What is Email Marketing & How Does It Work?

LAST UPDATED: August 6, 2020 • POSTED IN:

There are a lot of sources by which one can earn money. But earning money needs some good strategies.

So what are the strategies that can give a marketer good return on investment and that is easy to follow also? The answer is hidden in ‘Digital Marketing’.

What is Email Marketing? It is a powerful digital marketing strategy to target customers for promoting products and services through emails.

After 2017 the internet has become a part and parcel of most of the people living in the world.

The percentage of internet users is increasing day by day so investors find this profitable and introduced a new way of marketing by combining it with technology and the result is digital marketing.

Digital Marketing & Its Types

Digital marketing applies all marketing efforts to promote products to consumers by taking the help of the internet and technology. There are different types of digital marketing that include:

What-is-Digital-Marketing-And-Its-Types
  • Social Media Marketing: SMM is a great way when it comes to broadcast your content, whether promoting a product, or driving traffic.
  • Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketers promotes other products mostly on their websites and gets a commission every time user buy from there link.
  • Search Engine Marketing: SEM is a digital marketing strategy used to increase website visibility in search engines to gain traffic.
  • Email Marketing: Sending out emails in the form of Newsletters, Product updates, Deals, etc is a popular way to digitally market your service.
  • Content Marketing: It involves producing content and adding some value to your audience. It also helps to build a personal brand.

and so on.

Today we’re going to see What is Email marketing and how does it work?

What is Email Marketing?

We are living with people who are very professional in their deeds. This professionalism among people leads them to send emails.

About 290 billion emails are sent every day and it is expected to be 350 billion by 2022.

The conclusion by email statistics is its huge number of users so email marketing is a top and growing technique of marketing.

Email marketing is a direct way to target customers to promote services and goods through emails. It is an effective way to boost and grow sales funnel.

What-Is-Email-Marketing-Infographic

In order to collect emails, one strategy that you can follow is something to giveaway to your audience. Something like my keyword research ebook.

You should define a reason why should somebody sign up for your email list. Once you will have their emails, trust me you’ll never lose them.

Sending out newsletters, product updates, and post notification is a common way to promote content using email marketing but you should always follow 80-20 rule. What’s that?

That means once you have somebody’s email, don’t start selling your product and spamming their inboxes. In 80% provide value to your audience and rest 20% you can do affiliate and promotions.

Benefits of email marketing

1. Builds relationship

Email marketing is a direct way of communication and it’s important to develop a relationship with leads, prospects, current, and potential customers.

You all know how important is to turn first-time customers into returning customers but for that, people should have trust in you.

If you’re running a business reaching out to every customer through mobile phones is nearly impossible.

Email marketing has the potential to reach every single customer straight into there inbox which leads to a successful relationship.

Better Relationship = Higher Chance of Sales.

2. An Email Has 3800% ROI

Do you know? An email generates $38 for each $1 spent. It yields an average 3800% ROI for your company so it is the most effective method to drive return on investment.

Email marketing is considered to be the cheapest digital marketing strategy that delivers you the highest ROI and if your business falls under this category then I would highly recommend getting started.

3. Email for ‘Forever’

Email marketing is time-saving and for a lifetime. If you receive an email then it will be with you for days, months, and years.

It will never get disappeared from your mail-id. One can visit their id and read whenever they want.

People started delivering free courses over mail. Why? Because anybody can read it anytime, anywhere.

bloggerspassion-free-course-email-1
course from bloggerspassion.com

The point is the value you provide to your customers, they’ll have that lifetime. Unless they delete it 😉

4. Generates Revenue

No doubt, email marketing is the most profitable marketing tool which can help you to increase your sales.

Using some free email marketing tools you can create campaigns and generate sales out of it. Campaigns generally deliver product or services, upcoming courses, and webinars

See some stats of email marketing which will help you to better understand the potential.

5. Cost-effective

There are many free email marketing tools that can be used to design the template, test the email, and so on.

There is no need to spend a lot of bucks while sending out emails even you don’t need any physical copy of any product. The majority of tools offer free services following with cheap paid plans.

mailerlite-email-marketing-tool-pricing

I hope this will help you to know the basics and dos and don’ts of email marketing.

Now let’s deep dive into how to create email marketing funnel and why it’s important.

Creating An Email Marketing Funnel

An email marketing funnel refers to the entire lifecycle of a visitor starting from gathering leads to becoming a customer.

Creating a funnel not only helps you to get customers but also helps to own trusted people of your niche and your own eco-system.

Email-Marketing-Funnel

ConvertKit explained why creating an email marketing funnel is important.

Let’s see how it works.

1. Awareness

It is about how convincing you can be in making visitors coming to your side. Your business needs to identify & understand the problem of the visitors and give them a surety to resolve it.

Make people aware of your brand, content, and show them the value you provide. Also, build a relationship with your subscriber. Don’t sell while creating awareness.

For example,

might help people to sign up for your email list. Which is somehow the first step to create any sales funnel.

2. Consideration

Once your audience is aware of what type of content you write and how you can help them to achieve their business goals. It’s time to make some consideration in there inboxes.

Sending out targeted content such as related to your niche, your products, and your service might help in this stage.

Here, people know you and what you’re about so they are happy to accept your paid products also.

Win! Win!

The visitor is focused on searching for a good solution. Try them to send relevant emails that promote your service.

For example, sending case studies, earning reports, ultimate guides attract visitors and force them to stick to your content.

Sending irrelevant emails won’t help.

3. Purchase

Finally, the main goal of email marketing arrived. Here, you’re going to convince people to purchase.

Encourage your visitors to buy & promote your product by giving them offers like never before. Send them product reviews, deals and discount emails.

Here are few tactics, you can follow to convert your subscribers:

  • Write product reviews.
  • Offer giveaways and cashback.
  • Create email automation (easily done by mailerlite).
  • Share your experience by creating a video or conduct a webinar.

At this point, start talking about benefits of the product and share your experiecne with them.

4. Loyalty

After making a successful sale, it’s time to celebrate. But with your subscribers.

By this, we want a relationship with subscribers that remain forever for you. Try to ask them if they need any assistance or help to set up the product they purchased.

Follow some below tactics to increase your loyalty.

  • Ask them for support.
  • Send a personalized thank you email.
  • Send out a survey.
  • Offer something in return such as an ebook.
  • Make an offer, if they purchase again.

Be loyal to your subscribers and send them regular emails, and provide value to them.

5. Support

This is the process to convert your active subscribers to website promoters.

If your customers are in this stage of the funnel then they’re your loyal customer who loves your services and also promotes them.

For example, you’ve written an eBook related to health and fitness and people are actually getting benefits, then it’s obvious they’ll start promoting you and bring more and more subscribers.

Referral Marketing is one of the best marketing.

This stage is very crucial because you’re getting viral and peoples are recommending your services. Think for a while, if your friend recommends you some product, you’re more likely to purchase it. Right?

So, how to convert subscriber into fans? Follow this:

  • Ask people to refer you.
  • Ask people how to improve?
  • Give people incentives when they refer you.

You can use below template while asking for referral:

Hi there,

Thank you so much for your support for my recent ebook on Health & Fitness.

Please let me know about your feedback and how we can improve? We will try to do as much as we can to grow your business.

In the end, we also want a little favor from your side. If you find my ebook helpful then refer it to your friend and help them to reach greater heights.

Click here to refer.

Thanks & Regards

You can also use tools like SurveyMonkey to collect feedback from your subscribers.

Email Marketing Framework

Identifying your audience is the first step of the email marketing set up. I am sure you have set up your email list and now you’re eagerly waiting for sending your first email.

But, before starting an email marketing campaign remember some point-

  • Be Humble: Write as you are a guest in your audience inbox.
  • Ask For Permission: Whenever someone signup for your email list, send them a confirmation email.
  • Give Them Value: When I signup for someone’s list I only wish high-quality content. Therefore, fill your subscriber’s inbox with great value content.
  • Segment Your List: Distribute your active and inactive subscribers in different groups.

