Email Marketing

The key to any successful online store is to have a marketing strategy that stands out. Today there are so many different marketing channels that it can be difficult to determine which ones are best suited for your store. That’s why today we’re going to talk in detail about email marketing.

You probably clicked on this article because you wonder: “What is email marketing? On the other hand, you may already know what it is, but you want to know the advantages of using this marketing channel.

You might just want to get some useful email marketing tips to help drive your current campaign. No matter what stage you are in with regard to email marketing, this channel can do wonders to increase sales and increase traffic to your site.

This practical guide is full of email marketing tools that will certainly help you achieve the desired results.

However, before going deeper into email marketing strategy let’s explore exactly what it is and how it works. We will then review a list of the key steps before, during and after you start your campaign to achieve the best results.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing can take many forms, but its most basic aspect is to send content directly to the inbox of your customers and prospects in order to increase sales. Typically, your email list will be made up of people who have already visited your website and provided their email addresses.

This can happen because they chose to sign up for your newsletter or have entered their email when making a purchase in your store. There are countless ways to grow your email list to incorporate into your campaign.

You can easily manage your email list and coordinate your marketing campaigns through systems like MailChimp and MadMimi, which offer quality templates and make it easy to track multiple email campaigns at once.

If you’re wondering why e-commerce entrepreneurs choose to incorporate email into their marketing campaigns, consider the following. The return on investment you can achieve through email marketing is enormous.

For every $1 spent on email marketing, companies get a return of ~$44. In 2017, the average return on investment for email marketing was 122%, four times more than other common marketing channels, including social networks and paid advertisements on search engines like Google.

This is largely because once someone gives you their email address, they have already shown interest in your products and your brand. Therefore, it’s a good decision to start implementing email marketing in your business plan, if you haven’t already.

Now, let’s explore the steps necessary to get started with your email marketing campaign.

Basics of email marketing

Choose an email service provider

There are many tools that you can incorporate into your email marketing strategy and email service providers can be particularly useful.

Through automation, this email marketing tool can literally send millions of emails on behalf of different companies every day. The following are some other reasons why you need a good email service provider:

  • Bounce rate tracking: this is one of the most important metrics you need to monitor to ensure you maintain a good reputation. The percentage of the bounce rate depends on the quality of your mailing list. Old and invalid emails that bounce should no longer be used. Your email marketing service provider will help you identify these faulty emails and maintain a lower bounce rate.
  • Email delivery capability: an email service provider has a higher deliverability rate compared to personally sent emails, which is another reason why, if you sign up with an email provider, your email campaigns will be more successful.
  • Mobile availability: in 2016, 55% of all emails were opened on mobile devices, so a friendly and responsive email format is crucial for your email marketing campaigns. The use of responsive email templates that fit any screen size will ensure that your subscribers see exactly what you want them to see. When looking for email marketing tools for your business, pay attention to the usability, interactivity and formatting that these email service providers offer in their email templates.
  • Full sales reports from email campaigns: Any email service provider worth using will present you with several important analyses, including full sales reports, in your account dashboard. These services make this information manageable and easily accessible. As with all marketing channels, it is key to make decisions based on data in order to design your strategies.
  • Email service providers usually offer free trials. This way you have nothing to lose by experimenting with different platforms. Take advantage of this, as it will help you better understand how email marketing for businesses works.

Get a professional email address

Email addresses with free domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail are designed for personal, non-commercial use. Email marketing campaigns sent from these addresses will not approve DMARC policy authentication, and many of them will never reach their final destinations. You can find more information about DMARC policy here.

It will also make your e-commerce business look more professional in front of your customers and assure them that you have a legitimate business. Learn how to create professional email addresses if you have your Shopify online store. This is an essential step to fully understand how email marketing works.

Create a healthy subscriber list

Regardless of how you design your email marketing strategy, it will be most effective if you have a healthy list of contacts. In fact, this part is crucial for your email marketing campaigns.

By “healthy” I mean that your contacts are familiar with your store, have chosen to subscribe to your email marketing list recently (in the last 6 months), and are still committed to your brand.

This is important to ensure better email opening rates, more clicks and more conversions in your campaigns. Having a quality email list will also keep your email bounce rate down and ensure you don’t have a negative reputation as a spammer.

As for spam, if your contact list is made up of people who have subscribed to your newsletter, there’s nothing to worry about. Your subscribers have already confirmed that they want to receive your emails and that is definitely not spam.

And if they no longer want to receive your emails, they always have the option to unsubscribe. Email services make managing mailing lists much easier than trying to do it on your own.

Updating your subscriber list is an endless task. You’ll continually include some obsolete addresses, because people often tend to change their emails for a number of reasons, including job changes and even last names.

Also, they may simply lose interest after a few months of being enrolled. Always remember that a smaller email list with quality addresses is better than a large one with a high bounce rate. In fact, even Hubspot removed 250,000 subscribers from its own email list for the sake of better deliverability rates.