It’s no surprise that every marketing email that ends up unread in your inbox is actually the product of a carefully considered communications strategy.
Given how easily you’d dismiss or unsubscribe from one of these emails, though, what might come as a surprise is that email marketing is actually a thriving, effective platform. After all, in the era of social media, instant messaging apps with billions of users, and the ever-changing world of SEM, email marketing seems like a quaint relic of the past.
But in truth, email marketing has never been more alive, and it remains one of the premiere methods of reaching out to prospects and converting them into leads.
Not convinced? Let’s take a look at some real-world figures.
- In 2022, there were 4 billion email users across the globe—a figure that’s slated to expand to 4.6 billion by 2025.
- In the same year, around 306 billion emails per day were exchanged globally.
- For every dollar spent, email marketing produces an ROI of $36—a significantly higher ratio than any other marketing approach.
- 99% of people check their email every day.
So is email marketing dead? Not by a long shot. In this article, we’re going to show you how to harness a powerful email marketing strategy that’ll transform the way you acquire your customers.
We’ll also discuss how URL shortening services, such as our very own TinyURL, can be a surprising ally in driving email analytics and helping improve your email campaign performance.
What is Email Marketing?
In a nutshell, email marketing is the process of sending out targeted, personalized messages to your prospects and customers with the goal of driving conversions.
Email marketing has been around for a long time—longer than most digital marketing channels, in fact. One of the reasons email marketing has remained so effective is because it’s an incredibly versatile platform. You can use email for a variety of purposes, including:
- Generating leads
- Nurturing prospects
- Building relationships
- Ensuring top-of-mind brand placement
- Increasing customer loyalty and retention
- Announcing new products or features
Yet while email marketing is certainly an old dog in the digital marketing space, it definitely has learned its fair share of new tricks.
What Can Email Marketing Do?
Modern email marketing platforms allow you to automate massive, detailed workflows, and leverage data and analytics at an unprecedented scale.
While old-school email marketers would have been satisfied with a few hundred or thousand people on their subscriber lists, today’s email marketers can see millions of contacts receiving emails with highly granular targeting based on a variety of audience metrics.
Let’s take a look at some of the things that are possible with email marketing today.
1. Run marketing sequences
Email marketing sequences, also known as automated email workflows, are systematic chains of emails that are designed to nurture your leads and prospects over time, moving them further down the sales funnel towards a purchase. Think of them as a form of storytelling, or an extended sales pitch.
Each email in a sequence has a specific goal, and each can be triggered by a variety of actions, including subscribing to your list, opening or clicking an email, or visiting a specific page on your website.
For instance, the first email in a sequence might be a welcome message triggered by a new subscriber joining your list. The second email might be sent a day later, and could provide more information about your product or service. Subsequent emails can be sent based on user activity, like open rates or engagement with what you’ve sent so far.
2. Keep customers informed
Another great use for email marketing is to keep your customers informed about your products or services. This could include sending out updates about new features, changes to your pricing, or special offers for existing customers.
These informative emails can also be personalized depending on your users’ preferences and purchase habits.
For instance, you might send different types of emails to customers who have made a purchase in the past month than you would to customers who haven’t bought anything in six months. Or, you could highlight different offers and products to customers who purchase in various niches.
3. Conduct market research
One of the great things about email marketing is that it gives you a direct line of communication to your target audience—hence the term EDM, or Electronic Direct Mail. This means you can use emails to conduct market research and get feedback from your customers.
This could involve simply sending out a survey to your mailing list, or gathering respondents for focus groups. You could also gather email marketing analytics such as open rate and click-through rate to get insights into your subscribers’ preferences.
4. Experiment with messaging
Email marketing is also a great platform for experimentation: with data-driven features, you can test out different messaging and identify what resonates with your audience.
One of the most powerful tools in the email marketing arsenal is A/B testing, in which you send out two different versions of an email, and then compare their performance to see which one works better.
For example, you might experiment with different subject lines, or try sending emails at different times of day. You might try modifying individual parts of your email, such as different CTAs or images. You could even try entirely different types of content, like video or infographics.
