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What is email marketing?
In the marketing realm, email marketing is often considered essential to building stronger relationships with your current and potential customers. Email is a direct marketing tactic that deserves its own strategy to ensure you provide value to the recipients while positioning your brand as trustworthy. Today, your audience expects to subscribe and receive information on what you offer (Adams, 2018).
The advantages of email marketing are:
73% of millennials prefer to receive business communication through email (Forsey, 2020)
It's inexpensive and reaches a hyper-engaged market – Mailchimp is a great free option
You can measure it using metrics like open rates, clicks on links, bounce rates, unsubscribe numbers, and social shares
It can be layered into a multitude of other marketing strategies to make them stronger
It's easy to scale up as your company grows
Email marketing is a series of campaigns designed to communicate information with an engaged audience who you would like to educate or evoke an action, like making a purchase or booking a service. When you're ready to start email marketing, start by finding industry leaders doing extraordinary things and get on their mailing list. You may not have the same budgets they have, but it can be a great place to see what works and what doesn't. Look at their frequency, subject lines, content, and the overall design and layout. Save your favourites and start a list of what stood out for you.
Finding time to do it right
Implementing email marketing starts with figuring out what resources are needed and ensuring you have them in place to execute the strategy. These resources can come from hiring a freelancer, reallocating your teams' projects to ensure this doesn't fall off someone's desk, or by reaching out to a different department within your business.
Using tools like Mailchimp, Active Campaign, and Campaign Monitor will streamline your process through templates, maintaining contact lists, ensuring compliance with CASL, and providing a dashboard that allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
I've used Mailchimp in the past because it is free and found it to be straightforward and produced a professional-looking email to send to your clients. In the last few years, I've shifted to using Campaign Monitor as it provides more customizability and more in-depth insights. Do your homework and find one that best fits your needs and your budget.
Figuring out how often emails will go out will have an impact on the resources required. Keep in mind that if there are long stretches between email campaigns, you are more likely to have subscribers that have forgotten who you are and have decided that your information isn't worth receiving (Adams, 2018). It's a good idea to reconfirm subscriptions to make sure your contact information is up to date.
Stay tuned as we explore email marketing more in-depth over the coming posts.
Works Cited
Adams, M. (2018, 7 11). Email and Newsletter Marketing Course. Retrieved from LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/email-and-newsletter-marketing-foundations/defining-email-marketing?u=2109516
Forsey, C. (2020, July 23). The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2020. Retrieved from Hubspot: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats
Put a rule or filter in place so these emails are automatically filed into a specific folder – this way, they'll be kept together and from cluttering your inbox (Adams, 2018).