct mail and flyer distribution, can create a holistic approach to reaching your customers at multiple touchpoints. Oppizi’s offline marketing solutions, such as Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM), work seamlessly with your email campaigns to increase brand visibility and engagement, ensuring your message reaches your audience both in their inbox and at their doorstep.
With the right mix of online and offline tactics, your brand can foster a stronger, more connected customer journey, ultimately driving growth and success.
Ready to amplify your marketing strategy? Create your Oppizi campaign today and see the power of integrated online and offline marketing in action.
Nederlands 
English 
Français 
Deutsch 
Español