A mandatory introduction to email marketing as a digital marketing channel

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Hello there!

In this blog post, you will learn the definition of email marketing and its main objectives and benefits. Additionally, you will learn what is a drip marketing campaign and the considerations you must have when executing one.
At the end of this article, I will mention the most popular email marketing tools and email marketing platforms to support your email marketing campaign efforts.

What is Email Marketing

As I already mentioned in the previous post "Digital Marketing Channels", Susan Ward at thebalancesmb.com wrote, "In its most basic sense, email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services. 
An even better email marketing definition is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers or clients".

What is the main objective of an email marketing campaign?

The main objective of an email marketing campaign is to transform:

• Strangers into friends.
• Leads into sales.
• Sales into repeated customers
• Repeated customers into brand advocates.

To do so, email marketing relies on drip campaigns, sending emails with different messages to different segments of audiences, while doing so at different dates and times.

• Note: The entire email marketing campaign should be oriented to providing value to your customers.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

In its website, Business2Community.com mentions "top 10 benefits of email marketing", including the following:

• Build credibility.
• Better brand recognition.
• Boost sales.
• Stronger customer relationships.

What is a drip email marketing campaign?

In his article at Zapier.com, Joy Stich wrote, "Often called drip campaigns but known by many other names—drip marketing, automated email campaign, lifecycle emails, autoresponders and marketing automation—the concept is the same: they're a set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule".

Stages of a drip campaign

A drip campaign is composed of 4 main stages, and they consist of achieving certain goals.
The stages of a drip marketing campaign are:

• Lead acquiring: People that have submitted their basic contact information.
• First Sales: People that have made their first purchase.
• Up & Cross-Selling: Customers that we encourage to do additional purchases.
• Loyalty Continuity: These are emails we send to our repeated customer so they become more loyal.

Considerations for your drip marketing campaign

1-Set Goals

It is imperative to start your email marketing campaign with a set of goals that are aligned with your company's marketing plan.

Following are 4 ideas for your drip marketing campaign goals:

• Increase Sign-ups: Obtain more leads (subscribers, contacts, etc)
• Create awareness: Let your audience know about your company and solutions.
• Generate more sales: Sell customized products or services.
• Reactivate a former customer: Upsell or cross-sell your products.

Keep in mind that goals should be written following certain basic rules. 

I suggest reading this article from The University of Notre-Dame to learn about "Six Steps for Setting Business Goals".

2-Build List

The single most important resource for your marketing campaign is your database of contact lists. If you don't have a list of emails, or if you want to reach more leads, focus on building your email lists.

Following are the main elements of email list building:

• Opt-in.

According to bigcommerce.com, "an opt-in is a form of consent given by web users, acknowledging interest in a product or service and authorizing a third party to contact them with further information" 

Acquiring contacts for your email lists through Opt-in forms is good customer service and overall practice. In some countries, an opt-in is mandatory if you want to send emails to your audience.

Make sure you provide quality content to your subscribers that otherwise they could not obtain from you.

• Database.

The types of people you want to keep in your database are leads, prospective customers, current customers, and past customers. 

To maintain the efficacy of your email list, you have to make sure to give it a good maintanence. Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor offer information regarding best practices for email database management.

• Segmentation

OptinMonster.com talks about "Email segmentation best practices" and defines email list segmentation as "the technique that email marketers use to send highly targeted emails by dividing their list up into smaller groups called segments.”

Following are some example of types of segments:

• Email lists
• Clicks and Opens
• IP Addresses
• Tags (Webinar registration)
• Purchases.

3-Great Content Creation

According to HubSpot, content creation is "the process of generating topic ideas that appeal to your buyer persona, creating written or visual content around those ideas, and making that information accessible to your audience as a blog, video, infographic, or other formats".

The content must be valuable, relevant and consistent. 

When creating content for your email marketing campaigns, keep in mind your content goals and lead magnets:

• Lead magnets

According to OptinMonster.com, "a lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information".

•  Content Goals

Your content strategy should be centered on your marketing plan goals (which should, in turn, be derived from your company business plan goals).

Among the content goals are:

• Educate, entertain and/or inspire.
• Establish Trust.
• Bring prospects closer to a buy decision.

4-Content optimization

• Drafting your emails

Your first email is very important because sets the expectations for your audience regarding quality, brand, and value of your email content.

When writing your first email, consider to include the following points:

• Give what was promised.
• Give information about the purchase.
• Introduce the prospects to new offerings
• Inform the prospect about your drip campaign

Additionally, make sure that the subject lines spark curiosity, create urgency, and make people want to click it.

5-Measuring results

Choosing the right type of metric to monitor can be daunting for digital marketers. There is the possibility of choosing and monitoring metrics that really pose no significance for what matters most in your business plan and marketing plan- your goals.

Avoid focusing on vanity metrics such as Facebook likes if they don't drive any value to your current objectives.

There are many metrics a business can obtain. Determine which metrics provide the most value for your digital marketing campaign.

Digitalmarketingphilippines.com, groups  metrics categorized into three

groups, according to the simplified flow of any digital marketing campaign:

a. Traffic Generation

These metrics are very important for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) digital marketing techniques.

• Overall Site Traffic:

When measuring site traffic, don't just focus on page views but also on how many unique visitors your website get per week or per month.

• Traffic Sources:

Knowing your source of traffic and keywords that brought them there can help you strategize your digital marketing campaign.

• Mobile Traffic:

More and more people are accessing the internet through their smartphones and tablets, which gives internet marketers more revenue sources. Understandind the metrics for your mobile digital channel is crucial today more than ever.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Each time your ad is viewed as an “impression" is made, and Click-Through Rates (CTR) measure how many people actually clicked on your ads or links inside your emails.

