Welcome to What The Source?! A series of blog posts exploring traffic sources. We’ll cover what types/methods of traffic there are and how to do them with additional tips and tricks!
Today we are covering Email Marketing.
So what is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a direct marketing method, whereby a company or person sends a commercial advert in the form of electronic mail to a user.
Emailing is considered very cheap when compared with other traffic sources. It gives you the opportunity to design and customise an advert tailored to the user, but requires various testing and optimisation to get right.
How can I get started with Email Marketing?
There’s a few options to get started in email marketing. You can build up an email list from scratch, one example is by having a website and offering your users to sign-up to a newsletter and giving them something in return such as exclusive deals.
Here is an example on our freebie site – WOW Freebies.
An advantage of having your own database is that you will know exactly what the users want, how active they are and when to do your sends, it’s unique and targeted.
Building your own email database can take quite some time and it may not be the best after all your efforts, which brings us to the other method which is buying emailing lists.
Buying an email list is simple – You pay to send your advert to a list of users in a database, there are many companies which offer this service so we won’t go in to depth of what to use. Purchasing can be risky as you won’t really know the database like you would if you built it yourself and it also isn’t free by any means, however you will have the ability to send to very large databases. Its important to remember though when purchasing an email list that you ensure its all fully opt in and that the company has permission from the users to sell the email list.
As email is an age old form of marketing, there are lots of tools and services to help you with your marketing, such as design, send times, what converts well and more.
Tips & Tricks
1) Email marketing can work very well, however there are many laws and acts which you must be compliant with. These laws are different depending on your location so we suggest you look-up the laws and acts in your country. These laws are designed to reduce spam and make emails user friendly. You can use tools such as Mail-Tester to test the ‘spammyness’ of your email.
2) We suggest to focus on a certain niche when building up an email list, this will give you a more targeted audience and the likelihood of higher conversion rates.
3) Having a good subject line in your email is key, it’s what the user will first see. You can use SubjectLine to evaluate your subject line.
4) Check out Campaign Monitors email gallery for inspiration from campaigns that have worked well in the past for their clients.
Email marketing mistakes
1) Buying an email list: Big protip here: just don’t do it. The point of an email list is that these contacts are curated around your products and brand. If the email list isn’t already interested in what you have to offer, it’s worthless. Also, buying an email list is potentially illegal. It’s not at all GDPR compliant, and it can get you marked as spam.
2) Being spammy: Speaking of spam, it can be easy to get carried away with an email marketing list and you can send too many messages too quickly. Before sending a message, ask yourself if you’ve sent too many messages recently, if the message is really relevant to your customer, and if your customer wants to know the information you’re about to send. If you feel even a little bit unsure about any of those questions, don’t send the message.
3) Neglecting email automation: Using email automation might seem too advanced or complicated, but it’s a lot easier than you think. The time that automating your emails saves is definitely worth looking into, as you can send ultra relevant messages to your customers no matter where they are in their customer journey without ever lifting a finger.
4) Not looking professional: It’s hard to get a customer to trust you if your emails look amateur. Take some time to study your competitor’s emails, and look at the best emails that are sent in your industry. How do yours measure up? Of course, if you’re using a great email marketing provider, this will automatically help your emails look more streamlined and professional.
Pros/Cons Round-up
Pros
– Cheap and can be powerful
– Options to create your own email database, or purchase one
– Lots of information on the web about email marketing
– Direct with targeting capabilities
Cons
– Time consuming to create your own email list
– Laws and compliance getting stricter
– Many people, typically the younger generation do not use email as social media has skyrocketed.
– It’s hard to make your email stand out from the crowd