1. Call to Action

This is the thing you want from your audience. CTA must be clear to your audience.

Make them feel like they will never get an opportunity like this again. Your CTA should reflect the below-mentioned points to get the subscriber’s vision:

  • Highlight in your email content.
  • Make the letters bold and larger than your regular content.
  • Use bright colors while appealing for CTA.
  • Add some buttons.
email-call-to-action

This is how you can insist users to click on your link.

2. Testing of Email

Did you write everything right? Is this email great for a high open-rate and CTR? What if your text needs a test?

So when it comes to email marketing A/B testing is the answer to the above-asked questions.

a-b-testing-mailerlite

There are some free tools of email marketing that provide you different features and allow you to check your content. Mailchimp and Mailerlite are one of the popularly known tools for email marketing. 

In A/B testing, you have two different strategies to write the same line. For example:

  • Your subscription is expiring
  • Uh-oh! Your subscription is expiring

Through A/B testing you can analyze which of the two email campaign strategies is most suitable to give high open rates and click-through rates.

3. Optimize The Subject Line

  • Number In The Subject Line: If you are giving something to your audience that can be counted then include numbers as this will increase the open rate. For example 25+ FREE WordPress themes.
  • Personalize Subject Line: The personalized message should be preferred for having good open rates and CTR. For example Hi {name}, we have brought this free eBook.
  • Prefer Title Case Subject Line: It improves title readability and increases the CTR. For example- Ways To Improve Writing Skills For Blog.
  • Length of the subject line- The ideal length of a subject line is 17-24 characters. It is believed that the length of the subject line matters for the open rate.
  • Urgency- Present your product like it is limited in stock, the offer of the product is only for a short duration. You can use words like hurry up, limited time offer, and limited stock.

4. Optimize Email Content

  • Content should be relevant to audience expectation
  • Use bullet points for easy reading
  • Follow proper format and structure
  • Use designs with fewer images
  • Share insights that your audience value
  • Clear call-to-action

5. Schedule Your Campaign

You must be on time in sending regular updates through newsletters. If you have promised your audience to send updates every week then you have to be stuck on your words.

On the other side if you are doing vice-versa there is a great scope in making your audience annoying and pressing the unsubscribe button.

schedule-campaign-mailerlite

Almost all tools allow you to schedule your campaigns. It helps you to never miss any email if you’re stuck somewhere.

Also, some of the tools allow you to schedule campaigns for different time zone. That really helps if you’ve global subscribers.

Types Of Email Campaigns

An email marketing campaign is an email used by the brand to communicate with its audience in order to promote its products.

The campaigns are used for marketing products through email and make people convinced to buy the product related to their interest.

You can opt for any type of email campaign that you think will give you maximum benefits.

1. Newsletter

Newsletters are used to send regular updates to the subscribers and they are connected with you through this medium.

You can share a different variety of informative content like videos, articles, and webinars with the recipient.

Newsletters majorly contain recent posts that you posted on your website or some product updates that you want to share with your audience.

2. Promotional emails

This type of campaigns are used to drive revenue by sending exclusive offers to your subscribers.

Promotional emails need to be personalized with a limited time offer.

It is better to send promotional emails to the recipient on holidays rather than on working days.

Promotional email may contain affiliate products, your own products, etc.

3. Re-engagement campaign

Emails are sent to inactive subscribers to make them remind about you. It helps to maintain a high Inbox Placement Ratio (IPR).

You can ask for suggestions from them like how can you improve. You can reach to your inactive subscribers like ‘We are missing you’.

Free Email Marketing Tools

Ready with your subject line and content but don’t have anything that turns them a bit more professional, more attractive, and catchier.

Here are some free email marketing tools that can turn your email with good structure.

I hope you got enough breif about What is Email Marketing and how does it works?

If you find this post helpful do share and comment. Also tell me which email marketing tool you’re using?

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