The higher the CTR, the better your Quality Scores will be, allowing you to lower your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) costs by receiving pricing discounts from Search Engine Marketing platforms like Google Adwords.

• Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC value depends on how popular your chosen keywords are, your Quality Scores as influenced by Click-Through Rates (CTR), and the standard prices search engines initially set.

b. Conversion

Converting website traffic into business leads or outright sales is at the heart of digital marketing campaigns.

• Conversion Rate (CVR)

Whether your goal is to gather valuable information about your website visitors and potential customers, or convert site visits into sales, monitoring your Conversion Rates can define your digital marketing success.

• Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a metric that defines the lead conversion ratio of a particular campaign and corresponding cost, giving insights to the business owner or marketer on how profitable their campaign is or not.

• Bounce Rate

Some visitors immediately leave or “bounce" should they find your content irrelevant to their, needs.

• Average Page Views per Visit

The more page views generated from each visit the more chances for engagement with website visitors, eventually influencing them to get converted into leads or paying customers.

• Average Cost per Page View

Your cost per page view should be significantly lower than the revenue you can generate from the page in order to gain profit from your campaigns.

• Average Time on Site

This is important for gauging what content is relevant and would drive results from site visitors, gaining their valuable trust so they would eventually convert.

• Rate of Return Visitors

Website popularity is not only defined by the amount of traffic your site is generating, but also by the rate of return visitors that keep coming back to partake more of what you can showcase with your content. Knowing your Rate of Return Visitors can give you an insight on how you can improve your content to entice site visitors who have not converted yet as leads or paying customers-to finally do so.

 c. Revenue

These will tell you if a particular campaign is profitable or not so

you can make adjustments on how you can improve your content for better engagement, higher conversion and bigger revenues.

• Return On Investment (ROI)

This helps you identify which area in your digital marketing campaign is driving sales and revenue, and which areas should be given more room for improvement.

• Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC)

Total of your marketing and advertising costs for a particular time period divided into, how many new paying customers were generated during that same period.

Notes of this section:

• The source of this "Measuring results": section was taken from DigitalMarketingPhilippines.com.

• If you want to dig deeper into metrics and understand the math behind them, I suggest to read the following articles by HubSpot:

• A Simple Explanation of the Math Behind 7 Common Marketing Metrics
• The 6 Key Marketing Metrics Your CEO Actually Cares About
• The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• The Ultimate Guide to Sales Metrics: What to Track, How to Track It, & Why

6-Campaign optimization

There is always room for improvement. Once your email campaign is running, and you are measuring its relevant metrics, its time to analyze them and perform optimizations.

There are several tweaks you can perform in your email marketing campaign to improve it, including:

• Timing: Is there a better time to send the emails or show up the opt-ins?
• The number of emails: How many emails is ideal?
• Best practices: Are there opportunities to improve the copy, images, etc?
• Retargeting: How can I retarget my content?
• The sales process: Is the message clear? Are the CTAs visible enough?

Use storytelling, content creation, metrics and email best practices to improve the performance of your email marketing campaign.

What are some of the best tools and platforms to support email marketing campaigns?

WPbeginners.com mentions "7 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business". Besides Aweber, ConstantContact, Mailchimp and other tools mentioned in the suggested article consider also myemma.com and email octopus two good alternatives.

You might also be looking for more powerful tools. In that case, check for SalesForce, Hubspot and ActiveCampaing.

When selecting the right email marketing tool, consider:

• Size of the email list.

Different platforms set different limits to your list. The size and the details you can add to each contact can be important factors for making a final decision.

• Lead generation and Integration.

The way different platforms integrate with other tools happens to be crucial in digital marketing. There are many tools digital marketers have to manage, and having those tools being able to integrate in order to enhance analysis and strategies can result in overall increased productivity.

• Automation.

The capability of a tool or platforms to automatically trigger processes, collect data and generate reports is one of the features you want your email marketing tools to be able to do.

• Easy of use.

Frequently the higher number of functions a tool can accomplish, the steepest the learning curve is; but not necessary. Test tools before fully committing to them. Many of these tools have free versions or demos for you to interact with.

• Scalability.

The entry-product or service might be low, but often the price increases with the number of contacts, list and/or segments you add to the tools or platforms. Reading about the changes in prices can provide you with a better understanding of the email marketing tool and its scalability.

• Analysis.

When looking for the analysis capabilities of your email marketing tool, not only see of the reports get automatically generated but also check if is possible to customize your own reports and the ways to view each report (graphs, tables, etc)

• A/B testing.

Crazyegg.com defines A/B testing as "the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing asset and measuring the difference in performance". In this case, A/B testing it is really helpful to compare the performance of two versions of the same email in order to see how they do, and which one to ultimately choose.

Wrapping Up

Email marketing is still a relevant and powerful digital marketing channel. Understanding the concepts behind it, the best practices and being familiar with the most powerful email marketing platforms and tools will allow you to improve your digital marketing performance and to achieve your marketing plan goals.

I hope this article gave you enough information, so you feel prepared to do your own research and gain more knowledge about email marketing, and digital marketing in general.

Keep in mind that, I will keep posting interesting information and defining concepts of digital marketing, according to the topics and order that I mentioned in my previous blog post "Table of contents for our Digital Marketing journey."


Please, comment down below. 
Every opinion on how to improve the content of this blog will allow me to make adjustments on the go with the objective of providing better and more accurate information for you.

Sincerely,

Alberto Salas