Email Marketing Authority

Jan 15, 2023

Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that lets you interact with your customers directly. It’s an integral part of every successful content marketing strategy and continues to be one of the easiest ways to build brand awareness and boost engagement.

Email marketing is used to:

Advertise products.
Host special sales.
Introduce new products and services.
Give important announcements.
Raise brand awareness.
Promote content.
Launch new tools and programs.
Survey your audience for future product ideas.
Connect with an audience that’s fully engaged.

While a social media presence is important to most businesses, email marketing is far more flexible, measurable, and intimate. It allows you to cut through the noise, and speak directly to your core audience in a more meaningful and effective way.

Email is the #1 communication channel. At least 99% of consumers check their email accounts daily, and in the United States, alone, more than 90% of people over the age of 15 have email accounts.

Finally, and most importantly, you own your list. Unlike social media platforms where you could lose your account without notice (and your following with it) when it comes to building your list, you own that asset. No one can take those leads away from you.

As you can see, email marketing is an important tool for both new and seasoned businesses.

In this special report, we’ll share proven email marketing strategies that will maximize brand awareness and overall exposure, how to plan an effective email marketing campaign, and much more.

Getting Started

Unlike social media posts that get lost in the clutter with a simple scroll, an email will stay in someone’s inbox until they do something about it. This means that emails are more visible and impactful than other channels.

For example, according to Harvard Business Review, the average full-time worker in America receives 120 emails a day, and the average TikTok user watches 110 videos per day.

Those 120 emails stay in the inbox until they’re interacted with. Meanwhile, those 110 TikTok videos are as good as gone and forgotten within seconds.

To further clarify, if someone reloads their TikTok account, new content will appear in their feed, and anything they might have previously seen, but failed to respond to, is no longer in their line of sight.

Email, however, doesn’t go anywhere. It will sit in their inbox until they take action–deciding to either read it or delete it.

Email is also a very flexible medium. You have a lot of creative control over your emails, from design and aesthetics to your content. The sky’s the limit!

This flexibility means that you can use email towards achieving virtually any business goal:

Generate traffic for your most recent blog post.
Inform customers about your new products.
Stay top-of-mind in between purchases!
Ask your audience for feedback.

No matter what age group or demographic you’re targeting, email remains an incredibly viable way to reach your audience quickly.

Email is also always changing. Imagine seeing an email with interactive buttons and personalized content in the 90s! Email marketing has certainly come a long way, and will continue to evolve in ways that will help you better connect with your target audience.

To get started, you’ll need a way to capture leads and grow your email list. Thankfully, there are many options available. Spend some time researching the many email service providers to find one that fits your budget and your overall goals.

If you need help getting started, here are 4 service providers worth considering:

Constant Contact: Https://www.ConstantContact.com

Constant Contact is very user-friendly, and affordable and allows you to create automated campaigns from pre-built templates.

SendinBlue: https://www.SendinBlue.com

SendinBlue offers the option to use pre-made templates, take advantage of A/B testing and even SMS marketing.

HubSpot: https://www.HubSpot.com

HubSpot offers a drag-and-drop email editing tool and includes built-in analytics and email segmentation using smart rules.

Funnel Builder Software: Best Funnel Builder Software

The Better FREE Way To engage your customers, Build Funnels And Sell Digital Products.

Tip: A good email service provider (ESP) should easily integrate with other marketing tools that you may use in your business. That way it will be easy for you to scale your business.

For example, you want to ensure that your email service provider works with automation tools, geo-location targeting, device-based targeting, and page-level targeting, or that it can integrate with specific e-commerce platforms that you may want to explore in the future.

Next, you’ll need a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something that you give away in exchange for an email address. This means that you want it to be as enticing as possible.

Most lead magnets are digital items such as PDFs, webinars, case studies, coupon codes, audio files or video-based content.

If you struggle with what to offer to potential subscribers, you may take a look at the resources below. Not only will they simplify the process, but they’ll save you a lot of time.

Best of all, they include high-quality, done-for-you content that’s designed to maximize opt-in rates, so you’ll be able to build your list faster and easier:

Automated List Profits: https://www.automatedlistprofits.com

With your purchase, you will get instant access to the exclusive, Automated List Profits member area containing HUNDREDS of Lead Magnet packages you can use, immediately!

PLUS, every month Automated List Profits members get to download TWO brand new exclusive list-building packages.

