What is email marketing and why is it important to your brand?
If you’re a student or a young working professional, email might have been around for as long as you’ve been alive. As such, when you think of marketing campaigns, email marketing might not be the first strategy that comes to mind. However, it can actually be a good way to reach your customers where they are.
But before we get into that, let’s start simple --
What is email marketing?
When you think of email marketing, you might be picturing the pesky ✨Early Bird Sale!✨ emails that you’re bulk-clearing from your inbox every week. But did you know that email marketing is actually one of the most effective marketing strategies? It has an impressive return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent. 😱
Email marketing is an essential cog in the CRM system - it’s all about helping your brand build a relationship with your customer. They serve to keep your customers in the loop about what’s going on with your brand or make them feel special when you send them a birthday discount.
Advantages of email marketing
Other than the amazing ROI that email marketing has, there are some other advantages of email marketing that make it important to your brand:
Send targeted messages
In olden times before data collection and targeting methods existed, brands used to use the “spray and pray” method for their email campaigns: sending emails to everyone on their email list, and hoping that they would get good results.
Nowadays, modern technology has given us the ability to segment email lists and tailor our email campaigns to suit the segment.
For example, a matcha brand might send a targeted email about a promotion on matcha whisks to a segment that made their first purchase of matcha powder, and exclude those who’ve purchased whisks previously.
This ensures two main things:
Money isn’t wasted on sending emails to customers who are unlikely to make a purchase.
Customers aren’t spammed with emails that are irrelevant to them. This is especially important as you don’t want customers to unsubscribe due to spam.
It’s measurable
Email marketing gives you a lot of information that lets you optimize your future campaigns. Typical email campaign reporting includes these key metrics:
1. Open Rate
Formula for calculating open rate.
Email open rates tell you how many recipients actually opened your email and didn’t leave it sitting there until their next inbox purge. According to Mailchimp, the average email open rate for the industries they analyzed was 21.33%.
This says something about how compelling your subject line and email preview was. Let’s say you got a 60% open rate - that definitely shows that your subject line/email preview is saying something right. If your open rate is 15%, maybe it’s time to brush up on your subject line writing skills. 📧
2. Bounce Rate
Formula for calculating bounce rate.
The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that didn’t reach your recipient. There are two types of email bounces 🏀:
Soft bounce
This indicates a temporary issue with delivery, and has a list of possible causes. For example, it can be caused by a full inbox (on the recipient’s end), the server being down, or your email is too large.
Hard bounce
This reflects a permanent delivery issue. Hard bounces can happen because the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist or because the recipient’s email server has blocked the delivery of your emails.
A high bounce rate (the average across industries analyzed by Mailchimp was 0.40%) is a red flag 🚩, and can affect your future email campaigns if you get blacklisted by email providers.
Read here on how to reduce email bounce rates.
3. Click-through Rate (CTR)
Formula for calculating click-through rate.
CTR tells you how many people clicked the links in your email. For example, you might have included a “Get your birthday discount 🎁 “ button in your email. If your recipient clicked it, it would contribute to your CTR.
Your CTR is an indication of how relevant your message is to your audience and how appealing your call-to-action (CTA) is.
The industry-wide average according to the same study above by Mailchimp was 2.62%. If your emails are getting a lower CTR, you might want to take a look at the messages you’ve been sending out and how they relate to your audience.
Peek other tips on improving your CTR and CTAs here.
4. Conversion Rate
Formula for calculating conversion rate.
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who actually completed the action you were hoping they would take. This is where your ROI comes from, and indicates how successful your campaign was.
Of course, the general idea is the higher the better, but conversion rates tend to be a bit more complicated. There are factors beyond the email that influence your conversion rate, such as needing to optimize your checkout process, or products being out of stock. If your email is tied to a particular landing page, it’s important to optimize the landing page too.
5. Unsubscribe Rate
Formula for calculating unsubscribe rate.
As the name suggests, the unsubscribe rate tells you how many of those who received your emails decided to unsubscribe. Ideally, you don’t want people to unsubscribe, but the average unsubscribe rate according to Campaign Monitor is 0.17%.
As mentioned earlier, it’s important to ensure you’re delivering relevant content that your audience cares about. This is an essential step in reducing unsubscribe rates.
Disadvantages of email marketing
As with other marketing strategies, email marketing also has some downsides:
1. Displays differently on different devices
How many times have you opened an email that only showed you tiny red crosses, or took about 5 years to load?
Nowadays, people access their emails from anywhere - their phones, tablets, even smartwatches. This means that although your email might look really appealing on your laptop screen, it might show up differently on your audience’s devices.
