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Email marketing is the use of — you guessed it — email to promote your brand, sell products or services, and build relationships with customers. Crafting an email marketing campaign is an opportunity to develop and deploy a message that enables your business to appeal to a specific audience.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most highly effective digital marketing strategies by sending emails to potential customers and current customers. Creating an effective email marketing strategy will help convert potential customers into customers and turn current customers into loyal customers.
Why should I do email marketing?
There are a lot of great reasons why email should be a vital piece in your marketing strategy toolkit, but what makes it most appealing and a great benefit of email marketing is that it’s one of the least expensive means of marketing. It’s also extremely effective in helping you gather data that enables you to better appeal to your customers.
With email marketing analytics, you can measure the effectiveness of your messaging based on metrics such as open rate, clickthrough rate, and conversion. You can also look at data such as how long a person spent on your site and what they clicked once they were there.
It’s a veritable treasure trove of information that allows you to discern which elements were and weren’t successful, allowing you to refine future messages, segment audiences, and create more compelling offers. Email marketing KPIs are much easier to measure than non-digital efforts.
For instance, compare it with direct mail marketing, which is much more expensive and often proves more difficult to measure ROI. A bump in sales following a direct mail campaign can logically be tied to the effort, but in terms of data that you can glean from the mailing to use for future advertising, there is much less unless you direct people to a specific URL, offer code, or coupon to drive sales online or in-store.
Are there different types of email marketing?
To determine the types of messages you should be sending your customers (and prospective customers) using email marketing best practices, you first need to understand the two main categories of email: transactional and marketing.
1. Transactional email
Transactional email is sent to a customer (or prospective customer) based on some action (or desired action). It aims to complete some type of transaction or process that the customer started with you or to notify your customer base of updates like system outages or a change of terms.
A confirmation is a very common transactional email. It’s sent as a courtesy to your customers when they’ve ordered a product, signed up for a newsletter, or registered for an event.
You want to think about where transactional email makes the most sense on your customers’ journey.
2. Marketing email
Marketing email contains a message or content that pushes a specific commercial purpose, whether it’s an upcoming sale or event or the announcement of a new line of products. Marketing email can be sent manually, or it can be automated. Either way, the timing of those is strategic and deliberate to fulfil a specific email marketing KPI.
Email marketing in Australia is subject to the ACMA Spam Act 2003. Before you start sending marketing email, make sure you are familiar with all the applicable email marketing terms and regulations. We recommend speaking with a legal expert.
8 types of marketing email
There is no one-size-fits-all for marketing email. The recipient, the occasion, and the content all influence the type of email you send. But broadly there are two categories of marketing email: manual campaigns and trigger campaigns.
A manual email marketing campaign is done, well, manually. That is, you pull together a list of customers whom you want to message, and then email them all the same message. We call these “blast campaigns”. Think about the customer groups you are targeting and customise the design and email marketing terms you want to use to best attract those customers.
A trigger marketing campaign automatically sends email to individual users based on an action, inaction, or some other variable. These can be incredibly effective, in part because they are so personalised.
We’ve found that personalised automated email far outperforms one-off campaigns to your entire customer list. Square has found that open rates for automated offers are 1.7 times higher than blast campaigns containing offers, on average. They also have a 2.3-times-higher redemption rate within seven days of the email send date.
An automated email marketing campaign is sent to customers who meet the specific criteria for each type of email on an ongoing basis, after a one-time setup.
Types of manual email marketing
1. Informational email
Informational email does exactly that—provides information. That information might be an update on new products, an engaging piece of content you created, or a just a reminder to visit your business.
You might use this type of email marketing for major gift-giving events —Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s and Father’s Day — to give your subscribers gift ideas or special offers (both online and in-store).
2. Newsletters
A newsletter is one way to market to prospective customers and deepen your relationship with existing customers.
You can use newsletters to highlight new products or services, upcoming events, news related to your business, content you’ve produced, and your brand’s social media accounts.
3. Sale or promotion email
If you’re having a special sale in your store, email marketing should be one of the primary ways that you get the word out.
