Wondering why email marketing is important?
You are looking to read up on some email marketing basics to get you started?
Perhaps you’ve heard how email marketing is an awesome digital marketing strategy and you want to learn more about it.
To all of you, we’ve got you covered!
In this article, we will look at why email marketing is important, look at email marketing definition, how email marketing can help SEO, how to do email marketing, what are email marketing KPIs and what is the best email marketing strategy.
We have divided this article into the following sections to help you better navigate:
- Email marketing definition
- How email marketing can help SEO
- How to do email marketing
- What are email marketing KPIs
- The best email marketing strategy
- Takeaways
Let’s get started…
Email marketing definition
The essence of email marketing definition is the use of email to market and promote a product or a service to a targeted audience.
An alternative email marketing definition is using email to build a relationship and nurture a lead in order to convert the lead into a paying customer.
Email marketing is a type of digital marketing or internet marketing technique used to engage with your audience, clients and target market.
Through your email marketing campaigns, your objective is to target a specific audience and send them a message about your products, services or provide them commercial information keeping them engaged on the one hand and motivating them to make a purchase on the other hand.
Email marketing is quite an effective digital marketing strategy.
According to Oberlo, email marketing continues to deliver a strong return on investment.
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42!
This represents a 4,200% return on your investment!
If done right, you increase your chances of converting prospects into customers and turn them to potentially raving fans.
If you are reading this article, you may have recognized how powerful email marketing can be.
Great job!
How email marketing can help SEO
Before we get into how to do email marketing, it’s important to mention that email marketing can have a positive impact on your SEO strategy.
Why email marketing is important is because it can positively affect your SEO.
How email marketing can help SEO you say?
With email marketing, although it will not directly affect your SEO, it will provide you with indirect positive SEO signals helping you boost your overall website ranking.
Email marketing can provide you with:
- Qualified leads
- Better on-site engagement
- Help you curate targeted content
- Help you develop more relevant website pages
- Help increase social shares
Let’s look at each one of these.
Email marketing brings qualified leads
With email marketing, you can drive qualified traffic to your website.
By sending personalized messages to your audience, you can target, entice and attract “qualified leads” to your website.
When a user already interested in your product and services before visiting your website, that user is more likely to complete a positive action resulting in a conversion.
Email marketing helps with your on-site engagement
Another way how email marketing can help SEO is by improving your on-site engagement.
When you’ve sent an email to a prospect and they find the content of the email relevant enough to click on the link leading them to your website, they’ll be inclined to take the time to read the content of your web page.
That’s increased time on page, i.e., better on-site engagement.
Time on site and bounce rates may have a direct impact on your web page ranking.
The more a user stays on your site and the less they bounce away, the more search engines see value for their user.
That can help you with your website’s rankings and SEO.
Email marketing helps you develop targeted content
Email marketing will help you develop targeted content that will help you convert your prospects into customers.
Sending email marketing can help you target your audience with different messages or the same message presented differently.
70% of marketers say they test their email content in their campaign to see what works relating to subject lines.
Marketers also say they test the actual message of the email, the call-to-action, design, personalization, landing page, target audience and sender’s name among other things.
Tweak things around, see what works and what doesn’t.
If you find a specific headline or email title catching the attention of your audience leading them to your website, you’ll know that you have a money-making combination right there.
Depending on the audience you are targeting, you can deliver the most optimal headline, personalized message and a call-to-action to maximize your conversion.
Good email marketing content can be incorporated into your website
Now that you’ve seen the actual email subject, message and call-to-action that works, you are in a perfect position to build a website page leveraging the same or similar content.
What’s great is that you already have proof that your audience has positively responded to your email headline and message.
Building web pages based on what you know your targeted audience wants and needs, you will dramatically increase your conversions.
The other way you can create relevant content for your website is by looking at the type of subscribers you have and based on their interests and needs, build additional web pages to cater to them.
Now that you have web pages directly curated for your audience in general, you’ll know that they’ll be engaged with your content.
That will potentially lead to higher rankings in the context of your SEO strategy.
Email marketing can increase the chances of social shares
Another way how email marketing can help SEO is by increasing the chances that your target audience shares your content on social media.
By sending a personalized email to your audience is a chance for you to bring a user to your web page.
If they saw relevance in the email subject and message and they end up on your web page, you have already an engaged user.
If they are really delighted by your web page content, they will potentially share it with their social network.
The more social shares you get, the more there is a signal to search engines that your page is relevant for its users.
And that my friends, will lead to better rankings.
How to do email marketing
There is no doubt that email marketing is one powerful digital marketing strategy for all businesses.
You are interested.
So now, how to do email marketing?
Define your audience
To start an email marketing campaign, you’ll need to understand who you will be going after.
Who is your audience?
What are they interested in?
What is your typical or ideal customer persona?
You want to know who you are going after so that you can put together a relevant and tailored email campaign in targeting them.