Considering you probably don’t know what operating systems or devices your audience is using, it’s important to have a good balance between text and images. On top of that, you should probably never send an image-only email.
Read more email design tips here.
2. It’s pretty competitive.
Your marketing email has to compete with a lot to get your subscribers’ attention. Take a look at your own inbox - it’s probably full of emails from everywhere: dinner reservations, job interview arrangements, and travel bookings. In addition, your customers are probably getting marketing emails from other companies too.
That’s why it’s so important to catch their attention with an appealing subject line and preview.
Learn more about how to grab your audience’s attention here.
Email marketing types and examples
Let’s take a look at the different types of emails that your brand can send to your customers.
1. Welcome Messages
The welcome message is the first message that you send customers. This usually happens after they create an account on your platform, or sign up for your newsletter.
It can include a short introduction of your brand, what to expect from your emails, or provide quick links to get them started.
This welcome email gives the new user an overview of what they can do on the app. Plus points for having a mix of text and linked images.
2. Promotional emails
Promotional emails are sent to encourage your customers to make a purchase - and who doesn’t love a good sale? Of course, this only holds as long as you’re not sending them too often.
To catch your customers’ attention, a good promotional email should display a clear benefit (eg. STOREWIDE 20% OFF). You can also create some urgency by including the promotional dates and encouraging the customer to make the purchase before the promotion ends.
This promotional email tells Body Shop’s members about the promotions exclusive to them, making it relevant.
3. Thank you emails
Thank you emails serve to make your customers feel appreciated for their support and create two-way communication between you and them. To show your gratitude to customers (and encourage future purchases), you can even give them a promo code for their next purchase like the example below:
This thank-you email is great because it shows gratitude to the customer, and encourages future business with the promo code. It also follows a simple design that doesn’t overwhelm the reader.
4. Review emails
Another type of marketing email is review emails - an email asking for your customers’ feedback. After your customer has made a purchase or has been using your service for a while, asking for an honest review can both engage your audience and help you to improve your product or service.
This review email tells subscribers why their review matters, and encourages subscribers to give a review with an incentive.
5. Education emails
Education emails aim to tell your customers about your brand, services, or products. Although your customers may know a little about your brand, educational emails can deepen their knowledge and show them why your product/service is suitable for them.
This educational email tells customers how digital banking has changed in the latest update. Following good email practices, the key information is displayed as plain text, and not embedded in the image.
Why Email Marketing is important to your brand
We’ve taken a look at some types of email marketing and how they’re useful to your brand.
If that hasn’t shown you how important email marketing is to your brand, here are more reasons why it's important to include email marketing in your marketing strategy:
1. Everyone has email.
Over half the global population uses email. This means that your brand’s target audience probably uses email, which makes for a good opportunity to reach customers.
In addition, emails can easily be forwarded by your customers. They can easily forward your latest discount or promotion to their friends, increasing awareness of your brand.
2. It’s cost-effective.
Compared to campaigns that use paid advertising, email marketing requires a lot less spending. Instead of paying for ad placements or agency fees, you probably just need to pay for the email marketing platform you use.
Most platforms have subscription packages that charge you for a set amount (or unlimited, for more expensive plans) of emails on top of additional services. Hence, you’re not charged per email sent out, compared to other advertising forms where you might be charged by cost per click.
3. It drives traffic to your website.
While you might use paid ads to drive people to a sales-oriented landing page, email marketing gives you the opportunity to spotlight other parts of your website.
For example, if a company selling computer parts created a new guide on how to build a PC, they might want to shout about it in their next email newsletter and include a CTA to send people to the guide.
4. It keeps you in touch with your customers.
Earlier, we highlighted that you should deliver relevant content and avoid spamming your subscribers. It’s quite similar to keeping in touch with friends or family - you wouldn’t want to be spammed every day, but catching up every few weeks helps to maintain a good relationship.
When done right, email marketing helps you keep your brand in your subscribers’ minds through timely updates.
5. It can improve sales.
According to OptinMonster, 60% of consumers state that they have made a purchase as the result of a marketing message they received by email. This shows just how effective email marketing can be when you send content that’s relevant to your customer.
One common way that brands improve sales is by sending cart abandonment emails. When visitors to their site leave something in their cart without checking out, an email is sent reminding them of the product they’ve left in their cart. Some brands might even follow up with a discount code, just to convince the customer to check out.
Do you now understand why email marketing is important to your brand?
Well, that was a pretty long read. Hopefully, this has given you a good overview of what email marketing is, and what it can do for your brand. With its cost-effectiveness and versatility, it’s definitely an essential part of your marketing strategy.
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