By testing different elements, you can gradually improve your email marketing strategy and get better results over time.
What to Expect from Email Marketing
Every email marketing campaign involves a diverse variety of techniques and practices that will differ from brand to brand.
In general, though, these are some commonalities that you can expect whenever you develop your email strategy.
1. Working with email marketing tools and platforms
Marketing platforms are a very useful part of running an email marketing strategy, and it pays to learn how to make the most out of them to gain a competitive advantage.
Some examples of tools include the iconic MailChimp, one of the original email marketing platforms, which has evolved into a powerful CRM and marketing automation suite. There are plenty of other examples, like MailJet or SendGrid.
Many email platforms have common features, such as drag-and-drop email designers that let you create elegant, highly-converting designs, as well as select which parts of your email to A/B-test automatically.
Most also provide real-time analytics about campaign performance, as well as integrations with CRM and other platforms that let you seamlessly interweave your email workflow with the rest of your organization’s software suite.
2. Owning your brand voice
When you’re creating your email marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure that the voice and style of your emails are consistent with the rest of your marketing communications—and just as importantly, that they reflect your brand.
This means thinking about everything from what goes in your subject line, to how you structure your content, to what images or videos you include. This ensures a seamless experience for your customers, and builds positive associations with your brand.
If you’re producing emails for a luxury fashion brand, for instance, your subscribers might appreciate an email voice that is sleek and sophisticated.
On the other hand, if you’re a SaaS startup, your email voice might be more casual and down-to-earth—or, as many brand guidelines put it, “professional but approachable.”
3. Setting clear goals and targets
Before you start sending out emails, it’s important to sit down and think about what you want to achieve with your email marketing. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive more traffic to your website? Boost sales of a particular product?
Your goals will dictate the content of your emails, as well as how often you send them. For example, if you’re trying to increase brand awareness, you might send out a monthly newsletter with interesting articles and blog posts.
If you’re trying to drive traffic to your website, you might send out weekly emails with links to your latest content.
Whatever your goals are, make sure that they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This will help you create emails that are focused and effective, and prevent you from missing opportunities to connect to your subscribers.
4. Building mailing lists and segmenting your audience
One of the most important aspects of email marketing is building a mailing list—a group of people who have signed up to receive emails from you on a regular basis.
To do that, you’ll need to find ways to capture and qualify leads. This can be done in a number of ways, such as using pop-ups on your website, or providing an incentive, such as a discount code or free e-book, for subscribing to your mailing list.
Of course, simply having a mailing list is not enough. You also need to segment your list into different groups so that you can send them more targeted, relevant emails.
For example, you might segment your list by location, so that you can target your emails by geography. Or, you might segment your list by interests, so that you can send different emails to people who are interested in different topics.
The more targeted and relevant your emails are, the more likely your subscribers are to engage with them.
5. Designing landing pages and CTAs
Once you have a mailing list, you need to start thinking about how to turn your email subscribers into customers or clients. To do that, you’ll need to design landing pages and call-to-action (CTA) buttons that are optimized for conversion.
Landing pages are standalone web pages that are designed for a specific purpose, such as getting a user to sign up for a mailing list or make a purchase. They usually have a unique URL and are distinct from the rest of your website. Your landing page should be designed to make it as easy as possible for people to take the action that you want them to take.
That’s where CTAs come in. They’re typically buttons or links that encourage a user to take a specific action, such as signing up for a free trial or downloading an ebook. They should be placed prominently on your landing page, and they should be relevant to the user’s needs and interests.
Your CTA button should be placed in a place where it’s easy to see and click on, and it should be clear what action you want people to take when they click on it. For example, if you want them to sign up for a free trial, your CTA button should say “Sign Up Now” or “Start My Free Trial.”
How to Get the Most out of Your Email Marketing
All this seems daunting to learn, especially if you’re totally new to email marketing. There’s no doubt that it takes a bit of practice and experience to become an email marketing expert.
With that said, there are a few best practices that you can keep in mind to ensure that your email strategy runs smoothly.
