What is email marketing?

Aneesh Kumar
skartio
Published in
4 min readDec 28, 2020

Email marketing is a way to promote products or services to potential customers or clients through email. It has evolved to be one of the main streams of marketing, and is used widely in e-tail as well as in retail.

Learn about the benefits of email marketing, methods to do it right, and how it compares to some other forms of marketing.

  1. What is email marketing
  2. Email marketing; to begin with
  3. Email marketing strategies

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy second only to search marketing. Whereby sending emails converts prospects into customers, and turns infrequent customers into loyal customers. An email could be considered as part of marketing when it’s sent aside from usual messages like order confirmations, OTP verification, and customer queries.

Email marketing has several key advantages over traditional mail marketing, including the following:

  • A substantial amount of subscribers can be covered as part of marketing
  • Email allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages
  • Email automation allows marketers to respond to customers automatically
  • Revenue can be calculated exactly when emails are tracked properly
  • Double opt-in (email confirmation) allows marketers to communicate with customers on subject of interest.

Email marketing; to begin with

You can always optimize, change and test your emails before sending. For example, you can test subject lines, from names, receivers and send times. Optimization is key to achieving desired results.

  1. Create your plan

Source:

If you are running an ecommerce store, customers’ source of joining is important and knowing them would enable you to target customers, and help you direct your campaigns on areas that boost your sales.

Schedule timing:

Decide upon a schedule when to send your emails. It’s better to create a calendar to schedule your emails list. Generally, this is decided on customer segmentation, industry type and target audience.

Content:

Now you are well aware of your customers and what they have signed up for. Decide what you want to convey to your audience after preparing a content marketing strategy.

2. Test it to perfection

Test the responsiveness to see that your emails fit well with multiple devices and responsive in nature

Send quite a few test emails to your colleagues and testing team to collect their response.

Conduct any sort of testing to hone your craft, such as AB testing or multivariate testing.

Email marketing strategies

  1. Review your engagement data

First, study your open and click-through rate statistics. This is essential, but if you want to improve your ecommerce email marketing results, you should also shift your focus on your previous data and choose which campaigns have performed better.

If you use Google Analytics, the tracking code will help you see within your reports which email campaigns are bringing in the most customers

2. Choose catchy content

Content is what customers get attracted to. Always include crisp lines, go straight into the message you want to convey. You must use action words like “Gifts awaiting”, “Today’s deals for you” etc.

An attractive subject line can easily capture the minds of your customers. If you aren’t sure, try emojis or interesting questions

3. Customer segmentation

Purchase history, demographics etc. have been used to segment customers. Moreover, follow up emails to be sent based on this .For example, two different customers may receive two different emails based on their purchase history or demography.

Browsing history or other relevant business information can be used for segmentation. This segmentation would also help marketers to send personalized emails to target customers.

4. Grow your subscriber base

Growing your subscribers in a meaningful way will bring you new potential customers. Upgrading your content is one very good way of doing it, or you can provide a redirection page or landing page to turn prospects into subscribers.

5. Revamp your subscribers list

Growing subscribers is a boon, but at the same time you must be wary of non performing subscribers. They bring you nothing but a considerable amount of time, a great deal of energy and money will go haywire by spending on them. Instead clean your subscribers list periodically, and remove non-performers, and bring in new subscribers. Analyze the segment of customers who have not opened your emails yet.

It’s always better to have fewer subscribers who are highly responsive, rather than many who never bother about receiving your emails.

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