Email marketing basics for better customer communication

Starting a new business includes a lot of challenges, from building a valuable product, finding opportunities to monetize, and also making people find, understand, and use it. To that end, a strong understanding of marketing is required. That led the High-Tech Seedlab Team to organize a marketing week with workshops on the main topics in Marketing. Starting with an overall introduction, going further to SEO & Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media & Paid Ads, and last but not least, Analytics. In this article, we want to sum up key email marketing basics making your email marketing a valuable channel for direct communication with your customers and in conclusion for your business.

Why should I use email marketing for my business?

First off, let’s talk about why Email marketing is presumably interesting for your business. When you hear about email marketing it may sound like an outdated channel compared to the many new possibilities on social media and co. However, in reality, it looks different. Taking a look at Hubspot stats 2021 shows how current the topic of email marketing still is.

Huge market which is expected to grow

In 2021 more than 4 billion people use emails daily, which already sounds immensely large, and is expected to grow by 600 million users by 2025. The global email marketing market is valued at 7.5 billion at the moment and the expected growth for the next few years is huge, till 2027 awaits an increase to 17.9 billion U.S. dollars. Marketers are aware of that development and see the importance of email marketing in their daily business. That’s why “4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing.” This number shows how marketing experts look at this old channel, which is still in the best shape.

Benefits of email marketing

Email marketing can have a real impact on your marketing and business success, but what are the main benefits of it?
There are definitely a few, these are some of them:

Low costs
Instant impact
Easy to measure
High ROI (return on investment)
Owning your media and contact lists
Direct, personal communication with target groups and customers

Four E-mail marketing basics to increase revenue

Seeing all the numbers explaining that email marketing is still an important part of a marketing mix, doesn’t mean that there are no hurdles and pitfalls on the way to a revenue-increasing outcome. To overcome some of this let´s take a look at four specific to-dos that have a real impact on your success.

1. Find the right e-mail marketing tool

Finding the right tool in the middle of swaths of options is the first hard decision that brings a lot of questions. To find the right tool for your marketing plans it’s crucial to have an understanding of what you want to do and what you need to do. To sum up, that means before you know what you need, you need to know what you are doing.

To avoid a time-consuming software change, you should ensure from the get-go that your tool can grow with you. Doing a simple checklist with all the basic demands, functions that are needed, and technical requirements will help you to keep an overview before you choose the tool.

Tool functions & criteria to have in mind:

Automation
List Segmentation
Scalability for future growth
Pricing that meets your budget
High-quality customer service
Intuitive usage

2. Send the right content

It may be instinctive to write mailings that fit your PR plan but aren’t that relevant to your audience. To tackle this problem you have to understand what your audience wants.
What value do I offer with this mail? This question should be easily answered before sending out an email.

An email list is full of individuals and not all of them want the same content. Therefore, segmentation is a big step to bring relevant content to your potential customer. There are a lot of criteria to segment your email list with, so it’s always necessary to have the right data. The impact of segmentation is shown by another fact from Hubspot stats which says that “Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.”

The decision on what criteria you should segment your list with always depends on your product and the information you want to share, typical ones are location, gender, past purchase history, browsing behavior, stage of the sales funnel, or interest in your content.

3. Automate for better timing

If you have a large volume of mailings, it´s at some point just not possible to schedule and send them all by yourself. Lucky that there are a lot of mailings you can automate.

Evergreen content for automation
To automate your mails you need the right Content, so-called Evergreen Content.
Examples are:

Welcome Mailings
Feedback Mailings
Dynamic product recommendation
Introduction of your brand
Explanation of your USP
Explanation to product categories & brands
Showing benefits
Reminder

Make sure that this content is always up to date and fits in your communication.

How to automate
To automate your communication it’s about sending the right information, at the right time. Depending on your tool you have different options and complexity to handle automation, but there is a simple ruleset to get started.

Trigger
Delay
Condition
Send E-Mail

4. Monitor KPIs and react

Your email list consists of X individuals and changes with each new subscriber. With this in mind, you know that email marketing won’t be finished. You have to continuously work on your content and subscriber lists. Therefore it’s critical to monitor the right KPI’s and react if they are changing. Don’t wait too long and take your learnings into what your users are interested in.

KPI’s to monitor:

Open rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Conversion rate (CR)
Unsubscribe rate
Bounce rate
Overall ROI

Don’t forget GDPR

GDPR is an unlikely but important part of email marketing. Since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in May 2018, companies are legally obliged to inform users why their data is collected and how it is used.

E-Mail Checklist

Meaningful subject line: The subject line should be short while providing an incentive to open the email.
Clear content: Keep the text short and clear and get straight to the topic. Don’t force the user to scroll.
Highly visible CTA: The call-to-action should be as high up as possible. Ideally, it should be in contrasting colors.
Good images: Images or graphics should match both your brand and the theme of the email. Pay attention to the resolution and the associated loading time.
Responsive design: Design your email so that it displays correctly on desktop, tablet and smartphone respectively.
Send time: Use A/B testing to see which is the best time to send certain emails.
Keep your target audience in mind when planning your marketing emails. The interests of your users are just as important for successful mailings as your brand voice.

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