Email Marketing may strike as being old fashioned to many. But there’s a reason it’s still around – It works!

Are you one of those who haven’t joined the Email marketing bandwagon yet? Hop on as we take you through this amazing marketing medium.  Before we get started about the benefits, let us throw some light on what exactly is email marketing.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing wherein an email is used as a medium to reach out to present and potential customers with the aim of gaining or continuing their business. Email marketing is used in a number of ways by organizations and marketers for company advertisements, acquiring or converting customers, brand and customer loyalty building, or for communicating promotional offers and more.

Why do Email Marketing?

In a recent research by Octane research, a staggering 89% of India Marketers voted for Email Marketing to be an effective tool for their business. One can see 10% YoY growth for India Marketers reporting email effectiveness.

Clearly, this is one marketing approach one can’t lose out upon.

Reach

There are 462 million internet users in India as of 2016. About 95% of them have an email account and about 91% check their mail atleast once in a day.

Emails are an integral part of our lives and there’s hardly anyone around who thinks of quitting email.

Some might argue that a portion of email marketing efforts go to waste when the emails land up in spam folder or are blocked or lost. Still they have a higher potential of reaching the targeted customer than posting on social media platforms like Facebook, where a major number of posts are missed due to algorithm settings.

Life Span

Unlike other marketing efforts including social media platforms where life span of a communication is very short, an email’s life span is indefinite. Email sits in a subscriber’s inbox waiting to be acknowledged. Even if the mail ends up deleted, it requires some action on the part of the subscriber.

Cost

Email marketing is one of the cheapest methods of advertising. Whether you do the campaign yourself or take the help of an email marketing agency, the costs involved will be a fraction what required by other channels of advertising for reaching out to the same number of people.

Success

Emails can be targeted to reach to the ideal customers. The targeted reach along with cost effectiveness ensures the ROI for the marketing efforts is higher than other direct marketing efforts. The trick lies in developing a proper strategy to reach out to the right people.

Measurability and Flexibility

With the extent of analytics available today, it is possible to measure response of your campaign accurately to gauge what works and what not and accordingly make changes to your plan.

How to do Email Marketing?

Now that you are convinced about the importance of doing email marketing, let us delve deeper into the finer points you should keep in mind before starting.

Build Email List

Ideally before starting a campaign you must have a healthy email list of prospective clients. But if you are one of those who are just starting and have no access to a database, heres what you need to do – Build an email list. The first and foremost step in building an email list is to make it easy for the prospects to sign up. For this you can use a simple form with few fields.

You can also use this form to engage prospects on your website by showing this form to them when they stay at the website beyond a certain threshold. Another approach to building an email list is from social media campaigns.

Deliverability

Once your email list starts growing, the next thing to ensure is the deliverability i.e. the percentage of emails sent which land up in the inbox of the desired recipient. There are a number of factors which affect the deliverability rate such as frequency/volume of sending, content, blacklists or sender reputation, subject lines, complaints, spam traps etc to name a few.

A specialist email marketing service provider can help you understand the essentials and hence help you increase your deliverability by ensuring all the conditions are met.

Engaging Email Content

Content remains one of the most important aspects towards the success of your marketing efforts. It becomes doubly important to make the content engaging so that the recipient actually wants to read your communication. There should be a healthy balance between promotional and informational content. Idea is to not make the content sound like you are trying to sell something. Though this may sound like extra work, but believe us it’s certainly worth the efforts.

Following are some tips to keep your readers engaged:

Personal touch

A personal tone in the communication never fails to strike a chord with readers and helps to increase the click ratio too.

Interact

It is important to interact with your customers at regular intervals. You can do this via feedbacks, polls, giving special discounts or simply by saying thanks!

Announcements

Whether it is about a new product, service or something special in your life of work, it helps to keep your customers informed and helps them feel engaged.

Knowledge Share

This is one of the most important aspects in any marketing communications.  When you share knowledge not only do people look out for your emails, but also start considering you an authority in your line of work.

Mobile Friendly Emails

With the ever increasing penetration of mobiles in the Indian households, mobile remains a highly growing element in the email market. With the chance of an email being opened in a mobile being as much as 50%, you must ensure that your email content is as mobile friendly as possible. A competent mailing services company can provide you with mobile friendly templates which would scale down nicely.

Another thing to keep in mind while composing an email is the subject line. Mobile phone screens being much smaller in comparison to computer screens, offer much lesser space for the subject line. So before you send out those mails it’s better to test this.

Measure your metrics

Keep a tab on your email campaign’s performance parameters such as click rate, open rate, bounces rate by ‘tagging’ your links in your emails so that they can be analyzed via Google Analytics.

Still wondering whether Email marketing is the right thing for you? Get in touch with us today and let our experts guide you.