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Introduction Guide to Email Marketing: What You Should Know Before Working on a Campaign

Por Guest Author |

introductory guide to email marketing

The Internet is like the Universe; it keeps on expanding. More companies appear (and planets) amongst the fog making it hard to stand out.

Having a good communication strategy is becoming an essential for any business. Mailings are the best communication channels thanks to its high profitability.

Here is a guide to create stunning mailing campaigns so you understand everything about email marketing!

Key areas of email marketing

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the English word used to define sending massive emails to a group of contacts that have authorized to receive your information.

The objective of emailing is to generate loyalty and/or generate sales through emails.

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Who uses email marketing?

  • Companies: the majority of companies use an email strategy to send information to recipients. It´s an adaptable instrument so any type of business can benefit from it, both small to medium- sized companies as well as large corporations including freelancers. This channel focuses on companies that need to communicate with their users.

  • Bloggers: for web users who have a blog, email marketing is a wonderful tool to communicate the pitch of a new post. This instrument is useful to let followers know about a new entry.

What type of applications and benefits are offered by email marketing?

Email marketing can have two different purposes:

  • Commercial: sell a service or product offered by a company. This is the basic purpose of mailing. Emails usually indicate a special or limited offer during a time period. Newsletters usually have a call to action that directs you straight to a webpage, to make conversion easier. This feature usually carries more weight during sales periods or when sales are focused on a certain product.

  • Customer Loyalty: in this case, email marketing’s objective is to generate brand recognition. There isn’t a direct sales strategy here but one that generates a continued relationship with users in order to maintain it. This feature enables you to stand out from the rest of the competition, even though you are not selling per say, you are generating potential clients and future sales.

We recommend that newsletters have 30% commercial information (offers, promotions, discounts…) and 70% quality content (tutorials, news, events…) in order to build loyalty among users.

As marketing expert David Newman would say: “Emails have an ability many channels don’t: they create personal valuable, at scale.”

Another advantage mailings offer are the following:

  • Using an emailing application help emails arrive at your recipient’s inboxes and prevents them from going to the spam folder. Therefore it’s useful to use the company’s domain since it maximizes deliverability and offers credibility. If you don’t look after the deliverability all your efforts creating the campaign will have been for nothing.

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  • Segmentation. Obtaining a contact list is one of the most difficult challenges. A solution is to offer your website readers a subscription to a newsletter and in this case, we recommend that they fill out a form so you can later segment the contact list or use a tool to generate a database, such as social media contests. Your emails can’t be adequate for all your users. You can divide the list according to interests, geographical location, age, etc., so your emails best adapt to the recipients. For example, if you have a sports store and you have a 2 for 1 offer in children’s sandals, you avoid sending this campaign to teenagers.

  • Personalization. Massive emails create a direct link between the company and the user. You are allowed to enter the user’s personal inboxes and you shouldn’t waste such an opportunity. You can personalize emails with the platform and create a familiar sensation. Personalization offers value.

  • Asynchrony. Mailings don’t bother anyone; it sits there quietly until you are ready to open it and doesn’t interrupt the recipient’s activity. Since it’s not an intrusive vehicle, it enables users to read the email when they want to and this fact offers a high opening rate.

  • Feedback. With email marketing, you can establish reciprocity with users, and get them to participate without it being a one-way communication vehicle. By getting them to participate, you can ask them for their opinion about a brand, ask if they have any questions regarding your service or what they would improve about it so they feel they belong.

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With all this information you can see your weak points and create a strategy to strengthen them. At the same time, you show users that you are interested in improving it and make their job easier, which is something users value a great deal. It’s important that the company or blogger answer messages and questions immediately.

  • Join with other channels. Email marketing likes to make friends, so you can integrate this with social networks. Studies show that if you join emailing with social networks, the efficiency ratio increases up to 30%. An integrated communication strategy improves your campaigns. Social networks serve to generate brand knowledge; everyone has access to it through a computer. If you get them interested, users subscribe to your newsletter. You should include social media logos inside a campaign in order to gain direct traffic toward them and gain more followers. Social networks should also incentivize a subscription to a newsletter.

  • Profitable and cost-effective. Emailing generates high profits for the small investment it requires. They generate a 4,308% ROI, meaning that for each Euro invested, 43,08 Euros is profited. That is why it’s the most profitable tool in the market, as long as they are taken seriously and quality content is created.

  • Results. Mailing platforms measure the impact of campaigns automatically, so you can evaluate your results and improve next time. Statistics are essential since they indicate your weakness. For example, if you have a very low opening rate, you need to improve your subject line, make it more attractive in order to increase the opening rate of the campaign. However, if you have a low click rate, you should place your call to action differently.

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How to create email marketing?

The best way to do it is by using a specialized application such as Mailify. The most used email servers (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo…) shouldn´t be used for this and can develop a bad reputation for the company since it sends messages to the spam folder.

Mailing platforms:

  • Are highly intuitive.
  • Offer a considerable amount of features so you can create excellent campaigns in a matter of minutes.
  • Have predesigned platforms and tools to create newsletters from the start.
  • They look after your database automatically.
  • Analyze the results of your campaigns.
  • Present a variety of extension.
  • Have a responsive design.

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What should the content be for email marketing campaigns?

Following all our suggestions won’t help you if the content is no good. As marketing expert Andrew Davis says about content marketing:

 Content builds relationships. Relationships are based on trust. Trust drives revenue.

Quality must be your priority since it’s the best form of advertising. Speak about current topics that relate to your environment, create original campaigns and demonstrate there are people behind the screen. If your content has quality, this is shared on its own.

You must offer a unified picture, meaning, choose a design, the colors, a font, a voice and a style and maintain this in each campaign. Users should identify with your newsletter as soon as they see it. Offer a common image as a whole, so the webpage, social network,s and email marketing are all on the same page.

 Avoid using bright or loud colors that impair the view. You may get the user’s attention but the campaign will be closed immediately. You should use a format that is pleasing to the eye and mix text and images. If recipients see a bunch of text they probably won’t read it and the content will go unnoticed.

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It’s very important to care for the image of the newsletter, revise grammatical errors and send a test to make sure everything is viewed correctly. Once you have everything set, you can press send.

 If you have read until this point, congratulations, this means that email marketing doesn’t have any more secrets. Now you can begin creating campaigns with the cornerstone of your communications strategy.

We hope you enjoyed this article and if you know any additional tips to create great email marketing campaigns, we hope you share them in the comments section so we can all improve.

And if you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend the following articles:

  1. Email Marketing: 3 Foolproof Techniques To Learn How to Sell by Using Social Networks and Stay in Contact With Your Customers

  2. Social Networks and Email Marketing united will never be defeated

  3. What is Content Marketing and How Can It Elevate Your Business?

  4. 10 types of visual content that you must include in your Social Networks (+ the tools to create them and the best tricks by experts)