Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business

Susan Gunelius

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781599182537
• eBook ISBN: 9781613083833
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available today, but most business owners and even most marketers don't know how to use it to its fullest extent. Email marketing has evolved rapidly and techniques that worked just five years ago are insufficient and outdated today. Five years ago, "Content is king," was the phrase being touted in business circles. Today, it's, "The power is in your list."

• Provides clear and easy to follow instructions, so immediately after reading it, readers can develop a complete email marketing campaign, promote it, track results, and generate leads and revenue from it.
• Includes email messaging samples, interviews, and an extensive resource section.
• This series book will play well in the consumer trade and academic channels.
• Author has consistent and strong sales history in the series biz/tech market, with a focus on social media marketing and writing.
• Author's previous titles are well-placed to the midlist series market and deliver best when there is a proven series behind the work (Dummies, for example), to which Ultimate Guide is comparable.
• Markets include:
  
• Small business owners, startup entrepreneurs, and marketers who want to learn how to use email marketing to build businesses
• Copywriters who want to learn how to write and manage email marketing drip campaigns for their clients
• College students learning about marketing, entrepreneurship, and business ownership who need to understand how email marketing

Chapter 1

The Evolution of Email Marketing

The email marketing of today is not the same as email marketing just five years ago. So much has changed in such a short time that it can be challenging for entrepreneurs to keep up, but staying current on the dos and don’ts of email marketing is critical for your business’ success. The reason is simple. Today, the power is in your list.

Email marketing is an essential part of an integrated marketing strategy, but even if yours is a microbusiness or you’re a solopreneur with an extremely small budget, email marketing should still be a priority for you. Why? Because email is where most people prefer to get news from companies and brands about promotions, discounts, and more.

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The power is in your list.

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Here’s some context. According to Radicati’s 2016 “Email Statistics” report (http://radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Email_Statistics_Report_2016-2020_Executive_Summary.pdf), email will be used by 3 billion people in 2020, which is nearly half the world’s population. Of the people who won’t use email by 2020, 1.6 billion of them do not have electricity. That means, if you’re selling to consumers in the developed world, the people you’re trying to reach with your brand messages are using email. If you’re not showing up in their email inboxes, you’re missing a significant opportunity to grow your brand and business.

THE BIRTH OF EMAIL MARKETING (AND THE CHALLENGING TEEN YEARS)

The first email message was sent in 1971, and the first mass email message was sent to 100 people in 1978. However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that email use became widespread. First, the internet debuted in 1991. Five years later, the first web-based email service launched as HoTMaIL. I graduated from college in 1993 and my first job was working in the marketing department of a division of AT&T. At the time, most people in the company didn’t have email, and those who did used AT&T’s home-grown email solution. Within a couple of years, every employee had Microsoft Outlook and email had become a critical part of the workday. Today, it’s hard to imagine life without email.

The point of the story is that it didn’t take long for email to become critical to business and life. As a result, marketers discovered that connecting with consumers via email gave them yet another way to promote products and services. But a problem arose fairly quickly—spam. By the late 1990s, email marketing had grown to its awkward teenage years where it seemed out of control. As a result, lawmakers stepped in to keep consumers safe from unwanted email solicitations.

In 1998, the Data Protection Act was updated in the United Kingdom to include email opt-out. Five years later, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was passed in the U.S. and privacy and electronic regulations were passed in Europe. It took another five years for Canada’s Anti-Spam Law to be passed. Bottom line, the proliferation of unwanted email messages sent by companies became such a problem for consumers that countries had to pass laws to stop them. If you’re sending email messages from your business, you still need to follow these laws today. Don’t worry—you’ll learn more about them in Chapter 3.

It was during this spam-heavy period in the late 1990s and early 2000s that email marketing got a bad reputation. Large companies with deep pockets could buy lists of consumer email addresses and send mass messages that may or may not have been relevant to recipients. Fortunately, anti-spam laws helped curb the volume of unwanted messages, so the messages that people truly did want to receive from companies could get to the right recipients.

EMAIL MARKETING TODAY (LOOK WHO’S ALL GROWN UP)

As we entered the late 2000s, something very big happened that would change email marketing forever. Email marketing service providers made email marketing available to the masses. The idea that email could be more than just a way to communicate between friends had been embraced within the marketing departments of large companies, but it wasn’t until companies like Constant Contact, AWeber, MailChimp, iContact, VerticalResponse, and Infusionsoft developed email marketing technology as a software-as-a-service product that it started on its path to becoming a critical part of every marketing plan. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model. The software provider hosts the application and makes it available to users online, rather than allowing users to install it locally on their computers.

SaaS products made email marketing affordable and easy. Thanks to 24/7 access, low monthly subscription fees, and easy-to-use tools, anyone could build email lists from their websites, create professional-looking email messages, and send those messages to groups of people at specific times. Promoting sales, sending discount codes, and announcing new products to people who had already opted in to receive these types of messages was suddenly easier than ever.

And that’s where we are today. Email marketing is mature, stable, and effective. Remember, the power is in your list. You just need to learn how to build that list and use it to turn subscribers into paying customers and brand advocates. Fortunately, that’s exactly what you’ll learn in this book.

