Email Marketing 101: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

Email marketing is an important marketing strategy that uses emails as a medium to communicate and promote products or services to ideal customers using sophisticated tools and techniques.

It is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, and it’s especially valuable for beginners to boost their online presence or even tackle online complaints/grievences.

Email marketing is a best way to reach wider audiences and can promote a deep sense of commitment, build customer loyalty and drive traffic to your website and increase sales. It’s also cost-effective compared to many other marketing strategies.

Before you dive into email marketing, it’s crucial to understand your target audiences. In fact, understanding your customers is an important factor for almost all marketing strategies.

You must research your ideal customers first.

Who are they, and what are their needs or preferences?

Then only, we must cater emails to audiences based on their interests and groups.

Building a quality email list is the foundation of successfull email marketing. You collect emails from Sign-up forms on your website or from social media, events or any other platforms.

The whole concept is just to collect quality data. Because quantity doesn’t matter here, but quality matters. Always seek permission to send emails, and keep your list updated.

You may be amazed to know that, despite the rise of social media, people still use email more than other platforms. After all, what’s the good of marketing to someone if they’re not there?

Here is the graph showing an increasing number of emails every year (By Finances Online).

Here’s another report by Oberlo:

Hence, it’s proven from the above reports that the email marketing strategy is not going anywhere. In fact, it will rise.

Crafting effective emails is an art. Your emails should be informative and must look convincing to your audiences. The tone of your emails must be friendly yet professional at the same time.

Your email templates must be mobile-responsive and use clean, attractive designs, as well as optimize images to load quickly. A well-designed email increases engagement.

You can use tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact for designing effective emails and CRM software’s like HubSpot to collect leads and analyze the data. There are numerous tools available in the market which are highly popular and commonly used.

For example, the following are the most commonly used tools for email marketing strategies:

It is essential to know or have at least a basic understanding of marketing metrics for emails. A few of them are open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, overall ROI, or unsubscribe rates.

1. Clickthrough Rate

• What It Is: The percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in a given email.
• How to Calculate It: (Total clicks OR unique clicks ÷ Number of delivered emails) * 100
• Example: 500 total clicks ÷ 10,000 delivered emails * 100 = 5% clickthrough rate

(Using either total clicks or unique clicks in the calculation above works, as long as you use the same approach consistently.)

2. Conversion Rate

• What It Is: The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product.
• How to Calculate It: (Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Number of total emails delivered) * 100
• Example: 400 people who completed the desired action ÷ 10,000 total email delivered * 100 = 4% conversion rate

3. Bounce Rate

• What It Is: The percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
• How to Calculate It: (Total number of bounced emails ÷ Number of emails sent) * 100
• Example: 75 bounced emails ÷ 10,000 total emails sent * 100 = 0.75% bounce rate

There are two kinds of bounces to track: “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces.

4. List Growth Rate

• What It Is: The rate at which your email list is growing.
• How to Calculate It: ([(Number of new subscribers) minus (Number of unsubscribes + email/spam complaints)] ÷ Total number of email addresses on your list]) * 100
• Example: (500 new subscribers – 100 unsubscribes and email/spam complaints) ÷ 10,000 email addresses on the list * 100 = 4% list growth rate

6. Overall ROI

• What It Is: The overall return on investment for your email campaigns. In other words, total revenue divided by total spend.
• How to Calculate It: [(Rs in additional sales made minus Rs invested in the campaign) ÷ Rs invested in the campaign] * 100
• Example: (Rs 1,000 in additional sales – Rs 100 invested in the campaign / Rs 100 invested in the campaign) * 100 = a 900% return on investment for the campaign

There are many tools available to simplify email marketing, from email marketplaces like MailChimp and Constant Contact to analytics tools like Google Analytics or the CRM like HubSpot, to measure your campaign’s success. If you are a WordPress user, you can use MailPoet or MailerLite to create and manage your emails.

Remember, a poor email marketing strategy can harm your brand’s reputation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, email marketing is a valuable tool for beginners and seasoned business owners alike. By following this comprehensive guide and paying attention to best practices, you can harness the power of email marketing to grow your business, connect with your audience, and drive success.

By implementing these strategies, you’ll be well on your way to mastering email marketing for businesses, even as a beginner. We will be updating this post soon with more depth. If you are looking for any agency to help you with email marketing strategies, then feel free to contact us.