What is email marketing?

Email marketing is an incredibly compelling digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails to your prospective or existing customers to gain a steady flow of new acquisitions or solidify relationships you already have. 

It’s an excellent way to boost sales and remains one of the best ways to nurture leads and customer loyalty. 

What are the benefits?

Email marketing for small and big businesses alike comes with many benefits that may turn you toward incorporating it into your strategy if you haven’t already. 

Firstly, email marketing is decidedly cost-effective, providing up to $40 on ROI for every $1 spent. And according to Smart Insights, that’s over two times more than other marketing channels making it the top choice for customer outreach. 

Emails provide consistent engagement with your customers, reaching them at their inbox; one of the virtual locations your loyal fans may be frequenting the most daily. It’s also an excellent way to collect important demographic and behavioral data for further personalization in your email outreach, product recommendations, and user experience updates to your websites and social media channels. 

Overall, email marketing strategies allow you to grow your brand by making you identifiable and giving you an edge over your competitors. 

4 Email marketing strategies

1. Segment your market

Not all audiences are the same, and it’s crucial to observe your customer base as multiple segments within the same pool instead of just one unified group. Now, you don’t have to narrow things down to the basics such as age, education level, or genders though they can certainly help. 

Maria Mora, vice president of creative and content strategy at Big Sea says, “Break lists up depending on where your contacts are in the buyer’s journey, and segment based on what you know about them.” This makes it exponentially easier to deliver and track metrics on targeted trigger emails. 

Here’s a handy list for your reference:

• Purchase history (frequency of making purchases, product preferences, purchases made during sales)

• Demographics (age, gender, location)

• Email engagement (click vs. no click open)

2. Decide on what kind of email you’re going to send

Just as your customers aren’t all the same, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to emails either. There’s a wide variety of options for email marketing, and knowing what they are and how they function is integral to designing your perfect email campaign. 

• Newsletters: Contain a report of recent news or activity within your business and is a popular way to keep your customers in the loop

• Promotional: Are composed of special discounts or exclusive offers meant to persuade purchases

• Seasonal: Seasonal emails are great for providing updates for sales or other news coinciding with upcoming holidays or seasons

• Transactional: Focus solely on providing information concerning a transaction that occurred on your site but can be a great branding tool

• Loyalty: Remind customers of their rewards, or notify them of VIP discounts to thank them for sticking around 

• Drip: Automated emails sent after a specific action, whether its a cart reminder, an email confirmation, or a product suggestion email

3. Personalize as much as possible

A well-personalized email can mean the difference between a customer opening an email versus instantly sending it to their trash bin. Based on whatever data you collected from your market segmentation, the more personal you make your emails, the more likely customers are to open and engage with them.

“One thing we saw an instant bump in open rates from was when we put the email coming from the owner’s name instead of the company name,” said Jeff Moriarty of marketing and web development at Moriarty’s Gem Art. 

And if you can manage to tack on your recipients’ names to each email, then you’re pretty much winning the game. You can do this automatically with the use of CRM software, which you can easily fund with us at Jenfi along with other necessary marketing expenses to guarantee long-term business growth. Visit us today to see if you qualify!

4. Track Your Metrics

Now that you’ve gone through the trouble of doing market research and segmentation, as well as email writing and designing, you can start track to track your results as soon as you hit send. 

This is the only way you can rule out what works and what doesn’t, so you can further streamline your marketing strategies and save time the next time you send out a campaign. 

Take note of: 

• Email opening rates
• Unsubscribes
• Links they clicked on

Now that you know what every successful marketing campaign entails pair these email marketing strategies with any future email campaigns you put out to watch your sales soar in 2021 and beyond.