Hey there, it’s you again! 🙂

Today we will discuss one of the most underrated tools for conversion in the Digital Marketing Industry – Email Marketing.

What is the fuss about, is the hack still effective, and why is it necessary for your online business?

By the end of this article on ‘Email Marketing 101 (2023)’, your views towards email marketing will completely change.

And you will get access to some of the best email marketing tools I use.

What is Email Marketing?

(Source: The Brand Hopper)

Hey XYZ,

Your cart is missing you, get 20% off on your Levis Stratus 500 Blue Denim Jeans only for today. Limited-time offer!! Buy now.

Have you ever received these customized messages in your email regarding the item you left in your cart on Flipkart or Amazon?

The offer is quite contemporary, isn’t it?

This is what Email Marketing is, and the above example is a type of Email Marketing based on a Trigger and Action set, which is a part of Automated Emails.

In which the trigger is you leaving your items without purchasing them, and the customized discount email is the company’s action.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Well, it’s all about tech and AI, you know! 😉

To keep it straightforward, Email Marketing is sending commercial messages to a group of individuals through email.

You can get these messages through promotions, newsletters, offers, or updates about their brand and special discounts they have been running for any special occasion.

Email marketing is more than just sending or rather blasting a series of emails to random email addresses.

Businesses often purchase email databases from vendors and send mass email campaigns.

And then complain of a low open rate of less than 10% (percentage of emails opened).

How to use it most effectively? Let’s find out!

Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

Have a look at the report below.

(Source: Statista)

Is Email Marketing still Effective?

I would have shouted a big YES on top of a cliff to answer the question 🙂

With its powers and upgrades, Email Marketing has proved to be the most effective return on investment compared to other online marketing channels.

Adult users’ most popular daily online activity is sending or reading emails.

After which is searching online, going to social media, checking news sites, and several others.

Reports also indicate that email marketing is ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing.

(Source: SmartInsights)

And why does email marketing still rule? It is more personal.

If you were to subscribe to a newsletter or a website, it is because you found value in their offering and their content.

And hence you signed up for it in the first place.

From then on, well, at least until the newsletter or content offers value, you look forward to the emails hitting your inbox.

The day you feel there’s no value and all it does is remain as unread emails in your inbox, you finally unsubscribe from it.

A study of DMA states that email marketing has an average return of 3800%, which means you can get a return of $38 for every $1 you spend!

Appealing, isn’t it! 😀

And with email marketing like never before, you can see some incredible things that can be done to convert your leads behind the screen.

The Importance of Email Marketing

Email Marketing has been taking the digital marketing industry by storm due to its concept, which forces users to act on an email.

Without so, the email will ideally sit in the inbox until it’s read or deleted.

Email Marketing is also an important bridge between you and your advertising network.

It can also help you drive traffic to your blog, website, or anywhere you want your folks to be.

The best part about email marketing is you own the list, so it is very convenient to segregate it and send your target users the content they want to see.

Through email marketing, you can also test your subject lines and check your call to action and identify the best-selling option.

Email marketing software also offers you various premium features through which you can identify hotlines to action and use them for your business accordingly.

New to Email Marketing?

Try our expert guide to see the ultimate power of this digital marketing tool and skyrocket your adsence.

You own the list

You are an influencer with millions of followers on your social media account.

And one fine day, the algorithms of the site change, or even worse, the site gets banned, and you lose all your followers. Scary, isn’t it?

But with Email Marketing, you do not need to worry about this; the most important advantage is owning the email list.

Another important advantage of email marketing is that you can send customized emails according to your user’s demand and segregate the list.

Build long-term relationships

Buy a ticket for a music concert on BookMyShow in Bangalore, and you will see tons of emails from BookMyShow regarding other musical events in the city.

Now that the company has your email ID, city, and interests, you will receive updates about events and promotions for many years.

This is what email marketing, along with some indulgence in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, can do.

With Email Marketing, you can build long-term relationships with your audience and provide them with your curated services for years.

Better conversion rate

According to a study conducted by Monetate, email marketing has an average conversation of over 4.5%, while social media has only 1.8%.

This is how effective Email Marketing is, and it is quite evident from the investments made by large MNCs to up their Email Marketing game.

On average, you can aim for anything above 10% as a conversation rate to help you boost your business and sales generation significantly.

How to Build an Email List?

Lead Magnet

Once you have a considerable amount of traffic hitting your website every week, you need to give your folks a desirable reason to sign up for your website.

(Source: Open Circle Solutions)

Have you seen Chegg asking to sign up to view an answer, an OTT platform delivering a free episode for your registration, and even gift vouchers or coupon codes for some websites if they are in their cash burn phase?

Well, this is what a Lead Magnet is!!

