How to Use Email Marketing For Your Business

If you have a business, or if you are selling products and services, you ought to try different kinds of marketing methods to drive traffic to your stores and generate sales. There are different kinds of marketing methods, however, it can be mainly classified into two categories:

1.       Traditional Marketing

2.       Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing methods include marketing in the mass media platform such as radio, television, newspaper, billboard, telemarketing, etc.

Digital Marketing, or online marketing, methods including marketing on various online platforms like search engines, social media, websites and online communities, emails and newsletters, etc.

Marketing through emails and newsletters is one of the common marketing methods for business. In this post, I will cover the following aspect of email marketing:

·         What is email marketing?

·         How to do email marketing?

·         Costs associated with email marketing

·         How to generate profits from email marketing?

·         Pros and cons of email marketing

·         Search engine marketing vs. email marketing

·         Social media marketing vs. email marketing?

What is Email Marketing?

Generally speaking, sending marketing emails to subscribers is email marketing. In order to start an email marketing campaign, you need emails of subscribers and something to promote among your subscribers. You will then have to design the email using email templates and then send these emails. Email marketing involves sending mass emails promoting your business, products, services, content, etc.

Let's say, you have a website and you send your website links to 10-120 people through your email service. This is email marketing. Let’s you are an affiliate marketer and you create a newsletter by adding affiliate products and send this newsletter through a mass email provider, you are doing email marketing.

How to do Email Marketing?

In order to start email marketing, you need an email list, Once you have emails you can start sending marketing emails and begin your email marketing campaign. If you have a business, you can do email marketing to sell your products, even when you do not have a business you can help your clients to market their products through emails.

Requirements for email marketing

·         You need something to promote

·         You need an email list (emails IDs)

·         You need to subscribe to a mass email provider

·         You need email templates (if you have subscribed to a mass email provider, you will get templates)

·         You need to design your marketing email (you need at least basic graphic design skills)

The first requirement for email marketing is to have a huge email list, and the list should consist of emails from people who are genuinely interested in your products and services. You also need to build the email list genuinely, if you grab emails from random people and send marketing emails to these random people, you will not have any conversion.

Without having a huge email list don't ever think about starting email marketing. Even if you have an email list but the list is not built from genuine subscribers, you will not be able to generate sales and leads.  

Costs Associated with Email Marketing

If you decide to start email marketing, one of the biggest problems you will encounter is related to building the email list. It does not matter whether you are trying to promote your own products or someone else’s product, you need an email list. If you are doing email marketing for clients, you still need an email list. The only exception to this is when clients already have an email list. In that case, you can start designing email and send emails. Email marketing cost can be broken down into two steps:

1.       Cost associated with building an email list

2.       Subscription fees for email providers

If you are building email list organically but encouraging to subscribe to your newsletters voluntarily, there will be no cost associated with building an email list. For instance, you can add email subscribe button to your website and encourage your visitors to subscribe. This costs absolutely no money. If you are running ads to build email list, you will have to spend money. How much money you should spend depends on the platform where you are advertising.

When your list consists of less than 2000 subscribers, you can use MailChimp for free. You can also try other email service providers and compare the price. GetResponse offers free email marketing if you have less than 500 subscribers.

How to Generate Profits From Email Marketing?

The average conversion rate for email marketing in 2020 was around 1.43 percent, and in 2021, it was 1.33 percent. Between 2 and 5 percent conversion rate is considered good in email marketing. The conversion rate is not about how many people click on the links promoted on your emails, the conversion rate is how many people end up buying products you have promoted on your marketing emails. When there is 2 percent conversion rate, for every 1000 subscribers, 20 people are buying your products and services. How much profits you can generate depends on a lot of factors, and most importantly, the number of subscribers. Other factors include

·         How many people check your email without sending to the spam box?

·         How many people click on the links promoted on the emails?

·         How many people actually buy the products you are promoting?

In order to generate profits, you need to focus on following things:

·         Build genuine subscribers

·         Improve click through rate for your emails

·         Improve click through rates of your links (products)

·         Promote quality products and services.

Pros and Cons of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a popular marketing methods. Almost all businesses use email marketing. Let’s say you bought something form Amazon and a few days later you receive email from Amazon asking you about the product you bought, encouraging you to leave review, and also check the similar product. This is actually a classic example of email marketing.

Pros of email marketing

·         Free to get started (if you already have an email list and if you use free email services)

·         Easy to start (email providers offer you drag and drop feature to design emails, you can start sending emails just by uploading your email list)

·         Easy to track performance (you can your email click through rate, links click through rate etc. on your email service dashboard)

Cons of email marketing

·         Low conversion rate compared to other marketing methods

·         Low click through rate (because most of the time, your emails end up in trash bin)

Search Engine Marketing vs. Email Marketing

Search engine marketing is very effective marketing method. Search engine marketing helps you to get paid organic traffic and it has comparatively higher conversion rate. For example, on Google search, you get 4.40 percent conversion rate for all industry. However, search engine marketing cost money. On average, you will have to pay $2 per click for marketing on Google search.

Email marketing, on the other hand is a free marketing method if you have managed to build an email list. Even if you spent money to build email list, that’s only one time cost. You can use the same list for a long time.

Social Media Marketing vs. Email Marketing

Marketing on social media and marketing through emails and newsletters are two most popular marketing methods. The average conversion rate for email marketing is around 1.4 percent where as conversion rate on social media depends on the platform and the niches of the products and services. On Pinterest the conversion rate is between 1.5 percent and 8.5 percent, whereas on facebook is about 9 percent.

However, the effectiveness of social media marketing and email marketing, both depends on the number of followers and subscribers you actually have. Let’s say you have 1k followers on facebook but you have 10k subscribers for your email service, you will obviously succeed with email marketing compared to social media marketing. Success on social media depends on your content creation skills, marketing skills, especially the skill related to building followers. Success on email marketing depends on your ability to build genuine email list and promote products that your subscribers find interesting and useful.

Interestingly, there is one benefit of social media marketing over email marketing. If you do not have huge followers, you can boost your post and reach a huge audience to drive sales and conversion. You don’t get this leverage with email marketing. However, you can of course use social media to build subscribers.

How to Become Successful With Email Marketing: Conclusion

Whether you can become successful with email marketing or not depends on the kind of audience (email subscribers) you have. If your audience voluntarily subscribed to your service, if your audience is genuinely interested in the products and services you are promoting, if you have a huge audience, you can expect to become very successful.

In order to become successful with email marketing, you need to ensure that your conversion rate is at least 2 percent. You also need to follow genuine email marketing practices such as never spam your subscribers' inbox (avoid sending too many emails), promote products and services that your subscribers are genuinely interested and never promote low-value products.