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Email is as a highly effective direct marketing channel and could be considered the modern version of direct response marketing.
Email marketing campaigns are core strategies in modern digital marketing, with entire businesses successfully built on the communication channel.
The real benefit of email marketing is the direct relationship you can build with your audience that you can control without the threat of a third party closing an account. A qualified email marketing list is priceless!
At a time when search platforms are getting more aggressive with advertising, generative AI is taking away organic traffic and some social media platforms are unstable, email is a way that brands can engage with their users and nurture trusted relationships.
Keep reading to understand how you can use email marketing to connect with your audience.
Email marketing can be highly effective due to a variety of factors:
This combination of advanced functionality and a strong connection between your audiences and your brand enables powerful marketing campaigns for many different types of businesses, whether you’re a publisher or an ecommerce store.
Email is one channel among many. Even email-only newsletters need other channels to acquire subscribers.
Generally, email is a channel for audiences who are aware of you in some way. They might have purchased a product, downloaded a document, signed up for a free trial, signed up for a newsletter, or set an alert.
Email audiences have usually taken action to end up on your mailing list. This makes it a critical channel for cultivating relationships, moving users through consideration stages in a sales process, or re-engaging users who took previous actions.
In combination with organic discovery strategies like social media, SEO, and paid advertising like search engine marketing, email campaigns can improve how well you can reach and convert audiences.
Your email list is a powerful tool. If you use the opportunities it presents you, you can enhance not only your marketing campaigns but how well you understand your audience and the effectiveness of your tactics.
With an email list and the right platform, you have access to:
Email campaigns are your opportunity to put timely and focused offers in front of the right people at the right time, as well as cultivate their interest and trust.
For a campaign to be successful, you need to know what you want from your audience and what problems they come to you to solve. To build an effective email campaign, you need:
1. A compelling offer to sign up for emails and provide you with information.
To find this compelling offer, you need to know what offer is valuable enough to trade for information and inbox access. This could be:
2. Tracking and tagging. Tagging is the true power of email marketing.
Ask people to submit basic information like their age, interests, or company size when they sign up.
But you should also look for an email platform that allows automated tagging, for example when someone completes or begins but does not complete an action on your website.
3. Custom campaigns and “tracks” based on information and behavior.
Based on the data you gather, you can create custom campaigns for different types of users. This should include:
4. Testing and experimentation. Email is one of the best ways to test your messaging.
You can test subject lines, different offers, and ads, your conversion optimization, etc., and the right platform will give you all the engagement data you need to refine your campaigns.
Separate a group into different test campaigns to compare performance so that you’re always improving and gaining insights about your audience.
Email mailing lists are your engaged audience. Take the opportunity to get to know them.
Depending on your business model and your audience, you may need different types of emails – and different combinations – in your campaigns.
Some campaigns will be more directly promotional, while others will focus on information.
You need to understand why someone signed up to receive emails in the first place to determine what kinds of emails to send them. You can do that by tracking how they signed up. Was it through an offer page? A digital download? A social media promotion?
You should also collect people’s preferences as they sign up and through welcome emails to better understand their needs.
Once you understand the intent behind an email signup and the user’s preferences, you can choose the best types of emails to send.
An email marketing platform should be able to do this for you automatically, entering users into different segments to receive types of emails based on their preferences.
Promotional emails are focused on conversions. They’re for audience segments that you’ve identified as likely to make a purchase but maybe need a little more enticing.
For example, it might be a user who has items in their cart but didn’t make a purchase. Or a user who went through the process of customizing a product but didn’t add it to their cart.
You might have identified them as someone waiting for a sale or shopping around.
It’s helpful to add incentives to promotional emails so that users get additional value for being on the mailing list.
Remind them of a discount code, or reward them for following through on an abandoned purchase by promising a future discount.
It’s important to be careful and intentional with these emails because they often get shunted into promotion-specific inboxes and lost in a sea of other promotions.
Running a nurture campaign to convince audiences to whitelist these emails could be an effective tactic.
Newsletters and emails containing news and information can be a service or business model themselves.
Alternatively, you can use this service to keep connected with audiences and keep them engaged with your brand, even if your business model isn’t newsletter-based.
Putting true informational value in people’s inboxes is difficult, and not all businesses are set up to do it effectively. These types of emails work best for companies that already invest in educational content or news.
If you don’t have an existing mechanism for content production, be aware that these emails are high-effort!
The tradeoff is that audiences are more likely to engage with emails regularly if they get genuine value from a newsletter.
You can build strong trust with audiences, and if the newsletter is successful, open a new revenue stream with in-email advertising.
You can send emails with information about your company, although the audiences that respond well to them may be limited.
Investors are an example of an audience group that would be highly invested in company update emails.
Be careful with the cadence of these because they can get lost, just like promotional emails.
Welcome emails are important for setting expectations, gathering information, and beginning nurturing campaigns.
In a welcome email, you can give users information about the track they’re on, the cadence of emails, what information they can expect, etc.
You can also use welcome emails to guide users through the next steps and instruct them on how to customize their experience.
Nurture emails take a slow and gradual approach to engagement and winning conversions.
They are critical to any email campaign because they create touchpoints with users and can help lead them to an eventual business goal like a conversion or sale.
These emails attempt to move users into consideration stages in a journey or assist them with their consideration and comparison activities.
They might include reminders, information about free services or information, or check-ins to ask users to update their communication preferences.
Re-engagement is very similar to nurturing but occurs when a user is colder.
If they haven’t interacted with an email in a while, you can move them to a re-engagement campaign that presents them with specific reminders or offers to try and get them to become an engaged user again.
It’s important to keep email lists clean by removing users who haven’t engaged for a long time.
If you’re gathering data from your email list or selling advertising, this ensures that you don’t have inflated data. However, before you kick users off an email list, you should enter them into a re-engagement campaign to see if you can pull them back in.
Direct feedback is one of the best ways to get information about your audience.
Surveys can be used to create content with first-party data, and feedback surveys can help you further customize user experiences. Reviews can be used as social proof.
These types of emails can also be combined with sales and nurturing campaigns to increase retention and conversions. Offering people rewards for providing their feedback can lead to additional conversions.
Consider the functionality and your needs, and growth potential when you’re choosing an email platform.
Some of the core functions you should look for are:
Between awareness and a sale, there’s often an email. Or two or three. Or more.
Email lists are so valuable because they’re a direct source of information about who your audience is, what they want, and what they respond to. It’s also a relationship that you have a lot of control over.
The right platform with the right capabilities combined with a strong content strategy can increase the rate at which you gain conversions from audiences that are already aware of your brand.
With automation, you can set these processes to occur automatically.
Email marketing involves encouraging users to sign up to receive emails, and then sending them specific, targeted emails to keep their attention, nurture their journey, and gain conversions.
Email marketing works by nurturing users to build a relationship and connection with your brand.
Journeys toward sales and conversions can take a long time, and the right email campaign can remind users to come back to you when they’ve made a decision to make a purchase.
Alternatively, email newsletters can themself be a business model, where you provide high-quality experiences in people’s inboxes and sell advertising. Advertisers get access to the audience of your email list.
No matter what your business model is, a well-curated email list is a valuable business asset.
Whether you’re selling advertising on your email list or nurturing users through purchasing journeys, email marketing is one of the best ways to gain insights about your audience, test your strategies, and re-engage with users who become disconnected.
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