Since its inception, email has been one of the most popular forms of digital communication. Even though social media and instant messaging has gained traction, email remains a primary choice for conversing online.
Email also has another important function as a marketing tool. It’s not just used for personal communication, but for all types of business marketing. B2B, B2C, one-off messages, campaigns—there are plenty of ways email is used as a promotional avenue.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing could be thought of as a method of communicating with customers and extending offers through their inboxes. The question many have is this: How do you do email marketing properly? What are the crucial techniques necessary to make the most out of email for your business?
Email, like other marketing tools, is put in place with one ultimate goal: to generate sales. Along the way, you’re building traffic, generating leads, and growing a steady subscriber base.
How do you measure the success of email marketing?
You can measure how well your emails are doing through a number of metrics. These include everything from the number of receivers that open your emails to those who click on links within and those who are converted to customers.
Mastering email marketing involves learning these metrics and analyzing them as you create and send content. You can measure the number of bounced emails, subscribers gained or lost, and overall ROI.
Nearly everyone has written emails or designed a newsletter. However, good email marketing is about analyzing the statistics surrounding it, and you’ll be able to improve on these metrics with the right techniques.
Techniques and strategies to help marketers
Some of these techniques include automation, which can streamline the sending of important emails like welcome, thank you, and purchase confirmations. There’s also A/B testing, which can help you test different versions of emails against each other. You can compare everything from subject lines, copy, and graphics to determine what works best for your audience.
There’s also personalization, which is a major key to improving your success with email marketing. Over a third of marketers said this was their top goal and challenge.
Succeeding at email marketing requires you to know what to look for, and what strategic approaches can help you succeed.
Does it really matter?
It’s easy to assume that with all the marketing options available in the digital age, email isn’t as important as it once was. The truth is, even if you’re excelling with other strategies, there’s a lot to be gained from email marketing.
Even if you’re looking beyond the financial gain of email, there are plenty of other upsides. For one, email is great for building your brand. It’s also helpful for making your customers feel more connected to your brand and company.
You may have email as the centerpiece of your digital marketing strategy or you may use it as a supplementary tool. In either case, it’s too good of a resource to be missing out on. Like other marketing platforms, email takes time to learn. Your success with it will always be relative to the time you put into it. Therefore, the sooner you get started, the sooner you can start seeing good results.
What now?
Now that you know the metrics to look for and the strategies to use in your email marketing, you can do more with it as a marketing tool. There are plenty of possibilities, no matter what you’re doing.
Maybe you’re marketing to individuals or to businesses. You could be sending single emails or full campaigns. In any case, email marketing can generate big returns. Learn what makes email marketing such a good business idea and how you can move forward with more advanced email techniques.