What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that promotes your products or services to potential and existing customers and builds brand awareness. It involves reaching out to your customer base via email, and it can be beneficial for engaging your clients and keeping them loyal to your brand.
How does email marketing work?
Using email marketing to promote your business requires creating an effective email marketing strategy. To do so, take the following steps:
1. Select an email automation platform
Email marketing software is the engine that powers your email marketing strategy, allowing you to keep your customer and subscriber data in one place, create an email campaign or set up email automation, and craft and send emails to your audience.
Make sure to choose a platform that:
- Collects email addresses: The email marketing platform you choose should enable you to import, organise, and use the data you collect via sign-up forms on your website.
- Has email templates: Your chosen platform should offer templates that make creating email design and copy easier so you can start sending emails to the specific list of email addresses quickly.
- Provides tracking tools: A comprehensive email marketing software includes tracking capabilities that enable you to analyse the performance of your email marketing strategy and adjust it accordingly.
2. Build an email list
To start reaching out to your audience, you must first create an email list. This list is a collection of email addresses of potential and current customers who have opted to receive marketing messages from your brand.
While there are various ways to grow your email list, one of the most common methods is to launch a sign-up form on your website.
3. Define your campaign goals
To make the most of your email marketing efforts, set a clear objective for your emails. Some of your campaign goals might include:
- Promoting new products
- Boosting sales
- Establishing brand authority
- Maintaining customer loyalty
Once you identify the goal of your specific campaign, it will be easier to decide which type of emails will best get your message across.
For example, if your goal is to promote new products or boost sales, send highly promotional messages to the audience that is most likely to respond to your offer. By contrast, if you want to establish your brand as an industry authority and keep in touch with your customers, send informational emails featuring industry news or similar updates that could be of interest to your customer base.
4. Segment your audience
For your email campaigns to be successful, you need to group your contacts into specific target audiences, or segments, based on the data you have. This method is called segmentation, and it helps you deliver highly targeted emails to the audience that’s most likely to interact with and act on your content.
For example, you can send emails promoting a particular product only to those who have shown an interest in similar items.
Types of marketing emails
Depending on the primary goal of your email marketing strategy, you can send different types of marketing messages to the contacts on your email list. The emails that you send to your audience can be:
- Planned: When planning an email campaign, you create a series of carefully designed messages with a particular purpose that you can either send right away or schedule for a specific time.
- Triggered: You can set up automated emails, or flows, to send messages automatically based on specific triggers.
Here are some of the most common types of emails that you can use to interact with your prospects or existing customer base:
1. Welcome emails
As soon as a prospect opts into your email list, they should receive a welcome email. Welcome emails help present your business in a positive light and can serve a variety of purposes, highlighting:
- Your brand
- Specific products or services
- Welcome deals, coupons, or promo codes
- Next steps for readers, like exploring your products and making a wishlist
2. Promotional emails
The goal of promotional emails is to get the word out about your new or existing products or services to the subscribers on your email list. To encourage subscribers to make a purchase or complete another action, these emails usually contain special incentives, such as:
- Special discounts
- Limited-time deals
- Seasonal or holiday promotions
- VIP-exclusive deals
3. Transactional emails
Transactional emails are triggered by particular actions a single customer takes, such as ordering a product from your website or signing up for a special offer.
The most common types of transactional emails include:
- Order confirmation emails: Sent to customers immediately after they make a purchase, these emails serve as proof of the transaction that customers can later refer to if necessary.
- Shipping confirmation emails: These emails let customers know their order has been processed and shipped. They typically include the shipping address, expected delivery date, and tracking information to help customers check on the status of their shipment.
- Order refund notifications: Informing customers that a refund for their order has been processed, these emails provide any relevant refund details. They’re important for maintaining transparency and trust with your customers, potentially encouraging them to make future purchases despite the refund.
- Subscription confirmation: Sent to verify that a customer has subscribed to your offer, these emails typically include a clickable link or button to confirm their intent to keep receiving communications.
- Thank-you emails: These post-purchase messages express gratitude to your clients for supporting your business, ensuring they feel appreciated. This may prompt them to choose your business over other options in the future as well.
4. Newsletters
Email newsletters help your business share valuable information with your subscriber community. Whether you use them to present product innovations or share industry updates, creating a newsletter can sustain your relationship with your audience and help you stay in touch with them.
To ensure your business remains on the customers’ radar, send newsletters periodically. They can also help build credibility for your brand, which may make customers more likely to choose your product or service the next time they’re ready to make a purchase.
5. Re-engagement emails
By examining customer behaviour, you can identify a target audience for re-engagement emails. These emails are best for subscribers who have interacted with your brand in the past but then became inactive. For example, you can send:
- Abandoned cart emails: These emails remind your shoppers that they placed items in your cart but didn’t proceed to check-out, encouraging them to finish the purchase.
- Wishlist reminders: If a customer placed one of your products on their wishlist, you can send them an email as a friendly nudge to make the purchase.
- Win-back emails: These messages are sent to customers who haven’t purchased in a while to rekindle their interest in your brand and show appreciation for their previous purchases.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. According to Klaviyo’s marketing mix report, email marketing is among the top 3 ROI-generating marketing channels for 78.68% of businesses.
Some of the main benefits of email marketing are:
- Increased brand awareness: Email marketing enables you to reach out to your customers directly, making potential customers more familiar with your brand and what it offers.
- Personalisation opportunities: Email marketing enables you to target specific audience segments with emails tailored to their preferences and behaviour, capturing attention more easily. This increases the likelihood that your marketing efforts will turn into sales.
- Higher ROI: This channel has a higher ROI compared to other marketing channels like paid advertising or social media because it gives your customers direct access to your promotions, products, and services. Your recipients are more likely to act on the personalised offers they already expressed an interest in and agreed to receive from your brand.
- Measurable outcomes: With email marketing platforms, you can track how your prospects react to your messages and use this data to improve your overall strategy. By examining metrics like open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate, you can identify what your audience likes and dislikes and adjust your strategy accordingly.
How to make email marketing easier
To reap the benefits of this marketing channel, you’ll need the right email marketing tool—especially if you’re just starting out.
Klaviyo is a marketing automation solution that can help you easily gain, retain, and grow your customer base by sending well-crafted, personalised emails at the right time. Using the power of AI, Klaviyo helps you compose emails, identify your target audience, and send your messages when they’re most likely to convert. Features include:
- Segmentation: Quickly group your audience into segments based on predictive analysis, shopping behaviour, or any other criteria you can think of, and start sending targeted emails to attract customers.
- Campaigns: Klaviyo enables you to create, personalise, and send email campaigns whenever you want to announce a new product launch or make a sale.
- Flows: With over 60 pre-built flow templates to choose from, you’ll set up automated emails in no time. You can use the original templates or customise them as needed.
- Reporting: Klaviyo gives you the metrics you need to analyse and visualise data with ease and use this information to adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
On top of this list of powerful features, Klaviyo integrates with 350+ platforms and tools, enabling you to centralise the data from all your channels in one place. This way, you can access all the information about your customers’ preferences at once and come up with a personalised marketing strategy.
Ready to start reaching out to your contacts with messages that speak directly to your audience? Sign up for Klaviyo to send your prospects emails that convert.