These are 100% original creations just for Automated List Profits members to use (and profit from). You cannot find these elsewhere.

PageDyno: https://pagedyno.com

With PageDyno, you can create amazing-looking, attention-grabbing lead-capture pages in a matter of minutes.

You can also turn your pages into pop-ups’, create multi-step pages on the fly, and so much more. It’s one of the most all-inclusive resources on the market for creating beautiful lead-capture pages.

Tip: If you need more help coming up with an idea for a lead magnet that your audience will love, here’s an in-depth article that reveals exactly how to get more leads:

https://promotelabs.com/blog/easy-way-create-lead-magnets/

Proven Strategies to Drive ROI

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at some of our best email marketing strategies so you can begin to build your list quickly.

Take Advantage of Segmentation, Personalization, and Automation:

Segmentation is the practice of breaking your email recipients into smaller, targeted groups - typically based on demographic or behavioural data such as age, a past purchase, a hobby, or even their location.

Businesses do this to make sure they are creating highly-targeted, relevant content that their subscribers want to read. Most importantly, segmentation makes it possible to personalize your email content.

By segmenting your lists, you’re able to better understand who the people are that will read it, what that audience expects to receive, and what the purpose is for every email.

There are lots of ways to segment your lists:

By Position in the Customer Journey:

This would include things like:

Are they new subscribers who only recently discovered your brand?
Are they new customers who have made a recent purchase?
Are they return customers?
How many products have they purchased? How long ago was their last purchase?

By Demographic Data:

Demographic data includes any personal information or characteristics about your audience, such as:

Age.
Gender.
Income/Salary.
Lifestyle.
Purchasing habits.
Location.
Preferences.
Interests.

Behavioural Data:

You can also segment your list based on behavioural data. This will make it easy to discover who uses your products and why.

Behavioural data includes:

What they purchase.
What they consider purchasing.
What they respond to (click on, follow, etc.)

Regardless of how you group your audience, segmentation will ensure that you’re sending customers the content that’s most relevant to them.

Segments can be as large or as small as you want, but generally, the smaller they are, the more direct and highly targeted your content will be.

Personalization in email is when you use subscriber data within your content to tailor it to your audience. This could be as simple as addressing your subscribers by name, but it is much more than that.

A common example of highly-successful personalization regarding boosting ROI is when companies send you a reminder email regarding your abandoned cart.

This type of personalization is possible using marketing software. It connects to all your channels, your customer relationship management software (CRM), and your email.

Then, your marketing software will use consumer insights, user data, and analytics to generate personalized emails for every single customer. With personalization, you can better connect with every subscriber by creating content that feels personal.

In fact, through personalization, you could even set an automated email to wish them a happy birthday! Consider what that could do for building a strong relationship with subscribers that encourages brand loyalty.

Personalizing your emails will also increase open rates as well as revenue, and drive engagement. You can even use personalized marketing strategies based on employing triggered emails.

This is when you use the power of automation to automatically send emails based on specific criteria such as Reminder emails, welcome emails and lead-nurturing emails.

If you aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to personalizing your email marketing, check out:

https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/personalized-email/

Don’t overlook this! When done right, personalized marketing can be the deciding factor behind an outstanding customer experience that takes your brand to the next level and encourages repeat business.

Next up - automation:

We’ve already mentioned automation regarding personalized marketing based on employing triggered emails, but in case you need more information, here’s a quick summary of what automation in email marketing means:

Automated email marketing involves a series of emails that are only sent when qualifying thresholds are met for each subscriber or customer.

This can be as simple as sending out an email automatically every time a subscriber joins your list to welcome them to your inner circle.

Automation and personalization go hand-in-hand. This is because you need automation to run personalized campaigns. It works by creating emails based on templates (or workflows) that you define beforehand.

A common example of automation in email marketing is a re-engagement email. Receiving this type of email from a brand means that their CRM marked you as inactive.
Since you’ve been marked as inactive, their email marketing software has automatically sent you an email.

Combining segmentation, personalization, and automation means that you can send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

If you need more help understanding how to use automation in your email marketing, here’s an in-depth guide that’s worth reading:

https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/marketing-automation/

And here’s another great article from HubSpot:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-automation-examples

How to Plan Your Email Marketing Strategy

You must always define your email marketing goals. With a clear target in mind, you’ll boost your chances that every email marketing campaign will be a success. For example, perhaps you want to increase sales of your latest product or convert new subscribers into new customers.

