Email marketing

If emailing is still not a part of your marketing strategy, you’d better take care of it. It’s one of the most efficient marketing tools for promoting products and services, and here’s why… 

Email marketing definition

Email marketing is the leading marketing channel that uses email campaigns as the primary way of communication with a target audience. 

More specifically, it means sending emails to a group of people to achieve a particular aim, such as generating leads, selling your solution, onboarding clients, nurturing them, and building long-term customer relationships. 

With the help of email marketing, you can notify your customers about new products/services, discounts, exclusive deals, or other business updates. 

Why email marketing is important

Email marketing is one of the most lucrative sales tools for promoting your brand and generating leads. Let’s take a look at its benefits:

• It’s productive. Email marketing has an average ROI of $42 for every dollar spent.
• It beats social media in customer acquisition, bringing 40 times more new users than Facebook and Twitter combined.
• It’s extremely affordable. Your only out-of-pocket expense will be purchasing email marketing software. After that, you can send as many emails as you want. What is more, many email marketing services offer free plans for you to try their features.

Now that you’ve learned how useful email marketing is, let’s take a look at how it works. 

How to do email marketing step by step

Here are 6 basic steps you need to take to get started with your email marketing:

1. Set the goals

With email marketing, you can achieve numerous business goals. Just make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. 

Do you want to email for sales purposes or to generate leads? Maybe you aim to increase the number of visitors to your website or invite more people to your webinar? What if your goal is to retain customers or increase their loyalty? 

Decide the primary purpose of your email campaigns before you start crafting them.

2. Build an email marketing list

Next, you need to search email addresses so you can start sending out email campaigns. This is a list with the email addresses of people interested in your service who don’t mind receiving messages from you.

To get these emails, you can add a special form on your website to encourage visitors to leave their contact details. This goal can be achieved with a lead magnet such as a guide, checklist, free trial, or any other valuable content to motivate the audience to join your mailing list.

3. Segment your email list

To run an effective email marketing campaign, your email list should align with your goals.

Segmentation is the process of splitting an email list into multiple target lists, which helps provide relevant content, meet your customers’ needs, improve their engagement, and, as a result, increase your conversion rates.

To segment recipients, you can send surveys to existing prospects and ask what content they expect, or you can divide them by analyzing their activity. Another way to get things done is to add a special form with clarifying information and place it right after collecting contact details in exchange for a lead magnet. 

4. Choose your email marketing tool

Doing email marketing manually and repeating the same actions for different customers can take a long time. Luckily, today the market offers plenty of email marketing automation tools to help you streamline this process. 

Choose an email marketing tool with a user-friendly campaign builder, ready-made templates, A/B testing feature, personalization, and integration option. This will ease your pain, automate the work, and save you many hours of hard work.

Check out the best email marketing platforms and services for successful automated emailing that we’ve collected to help you make the right decision.🧐

5. Create an email campaign

Now you are ready to craft an automated series of emails. Once you’ve built them, you can send them out to reach new prospects, no matter when they signed up for your list.

You may ask, ‘How many emails should be in my campaign?’ Think about how long your prospect might take to become your customer — 2 weeks, 6 months, or more. Depending on this timing, you can consider the number of emails that need to be prepared.

But be careful not to be overwhelming to your prospects. Don’t bombard them with emails every single day. Reaching out to your audience once a week will be the sweet spot. 

6. Measure your results

Once the email campaign is sent, go on to measure its performance. 

Regularly track the email campaign statistics, including open, click-through, unsubscribe, and conversion rates. These metrics will give you a clear idea of how well your emails perform and how you can enhance your subsequent campaigns.

Many marketing automation tools offer campaign analytics tracking. For example, using Snov.io, you can track email opens, link clicks, and replies to monitor your recipients’ engagement. Here’s how you can do it.

Email marketing examples

Now let’s look at the examples of email marketing campaigns so you can get inspiration for your confident email marketing start:

Spotify

Spotify’s email campaign is pretty simple yet pleasing to the eye — you can feel it from the first email on account verification to subsequent follow-ups. I particularly like that the text is so short that nothing hinders your attention from a clear CTA. This is a perfect email to send to prospects who don’t have much time and just skim through the message.

To improve engagement, Spotify makes its email marketing campaigns highly personalized. Based on what customers love to listen to, the company sends relevant updates on the latest music or podcasts.

Zapier

Zapier’s email campaigns are triggered by the steps its users have taken, and the company sends helpful content such as guides and instructions to its features to keep them afloat. This is an excellent example of how customer education can subtly help win their trust.

To make emails more special and enjoyable to prospects, the service incorporates videos and GIFs in their email marketing campaigns. 

Apple

Apple’s unrivaled marketers follow the rule ‘the less is more.’ The company’s email marketing is pretty straightforward and aims to make the product speak for itself. Apple usually highlights the main idea in bold so its customers can skim through the email, grab its purpose, and follow the CTA.

Here’s an email campaign with Apple’s summary of new products. It contains simple headings, a descriptive copy, CTAs, and product images — quality design and nothing superfluous.

Netflix

Netflix does a great job when it comes to re-engaging customers by sending out email campaigns with the suggested content. Showing awareness of the tastes and preferences of their customers, it maintains a long-term relationship with them.

And here’s an example of another successful Netflix email strategy – getting feedback. In this survey email, which asks customers about the service quality, the company didn’t forget about personalization, explained how vital the customer opinion is to them, and placed a clear call to action.

Wrapping it up

Email marketing is a powerful tool for greater reach and a high return on investment. If done right, it will help your business keep your clients informed and create a better customer experience.

If you’re searching for a reliable email marketing service, Snov.io is just what you need. With Snov.io cold email software, you’ll find it easy to immerse into email marketing.