A lead magnet can incentivize you to offer your visitors or your traffic in exchange for their email addresses.

It could be a free ebook, a whitepaper, a webinar, a gift voucher, or anything that can provide value to your audience.

Lead magnets can be of many types, and various things might work for you according to your different business ideologies.

Try creating a sense of regency or scarcity for your lead magnet, and thank me later. 🙂

What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?

One method is not to buy a database.

There’s no point in spending money buying databases.

I’ve gone down that path and can tell you, it doesn’t work!

You rather invest the same money in running paid ads on social media or Google and capture email addresses.

Building relationships with clients takes time.

And above all, building an email list takes time.

But, even if you end up with 100 clients who open your emails, that’s a great start.

If you ask me, I would say a Good Lead Magnet is:

Relevant to your Audience

You are running an online clothing store and offering a free digital marketing webinar on successful registration.

Does that make sense?

Try offering 50% off and seeing the magic. Just Kidding! 😅

But you got the point right.

Try offering something relevant to your audience to make them crave more!!

Valuable and Informative

Do not provide anything that does not add value to your user’s life or is well-informed, as it will only make them bounce back from your page.

Remember, competition is everywhere, and this is Digital Marketing we are talking about, competition runs in and out in this game.

Easy to consume

Signup for our news website and we will deliver a BMW motorbike to your home; how good isn’t it?

You gotta be kidding me.

Refrain from over-delivering or spamming your visitor’s mind with anything and everything; be precise and on point.

Always try to commit things that your visitors think to be true that you are offering.

Create Curiosity

Another great idea for an impeccable lead magnet is to create a sense of curiosity in the mind of your visitors.

Like many websites, try offering something without the name of a particular thing.

Instead mentions the product category, which makes the user curious to register for the same.

Follow the 80/20 rule

If we have reached this, you should note the 80/20 rule regarding email marketing.

Always ensure that all emails you send your visitors have 80% of genuine and relevant content you want to convey and 20% of promotions and self-branding to help you with conversions.

Offer content, to begin with.

And by content, I mean blog articles, videos, images, infographics, podcasts, and more.

By providing free content, you slowly but steadily build yourself as an authority in your space.

This way, you can make your readers read your full article and very smartly include your promotions anywhere in between, which will seem manageable but will do the job well.

In a world where several individuals are out there to carve out a niche for themselves, you must build your tribe.

Your followers.

And while it does take time, focus, and consistency on your part, the benefits of this are exponential.

This is an amazing mantra that has helped many top-level companies to establish themselves in email marketing effectively.

Build Trust & Nurture Relationships

Well, once you have the email list and emails to all your visitors and traffic, don’t celebrate, as the job still needs to be done.

It is significantly important that you build trust and nurture your relationship with your audience.

How you will do so, send them relevant content about their interest regularly.

Yes, this may take some time and investment of your resources, but I promise you will be astonished by its results.

Send the newsletter updates about your branch, exclusive content, and special discounts and offers.

If a product or service genuinely solves the problem of your tribe, by all means, offer it.

If it is your product, e.g., an ebook or an online course, or software, clearly mention the benefits and features, more so the benefits and how it will help the customers.

If it’s an affiliate product, ensure you review it first. And then give you honest feedback.

This way, you build trust with your audience.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Step 1: Increase Traffic

To build a great Email List, you should focus on increasing website or landing page traffic.

You can use many methods, like social media, SEO, PPC, content marketing, or influencer marketing, to drive traffic to your website.

With the first step considered done, we would jump onto the next step, the Lead Magnet.

Step 2: Lead Magnet

The next important part of the game is the lead magnet.

Consider it a bit that you would offer your visitors to sign up for your website.

You, of course, need to offer something valuable and informative to your audience, something relevant to your business and easy to consume by your visitors.

Your lead magnet should be a trigger that the user reads and has to decide the form of an action in which he agrees to take the offering and offer you his email in return.

Below are some amazing examples of a Lead Magnet:

Step 3: Segment your list

Once you have the email list, you have it all, based on the user preferences and the user characteristics that you can monitor through machine learning and paid email marketing software.

You can segregate your list and send custom messages to all your visitors based on their preferences so that they can see only the content they want.

In this way, you build trust with your audience and day like to visit your page more often instead of you just spamming their inboxes with irrelevant content.

Step 4: Automated mail

When the segmentation is complete and the preferences part, you can automate these emails through premium email marketing software.

This is a great move as your website would regularly target your visitors in boxes with informative content and your visitors asking for more.

Through this, you can build a long time connection with your audience and ultimately get higher conversion rates than other social media campaigns or digital marketing options.

Best Email Marketing Tools

Okay, so I can conclude on the fact that Email Marketing is one of the most effective ways to interact with your audience in a very personal way.

