What is an email marketing strategy?
As with all marketing channels, no two email marketing strategies are the same. An email marketing strategy is designed to help you reach your marketing goals, such as improving brand recognition, increasing sales or keeping your customers up to date. Once you identify your marketing goals, you can create a series of emails and workflows with tools such as automation, email templates and list segmentation.
Why is an effective email marketing strategy important?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your products and reach your customers. If executed correctly, email marketing campaigns can build trust with your customers, encourage users to visit your website, and ultimately result in more sales and satisfied customers.
How do I know if my email marketing campaigns are working?
The best email marketing services have extensive reporting and analytics. To determine if your email marketing campaigns are successful, check the recorded data once an email is sent. The reports should indicate how many people received your email, the click-through rate, bounces and other metrics.
How do email marketing services help you grow and maintain your contact lists?
Email marketing services offer several tools to help you obtain and manage email addresses from your customers. Most software options integrate with your current email address book to start your list. In addition, many provide the ability to embed sign-up forms on your website and social media accounts to grow your contact list.
Did you know?: Most email marketing software solutions have tools that keep your contact list up to date by removing inactive addresses and customers who unsubscribe from your emails.
What are automation tools, and how do they make the email marketing process easier?
Automation tools allow you to set up recurring emails that automatically go to certain subscribers based on the actions they take. For example, if you set up a welcome series, a contact will receive a welcome email once they subscribe to your list.
What types of analytics do email marketing services provide?
One of the biggest reasons email marketing is so popular with businesses is that you can track its success. Services typically provide details such as who opened your email, who immediately deleted it, who forwarded the email to others, and who bought your product or service. You can drill down into the data by looking at the days and times emails are being opened and the demographics (e.g., male, female, old, young) of customers who engage with your emails most. All of this information helps you increase the success of future campaigns.
Can you use email marketing in conjunction with social media?
Yes, most email marketing services let you take advantage of the social media following you've built. Many providers let you connect your campaigns with your social networks, so your emails automatically post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms. In addition, the services let you collect email addresses for your contact list with prebuilt social media sign-up pages.
Tip: See whether your email campaigns are resonating on social media by checking which messages are being liked and shared on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter.
What is the difference between traditional email marketing messages and transactional messages?
Traditional email marketing is designed to communicate with many people. These emails can share information about your business, such as news, promotions and special events. You can send these emails to your entire subscriber list or certain segments of your list.
Transactional emails are sent to individual customers after they perform certain actions. For example, when a customer makes an online purchase from a business, the confirmation email they receive is a transactional email.
Does email marketing software integrate with any programs I already use?
Yes, most email marketing services integrate with at least some popular business applications. The most common integrations are with Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify and Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento). These integrations save you time and resources by automatically transferring content between your email marketing platform and your other software. Some providers also let you tap into their application programming interface to build custom integrations.
