Launch Converting Email Campaigns

This content is a short summary of the Skills21 session ‘Cold Emailing’ delivered by Alaeddine Abid.

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on sending emails and developing relationships with prospects and customers.

An effective email marketing strategy convert prospects into customers and turn first time buyers into recurring customers.

Why Email Marketing?

There are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined. If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time.”

Indeed, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. The average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients), whereas the average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%. This means you are 6x more likely to get someone to click through to your website via email than you are from Twitter.

Studies show 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.

How to use Email Marketing?

Each of your customers receives many emails every day. That means, if you don’t take the time to develop a strategy, your emails will get lost in crowded inboxes, or worse, be sent to the spam folder.

You can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people want to read. Think of the following six steps as an outline for your email strategy. We’ll dive deeper into some of these in a moment.

1-Define Your Audience

An effective email is a relevant email. Like everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona, understand what they want, and tailor your email campaign to your audience’s needs.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization.

2-Establish Your Goals

There’s nothing set in stone about how often you should email your customers, but if you send too often, your subscribers are likely to tune out what you have to say or unsubscribe altogether. Some users that run a blog or news website might choose to send daily updates to their subscribers, while other users only send twice a month so subscribers stay excited about their emails.

Choose to send your email campaign at your own pace, and check the unsubscribe rates and the click-through rates to adjust the frequency if needed.

3-Create a Sign-Up Source

You need people to email, right? An email list is a group of users who have given you permission to send them relevant content. To build that list, you need several ways for prospects to opt-in to receive your emails.

Don’t be discouraged if you only have a few people on your list to start. It can take some time to build. In the meantime, treat every single subscriber and lead like gold, and you’ll start to see your email list grow organically.

4-Choose an Email Campaign Type

Email campaigns vary and trying to decide between them can be overwhelming. Do you send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements? Which blog posts are worth sharing?

These questions plague every marketer. The answer is subjective. You can start by learning about the different types of email campaigns that exist, then decide which is best for your audience.

You should also set up different lists for different types of emails, so customers and prospects can sign up for only the emails that are relevant to them.

5-Make a Schedule

Decide how often you plan to contact your list, inform your audience upfront so they know what to expect, and stick to a consistent schedule to build trust, and so they don’t forget about you.

Your email marketing schedule will depend on your industry, the types of content you send (content marketing strategy), and your sending frequency.

6-Measure Your Results

There are four keys metrics to pay attention to when evaluating the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

Deliverability measures the rate at which emails reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes.

Open rate is the percentage of people that open your email once it reaches their inbox.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your CTAs.

Unsubscribes measures the number of people who opt-out of your email list once they receive an email from you.

How to build an Email List using a Lead Magnet

Now to the fun part: filling your email list with eager prospects that are excited to hear from you.

There are many creative ways to build your email list (and, no, purchasing emails ain’t one). Tactically speaking, list building comes down to two key elements that work cohesively to grow your subscriber numbers: lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Lead Magnets

Your lead magnet is exactly as it sounds: something that attracts prospects to your email list, usually in the form of a free offer.

The offer can take a number of formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away for free in exchange for an email address.

There’s just one problem: People have become hyper-protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive an email address without exchanging it for something valuable.

Think about a lead magnet that is relevant, useful, and makes your prospects’ lives easier.

Choose an ESP, Email Marketing Provider

An email marketing provider (ESP) is a great resource if you’re looking for any level of support while fine-tuning your email marketing efforts.

You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation. Aside from that, your email marketing service must make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

How to write an Email using the AIDA framework

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

It’s a marketing model based on the stages consumers go through when making a (purchasing) decision

Attention — The consumer becomes aware of the product.

Interest — They learn something about the product that piques their interest.

Desire — They start to think seriously about buying that product.

Action — They take action based on their desire — usually this entails making a purchase.

If you are interested in pursuing a sales career, Skills21 is the right solution for you. We help you, not only develop tech sales skills but join promising startups in the MENA and Africa. To get more details about us, please visit https://www.getskills21.com/