What is email marketing and how does it works?

March 14, 2019

Author: AK Digihub

Every person uses Email Marketing because to engage in the conversions and email is one of the easiest ways to communicate in all the different sectors of life.

Then What is email marketing and how does it works?

You have been sending an email both in personal life and professional life.

By 2020 email users worldwide will touch around 3 billion users growth.

In the current scenario, Email Marketing is still an integral part of any organization’s marketing strategy.

And it plays an important role for any type of business whether it is product or service oriented.

Is buying email database and sending email is email marketing?

No, it is called spamming, then

What is Email marketing?

Email Marketing refers to an act sending the informative messages as a broadcast for commercial purpose.

whether it is in form text, Infographic or embedded video format to the subscribers or potential customers.

An effective way to give insights about what’s going on with your business and a great way to build a relationship with the customers.

Doing email marketing is not as easy as it seems to be, it’s not as simple as simply drafting a message and hitting the send.

One should build the healthy email list and comply with email regulations, segmenting your contacts and delivering the right message to the right audience at a right time.

How Email Marketing Works?

Choosing the Best Email Service Provider

When we think of email marketing, there are many service providers who offer a personalized way of sending emails to potential customers or subscribers.

There are email service providers like

Sendgrid
mailChimp
Mailerlite
Getresponse
Aweber
Active Campaign and So on.

There are many of them who offered the best possible customized solutions for business to engage with potential customers.

And I personally used Sendgrid for email marketing campaigns and send more personalized email in order to engage with the customers.

You can also choose any of the service providers for email marketing.

This is the website that is gonna host the email address that you are collecting in a way that keeps emails organized.

Creating a list

Once you have created an account with one of the email service providers. The next step is going to create a list.

Many people get confused with this whether to segment the list and create a different list.

First, you have created the main list later you can segment them based on customer behavior pattern.

You can give a name to the main list so that specific name as you like but for me, I have KapSystem list so that it is an easier receiver to recognize that mail.

I would suggest always use the brand name.

Lets say you are sending for blog subscribers give your name or blog name.

so that people from another side can recognize the emails and it also helps in reducing the unsubscribe rate.

Setting up Auto Responder

Once you have created a list, the next step is to set up the autoresponder. This is the email that goes out immediately after somebody confirms their subscription.

Let say I am providing free e-book and to get that e-book you will Sign up for free after the signup process you will get an email, that is autoresponder email which includes the attachment.

You can set up many autoresponders as you want like you can set up autoresponders every couple of days with a different set of messages in it.

Maybe a most popular blog post to get the traffic and other responder goes out a couple of weeks later saying are you still struggling with email marketing check out the free tips.

This is autoresponder is a great way to connect with your subscribers more efficiently and effectively with less work.

The best way to find out the different ways can do better in your job in helping them and providing the value to them.

Generating a list

Once you got your list ready and now we have autoresponder with your free gift like an e-book, what we have to do is to advertise that it to everybody.

Within your email marketing platform go to the list and create a sign-up form specific to that list.

You can create for the sidebar which can be seen throughout every page on your website or you can create an entire landing page for the opt-in form.

you can also create an opt-in form from about us page because there are people who just got there and go to learn more about you to see if decide to stay because of what they have learned and then sign up for an email form.

It is also a great place to get those email addresses as well.

Sending the Broadcast Emails

The last and important step is to broadcast the emails that sending out your first email blast campaign. If you are not doing this and only rely on autoresponders you are not going to have a healthy list.

You need to be clear both Optin form and newsletter because how regularly you have planned to communicate with them.

so they are not going off side and they can unsubscribe whenever they want.

Always mention the unsubscribe at the bottom of the mail so if they wish to unsubscribe, they can do it. Always a great way avoids coming under spamming list.

Keeping it consistent and maintaining transparency is a great way to keep subscribers happy in your email list.

Because when they are happy would be thinking of doing business in the future and if not, they are able to stay tuned until they make a decision.

Challenges in sending bulk emails and how to overcome these challenges

While we already got to know how Email marketing works and there are challenges in sending the bulk emails and they are

Low Delivery ratio

The major challenge we face it is the email deliverability and you also aware about it.

Email Deliverability refers to a percentage of email delivered to the recipient’s inbox versus the total number of Email sent. In simple terms how many emails bounced back.

There is two kind of bounces soft bounces and hard bounces.

Soft Bounces are temporary in nature when server rejects incoming messages in case the recipient inbox is full.

Hard Bounces are permanent in nature because when you are trying to send a message to an email which doesn’t exist.

Improving the Open Ratio

Open Ratio which isn’t under one’s control because you cannot predict who is gonna open an email sent by you.

There are many ways you make the recipients opens up the email like Sending messages with a great subject line, Sending the informative content, Sending as a person, not from the company, Avoiding the spam futures.

High Unsubscribe Rate

This is also the major challenge for email marketer High unsubscribe rate, it happens because of less user engagement.

That is maybe because of unappealing contents or maybe users get tired of receiving the emails from you.

In order to overcome this issue and reduce the unsubscribe rate.

you should improve the quality of your contact list (clean up that un engage users from the lists).

And send your email to recipients who have agreed to receive an email from you.

Always review the Email Content, they may look spammy or inappropriate to the target you are aiming to achieve.

Integrating the email data with other data systems.

In the current scenario, every marketer believes in email still have one of the highest ROI of all marketing channels.

And It is still popular as both lead and revenue generator.

Most of the time as a marketer, we all need every possible data to optimize and improve the results.

Integrating email service provider platform to any of the other systems such as CRM, Web Analytics.

Allows you to analyze your customers and prospects and segment them into targeted groups and market them with the Content.

Some Facts of emails

The first electronic mail was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971
The first bulk emails sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk
The world largest email spam is also a famous email marketing campaign
From 2014 to 2018 more than 50% email messages considered as spam in email worldwide traffic

Conclusion

Email marketing plays an important role for any type of business whether it is a large enterprise or startups.

Email is one of the major strategies in digital marketing in generating the lead and convert them into Prospective customer.

I hope I am able to give you an idea about email marketing and how email marketing works.

In the coming days, I will be discussing types of email Marketing i.e. Optin and Bulk Emailing in great details.