1. Invest in great design
Aesthetics matter, especially when it comes to email. Your emails should be visually appealing and easy to read in order to maximize their engagement. A boring, drab email might be passed over by a potential buyer, even if you provide all the information that they want and need.
If you’re not a designer, you might want to hire one, or alternatively use a pre-designed email template. There are a number of different email templates available online, or you can use a drag-and-drop email builder to create your own.
Whatever you use, it’s also important to ensure that your design is mobile-friendly, as 42% of all emails were read on smartphones in 2019. And that number’s sure to grow along with mobile adoption.
2. Create compelling experiences
Your email should tell a story that captivates your reader and keeps them engaged. In other words, it should be more than just a sales pitch. It should be part of a larger journey that you take your leads on, which ultimately ends with them becoming customers or clients.
Think about the overall experience that you want to create for your leads, and map out each step of their journey. Then, create an email strategy that aligns with that journey. Your goal should be to move your leads closer to conversion with each email that you send.
One of the best ways to achieve these goals is to personalize every step of the way, so that customers feel like they personally are being guided to what they want. You can personalize your emails using data that you’ve collected about your subscribers, such as their names, locations, and interests.
You can also use dynamic content to show different versions of your email to different people based on how they interact with your brand.
For example, you might show one version of your email to someone who has clicked on a link in a previous email, and another version to someone who hasn’t. You might even send an abandoned cart email to someone who puts items in their shopping cart but doesn’t complete the purchase.
Whatever the case, it’s important that you meet the expectations of your audience, and that the experiences you produce are consistent and seamless, without the obvious trappings of tracking and data-gathering at every step.
One way that many emails shatter the illusion is when they’re filled with long, unwieldy URLs loaded with UTM tracking parameters, or deep sub-links and randomly generated landing page codes. Short, branded links give your users a more elegant experience without annoyingly long and indecipherable URLs.
3. Be earnest and trustworthy
Scams are everywhere, and even tech newbies can be suspicious that you’re selling a bridge to them. So if you want your emails to be effective, you have to come across as trustworthy.
The best way to do this is by being earnest and transparent about what you’re offering. Be clear about what someone will get if they take the action that you want them to take, and don’t try to hide the details behind a wall of text.
It’s also important to ensure that your branding is consistent across all channels, so that people can easily recognize your company and know that they can trust you.
One way to make your emails more consistent is to use short branded domains such as those that TinyURL can help you set up. Your links will look more legitimate, assuaging your subscribers’ doubts about your brand.
After all,
bostonlegal.com/free_consult
looks a whole lot better than
bostonlegal.com/consult?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=promo
doesn’t it?
4. Track your performance
Email marketing isn’t fire-and-forget. In order to be successful, you need to track your performance and analyze the data to see what’s working and what isn’t. There are a number of different metrics that you can track, such as:
- Open rate, or the percentage of people who open your email
- Click-through rate, or the percentage of people who click on a link in your email
- Unsubscribe rate, or the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your email list
- Bounce rate, or the percentage of emails that don’t get delivered
You can also track engagement metrics, such as how long people spend reading your email, how many times they forward it to a friend, or how many times they click on a link. And finally, you can track conversions, or the actions that you want people to take after reading your email.
One way to track your performance without the need to reference an email marketing platform is to run your CTA links through TinyURL to gain analytics and insights. Every click on each link will be tracked by your TinyURL dashboard, and you’ll have a real-time overview of user information such as device type and origin.
TinyURL: A Tiny Solution to a Big Email Marketing Demand
Global email marketing revenue reached $7.5 billion in 2020, and that’s slated to grow beyond $10 billion by 2023. The numbers don’t lie—email marketing is an ROI-generating beast that every marketer needs to tame.
And yes, there’s definitely a lot to learn and a lot to track, no matter how small or large your intended investment into it will be. But you can make your efforts so much easier and more robust by weaving in TinyURL’s powerful tracking and analytics features.
From simplifying the URL experience for your users and encouraging clicks, to making it easier than ever to discover more about who your subscribers are, TinyURL can transform the way you conduct your email marketing campaigns.
Create a free account now to get started! Then, check out our pricing plans and find one that suits your needs, or contact our sales team for a plan tailored to you.
