Did you know that email marketing provides the highest return on investment out of every marketing channel? Email marketing drives an average of $36 for every dollar spent and can become one of the most effective channels in a brand’s marketing toolkit.
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email to broadcast promotional messages to a list of recipients. Email marketing can be used to educate customers on new products, services, announcements and discounts to promote the brand and increase sales. Brands can also take a softer approach by sharing news, tips, tricks and videos in emails such as through newsletters.
Email marketing can play a strategic role in a business's marketing strategy by helping to generate leads, maintain customer attention, build trusted relationships and drive purchases. Working in sync with other activities in the marketing mix like advertising, sales and promotion, email marketing can be a low-cost yet effective way to grow and scale a business.
In this article, we explore how brands can use email marketing to engage and convert customers. Additionally, we share email marketing best practices and some excellent types of emails that brands can use in their email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing is one of the most direct and effective ways of connecting with leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers. Creating a strong email marketing strategy helps brands to reach and connect with their target audience in a personalised way and increase sales at an affordable cost.
This channel remains the primary way that customers receive messages directly from brands meaning that brands can get their message across to customers at a very low cost. Additionally, email is an owned channel meaning that customers are directly reached in their inboxes without other intermediaries. In this way, brands can craft messages exactly as they envision and send compelling messages at chosen and scheduled times.
Email marketing is also one of the best platforms to build relationships with audiences due to the highly personalised nature of the medium. Brands can leverage the information that brands have about their customers such as their name, previous purchases, log-in data and location for directly targeted offers and messaging. When messages are relevant to their interests, customers are more likely to read them and engage with the content - ultimately leading to sales and long-term loyalty.
Before starting an email campaign, brands need to identify their ideal end results as well as the purpose of the campaign. This will set the direction for the audiences that the campaign will reach out to as well as the contents of the email messages - culminating in an email strategy that works.
Developing an engaged email marketing database is crucial to building an audience to communicate with. Businesses can create simple subscription opportunities on their website - for example, when they checkout or signup. They can also use lead magnets like discounts to incentivise subscribing to emails or offer early access to products or promotions to subscribers.
By dividing email lists into smaller groups based on demographics, brands can speak more directly to the needs of their audiences. Businesses should automatically filter their email list by contact data and behaviour into target audience categories so that email messages can be tailored to the most appropriate recipients.
Starting with a responsive and eye-catching email template, brands should create email content that is conversational, easy to read and relevant to their customers. First grabbing attention with short and catchy subject lines, email content should be focused on providing educational, informational or promotional value so that recipients want to read on. Also, the email should close off with a call to action to invite readers to take the desired action.
Email marketing services often include analytics tools that brands can take advantage of to track and understand their email marketing performance. This means that brands can learn from metrics like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates and conversion rates to make decisions on how to optimise their email marketing strategy and improve their future emails.
Welcome emails are the first email touchpoint that brands have with their audiences after they sign up, subscribe, or submit their email to a website. These emails welcome customers and drive them to learn more about the brand and its products.
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Newsletter emails are regularly sent emails that encapsulate the latest news, tips, or updates. They can focus on a brand’s products and services or include interesting and relevant content like articles, blogs and video links. These newsletters aim to educate and entertain subscribers and may also include a call to action like signing up for an upcoming event or buying a product online.
Nurturing emails are a series of emails that deliver targeted and time-based information that guide potential customers through the buying process. These emails are tailored to customer shopping behaviour and present them with information to push them to decide to buy certain products.
Promotional emails aim to move a potential customer through the sales funnel to a conversion. These types of emails often include coupons, exclusive deals or other discounts. They can also incentivise purchases through other means like access to exclusive products, or an invitation to an event.
SHOPLINE helps you cut down on email marketing hassle by streamlining your process with a convenient and easy-to-use platform that is integrated with your e-commerce site.
Smart Push is SHOPLINE’s multi-channel automation tool that allows you to promote your brand on a wide range of platforms including email marketing, SMS, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Your team can simply drag and drop to create your own marketing campaigns. At the same time, you can easily import your customer data and manage outreach campaigns based on individual segments and conditions.
In addition, SHOPLINE is integrated with Mailchimp - the #1 email marketing and automations brand. Mailchimp comes with a wide range of features like messaging message automation, target segmentation, AI and analytics. With our integration, can connect to your store with one click and automatically sync SHOPLINE customers, products and purchase data to MailChimp. Additionally, your SHOPLINE and MailChimp data can be accessed in the same dashboard for more unified marketing decision-making.
Looking to integrate online and offline retail solutions with email marketing features? We highly recommend using SHOPLINE to grow and scale your business. It’s easy to use, perfect for beginners, and incredibly affordable. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to get started.