By deciding on a goal for every email campaign you’ll create measurable goals, be aware of when you’ve achieved those goals, and create highly-targeted content that nurtures engagement.

We’ve broken the process of planning your email marketing strategy into a few easy steps.

Focus on Value:

Everything you do should be about providing value to your customers. This is the key to fostering long-term relationships with your subscribers.

This is where segmentation is so valuable. By sorting your audience into groups early on in your list-building journey, you’ll be able to better know and understand what subscribers are most interested in, and what they expect to receive from you.

This information will help you tailor your email marketing strategy and create content that drives ROI, and keeps customers coming back.

For example, highly-tailored emails might involve:

Creating content that inspires with case studies, success stories, and testimonials.
Create tutorials for topics in your niche that people struggle to understand.
Send educational-based content about pain points your customers may be facing.
Offer free tools or discounts, promotions, etc.

Build Your Email List:

Building your list will be where you put the most effort, especially in the early stages of growing your business.

The most successful email campaigns involve a highly-engaged audience, so you’ll want to look for ways to motivate visitors to subscribe to your list, and then create tailored content that your subscribers will love.

As previously mentioned, you can do this with an attention-grabbing lead magnet as found here: https://www.automatedlistprofits.com

When you create your landing page, clearly lay out:

Why you want their email addresses.
What you’ll send them.
The value they receive in return.

Be sure to experiment with different opt-in forms on different parts of your site as well. This could include exit-based popups, welcome popups, or exit-based popups that appear when people are about to leave your website.

Plan Emails & Follow-ups:

Spend time creating a series of emails based on one segment of your list at a time. Set clear goals, decide on an email frequency you can maintain, and create a swipe file of ideas for follow-up content.

You should also decide on a main action, and goal, that you want subscribers to take after reading every email.

For example, do you want them to click on a link? Complete a poll? Hit reply and provide feedback or suggestions. Purchase a product?

Segment Your Email List:

It’s always best to set up segmentation rules early on.

That way you’re building clean lists that are easy to connect with and don’t run into the issue where you have a lot of leads all in one list and aren’t sure how to tailor your content to what they’re most interested in.

And if you want to use personalization and automation in the future, you need to segment your email lists, so we strongly recommend starting from day one.

Automate Your First Campaign:

Automating a campaign could involve sending out welcome emails, reminding subscribers about a purchase, offering a discount code or informing them of a special offer.

Here’s an example of email marketing automation software:

https://mailchimp.com/en-gb/resources/free-marketing-automation-tools/

Measure Your Performance:

Even though your campaign is automated, that doesn’t mean you can set it and forget it.
You should check your metrics often so you can keep a pulse on what’s working and what isn’t.

If your metrics aren’t looking too good, you can start looking at these things to improve the performance of your emails:

When you send your emails.
The quality of your email list.
Frequency of emails sent.
Subject lines.
Preview text.
Call to action.

Audit Your Overall Content Marketing Strategy:

A marketing audit is a systematic analysis of everything that you do to grow your business. This is an important step because it helps you identify your strengths, weaknesses, as well as opportunities that you may not be taking advantage of.

Once you’ve conducted your audit, you should know which parts of your strategy are working (and which ones aren’t). You can then use this information to design more engaging content, and improve the content delivered at each part of the customer journey.

For example, your audit might indicate that lots of prospects enter your funnel but drop out during the decision-to-buy stage.

You could then focus your email marketing efforts on solving this problem by better highlighting the benefits of your product, or by offering them a discount to boost conversion rates.

If you’d like more information on how to conduct a content audit, check out this resource:

https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-audit-for-content-marketing-strategy

What You Need to Know

Here are a few very important things that’ll keep your email marketing fresh, relevant, and profitable:

Protect Your IP Reputation:

Your IP reputation is the “quality” of your email address. It’s measured by how many unwanted messages an email account sends. So, an email address that’s flagged many times will have a negative IP reputation.

Emails with negative IP reputations get sent to spam, meaning a negative IP reputation will hurt your business and cost you money.

To protect your IP reputation, you should:

Stick with One Email Address:

Spammers will change emails and IP addresses to avoid being tracked. So, you should use one account for a long time to establish send history that will keep your emails out of the spam folder.