You can also use email to do a promotion specifically for your customers, where you send them a voucher or discount code to use online or in the store. This is a great way to achieve your email marketing KPIs, like driving more traffic to your online store.
(Pro tip: You might even use a promotion like this to acquire new customers by making discount codes shareable and posting them to Facebook.)
4. Event invitation
If you have a brick-and-mortar business and you want to get people into your store, you might hold special events. Or you may want to hold a virtual event that can help you sell more online. An email is an efficient way to invite your customers.
For example, a retailer might host a weeknight shopping party with later hours, cocktails and appetisers, and sales. A restaurant might do a special tasting menu for regular customers. A salon might have an event where it teams up with makeup artists to do makeovers.
Types of trigger email marketing
5. Welcome email
When people sign up for your newsletter, marketing email, or other offers, send them a message that introduces them to everything that your business has to offer. Let them know about things like exclusive discounts for subscribers so they keep receiving (and opening) your email.
6. Thank you email
In many cases, your confirmation email and your thank you email may be the same thing. You might use a thank you email when a customer completes an action like subscribing to a newsletter or signing up for a loyalty program.
You can also use thank you messaging when there isn’t something to confirm. For example, you could thank your customers on your business’ anniversary each year via email (and provide a promo code or special discount). Or you might send a thank you each time a member of your loyalty program purchases something or reaches a reward.
7. Reengagement email
The goal of a reengagement campaign is to get lapsed customers shopping with you again. You could do this with an email that offers a promotion or discount to the lapsed customer, or you might send an email that highlights products or services you provide.
But the bigger question is how do you know which customers are lapsed? If you have email marketing software that integrates with your POS, you should be able to group customer email based on their purchase behaviours.
For example, a loyal customer might have made more than three visits to your store in the last month, a casual customer visited twice, and a lapsed customer hasn’t returned in six weeks.
8. Birthday or anniversary email
Another example of a transactional email you can incorporate into your email marketing campaign is a birthday or anniversary message. Most birthday or anniversary email comes with some kind of offer like a discount or free gift if they show the email or use a specific code during their birth month.
Email marketing tips
The goal of email marketing is, of course, to get people to open your message and respond to your call to action. But consumers (and the email systems they use) are increasingly savvy, so you need to make sure that your email strategy is, too.
Here are some email marketing tips to get your messages read (and keep them out of the spam filter):
1. Don’t send too many emails
Even if customers like your brand, they don’t want you to blow up their inbox, so unless they sign up for a daily newsletter, be conservative about how often you email them.
2. Invest in optimisation tools
Sometimes it’s not just what you say in the message, but when you send your message. For a more sophisticated operation, consider employing tools like email marketing software that determines the best time to send your message to each subscriber.
3. Avoid language that looks like spam
Customers will never even see your email if it gets caught in the spam filter, so avoid suspect email marketing terms like “click now to win a prize!”. While you want subscribers who opt in, you need to make sure customers can opt out of email. You also want to be sure to comply with other applicable legal marketing requirements. Check this ACMA guide for more information, and make sure you consult with a legal expert for your particular needs.
4. Send clear, attractive messages
You don’t want to send an email that sounds too good to be true (or legal), but you do want to appeal to your customers with great offers and easy-to-understand language.
How to start an email marketing program
We’ve put together few key steps to get your email marketing program started.
1. Create an email marketing strategy
Before you start reaching out to your subscriber list, you should have a clear strategy in mind, including the following:
- Target audience
- Goals of your messages
- Types of emails you’re going to send
- A calendar outlining when you plan to send out emails.
2. Build email lists
There are a few ways to do this:
- Through your point-of-sale system and its customer management features
- With prompts inviting customers to subscribe to your mailing list on your website
- With calls to action on social media
3. Send marketing emails
When you’re ready to get started, one of the first steps in sending out email marketing for beginners is to find an email service provider. Look for a platform that is easy to use and offers access to email marketing analytics so you can easily determine the success of your campaigns.
You should also consider the following:
- Implement email segmentation
- Personalise your email marketing
- Use email marketing automation
Once you’ve got an email marketing strategy, provider, subscriber list, and calendar in place, you’re good to go. Start sending!
