What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing, allowing you as a business to use your email to market your products or services to those on your mailing list. With the ability to appear directly in the inbox of a customer, it is thought to be a very effective marketing channel.
Let’s start by asking when was the last time you checked your email?
We imagine your answer will be within the last 24 hours, with many people dedicated to checking their emails multiple times a day. This offers a huge opportunity for your business to be at the forefront of your recipients’ minds on a regular occasion.
Top Tip – make sure there is a good strategy and intent behind your emails, you don’t want to be perceived as being spammy and giving people a reason to unsubscribe from you.
Getting Consent
When it comes to email marketing you must ensure that you are abiding by GDPR rules. You must get consent to email the people on your list. Some people worry that this will reduce the number of people signing up to your list, however, we like to see the positives in this, those signing up to your list are doing so because they want to see your content!
How do you start an email marketing list?
So, you might be thinking how do I get started?
If you’ve got a website, you can add a sign up to your site (again making it clear that you are asking them for their consent to be able to email them and that by signing up they are agreeing to be added to your email list). The sign-up page will then feed these email addresses into your email marketing software, adding them to your mailing list.
Some email software will also offer a landing page within their system, so even if you don’t have a website, you can still easily sign people up to your database.
One of the great things about email marketing is that you own the data that you collect (unlike your followers on social media). Just make sure you are securely storing your email contacts, so that you are able to get in contact with them even if your email provider goes down.
What types of email should I send?
Some businesses will choose to send just a regular newsletter, this might be sent once a month and sent to everyone on your mailing list.
However, some businesses will opt for a more sophisticated email marketing strategy considering the different types of interests your audience might have. Let’s dive into this in a little more detail.
If we take a hotel for example, and this hotel has a restaurant, rooms, wedding functions and a Spa. You might want to segment your audience and tailor your email content based on the audiences’ interests.
You might also want to consider setting up a welcome sequence so that when a subscriber joins your list, they are sent some information introducing them to your email list and letting them know what they can expect.
Top Tip No.2 – This is a great place to include a discount code to really incentivise your audience to purchase something from you.
Here are some other popular types of emails you might want to include in your email marketing strategy:
Promotional
Educational
Testimonials
Newsletters
Which email marketing platforms should I use?
Now this really is the million-dollar question. There are so many different platforms to choose from. It’s important to look at the different features that each of them present and work out which would be most suitable for your business.
A lot of the email software companies will base their pricing on the number of contacts or number of emails that you are going to send each month, so this is something you should also consider when you are choosing which platform is right for you.
Still not convinced that email marketing is right for your business?
Here are some stats that might make you think twice:
Hubspot (2022) revealed that there are 4 billion daily email users, with 77% of marketers seeing an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. Oh and (Statisa Research 2021) estimates that email marketing revenue could reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023!
If you’d like support setting up or creating a regular email marketing strategy, the Carrick Creative team would love to help you!