Email marketing is the most profitable form of direct marketing. With a strong email campaign you can connect quickly and efficiently with your target audience, nurture leads, and boost your marketing efforts in one fell swoop.
in this article, we’ll answer your burning questions from what is email marketing to how your team can perfect their email strategies.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is all about sending those snazzy marketing messages straight to people who actually want to hear from you. It’s like having a direct line of communication with your audience, where you get to share exciting offers, engaging content, and important updates right into customer’s inboxes.
What’s so good about email marketing?
Increases brand awareness
Email marketing as a tool is great for getting your name out there. Be consistent (and not spammy) with your marketing messages, so you be top-of-mind for when customers are ready to make a purchase.
Nurtures leads
An extension of maintaining your brand awareness is keeping your consumers engaged. You can nurture your leads by offering them valuable content, exclusive access and personalised recommendations.
Boosts other marketing channels
If you’re marketing savvy like we know you are, you’ll know the benefits of integrating your marketing messages across channels. Try including links to your blog posts, social profiles and other content you want to promote. Increase your enagagement on newsletters by sharing it with your community on social media. Our social update feature will automatically generate a post for you to share your latest newlsetter to your online community.
Gains valuable customer insights
Understanding your customers often comes down to having some really great insight into how they behave. Vision6 make it easy by keeping all your customer analytics and data in one convenient location. Having it all stored in one list can make segementing your subscribers by demographics, behaviour or geographic location a breseze.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
ROI is the best
Email marketing boasts the highest returns on investment compared to other marketing channels. This means, with an effective email campaign you can achieve impressive results while still keeping costs relatively low.
Email is permission-based
Unlike other forms of marketing, email marketing relies on permission-based communication. Subscribers willingly provide their email addresses, meaning they want to hear from you. As you can imagine, this leads to higher engagement and conversion rates.
More reliable than social
While social media platforms are constantly changing their algorithms and visibility, email marketing offers a reliable and direct channel to reach your audience. Getting your message into inboxes is a lot more straightforward than simply posting on Instagram and crossing your fingers that customers see it.
Easy to track success
Email marketing platforms provide robust tracking and analytics tools to monitor the performance of your campaigns. You can track open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and other important metrics to gauge the success of your campaign.
The fundamentals of email marketing
Establish your email marketing goals
No journey can begin without a clear map ahead and the same can be said for your email marketing campaign. It might help to ask yourself what you really want to get out of your campaign. Maybe it’s to increase sales, drive website traffic or to improve your customer retention rates. Whatever goals you have for your brand, defining some clear objectives from the outset is the best way to guide your strategy.
Add a personal touch
Tailoring your message is a piece of cake when you know how to use your subscriber data. Making things a little more personal for each of your subscribers, either through targeted promotions, relevant reminders or celebrations are the secret to having higher open and boosting click-through rates.
Optimise for your audience
While it’s good practice to optimise across all devices, for both light and dark modes, you’re going to want to put some special attention into how your content appears for individuals who may rely on screen-reading tools. Designing a thoughtful and intuitive email marketing campaign is always a good thing, especially if it has the dual benefits of enhancing the user experience and increasing customer engagement.
Keep it simple
The bottom line of email marketing messages is to make it clear, concise and compelling with great copy, relevant images, and most of all a standout call-to-action.
How you format your email marketing messages is of course up to you, but a word to the wise: keep it simple. Clean and visually appealing email designs help with the all important readability of your message and in turn is more likely to keep your customers engaged.
Stay compliant
Here in Australia we have some pretty robust laws that dictate what you can and can’t do with your marketing messages. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how pretty your email font might be, or how captivating your CTA is, staying compliant should be your number one priority.
There are the obvious rules like having a clear opt-out or unsubscribe link but for a more in depth explanation on staying compliant check out out guide to understanding email compliance here.
Keep your database clean
If you’re like a lot of us, you need a tidy space to really work efficiently and it’s no different for a marketing campaign. Too many unengaged and outdated emails, the higher your bounce rates will be. This can severly damage your sender reputation and can often end up with mail servers flagging your domain as spam.
Luckily we’ve got some tips for keeping your database spick and span and they include sending out reactivation campaigns or prompts to opt-in again. If all you haven’t seen any enagagement from subscribers in the past 12-months, it’s probably time to move on and remove these contacts from your list.
Types of emails
Promotional emails
If you’ve got an exclusive VIP offer, eBook or webinar to show off, promotional emails are for you!
We like this example by Sauna House who build their messaging around the ‘self care’ hype. You’ll notice they’ve included a clear CTA that is easy to follow and chosen a stylistic language that really reflects their product and consumer base. Sauna House offer a discount, however this takes a backseat to the email layout promoting a new collection.