WHY YOU SHOULD INVEST IN EMAIL MARKETING

Just like every marketing tool that is available for you to connect your brand with consumers, email marketing has pros and cons. You should understand what you’re getting into before you invest in an email marketing application. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective investments you can make to promote your products and services, but it’s not perfect.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Let’s start with the pros. Email marketing has more advantages than disadvantages since consumers have become more accepting of it during the past decade. To determine if email marketing is right for you and your business, consider these advantages.

Affordability

If you or an existing member of your team can manage your email marketing programs and learn how to use your chosen email marketing application, then it’s an extremely affordable way to connect with large numbers of people who have expressed interest in your products or services (since you can send email messages only to people who have opted into your list by law—see Chapter 3 for legal details).

Email marketing service providers typically offer their software at low monthly fees. They might charge you based on the number of subscribers on your list, the number of messages you send per month, or a combination of the two. For example, some providers offer plans that allow you to send messages to a small list for free or for less than $10 per month. You’ll learn more about these providers and their applications in Chapter 4. For now, understand that pricing usually starts quite low and increases as you add more subscribers to your list or send a higher volume of messages.

Effectiveness

According to the Direct Marketing Association’s “National Client Email Report 2015” (http://emailmonday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/National-client-email-2015-DMA.pdf), for every dollar you spend on email marketing, the average return you can expect is $38. Of course, that return isn’t guaranteed, but if you test, tweak, and optimize your campaigns, it’s very achievable. Furthermore, Forrester’s “Social Relationship Strategies That Work” report revealed that people are very willing to receive email messages from businesses. Forrester found they’re twice as likely to sign up to a business’ email list than they are to interact with a business on Facebook. In other words, despite all the hype that Facebook marketing gets, consumers are more engaged with email marketing. Whether you’re using email marketing to drive more website traffic or increase conversions and sales, email marketing is an important piece of your marketing plan.

Measurability

Most email marketing tools give you access to a lot of data about your subscribers and their behaviors. For example, you can quickly learn who opened your email messages and clicked the links in your messages. Using this data, you can test elements of your email campaigns, such as subject lines, time of delivery, and more. When you set up email automation sequences, you can even track where people fell out of your marketing funnel and develop new ways to not just keep them in the funnel but continue moving them through it to a conversion (see Chapter 5 for more information about funnels and sequencing).

You can even integrate your email marketing tool with Google Analytics to do a deeper dive into subscribers’ behaviors. The information you collect could help you create additional email campaigns as well as ad retargeting campaigns. In fact, all this data can get overwhelming, but don’t worry. You’ll learn all about tracking email marketing performance in Chapter 12.

Customization and Personalization

Email marketing applications make it easy for you to customize your email messages. You can change the layout, colors, images, fonts, and so on to match your brand and appeal to your audience. Many applications provide easy drag-and-drop design editors so you can create a highly professional email message quickly. In addition, tools that offer advanced sequencing, segmentation, and automation features allow you to customize every element of your email messages for your target audience.

Personalized email messages often generate higher open and click through rates. You can test personalizing the subject line of your email messages by adding the recipient’s name, or you can test personalizing the greeting within the body of the message (such as “Dear Bob”). Personalization doesn’t always work perfectly, but if you’re confident that your list contains accurate recipient names, it could make a big difference in the success of your campaigns. It’s a perfect element to test.

Segmentation

Who are you sending email messages to? Do you know where they are in your marketing funnel and what they want or need from you to continue pushing them through the funnel to conversion? An email marketing application that provides segmentation features allows you to segment by a variety of factors (depending on what information you’ve captured from your subscribers), such as age, geographic location, birth date, anniversary date (of when they became your customer), average order value, date of last purchase, and more. You can segment your list of subscribers and send targeted email messages to groups of people based on the criteria you choose. For example, you might set up an email automation that automatically sends a coupon to prior customers on their birthdays. This is a great way to increase loyalty.

Segmentation can increase open rates, click-throughs, and conversions. Some email marketing applications offer advanced segmentation features so you can segment by behaviors. For example, you set up a sequence that sends an email message to your list of customers that offers a special price on a product for sale on your website. Those recipients who click on the link in the email to get the offer are taken to a special landing page on your site where they can click the “buy” button and make a purchase. People who make the purchase would then be segmented separately from those who did not make a purchase. The buyers would receive a follow-up email sequence offering related products and services while the nonbuyers would receive reminders that the discount is expiring soon. You can get very complex in your segmentation and automation processes in an effort to increase conversions.

Relationship and Trust Building

One of the most important aspects of building a successful business is building a brand that consumers recognize and trust. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface: Your Power Is in Your Email Marketing List
• Chapter 1: The Evolution of Email Marketing
• Chapter 2: The Marketing Funnel
• Chapter 3: Know the Laws and Deliverability Rules
• Chapter 4: Choosing Your Tools
• Chapter 5: Types of Email Marketing Funnels
• Chapter 6: Growing Your List
• Chapter 7: Creating a Lead Magnet
• Chapter 8: Developing an Email Marketing Conversion Funnel
• Chapter 9: List Segmentation
• Chapter 10: Writing an Email Message
• Chapter 11: Autoresponder Messages
• Chapter 12: Measuring Performance
• Chapter 13: Handy Resources and Swipe Files
• Appendix: Email Marketing Resources
• Glossary
• About the Author
• Index