Define your goals
You’ve defined your customer persona and understand who they are.
Now let’s define your own goals.
What do you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign?
What are the current trends in your industry?
What are you going to use as benchmarks to achieve your goals?
Once you have an understanding of what you are trying to accomplish with your email marketing strategy, you’ll be in a better position to execute your plans.
Build an email list
To execute an email marketing campaign, you’ll need people’s emails to start with!
This makes building an email list crucial for your overall success.
What you need to think about is how are you going to entice people to give you their email address.
The most typical approach is to offer your site visitors a lead magnet.
You give them something valuable, an industry report, a study, a comprehensive guide or something your users will find useful in exchange for their email.
Once you get emails, you’ll build up your email list.
You’ll also have the relevant information as to what prompted that person to give you their email.
Based on why they gave you their email or the type of information they were looking to get, you’ll have an initial understanding of their interests and needs.
Select your email campaign type
Once you’ve got your emails, now you’ll need to target your audience with an email campaign.
Which of your subscribers will you target?
How will you target them?
Should you give them a product review, a recent blog post, tell them about the launch of a new offering?
Should you send an email once a week, once a month, every day?
You want to find the right balance of emails to send to your users to ensure you keep them engaged while not annoying them.
There are different types of email campaigns you can send.
Make sure you select what’s appropriate for you.
Track your results
A crucial element in any digital marketing campaign, including email marketing, is to track your results and see if you are on the right track.
You should not be spending a lot of effort on an email campaign that does not produce any results and can even damage your relationship with your audience.
You want to make sure you are measuring everything.
Compare your results with your goals and see where you stand.
Try to understand what is working and why it is working well.
If you can replicate your successful results for other products and services, you should make sure you do so.
Why are other email marketing campaigns not producing the results that you need?
With the real-life data on the result of your email marketing campaigns along with your initial objectives, you will then need to make a decision on how to move forward in your campaigns.
What are email marketing KPIs
Until now, we’ve discussed why email marketing is important.
But how do we track our success?
Email marketing has been proven to be one of the most important and effective way of marketing your products and services.
No matter the type of business you are operating, email marketing should have a place in your digital marketing strategies.
According to MarketingSherpa, 60% of marketers indicate that they’ve seen a positive return on investment with email marketing.
This makes email marketing one valuable digital marketing tool in your toolbox.
Now, what are email marketing KPIs?
Some email marketing KPIs consist of:
- Email delivery rate
- Unique open rate (UOR)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
- Unsubscribe rate
- Spam complaint rate
- Bounce rate
- List growth rate
- Conversion rate
With each of these email marketing KPIs, you’ll be in a position to monitor the success of your email marketing campaign.
Email marketing KPIs are indicators giving us signals about the quality and success of our email marketing campaign.
If you see your email subscription list is increasing, your click-through rate is positive and have a little bounce rate, you’ll react to your email marketing campaign differently than if it were the opposite.
With your email marketing KPIs, you’ll be able to analyze your email marketing campaign results from different angles helping you paint an overall picture of your success.
The best email marketing strategy
There are many ways you can run a profitable email marketing strategy.
What is the best email marketing strategy to get real results?
We’ve selected the top five best email marketing strategies to get you started:
- Personalize your email messages
- Target a well-defined segment of your subscribers
- Send mobile-friendly emails
- Try different email design, message and call-to-action
- Automate your campaigns
The best email marketing strategy is an email that writes a personalized message to a target audience that is interested in the precise topic of your email.
If you define the right segment of your email subscribers and send them the right message at the right time, your conversions can go through the roof.
Your emails should be designed primarily for mobile devices.
We all have a mobile device and one of the things we do the most is to check our emails with it all the time.
If your emails are hard to read or are not responsive, you are sure that the user will not read your email.
Make sure you build your email marketing efforts on the assumption that 6 out of 10 will read your email on their mobile device.
The best email marketing strategy is one where you leverage real-life results and adapt based on what’s working.
Try different email designs, different content, call-to-action, send your emails at different intervals or times of the day.
Change a variable and test it for a while to see if you see positive results.
Keep testing until you find what works and build on that.
Lastly, if you can find a way to automate your email marketing efforts as much as possible, you’ll be able to minimize the heavy-lifting in actually running those campaigns and focusing more on tracking results and converting customers.
Takeaways
There you have it, now you know why email marketing is important.
In this article, we’ve given you the email marketing basics to get you started.
Email marketing is one highly effective internet marketing tool that all companies, large or small, should be using.
You can target your audience in a personalized way and provide specific content based on their interests and their needs.
This article is a good place for you to start learning about email marketing as we looked over things like email marketing definition, how email marketing can help SEO, how to do email marketing.
If you have not read our article in full, we encourage you to do so.
We hope you will see great results in your future email marketing campaigns.
If you’ve done email marketing before, we would love to hear from you. Tell us about your experience. Drop us a comment!
