Email marketing is one of the constants of the marketing world in relation to customer service. When you look at a business online, a banner pops up offering you a deal for signing up to their email list. When you go to a restaurant and scan a review custom QR code , you’ll put your email in and receive restaurant news and deals.
All that’s to say, email marketing is important for every business and its marketing strategy–sometimes even B2B marketing. Email marketing can be a campaign all on its own, or it can be a part of a larger marketing campaign. It can be a way of sharing news, bringing in customers, and measuring the reach of the email marketing strategy and business overall.
In this blog post, we’ll walk through some key points of email marketing. By the end, you’ll have a firm grasp on what email marketing is and how you can use it to boost profitability for your business.
Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing strategy is a two-fold definition. It is both:
- The general strategy of using email marketing to reach new audiences, connect with your customers, and gain insight into your customer base.
- Your specific email marketing strategy.
Together, those definitions create the strategy you use, based on data-driven strong email marketing practices, paired with your own business strategy and needs.
To give some perspective on email marketing strategy, we’ve rounded up three of the best email marketing strategies. These three tips showcase the drive behind email marketing strategy, and they’ll give you a place to start as you write your business plan.
3. Customize Carefully
A lot of emails look very similar to each other–especially when it comes to wholesale marketing. When you’re crafting your email marketing, finding small ways to customize your emails will make you stand out. From a unique subject line to a logo embedded in the email, small customizations will keep your emails unique, but still streamlined.
2. Test Your Emails
With email marketing, there are lots of options for wording, headers, and specific content. Using A/B testing to see what your ideal audience responds best to will give you long-term success in your email marketing content choices. It also gives you tangible results to share with your team.
1. Define Your Audience
In a recent BinWise blog post about business marketing, we addressed the importance of building a buyer persona of your key customer base. A similar method of defining your audience in email marketing will help you craft your content to cater to your audience.
What Is Email Marketing?
With those three tips for email marketing strategy, you’re getting close to being ready to send your first emails. However, you might still have questions. With a subject as broad as email marketing, we’d be surprised if you didn’t.
“Key Takeaway: Email marketing is important for every business and its marketing strategy.”
One of the main questions has an open-ended possibility of answers: What is email marketing? Email marketing is a vast concept. It can mean something slightly different to every business, every industry–including the hospitality industry, and every email marketer.
These three key points of email marketing are general in many ways, because they can be applied to any business or industry. Whatever your email marketing strategy is, you’ll see these definitions of email marketing come into play.
3. Intriguing Openers
People open and read so many emails every day, you need something intriguing to catch their attention and keep them reading. An attention grab at the beginning makes people want to know what comes next–perhaps a question they want the answer to. That will up your email read-through rates.
2. On-Brand Content
One thing to be wary of in email marketing content is ending up with content that doesn’t hit the mark of your brand. When you focus on the creativity of the content, it can be easy to lose sight of that main message. Start each email with your brand in mind to keep your messaging centralized.
1. Value Offers
One of the main goals of email marketing is to convert email readers into active customers. Providing offers of value through your emails is one of the best ways to do that. Whether it’s coupons or advance knowledge of events-like bar promotions, offering your email audience something to bring them to your business is the top priority.
Email Marketing Specialist
For a lot of businesses, especially small businesses, email marketing is something the business owner will take care of. There are, however, other options. Any business that wants to focus on email marketing without bogging down the owner’s workload can and should hire an email marketing specialist.
An email marketing specialist is someone with experience in marketing who can spend their time evaluating the buyer persona of the business. They can draft emails, build email lists, and keep an eye on business trends to keep the emails up to date.
These three factors are part of the job of any email marketing specialist. Whether you’re looking to hire a specialist, or find work as one, keep these factors in mind.
3. Sales Experience
Getting people to become customers of your business through email marketing is very similar to getting people to buy products through salesmanship. An email marketing specialist with sales experience will be able to tap into what makes people buy a product or service.
2. Advertising Experience
An email is effectively a direct form of advertising. Advertising experience, through social media, an advertising agency, or previous business branding work, will help an email marketing specialist. It will prepare them for the need for poignant ad copy in each email.
1. Creative Writing Skills
While creative writing is a different type of writing skill from ad copy writing, it is equally important for email marketing. The ability to write something compelling and well written-including for eCommerce content marketing–stems from the ability to look at the message and write it creatively.
Frequently Asked Questions About Email Marketing
With a subject as broad as email marketing, there will always be more you can learn. From types of marketing emails to finding inspiration for consistent new email marketing content, it’s an ongoing process. Our answers to these frequently asked questions will help you get started.
What Are the 4 Types of Marketing Emails?
The four types of marketing emails are email newsletters, acquisition emails, retention emails, and promotional emails. There is some crossover in who these types of emails are sent to. For example, newsletters, promotional emails, and retention emails are often sent to the same people. Acquisition emails and promotional emails will also be sent to the same folks.
What Are the Advantages of Email Marketing?
The advantages of email marketing are that email marketing is a relatively cheap, easy way to spread your reach and build your business. You can save costs by keeping content creation in-house and using minimal software by doing the work manually as much as possible. Overall, email marketing is a cost-efficient, malleable marketing strategy.
How Do You Master Email Marketing?
The best way to master email marketing is to keep at it. Of course, you can take courses and seminars, do market and competitor research, and learn about content marketing. All of that information will give you a basis to start with. Practice, however, is the thing that will help you continue to improve and find your email marketing groove.
How Do You Create Email Marketing Content?
To create email marketing content, you need an idea of the message you want to send and a variety of topics about the message. If you’re sending newsletters, your message can change every week. To keep up the creative drive, you should find the key message you want to relay, and center your content around that central theme.
Marketing Through Emails: You’ve Got To Email
Email marketing is one crucial part of the overarching practice of business marketing–including small business marketing. Come back to the BinWise blog for more solutions to business marketing needs. Visit our sister site, the BlueCart blog, for eCommerce information and order management support.