What Is Email Marketing?

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Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy in which emails are sent consistently to an opted-in list of customers and prospects, also known as email subscribers.

While it’s one of the oldest forms on online marketing, it’s also one of, if not the most, effective ways to turn your contacts into customers.

Since the dawn of the internet, the inbox has been a sacred space for connecting with family, friends, coworkers – and eventually businesses and brands. It began as a one-to-many approach. Businesses typically sent one message to their entire audience, whether through a monthly newsletter, promotional send or announcement. Over time, inboxes grew noisier, more crowded. And those batch & blast sends? They just didn’t engage subscribers like they used to.

Fast forward to today, the digital experience has completely evolved. Even though your customers and prospects are receiving more messages than ever before, increased access to valuable customer data and insights means that you can be more engaging than ever before in the inbox

Modern email marketing is personalized, often automated, and in-tune to each subscriber’s own experience with the goal of moving them through the buyer’s journey to generate loyal customers and repeat business.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

The buyer’s journey is the process in which a buyer realizes they have a problem that needs to be solved and seeks education before making a buying decision.

What are the stages of the buyer’s journey?

Awareness: Buyer realizes they have a problem that needs to be solved.
Consideration: Buyer performs research, brand, and product comparisons while considering which solution is best.
Decision: Buyer selects a solution to their problem.

Understanding the buyer’s journey is at the core of an effective email strategy. By understanding what stage your buyers are at, you’ll be able to create personalized content that address specific needs at specific stages of the buyer’s journey to launch a successful campaign. Let’s outline the steps you need to take to get your first email campaign off the ground.

Tap Into Your Buyer Personas

One of the first things every business should do is create buyer personas. These are detailed descriptions of each “person” you’re selling to. Your personas should include information on:

Job title
Industry
Pain points
Job expectations/functions
Budget
Who they report to

Tap into the personas you’ve built to understand your audience better, as well as inform the type of content you create to fuel the campaigns you’ll be building.

Examine the Buyer’s Journey

How are your leads finding your company? What are they doing once they get to your website? By digging into the journey your customers take to learn more about your brand and eventually consider it as an answer to their problems, you’ll uncover a wealth of opportunities. You’ll find areas in which you can send them the right kind of content and messaging that will move them from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next.

How do I re-engage lost customers?

You should never give up on your customers. Just because someone abandons cart doesn’t mean they won’t eventually purchase. Enter the ever-successful cart abandonment email.

28.3% of all eCommerce revenue comes from successful abandoned cart emails.

Cart Abandonment: Why?

Second to automated welcome emails, abandon cart emails are one of the most common email automations. But if you’re going to put together effective abandon cart emails, you have to understand customers’ reasoning for abandoning in the first place.

Top three reasons people abandon cart:

Unexpected costs from shipping and taxes
Lower prices elsewhere
Confusing or long shopping cart process

How do I get customer feedback?

The experience your customers have not only with your website but with your actual company matters.

86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience.

Implementing customer-centric tactics will lead to more value for your subscribers. So, if you’re going to delight your customers at every stage of their journey, it’s crucial that you know what they think about their experience with your brand.

Serving the needs of your customers serves your business. This is why asking them for feedback is a great way to provide them with increased service in the future. Let them tell you what they want!

Surveys and polls are built into email features to help you get valuable feedback from your customers and subscribers. You can then use those customer surveys to inform your marketing strategy and how you personalize your emails, your sales approaches, and how your team provides customer service in the future.

Six Advantages to Getting Customer Feedback From Surveys or Polls:

They start a conversation. Create engagement with your subscribers and find out what they want.
They’re fast and easy. It’s very simple to create and send a survey. They can also be fun!
They yield innovative ideas. Your customers are one of your most valuable creative resources. Their input can help you brainstorm better, more efficient tactics and processes.
They alleviate pressure. Surveys and polls don’t put customers on the spot the same way a phone call might.
They gauge satisfaction. Are you doing a good enough job for your customers and subscribers? No more guessing because they’ll let you know if they’re satisfied or not.
They provide immediate results. The reporting data from your surveys and polls are available in real-time, letting you track the results right away.

How do I retain customers?

It’s commonplace for companies to focus on refining and perfecting their sales processes. Getting new leads to feed the inbound funnel is crucial for the overall success of a company. But a lot of businesses don’t understand that in doing so, customer retention tactics can sometimes play second fiddle.

It costs five times more to attract a new customer than to sell to existing ones. So while your sales strategy is obviously important and necessary, so is having a long-term email marketing plan that focuses on customer retention.

This makes sense, right? If someone used your company or product before, then you shouldn’t have to work so hard to dazzle them into using you again. But that doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing. You need a solid plan in place so you can maximize your time and resources.

Email marketing can result in the highest ROI of any marketing channel. But successful email marketing is more than sending an newsletter to your email list every month.

If you want to capture, engage, nurture, and convert your prospects, you need a full understanding of every step that goes into an effective email marketing strategy. And, you need the right email marketing service to help you pull it off.

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Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy in which emails are sent consistently to an opted-in list of customers and prospects, also known as email subscribers.