Automated emails
Setting up an automated system of email marketing messages is a great way of getting your email campaign working for you and saving yourself the headache while you’re at it.
There are a couple of ways to automate your emails, but however you end up going about it, take a page from Squarespace. In a message that could have easily come off spammy and annoying, Squarespace masterfully did the opposite by creating a simple, yet personal end of trial message.
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are a type of automated email that respond to a specific action like invoices, receipts and abandoned cart notifications. They’re a great time saver all while allowing you to strengthen your lines of contact with your subscribers.
If you’re ever in doubt, check-out this example from AirBnB. While it isn’t a fancy design or layout, it contains all the necessary information in one email without overwhelming the user.
Lead-nurturing emails
Lead-nurturing campaigns can take many forms. Knowing your customers and what stage of the sales funnel they’re in is a great way to tailor your emails to them and help you get a higher response rate.
Mod&Dot showed us how it’s done with the offer of a free eBook for any subscribers on their early access list. This strategy works well as it draws on some pre-established interest and keeps everyone hooked while the countdown to a launch, event or sale is on!
Re-engagement emails
Re-engagement emails are a great way to reconnect with your inactive subscribers and hopefully show them what they’re missing out on.
This example by Pitch is great because it gives subscribers a step-by-step guide to using their platform with a clear CTA to jump right in. It’s fun, it’s playful and it really illustrates the brand’s creative spirit in just a few words. Providing helpful resources like ebooks, whitepapers, how-to steps, or even latest features which could solve a users painpoints is an effective eay to drive susbcribers to revisit your brand.
Choosing your email service provider
When it comes to ESP providers, no two are built the same. Here are some questions you might like to ask:
What’s your budget?
Depending on your needs and any variables such as how many emails you plan to send or your number of subscribers will influence the price.
How do you want your brand to appear visually?
If you want greater design freedom you’ll need an ESP with customisable templates, drag-and-drop editors and more creative features.
What’s your intended send volume and will they likely change?
If you know you’ll be sending bulk marketing messages quite frequently, it’s important to go for an ESP without daily or monthly caps.
Pro-tip: if one of your brand goals is to grow your subscriber base you’ll also need an ESP that can cater to your changing sender needs.
Who is your target audience?
Think about your subscribers and what their needs might be. If you’ve got subscribers from all over the world you might source an ESP with multilingual capabilities.
What types of emails are you sending?
Figuring out what types of emails are important for your brand, whether they be transactional, automated or promotional emails, will narrow down your ESP search.
How important is data security?
Ok that last question was kind of rhetorical, we know that your data security is extremely important and think it’s something you shouldn’t skimp out on. While many ESPs will manage to tick off a couple of your business’ volume, scale and/or design needs, at Vision6 we can take your campaign to the next level.
We’re really proud to say we’re the only Australian email marketing software company with accreditations in SOC2 and ISO 27001. We can guarantee data sovereignty on transactional emails which is not something many ESPs can boast about here in Australia.
What are email marketing benchmarks
You probably already know that email metrics matter. But what you might not know is what they can tell you about the success of your campaigns. If that sounds complicated, don’t worry, we’ve broken it all down below:
What’s a good open rate?
When it comes to open rates, the gold standard is typically around 20%.
Pro-tip: If your open rates are low, try a/b testing your subject lines to see which one performs better.
What’s a good click rate?
A good click rate generally falls between 15-20%. This metric measures the percentage of recipients who had opened and clicked on a link in your email.
Pro-tip: Make your CTA is clearly visible by positioning it in the top-half of your email.
With our click maps feature, you can measure how well your CTA and other email elements are performing.
What’s a good bounce rate?
A good bounce rate is typically below 2%. Bounce rate measures the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to the intended recipients. It can be caused by factors like invalid email addresses, full mailboxes, or technical issues.
Pro-tip: If you notice a spike in bounce rates it might be time to give your email list a spring clean.
What’s a good unsubscribe rate?
A good unsubscribe rate is generally below 0.5% and measures the percentage of recipients who opt out of receiving future emails from you. Rather than getting down in the dumps about it, focus on providing valuable content and engaging your subscribers to prevent those unsubscribe rates getting higher.
Remember, these benchmarks can vary based on industry and other factors, so it’s essential to track your own performance over time and aim for continual improvement.
Conclusion
What is email marketing and how does it work, are two pretty daunting questions to have to answer, especially when you’re a business just starting out. Hopefully you realise that it’s much simpler than it sounds and getting email marketing right is completely achievable. If you’re still not convinced, we’ve got you covered with our complete email checklist to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
