Email Marketing: Tips Tricks & Terms to Know
By: Nomad Endeavors
Tags: Inbound Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Email Productivity, Email Marketing Tips

Oct 1, 2020

Written By MJ Renner

Email continues to grow in popularity as a form of digital communication. It is an especially important way for brands to grow and connect with their consumers. Just as one may use social media to get the word out about their business, email is an economic way to communicate with your audience.

Opposed to large billboards or radio advertisements, you can slowly build email lists with promotions or information for consumers to access your website or other relevant links within the copy at the click of a button. It is also relatively easy to ensure greater personalization and measure the success of email campaigns through various types of software to create strategies that compel others to interact with the content.

Planning is Important

Before sending out your first email, it is helpful to look at the goals you have with this communication, the audience you are trying to reach, the schedule for sending, and the type of campaign you want to run. Introductory emails can be a good way to start once you have built out a template and want to share your vision with people.

If the intention for future communications is sharing updates or informative messages, it can be helpful to decide on a schedule so people can perceive consistency in your brand and know when to expect your email.

Transactional emails are one form of automated messages which are set based off of purchases. They have a higher click-through rate and are good places to include a receipt, follow-up information, or other engaging content.

The click-through rate (CTR) is the marketers way of seeing how successful an email was based on how many people clicked on the interactive elements of the content they were sent like any hyperlinks included within the text.

How to Build the Email List

When asking people for their emails in order to be added to your list, it is more likely they will volunteer this if you offer them something in return. Providing an infographic, ebook, checklist, or some similar form of content in exchange for their contact information to add to your list will make it more compelling to potential sign ups.

If you have a website, it is also helpful to have a section on your site where people can sign up for the emails you send. Making this accessible and easy to fill out can help you build a strong email list though it is important to get rid of hard bounces as they occur. A hard bounce is what happens when an email is returned to the sender, likely because it is an invaliud address. Clearing those out as they come up can protect your content from being flagged or marked as spam.

After making yourself aware of things to watch out for and developing a plan to build your base, you can move on to creating content.

Which Email Service Provider to Use

An email service provider (ESP) is the place where marketers are able to easily send out their campaigns to those subscribed to their emails. Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Sendinblue are all different softwares which allow you to create and send engaging emails but each one comes with its own capabilities or included features depending on how large your base is. As your business grows you may want to opt into paying for different features but doing research on the different services is useful because they can each cater to different preferences based on what you want to accomplish.

Best Practices

Personalization is a unique aspect of email campaigns because there are opportunities to have different mailing lists or cater to your audience in a way that makes your content feel more like a conversation. Stylized and intentional content will keep people coming back to the emails you send as they can perceive the time put into cohesive designs and things that are relevant to them.

Including a call to action (CTA), something that pushes the reader to act, also helps with engagement elsewhere. If you are trying to draw people to your website, it is best to use that as a specific callout to make it clear what you want someone to get out of the content they are reading.

Creating a checklist of things you want to look over before sending everything out can be a way to develop consistency but sending the email to yourself first is also a good practice to be in the habit of. This ensures that you can look over how it appears from a mobile and desktop standpoint before sharing with others.

Ultimately emails are an inexpensive way to grow your brand and develop a relationship with your consumers but it is not as simple as it might seem at face value. A little bit of planning can go a long way for a successful marketing campaign.