To fully understand how email marketing can be used in your business, and how it can help with achieving
your goals, you need to start with the basics.
What is Email marketing?
Email marketing is a part of online marketing focused on communicating and establishing the connection with online users through emails. Regardless if the goal is promotional or informative, regardless if you send weekly or monthly, the core of email marketing is still communication with the recipient. The purpose of this communication is to nurture the relationship with the existing or potential customers, and to encourage an action which is the goal of an email marketing campaign.
To make sure you are communicating successfully, your email message should be:
• Relevant to the recipient
• With a relevant, yet engaging subject line
• Concise and spot on
• Planned
• Sent at the right moment
• In the language the recipient understands
• Without any grammatical or spelling errors
• Without any broken links
The process of communication between a business on one side and a customer on the other goes like this. You have a message that you want to share. It can be a promotional message about a sale in your online store. It may be the news about your latest ebook.
It may be an announcement for the event you will be hosting. The idea is to send a message that will encourage the recipient to complete an action, such as purchase an item, fill out a form, etc.
The point is you have something to share with the subscribers. The next step is to write an email. There are lots of things to have in mind here, which will be the topic of one of the subsequent chapters.
Finally, you send the message, wait and examine the results, in order to find out both positive and negative outcomes of your email marketing campaign. That is the email marketing process summarized in a nutshell.
One of the first obstacles every marketer faces is getting emails delivered and read. It is not an easy task, especially if you have in mind that over 200 emails are sent and received per person each day. As much as getting the attention through email marketing is lucrative (with huge ROI), it is a very difficult job. There is a true combat over users’ attention and it has become a real art to get under that spotlight. This is how email deliver-ability was introduced as the process of analyzing and optimizing the performance of an email marketing campaign.
Gradually, this is how the field of email marketing evolved, to become a whole new segment of online marketing, with its own best practices, strategies, and tools to use.