Unlike Social Media Marketing or any other sort of marketing, Email Marketing gives you the power to tailor your messages for individual recipients and track their responses accordingly.

But the catch is how you would track the performance of your action lines and see what is working and what is not.

Well, this is where Email Marketing tools come into the picture…

With tons and tons of amazing Email Marketing software available for you in the market, it gets very difficult to choose one, but no worries, I am here to help!!

Further are the top 6 Email Marketing software you can use to enhance your future email marketing campaigns and thus improve your investment return.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp has got to be one of the best Email Marketing software that you can access in 2023.

It is known for its simple user interface, which is more of a drag-and-drop email builder, and is widely popular for its long range of features.

It offers pre-designed templates, several customizations, and automated features that help you easily create professional-looking emails.

This premium software also offers a robust real-time analysis that helps you track your campaign’s performance and build useful reports.

Advantages:

• Robust Analytics for tracking performance
• Automated features to make your life easy
• Integrates well with 3rd-party services like WordPress and Google Analytics
• Drag and Drop Email Builder

Pricing:

Mailchimp’s pricing completely depends on the number of subscribers you have; with its free plan, you can access its basic features for up to 2000 subscribers.

The paid plan starts at $9.99 monthly, increasing gradually as your subscribers count increases.

Aweber

Aweber is another popular email marketing tool known for its reliability and affordability, making it the best for beginners.

It offers several templates, layout options, automation, and analytics to help you track your performance effectively.

The tool also integrates with third-party apps like Paypal, Facebook, and WordPress.

Advantages:

• Real-time Analysis
• Beginner Friendly
• Complete Integration with third-party apps
• Several custom templates to choose from

Pricing:

You can access Aweber’s free plan with basic features for subscribers up to 500; however, above that, you must opt for their premium starting at $16 per month.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing tool mainly designed for content creators and influencers.

This premium tool offers advanced segmentation and automation to help you run customized campaigns per your subscriber’s behavior.

ConvertKit also integrates with several third-party apps like WordPress and Business Analytics to help you get started with

Advantages:

• Advanced segmentation for customized campaigns
• Integrates with third-party apps
• Build especially for content creators
• Offers live analytics

Pricing:

Again, ConvertKit pricing depends on the number of subscribers you have; with the free plan offering basic features for subscribers up to 1,000, its premium starts at $29 per month and increases gradually as the subscriber count increases.

GetResponse

GetResponse is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers email marketing landing pages and all kinds of marketing automation.

Its email marketing features include customizable templates, automation workflows, and advanced segmentation options.

GetResponse also provides a landing page builder that allows you to create landing pages without any coding knowledge.

Advantages:

• A completely Automated Tool
• Offers real-time Analytics
• A wide range of customization to choose from
• Integrates with various third-party apps

Pricing:

GetResponse again offers its pricing based on the number of subscribers you have, you can access its free version if you have up to 1500 subscribers. However, for more than that, you must opt for its premium version starting at $15.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a popular single-stop destination for all your marketing needs, offering email marketing, sms marketing, and marketing automation features.

It offers complete flexibility with its drag-and-drop builder and helps you alter your email with a custom touch according to your viewer’s behavior.

Sendinblue can also send you a range of trigger emails like transaction emails or regular updates emails.

Advantages:

• Works for Action Sets
• Offers 300 emails free every day
• Complete Flexibility
• More Robust and dynamic

Pricing:

You can enjoy the free plan of Sendinblue, allowing you to send 300 emails daily; however, for its premium, you have to pay $25 per month, increasing gradually with the increasing number of subscribers.

Moosend

Moosend is a high-end email marketing software offering automation features, user segmentation, and other personalization features.

It also provides real-time tracking, tracking, and A/B testing options to analyze your Email marketing campaigns’ performance.

Moosend also integrates with third-party apps and techs like Facebook, WordPress, and Salesforce.

Advantages:

• Real-time Analysis
• Beginner Friendly
• Complete Integration with third-party apps
• Several custom templates to choose from

Pricing:

Moosend offers a free plan with all basic features; however, if you want to make the most out of it, you must opt for the premium starting at $9 per month.

Wrapping it up

Email marketing is arguably one of the most influential and cost-efficient marketing strategies for just about any kind of business.

You get to communicate directly with your target audience and build relationships over time.

That being said, to be successful in email marketing, you must provide value to your subscribers.

It also helps to use segmentation and personalization, not to mention, to abide by the best email marketing practices.

Follow these guidelines and you can increase open rates, and click-through rates, and drive more revenue through your email marketing campaigns.

With the continued growth of digital communication channels, email marketing is a tool that businesses must pay attention to.