Email might have been around longer than social media and even search engines, but it remains one of the best ways to communicate with your customers. When used effectively, it can be one of the best ways to raise brand awareness, nurture your leads, and sell your products and services.
Over four billion people worldwide currently use email regularly, which is more than half of the global population. However, the large number of users is not the only reason why marketers love using email so much. It also has a much higher ROI than most other marketing channels, with a massive $36 return for each $1 you spend on it.
It makes sense that if you run a business, you will want to channel the power of email marketing. To get started, you need first to figure out which email marketing software is the best option for you and how to get it to work harder for you for a more successful email marketing campaign.
Email Marketing Software – What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a process that involves sending emails to both current and potential customers. The main goal of the process is to increase brand awareness, improve engagement rates, make sales, or nurture leads. When running a business, email is something you can’t afford to neglect or ignore since it has the highest conversion rate across marketing channels and delivers the highest ROI. Some of the main benefits of email marketing include the following:
1 – Boost Website Traffic
Email is one of the best ways to drive more traffic to your website. You can use your email newsletters to share snippets of recent blog posts, for example, with a link to read the full version. Or, adding calls to action buttons to your promotional emails can be an ideal way to encourage subscribers to visit your sales and landing pages to learn more about your products and services.
2 – Improve Brand Awareness
Email can be one of the best ways to get the word out about your brand, your products and services, and your business overall. This is because it is an ideal channel for sharing educational content, updates, news, and valuable resources that your subscribers are likely to be interested in. Ensuring that your email content and design align well with your branding and brand identity will help boost brand awareness.
3 – Boost Other Marketing Channels
Email can be an excellent option for integrating different marketing channels and driving further traffic to various customer touch points for your business, such as landing pages, social media profiles, blog posts, and in-person events you are hosting or attending. For example, you can use a promotional email or transactional email to direct a customer to your Facebook or Google My Business page by asking them to leave a review of their experience with a link.
4 – Increase Sales and Revenue
Email will also help you put your products and services in front of more customers, ultimately giving you a better chance of driving sales and revenue. You can test different promotional techniques to see which drives the most revenue and boosts sales more effectively. For example, to encourage more sales, you can send out emails that include rewards for customers, such as voucherondes to get a discount on their next purchase.
5 – Increase Customer Engagement
When you use email marketing, there are lots of different campaigns you can send and plenty of room to be creative. With different campaign types, you can boost customer engagement by keeping your recipients excited and interested in what they will hear about from your brand next.
Understanding What Your Goals Are with Email Campaign Software
To make your email marketing software work harder for you, it’s essential to understand your primary goals before you get into creating your campaign. Consider what you want to achieve with the emails you send and the actions you want your recipients to take after they open and read the message. Some common goals for email marketing campaigns include increasing website traffic, generating more revenue, boosting brand awareness, gaining data through surveys and feedback, and nurturing leads.
Define Your Audience Before Using an Email Marketing Platform
Regardless of the industry, your business operates in, you are marketing to several different customer types, each of which has unique needs and characteristics. To ensure that your email marketing software is working as hard as possible, it’s essential first to put in the time and effort to define and get to know your target audience so that you can segment subscribers based on various factors. This could include engagement levels, interests, demographic data, preferences and more.
Choose an Email Marketing Software Campaign Type
There are various email types that businesses can send out to achieve specific goals. The type of campaign you choose will be based mainly on your target audience and your goals. Some options include:
Using Campaign Email Software to Send Welcome Emails
A welcome email or welcome email series is the first email that a subscriber will get after they make a purchase from your brand or sign up to your mailing list. Welcome emails are one of the best ways to introduce a new subscriber or customer to your brand, and they are worth sending, with an open rate of almost 50%.
Email Marketing Program for Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned basket or cart email campaigns refer to emails sent to customers who have added products into their baskets to buy but did not complete the purchase for any reason. These are hugely effective, and setting them up can often be one of the best ways to ensure that your email marketing software is working harder for you if you run an eCommerce store, as they make up around one third of all eCommerce revenue.
Customers don’t always abandon their baskets because they have changed their mind – often, they might have gotten distracted when buying, or they might have been put off by the final cost. Cart abandonment emails can serve as a reminder to customers who have been side tracked, or you can use them to offer a discount or free shipping, encouraging the customer to return and make the purchase.
Re-Engagement Email Campaigns
A re-engagement email is targeted at subscribers who have not been active for a while to encourage them to start engaging with your emails and your brand once again. For example, suppose you have noticed that a certain subscriber hasn’t opened any of your emails in the last month. In that case, a re-engagement email could be sent offering them an exclusive discount to trigger the engagement and encourage them to make a purchase. Some brands send re-engagement emails with surveys designed to find out more about what is causing the lack of engagement from the subscriber, which can be a good way to gather data that can ultimately help you design more engaging and interesting email messages for future campaigns.
Email Software for Marketing Newsletters
Marketing newsletters are one of the most popular types of email campaigns you can send. They are typically non-promotional and used by most brands to share updates and news from the industry, tips and tricks, how-to guides, roundups of the latest blog posts from your company, and much more information with subscribers.
Setting up a regular newsletter to send to your mailing list subscribers is one of the best ways to increase customer engagement and position your brand as an authority in your industry.
Use Automated Email Marketing Services
When making your email software work harder for you, one of the best things you can do is send automated email marketing messages. Using automation is one of the best ways to ensure that everything runs smoothly and free up time and effort that can be spent elsewhere instead of sending messages manually. Many campaigns can easily be automated using a good email marketing platform, including automated welcome emails, cart abandonment messages, re-engagement emails and more.
Getting More from an Email Marketing Solution
Some more tips to keep in mind to help you get the most from your email marketing software include:
- Focus on Good Design: No matter how valuable your email content is, it might not have a significant impact on readers if it’s poorly designed, boring, or just doesn’t look that good.
- Clean Your Email List: You should regularly clean and keep your email list up to date by removing inactive subscribers, checking for email address errors, and removing duplicates.
- Focus on Subject Lines: Since the subject line is the first thing the recipient will read when the email lands in their inbox, it’s worth prioritising to ensure that it stands out.
No matter what email marketing software you use, choosing the right email campaigns and focusing on sending attention-grabbing, valuable and interesting content will ensure that it works as hard as possible for you.