Mind Your Open Rates:

Email providers will filter out emails from IP addresses with consistently low open rates. If you notice that your open rates are decreasing, review your content strategy or clean your email list.

Keep in mind that a higher subscriber count is not always better! Scrub your email list of inactive subscribers from time to time. Doing so will help not only keep your lists clean but will save you money as well.

You can use software like NeverBounce to do the dirty work for you: https://neverbounce.com/

Stick to a Consistent Send Schedule:

Be consistent with the emails that you send to your subscriber base. Being predictable will help improve the reputation of your email address as well. This is because email providers can see that you have an established history.

Overall, protecting your IP reputation is easy if you follow the best practices:

Focus on value so that your emails get opened.
Stick to a schedule so that your emails get opened consistently.
Maintain a quality email list for one IP address.

Integrate Your Other Channels:

Omnichannel marketing is about creating a seamless customer journey by integrating all your marketing channels.

A brand that’s using an omnichannel strategy is:

Presenting its brand identity in a consistent way across platforms.
Using personalization to their advantage.
Making customers feel like they’re talking to a person, not just a business.

So, you can see why email is such a great starting point for an omnichannel marketing strategy!

This is because:

It’s easy to create a consistent brand identity if you’re smart with templates and brand assets.
You can easily redirect customers to your website, blog, or social media.
Data-based personalization is already accessible.
Automation makes scaling up easy!

Here’s a great resource from Marketing Evolution to get you started: https://www.marketingevolution.com/knowledge-center/topic/marketing-essentials/omnichannel

Final Tips

In closing, here are a few final tips that I hope will help you get started in your email marketing journey.

A good starting point for every successful email campaign is a rock-solid subject line. This is what encourages people to open your emails and click your links, so spend time learning how to craft a captivating subject line for every campaign.

Here are a few quick tips to write an effective subject line:

Keep them between 30 and 50 characters (counting spaces)

Steer clear of words and phrases that trigger spam like:

Quote
Money
Payment
Buy now
Free
Save
Cash
Risk-Free
Order Now
Promise You
Click Here
Dear friend

The preview text is the second part of your email that people see, so try to use copy that’s relevant, enticing, urgent, or just conveys the value being offered in your email.

Finally, learn the lingo! There are many terms associated with email marketing so you want to spend some time learning them, but here are the metric-based ones that you should know:

Open Rates:

This involves how many people have opened your email. This is often monitored through tracking images, however, with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature open rates have become quite unreliable.

Still, they’re a somewhat useful metric, though we encourage you to pay more attention to engagement metrics instead.

Clickthrough Rates (CTR):

Clickthrough rate refers to the percentage of people who are engaging with a link in an email. In other words, they’ve clicked on a link in your content.

Generally speaking, CTR is a more accurate representation of your engagement than an open rate. This is because open rates don’t tell you if someone read or reacted to your email, only that they opened it.

Conversion Rate:

A conversion rate measures the percentage of people who took action, such as: purchasing a product, downloading a trial, completing a survey, or any other action you have decided to track.

Your conversion rate is tied to your call-to-action, which should be related to your business goals. Therefore, a conversion rate indicates how much an email helped you achieve a certain business goal.

Bounce Rate:

Bounce rates refer to the percentage of successfully delivered emails.

Note: This is not the same thing as a bounce rate in web analytics, which refers to the number of people who entered your site and immediately left.

Within the bounce rate, there are “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces. Soft bounces are problems with the recipient’s email server and aren’t your concern.

On the other hand, hard bounces refer to emails that will never get delivered. These email accounts are either invalid, don’t exist, or have been closed.

Lots of hard bounces will impact the reputation of your email account. This means that if you have too many hard bounces, your emails are more likely to be marked as spam.

Return on Investment (ROI):

Return on investment helps you understand the business yield of your email marketing. There are several ways to calculate ROI, so you should choose one that suits your business.

ROI helps you see the results that your email marketing campaigns are generating. A negative ROI will also show that you’ve got serious problems, so it’s important to keep an eye on it.

Your metrics will guide you toward the areas of your email marketing campaign that needs optimization.

If you’d like to jumpstart your email marketing and eliminate the steep learning curve, you should take a look at Mail Labs, an in-depth, 12-week training program (with lifetime access included!). Link: https://promotelabs.com/maillabs/

Mail Labs will show you how to reach more people and make more money using the proven power of email marketing.

Inside the Mail Labs membership, you’ll discover: