Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy that allows you to connect your audience to your brand and increase sales. Personalized email marketing is one of the most effective ways to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty. Elements of a successful email campaign include:

• A strong email list
• Email service provider – helps design and execute email campaigns
• Clearly defined goals – drive sales, boost brand awareness, and generate and nurture leads

How does Email Marketing Work?

To have a successful email marketing campaign, you must have a strong and reliable email list, and send enticing email notifications to your email list to encourage customers to take specific action. To build your email list, you can create a signup on your website, use a paper signup sheet at events, or use social media to encourage viewers to join your list. You can also host a contest, offer a discount, and make emails that are easy to share to strengthen your email list. Businesses can convert potential customers into active customers through personalized email marketing campaigns. The emails can be automated, reducing time and resources spent on personalized email marketing campaigns.

5 Types of Email Marketing

Many types of personalized email marketing campaigns can be used to capture potential and existing customers. Here are a few examples:

Welcome Emails

Welcome emails allow you to introduce your organization, business, products, or services. You can optimize welcome emails by making it individualized and avoiding making the email a sales pitch. Welcome emails give customers an overview of the company and an opportunity to form a positive first impression before being introduced to products and services.

Email Newsletters

Businesses use newsletters to stay in the front of the minds of customers. Newsletters often contain company news, product announcements, feedback requests, and are good for engaging potential customers and retaining existing customers. It is important to send newsletters on a schedule because users who enjoy the content will stay subscribes and get in a habit of receiving the emails. Newsletters give customers access to more company information and encourage customers to re-visit your website.

Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing emails use a defined purpose and useful content to capture sales and interaction from your leading customers. It allows you to connect a set of emails with a specific activity, allowing you to understand customer behavior and adjust your campaigns. The emails can promote products or services, update customers about current discounts, or give information about what is happening in the company. To be successful, lead nurturing emails should be targeted to the needs of your customers based on the stage they are in the marketing journey.

Re-Engagement Emails

When a customer on your email list has become inactive, re-engagement emails can be sent to re-connect with the customer and establish goodwill. Re-engagement emails can include feedback, allowing you to understand what you can improve to create a better customer experience.

Triggered Email Marketing

Triggered emails are automated emails that are sent when a defined event or condition is met by a customer. Emails can be triggered based on customer’s behavior, demographic, or events. For example, if a customer adds an item to their cart and abandons it, an email would be automatically sent to them encouraging them to complete the purchase. Emails can also be triggered for events including birthdays, anniversaries, price drops, expiration dates, or weather changes.

To discover how using the geolocation pixel can improve your email marketing campaigns, watch the video below or read the transcript here.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing allows you to directly communicate with your customers to increase sales and brand loyalty. Advantages of email marketing include:

• Permission Based – customers sign up by choice, increasing the chance of engagement and conversion
• Direct Access to Audience – you can communicate directly to subscribers on their schedules, most people check their emails daily, making it more likely for your content to be seen
• More Control – businesses have full control over their email accounts, making it easier for them to manage and less likely that the accounts or content will be removed
• Personalization – you can use demographic and psychographic data, allowing you to create personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns
• Self-Promotion – one of the best ways to reach customers is through self-promotion, with email marketing you will always have a method to promote yourself
• Less Intrusive – email is voluntary, customers can update their preferences or unsubscribe if they are unsatisfied with the content or how often they are receiving notifications

Email marketing is an effective marketing technique, but there are many downsides to using email marketing as well. Disadvantages of email marketing include:

• Competition – hard to stand out in inbox with many email campaigns, emails must get opened to be effective
• Rules and Regulations – you cannot send soliciting emails, people can report your emails as spam, and countries have different rules and regulations to keep track of
• Delivery Issues – when an email is sent, it is not guaranteed to be received or delivered, email campaigns cannot be effective if the customer does not receive the email
• Design Problems – emails must be able to appear on multiple devices and there is often a trade-off between design and functionality, they must also be small enough in size to download quickly
• Skills and Resources – creating email marketing campaigns requires copyright and design skills
• Ease of Un-subscription – customers can easily unsubscribe from your email list; you can lose customer quickly if your marketing is not good or appealing to your customers

Transactional Emails vs. Marketing Emails

A marketing email is any email sent that contains commercial messaging. They are sent to groups of existing customers or potential customers. Transactional emails are personalized emails that have information to complete a transaction the person has started. They are triggered by a specific action by a customer and are only sent to one customer. Examples of transactional emails include:

• Customer Feedback
• Password Reset
• Notification Emails
• Order Confirmation or Receipt

While marketing emails are sent in large quantities to many people, transactional emails are more individualized and are usually sent to one person. Transactional emails can fulfill a marketing need as they can increase the recipient’s relationship with the brand, however, they are mostly used to complete a request or action by a customer. Marketing emails are meant to drive customers to engage with your business who have not already begun an action or transaction. Overall, transactional emails can be used to achieve marketing goals, but they are not sent for the sole purpose of promoting your business and attracting customers.

Create Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns with Optimove

Optimove has integrated every aspect of preparing, delivering, and optimizing personalized email marketing campaigns all in one platform. The advanced email feature of Optimove includes a visual template editor, cross-client preview, personalization tags linked to any database field, multi-brand email management, and more.

Watch this video (or read the transcript here) to learn from Optimove’s CRM experts how the Gmail’s Promotions tab can optimize your email campaigns.

Contact us today or request a Web demo to learn how you can use Optimove to seamlessly personalize your email marketing campaigns.

Related Articles

Email Deliverability  Email Segmentation SMS Marketing