What is Email Marketing and How Does it Work
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Here are some of the ways in which e-mail marketing can help your business:
Email is an easy way to communicate directly with your customers and prospects – just compose an e-mail and send it! Unlike social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter where you have no control over who sees your posts and when they see them. E-mail marketing enables you to add thousands of subscribers with ease – you can grow your list as big as you want! Unlike direct mail which can be extremely costly.
Email marketing is an essential tool for businesses of all sizes. The key is to use the right email marketing software for your company and its goals. The software or service should provide the features and flexibility to suite your needs, and of course be within your budget.
With email marketing, you can build relationships with potential customers or clients, as well as your existing customer base. You can encourage customer loyalty and reward customer referrals. You can promote new products or services as well as events, special offers and more. It’s a cost-effective way to spread the word about your business.
What is Email Automation
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is applying email automation to your business.
Email Marketing Automation is a technology that allows you to send pre-written emails to your subscribers automatically.
Email sequences are a series of emails, which are sent out from one day to another and allow you to build a long lasting relationship with your subscribers.
By sending out email sequences that provide value to your subscribers, you will be able to turn them into paying customers.
An email sequence is basically a pre-planned series of emails that are sent to your audience at set times. There are many different types of sequences, but they all have the same end goal — to help you build relationships with your audience and sell your products or services.
For example:
You could send a monthly newsletter instead of writing an individual one for each person that signs up.
You could use a “Welcome Email Sequence ” to welcome new subscribers to your list and get them familiar with your business.
You could set automatic reminders to go out if someone doesn’t buy after you offer them a product or service.
The possibilities are endless! You can automate just about anything with email marketing automation. It’s one of my favorite ways to communicate with my audience because I don’t have to manually write every single email — saving me tons of time!
Email marketing automation is when you use software to add, remove and manage people on your lists, create email sequences, and send emails to different segments of your list. It’s commonly used to nurture leads and retain customers.
What is Email Bounce Rate and How Can it Affect Your Email Campaign Results
It’s not a good idea to use email marketing if your email bounce rate is higher than 10%. If you are thinking about how to reduce your email bounce rate, then you first need to understand what email bounce rate is and how it is calculated.
So let’s dive in.
Email bounce rate is the number of emails that were undelivered to the subscriber because of a technical reason such as an invalid email address. The bounced emails can be either hard bounces or soft bounces.
A hard bounce means that the email address does not exist and it cannot be delivered. A soft bounce, on the other hand, indicates that the message has been bounced back for temporary reasons like server issues, a full mailbox etc.
So how do you calculate your email bounce rate? It’s simple: divide the number of bounced emails by the total number of delivered emails (bounced emails + delivered emails).
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of email addresses from your list that are “bouncing back ” emails you send. The email is sent, but it bounces back to your sender address because the recipient’s email address is invalid or has issues.
Besides being a good way to lose customers and damage your reputation, a high bounce rate is also bad for your deliverability. It’s one of the factors spam filters use to determine whether or not to deliver your emails. So it’s important that you keep an eye on it.
So, when it comes to hard bounces and soft bounces, hard bounces are more damaging.
Hard bounces are permanent failures—emails that will never be delivered. If you’re consistently sending emails to these addresses, you could get flagged as a spammer, which will hurt your sender reputation and make it harder for people who do want your emails to get them in their inboxes. These addresses should be removed from your list so they don’t continue to hurt your deliverability rates.
What Are Email Open Rates and How Can they Affect My Email Deliverability
Email open rates are an important metric, they help you know how your list is engaging with your messages. However, they’re often misunderstood and can be misleading. So, let’s take a look at what email open rates are, how they’re calculated and give you some tips on increasing your open rate.
Your email open rate is one of the most important metrics for judging the success of your email marketing campaign. It’s also a favorite of marketers and business owners alike. The email open rate tells you exactly how many people saw your message and decided to take action by opening it.
But how exactly is the open rate calculated? And what does it really tell you?
You probably already know your email open rate. It’s typically reported as part of your email service provider’s analytics, and it’s one of the most important metrics you can track.
But knowing what an open rate is, and how to interpret it, isn’t always so easy.
It helps to start with the basics: what is an ‘open’?
As already stated, the email open rate is one of the most important email marketing metrics. It tells you how effective your subject line was in encouraging subscribers to open your email.
If you think about it, the subject line is the first impression that an email makes on a subscriber, and they will decide whether or not to open it based on this alone. The subject line is also the first piece of information that email clients display when listing messages in inboxes, so it’s vital for getting your emails noticed.
Remember, with subject lines you only have a certain number of words to grab your audiences attention, and create some curiosity – So do not rush this small but important task when creating your email campaigns.
What is Email CTR – Also known as ‘Click Through Rate’
Email click-through rate (CTR) is the number of subscribers who click on a link in your email divided by the total number of subscribers. CTR is an important metric because it communicates how relevant your content is to your audience.
How to calculate email CTR
To get your click-through rate, you divide the total number of clicks on a particular link by the total number of emails sent to that list minus bounces and unsubscribes. This can be calculated with the following formula:
(Total clicks on the link / (Total emails delivered – Total bounces – Total unsubscribes)) x 100 = Click-through Rate
Anytime you send an email campaign, you’ll want to check your click-through rate to see how well that particular message resonated with your audience. The higher your click through rate, the more successful your content was at getting people to take action.
Email is one of the most effective marketing channels at our disposal, but it is not without its challenges. One of the most common email marketing questions we hear from marketers is: “What is a good click-through rate?” or “What is a good open rate?” As with any question that starts with the word “good,” it’s not an easy one to answer.
The answer depends on a lot of factors: type of email sent, company size, industry, and other demographic data points.
One tip to get a higher ‘click through rate’ is to include your clickable link higher up in your email copy. Also, for longer emails, include more than one link.
One thing is certain, email marketing should be a priority within your business and be a part of your overall marketing strategy.
Good luck!
Andy Black