Email marketing basics

Benefits of email marketing

Your customers are busy. And between social media, mobile notifications, and traditional media like television and print, there’s a lot of noise competing for their attention. That’s why email marketing is such a great way to stay at the top of their minds — by staying at the top of their inboxes.

Email can help you drive engagement with your customers and build loyalty while also having a significant, positive impact on your business, especially sales.

Here are four ways you can put email marketing to work for your business:

Build loyalty and stay top-of-mind

Email marketing lets you send out regular offers and discounts, as well as updates and news about your latest products.

And because email marketing is relatively inexpensive, you can use it even during off-seasons to stay connected with your customers, increasing the odds that they’ll return the next time they’re ready to make a purchase.

Pro tip: By including links to content and offers on your website in your email marketing, you can drive traffic to your website.

Promote sales and offers

If you want to give your latest sale or promotional offer a little extra boost, share it with your customers via email.

Because email campaigns can be created quickly and affordably, they enable you to react quickly to changing trends. That way, you can more effectively use sales and promotions to capitalize on the latest trends.

Pro tip: Using email marketing to make your customers aware of in-store offers can help drive them to your brick-and-mortar locations.

Gather feedback and reviews

Keeping tabs on what customers want is critical to any business. And it’s equally important to ensure that your brand is continually offering a great customer experience by showing that you’re listening to their needs.

Using email to send customer satisfaction surveys is a powerful, scalable way to take the pulse of your customers on everything from your products’ performance to the quality of your customer service.

Promote your latest content

You worked hard on that new blog post, newsletter or founder's story — so make sure your customers know about it with email marketing.

Sharing new content via email helps position your brand as a thought-leader in the market, and keeps your brand awareness high among customers who may soon be looking for services in your industry.

Whichever platform you choose, here are a few key features you’ll want to make sure your service offers:

Email sign-up forms

Accurate, up-to-date email lists are critical to your success as an email marketer. Without them, even your most eye-catching content and most enticing promotional offers won’t reach your audience.

That’s why it’s so important that the email marketing service you choose gives you the ability to create, customize, and embed email sign-up forms into your website, blogs, and other content. These forms should then automatically add the addresses you collect into your mailing lists so you can start emailing them.

You’ll want to choose a service that makes these forms customisable, allowing customers to select the types of content they do and don’t want to receive from you. Customers that want to receive sales promotions may not care so much about new products or company updates, for example.

Your sign-up form should also include an explicit “opt in” statement and checkbox, so you gain each user’s legally required consent for receiving emails right from the start.

Professional templates

Let’s face it: text-only, black-and-white emails are boring. They’re easy to ignore, and you probably get dozens of them every day.

But a great email marketing service will put a wide array of beautiful, professionally-crafted email marketing templates right at your fingertips for you to customise, and make your own. What’s more, they should offer templates for certain types of emails, like sales and product updates, making it easy to ensure your customers get the information they need. Swap in your brand’s colors and logo, and add important information where you want it. You’re on your way to sending professional, eye-catching emails that can make your brand stand out from the crowd (and your customers’ crowded inboxes).

Reporting functionality

When it comes to your email marketing, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t.

That’s why reporting is so key. A good email marketing service will include tracking and reporting analytics that give you a full 360-degree view of results like who opened your emails, who clicked on the links you embedded in them, and who is deleting them without ever opening them.

Reporting allows you to fine-tune your marketing efforts to boost your results by tweaking things like subject lines and copy length. It also helps you prioritize your outreach by helping you learn which customers are most likely to engage with your emails.

Here are some popular email marketing services to consider: