Welcome to my in-depth email marketing for beginners guide, where you will know what is email marketing, key benefits, ROI and more
With email marketing, you can do wonders. But, if you're relatively new to this scene, it's crucial to understand the basics, like what are the benefits of email marketing, how to do email marketing effectively, and how to set up your first email campaign.
It's time to get started with the help of our beginner's guide to email marketing!
TABLE OF CONTENT ON EMAIL MARKETING FOR BEGINNERS GUIDE
- What is email marketing?
- What are the 11 key benefits of email marketing?
- What’s the average email marketing ROI?
- Choosing the best email service provider
- Growing your email list
- Segmenting your email list
- Types of emails you can send
- Email marketing strategy and metrics
- Setting up your first email campaign
- Time to send your own email marketing campaigns
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of marketing in which one uses commercial emails to build relationships and sell products or services to their audience.
An effective messaging program will help you keep your audience informed and engaged with your brand and its offering. Additionally, it will help you turn window shoppers into customers and one-time shoppers into loyal brand advocates.
Despite the fact that email marketing has been around for a long time, it continues to generate impressive ROI for thousands of marketers around the world, making it one of the most effective digital channels.
What are the 11 key benefits of email marketing?
Before deciding to invest in email marketing, it is worth knowing its advantages. These are 11 of the top benefits that make email marketing the perfect choice for your digital marketing endeavors.1. Low cost
Let's start with the most important aspect: how much does email marketing cost?
To launch professional email campaigns, all you need is an email list, a basic strategy, and an email marketing software provider that will help you manage your campaigns.
Most professional email service providers, like GetResponse, offer multiple plans depending on the size of your email list (number of subscribers).
For example, the GetResponse Free plan doesn't cost you a penny for up to 5,000 contacts with unlimited sends and provides key features like email marketing, website builder, web forms and pages. destination.
As with most marketing tools, you'll find that some are more affordable and others are more premium. In most cases, this has to do with the type of audience they are targeting and the number of features included in the platform.
We'll look at the most popular email marketing services and how you can choose one later in this article. And if you want to practice while you learn, sign up for the GetResponse Free plan. Along with its email marketing features, it gives you time-limited access to its premium features and you don't need to provide your credit card details.
2. Full control
You have full control over your email marketing communication.
You can:
- design your assets (e.g. web forms, emails and landing pages)
- Decide what type of email marketing campaign you want to run
- segment your mailing list for precise targeting
- identify your contacts for better personalization
- create email automation workflows that will help you send even more targeted emails at the most optimal time
The one thing you can't fully control is your email deliverability, but if you follow email marketing best practices and effectively engage your audience, you won't have to worry about your emails. missing mails in the inbox.
Speaking of inbox placement, it's worth mentioning that the overall average inbox placement is around 83%, according to the Return Path Deliverability Benchmark report.
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| Deliverability Benchmark Report 2020. Source: Return Path |
Compared to other digital channels where organic reach is highly dependent on ever-changing algorithms, this result gives you a much better chance of reaching your audience with your marketing communications.
Read more:
3. Precision
One of the main advantages of email marketing is precision.
Unlike other marketing channels, when you send out an email marketing campaign, you target people you already know whose details are in your contact list.
They got there through one of your contact forms on your blog post, attended a webinar you hosted, or perhaps downloaded an ebook you were promoting.
By doing so, they not only gave their contact details, but also showed you the topics they were interested in.
Additionally, if you use an email marketing service, such as GetResponse, you have access to a variety of data that you can use to send even more targeted campaigns.
Starting from the basics, you can target specific segments like new subscribers, existing customers, or your most loyal customers.
When you decide to dig deeper into the analytics dashboards available, you can target specific email accounts that clicked on your call to action or visited your website but did not result in conversion.
And when you want to take it up a notch, you can even run a/b test campaigns to analyze which individual elements of your marketing campaign (e.g. subject line, call to action, offer) are driving sales and which are driving users away from your key. objective.
4. Ease of use
Creating an email marketing campaign is simple.
You can design your email templates, signup forms, and marketing automation workflows with intuitive drag-and-drop editors available as standalone tools or integrated with an email service. email marketing.
And if design isn't your thing, you can simply use ready-made templates to set up your first email marketing campaign in no time.
5. Preferred Marketing Medium
According to the DMA and Adobe, most people prefer to be contacted and receive offers from companies via email rather than other channels.
The results of these studies make perfect sense since well-crafted marketing emails are relevant and non-intrusive – emails wait in the inbox and subscribers decide when to open and read an email. And if they no longer wish to receive the content, they can unsubscribe with just a few clicks.
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| 2018 Consumer Email Survey report. Source: Adobe |
6. You can reach mobile device users
The percentage of emails opened on mobile devices continues to rise. According to our Email Marketing Benchmarks report, desktop opens account for 45.69% of all email opens, followed by mobile opens at 34.31% and webmail opens at 20%.
This means you can reach your customers and influence their buying decisions wherever they are. You can also integrate your online and offline marketing, eg. by collecting email addresses at events or when shopping in a physical store.
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| GetResponse preview feature lets you test what your email templates will look like on different devices |
7. Email is an owned medium
Traditionally, digital marketing strategy has been divided into paid, earned, and owned media. Emails fall under the owned media category (unless we're talking about sponsored direct mail). This means that your business has full control over this online channel.
In fact, over time, your email list becomes your greatest online marketing asset: a huge database of people who want to hear about your brand.
If you use professional email marketing services, your emails will reach almost everyone on your mailing list, as opposed to eg. social media, where you can't control your organic reach. This is why investing too much in social media is often referred to as building a house on rented land.
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| The Digital Marketing Mix. Source: SEJ |
8. Targeted and personalized communication
You may collect relevant information from your contacts throughout the subscription process and use it to tailor communication to their needs and preferences. Based on the data, you can create segments of people who share common traits and provide them with relevant content and build customer loyalty.
Your subscribers will stay on your list as long as they see the value in your communication - that's why over time you can build a large mailing list that generates impressive revenue.
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| Example of a personalized email that sums up users’ activity in the app |
9. Results that are easy to measure
You can fully control your email marketing efforts by integrating your email marketing software tool with online analytics tools like Google Analytics. Simply add UTM parameters to your emails and you'll know exactly which email, subject line, or call-to-action button brought you the best results.
You can monitor the performance of individual emails in the statistics panel of your email marketing tool and then track user behavior on your website. You can set goals for individual email campaigns, track conversions, and measure ROI.
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| GetResponse Mobile App lets you track your campaigns even when you’re on the go |
10. Fully automated
With marketing automation, you can create custom workflows for your campaigns. You can easily create any type of automated email marketing campaign using a drag and drop editor to schedule the communication flow with available conditions, actions and filters. |
| Building a simple marketing automation workflow in GetResponse. |
11. Excellent ROI
Email marketing continues to provide the highest return on investment of any online channel. This is something we've seen firsthand and came out of the research we conducted with Smart Insights (see chart below). This results from all the factors mentioned above. If you execute and measure your email marketing activities the right way, they will become a proven source of revenue for your business.
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| How effective are different marketing channels? Email Marketing & Automation Excellence Report |
What’s the average email marketing ROI?
According to a 2021 study by DMA, the return on investment for email marketing is 38:1 on average. Statistically, if you invest $1 in your email marketing activities, you will get $38 back.
Of course, it's not a fixed number - it's an average. Your company's return on investment will depend on a variety of factors, for example:
- size and quality of your email list
- content relevance
- design and copy
- call to action (is it clear and persuasive?)
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that you can track performance and present data to prove ROI. This is especially important if you don't have large marketing budgets and every decision you make needs to be data-driven.
How to measure the ROI of email marketing?
Generally, it is easy to calculate the ROI of your email marketing activities. All you have to do is track the total income and divide it by the total expenses.
Here's an example, let's say you generated $100 in sales and invested $30 in the email marketing campaign. You will measure your campaign ROI as follows:
How to calculate your email marketing return on investment (ROI):
Total revenue: $100 – $30 = $70
Total spend: $30
ROI: ($70 ÷ $30) * 100 = 233%It's a simple way to prove your success and get more budget for your future campaigns. Naturally, this equation will become more complex if you include other costs such as the time of your staff or the cost of producing the goods you sell.
Choosing the Best Email Service Provider
Before we get into the exact process of setting up a successful email marketing campaign, let's spend a moment talking about email marketing services and whether you even need them in the first place.
Do You Really Need an Email Marketing Software Provider?
In short no.
In theory, you can do all the individual activities like setting up your signup forms, designing email templates, segmenting your audience, and even sending your emails on your own. without using email marketing services.
However, this process would be both resource and time consuming. Plus, there are many technical aspects of email marketing that most marketers don't even know about. Like how to design your email templates so they display well on various devices and email clients. Or how to handle spam bounces or complaints and not be penalized by spam filters.
The good news is that the most popular email marketing services have great tools and in-house expert teams that will help you launch your marketing emails with ease and confidence.
Now let's review three popular email marketing software providers on the market and what they offer.
GetResponse
Like other similar tools, GetResponse started as a pure email marketing service over 20 years ago and has evolved into an all-in-one marketing solution.
Not only does it have all the essential tools you'll need to create and send marketing emails, but it will also help you grow your email list, segment your audience, report on your campaigns, and run campaigns. automated campaigns through email automation.
Moreover, it will also allow you to create a website for your business, talk to your audience via live chats, host webinars, send transactional emails, launch web push notifications or even to reach your contacts by SMS.
Key features:
- Free plan that’ll let you get started with email marketing
- Email marketing and email automation to help you create and send emails
- Signup forms, websites, and landing pages to help you build an online presence and grow your list
- Live chats, web push notifications, and SMS to help you reach your audience through other channels
- Transactional emails if you’re an ecommerce that wants everything under one roof
- Conversion funnels if you want to sell digital products and create sales funnels
Pricing:
GetResponse offers a free plan that allows you to store up to 500 contacts and gives you access to its essential email marketing features as well as website builder, landing page builders and signup forms .
Paid plans are based on the size of your mailing list and the features you want to use.
- Basic: starts at $15 per month for an email list up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Plus: starts at $49 per month for an email list up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Professional: starts at $99 per month for an email list up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Max: custom pricing available for transactional emails, migrations, dedicated support, and more.
The Basic and Plus plans are designed for those who are primarily interested in email marketing features, building their website, and growing their audience. Professional and Max, on the other hand, are for those who want additional tools such as web push notifications, transactional emails or SMS.
In its free plan, GetResponse also gives you time-limited access to its premium features, so you can not only build your website, collect emails, and send newsletters, but also try out marketing automation, webinars or live chat.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is probably the best known tool. And just like GetResponse, it started as an email marketing service and grew into a solution that contains many other tools that small business owners will find useful.
It will help you grow your mailing list, manage your contacts, create templates, and send campaigns manually and automatically.
Its advantage is to integrate with many other marketing tools that you may need. Whether you plan to use a CRM or build a website on WordPress, you can easily connect them to Mailchimp.
The biggest criticism about this tool is that it's great for getting started, but once your list and needs grow, it's no longer profitable. The free plan is also a bit limited and does not allow you to perform basic actions such as scheduling emails or getting help from the customer support team.
Key features
- Email marketing and automation that’ll help you send emails
- Ready-made integrations that’ll simplify your work with other marketing tools
- Free account that’ll help you get started if you don’t have a budget
Pricing
Mailchimp offers a free email marketing service for those new to email marketing who don't yet have an email list.
While the free plan is great to start with, most marketers end up switching to one of their paid plans as soon as they realize that the free service has some serious limitations.
Here’s how their paid plans are structured:
- Essentials: $9.99 per month for up to 500 contacts
- Standard: $14.99 per month for up to 500 contacts
- Premium: $299 per month for up to 10,000 contacts
You can also pay-as-you-go using an email credits plan.
Constant Contact
Another popular email marketing service you've probably heard of is Constant Contact.
Founded 16 years ago, it has also expanded beyond email marketing and started developing tools such as a landing page builder, website builder, or SMS.
Although many small businesses rely on Constant Contact in their day-to-day operations, some of the reviews we've seen mention that the platform lags slightly behind its competitors and is less profitable than other platforms.
Key features:
- Email marketing and email automation features that’ll help you send email campaigns
- Contact segmentation and filtering that’ll help you target your audience better
- Signup forms and websites that’ll help you grow your list
Pricing:
Constant Contact operates two pricing tiers for its email newsletter software, and like other tools, its pricing is primarily based on the size of your email list.
- Email: 0-500 contacts for $20 per month with unlimited sends
- Email Plus: 0-500 contacts for $45 per month with unlimited sends
They also offer a one-month free trial, but you'll need to provide your credit card details to get started. Also, your subscription will automatically renew as soon as the trial period ends, so you'll need to cancel your subscription manually to avoid being charged.
How to choose the best email marketing service for your business
We have just reviewed three tools, but as you well know, there are many email marketing platforms in the market.
FYI: You can find an updated list of the best email newsletter software tools in 2022 here.
Finding the single tool that will work best for you will start by answering key questions such as:
- Who’s your target audience?
- What’s the primary reason why you want to run email campaigns?
- What’s the size of your email list and what will it look like in say 6 to 12 months?
- What types of communications are you planning to run?
- What channels and tools are you planning to use?
- What are the core capabilities your tool should offer?
It may seem like a lot of questions, but there's a good reason for each one.
Some email marketing platforms have great e-commerce integrations while others are better suited to a B2B audience.
Some email marketing services are affordable when you're just starting out, but turn out to be expensive as you grow.
Some offer great automation capabilities, but their drag-and-drop email builder is very difficult to use.
And if you already have a tech stack you want to work with, you'll want to check if the email marketing platform integrates seamlessly with them.
The good news is that most platforms offer a free account or a free trial so you can test them out. That's why I highly recommend that you shop around and do some first-hand testing, to make sure you find the best fit for your business.
You can start using GetResponse today, simply by signing up through this link:
Growing your mailing list
Building an email list is one of the major ongoing tasks of an email marketer.
You want to attract a large and engaged audience so you can communicate directly with them in their inboxes.
There are several ways to create a mailing list. Let's now explore the main tactics and tools you can use to acquire a high-quality list.
If you want to dive deeper, consider reading our complete guide on how to build an email list from scratch.
lead magnets
You need to provide your target audience with a good reason to convince them to sign up for your mailing list. Most people will want to receive something in return for their efforts and the ability to contact them directly in their inbox. This is where lead magnets come in.
A lead magnet is an incentive that you offer in exchange for your visitor's email address. Most often, lead magnets come in the form of an e-book, checklist, or free tool, but they come in all forms.
Our recent study showed that marketers saw the highest conversion rates with video (eg, webinars) and written (eg, guides) lead magnets.
That's not to say you shouldn't use other types of incentives. You'll want to use a variety of different lead magnets depending on the type of industry you're in, the type of audience you're trying to attract, or the goal of your email marketing campaign.
To learn more about the most popular types or how to choose the opt-in incentive for your business, read our guide to lead magnets.
Optin forms
A signup form, web form, or registration form is an HTML form that is installed on a website to allow visitors to register. This is the key mechanism you will use to capture leads.
There are different types of optin forms that you can use. The difference between them is usually how or when they appear in front of your visitor's eyes.
The most popular types of web forms include:
- Embedded/Inline web forms
- Popups and lightboxes
- Exit intent forms
- Scroll forms
- Fixed bars
- Welcome mats
- Click forms
On your website, you will want to use a variety of different types of forms. The minimum you should aim for is to have an embedded form on every page of your website and pop-up forms on the pages that drive the most traffic.
When designing your web forms and choosing your lead magnets, consider what information you need to run an effective email marketing campaign.
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| Popup form example from Shinesty |
At the same time, you don't want to end up collecting lots of email addresses, none of which match your target audience.
Another key aspect to keep in mind is user experience. By displaying too many interstitials, you risk negatively affecting your website visitors' experience and discouraging them from returning to your site in the future. To overcome this, you might want to keep tabs on who you show your forms to and potentially limit pop-ups to only show up when users have spent a reasonable amount of time on your site.
To learn more about building your list with signup forms, consider reading our article on effective lead capture forms and website popup examples. You can also watch the following video, where Andy Crestodina walks through the whole process of optimizing your signup forms – including where you should place them, how to choose your CTAs, and what works for form copy website.
Landing pages
Most websites and landing pages have multiple goals to achieve. They are meant to provide information to all types of visitors who enter the page and therefore are often quite messy. They are also not designed to effectively convert email subscribers. This is why marketers create dedicated landing pages.
Although landing pages can also serve various purposes, there is one specific type designed just for capturing emails and that is squeeze pages. Squeeze pages are designed to collect visitors' email addresses. They contain just enough information to convince them to fill out the form and keep them focused on that one goal.
That's why most squeeze pages contain only the following (sometimes even less):
- A headline that makes a promise and captures attention
- A subheading that builds upon the promise
- Key benefits of the offer and the lead magnet
- The signup form
- Additional elements increasing the conversion rate like social proof or trust symbols
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| Squeeze page example from Masala Body. |
As you can see, they are much simpler than your normal website homepage. And that is exactly why they are so effective. The average landing page conversion rate is nearly 6%, but it's not uncommon to see better results.
In one of our case studies, Alex Terrier, a jazz musician and music teacher offering online music lessons, describes how he achieved a 19% email sign-up rate with a high quality free content.
Although landing pages can be placed in your website navigation, marketers primarily use them to capture leads from external traffic sources, such as paid social media campaigns, sponsored mailings, solo advertisements and various content marketing activities.
If you want to learn more about using landing pages in your list building campaigns – how to design them effectively and what could potentially hinder your conversion rates – you can check out our beginner's guide to squeeze pages and how to create landing pages that convert.
Paid Ads
While you can use paid ads to drive traffic to your squeeze pages, there's also another way to collect email without forcing visitors to leave the page they're currently viewing.
On Facebook, they are called Lead Ads. In Google, these are called Google Lead Form Extensions. And on LinkedIn, you'll find them as Lead Gen Ads.
Each platform has its own name, but the principle behind them is the same: they offer an easy way to collect emails from platform users. And why is it simple? This is because the platforms pre-populate the lead capture form with the email address the user signed up with.
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| Facebook Lead Ad example |
While this dramatically increases conversion rates, it also has a downside. Most of us are logged into Facebook using our personal email address, not our company email address. And if you want to capture a B2B audience, that makes the process more complicated.
That said, lead ads can deliver impressive results. One of GetResponse's clients, InfoShare Academy, used them to successfully capture 1200 new leads in just one month and keep the cost per lead around $0.35. They achieved this by creating highly relevant content (an IT glossary guide) and targeting people who want to learn how to become a developer.
Segmentation of your mailing list
We mentioned how email marketing allows you to run targeted email campaigns instead of sending the so called email sends. It does this through the use of segmentation.
The purpose of mailing list segmentation is to identify cohorts or groups of customers who share common characteristics and tailor communication to better meet their expectations and needs. By making your email communication more relevant, you can achieve higher engagement and conversion rates.
And not just by a fraction, according to data from the Email Marketing Benchmarks report, personalized emails see an average of 19% increase in click-through rates.
How you want to segment your audience will vary depending on the type of business you run or the goal of your email marketing campaign. For example, a nonprofit might want to look at the average amount donated by its customers, while an e-commerce brand might be interested in a segment purchased in the last 90 days.
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| Stages of email segmentation |
That said, most marketers segment their email lists based on:
- Demographic information (e.g. gender, age, income)
- Contact engagement with communication (e.g. page visits, link clicks, email opens)
- Contact buying behavior (e.g. products purchased, products added to cart)
- Contact stage in the buying cycle
To find out more, about how you can use contact information to improve your email campaigns, read our getting started with email segmentation and 9 super-easy ways to personalize your emails.
Types of emails you can send
When it comes to what can go into your emails, the sky really is the limit.
You can use email marketing throughout the customer lifecycle by aiming for different types of goals for each stage. Here, we'll focus on the types of emails you can send based on how they're sent, not what's in them.
If, however, you want to explore more about the different types of content you can include in your messages, consider reading these articles on the most interesting newsletter ideas and employee newsletter examples.
Newsletters and marketing offers
Most marketers use email marketing to communicate their offers and send regular updates about their business.
These types of emails are typically sent as a single campaign type targeting their entire audience (i.e. when you call them an email blast) or a segment. particular clientele.
Newsletters are very popular and simple to execute, but because you send them manually, they tend to get lower engagement rates than triggered emails.
On average, an email newsletter has an open rate of 22% and a click-through rate of 3.4%.
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| A fragment of an email from American Giant promoting their product as the best choice for fall |
Triggered emails
Triggered emails or automated emails see much higher engagement rates. Their average open rate is around 44% and the click-through rate is over 10%. Why so much higher than newsletters?
What makes triggered emails so effective is that they're sent in response to your contact's actions. This can be after they sign up for your mailing list or after they leave your website without completing the order. You decide when these emails are sent.
But it's not just timing that makes automated emails powerful. It's also about the fact that they're super relevant. Most automated emails contain information specifically for the recipient who just performed some action.
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| Example on a welcome email that’s automatically sent to new email subscribers |
To learn more about automated emails and see over 30 template examples, check out our guide to email automation.
Blog Updates
Here's another popular type of email among marketers. Blog updates or RSS emails are messages you send after you post a new post on your blog.
You can send these emails automatically or manually, depending on your preference.
These types of emails also tend to get higher open and click-through rates than marketing newsletters. This is especially true for bloggers who offer unique content and focus primarily on adding value rather than marketing their products or services.
Drip Campaigns
Email drip campaigns or autoresponder emails are similar to triggered emails. You send them automatically, but unlike triggered emails, they follow a predetermined sequence and schedule.
Usually, marketers use drip campaigns to set up email courses, lead nurturing sequences, or onboarding sequences. Setting up an email sequence this way gives you the ability to keep your brand at the forefront of your audience's mind and makes your content easier to digest.
Email drip campaigns are easy to create and tend to get pretty high engagement rates. Their average open rate is almost 30% and the CTR is almost 6%.
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| Email drip campaign promoting a special offer. |
If you’d like to find out more about setting up email sequences, here’s a handy email drip campaign guide.
Email Marketing Strategy and Metrics
To be successful in email, you need to develop a strategy and focus on the right kinds of metrics to know if you're headed in the right direction.
Simply put, email marketing strategy is an overview showing the long-term vision and future direction of your email business. Although many businesses operate without a strategy, having one is essential if you want to be successful.
Here's why you need an email marketing strategy:
"You need a strategy with your email marketing and marketing automation. Getting leads down the funnel won't happen by accident. (…) You need a planned project to map all the different potential customer touchpoints and when you can potentially send emails, and then to integrate them". - Dr. Dave Chaffey
Developing a basic email marketing strategy doesn't have to be complicated. (Actually, you shouldn't.) You don't have to cover everything at once - you can include more areas and details as you go.
On our blog you will find more information on how different companies can use email marketing:
- email marketing for SMBs
- email marketing for B2B
- email marketing for ecommerce
- email marketing for musicians
- email marketing for real estate agents
In general, your email marketing strategy should cover areas such as:
Main long-term objectives
Decide what you want to achieve with your email marketing in the long term. Your goals should be business-related and measurable. Here are some examples to consider:
- increase the number of subscribers by 20% by the end of the year
- increase email marketing relevance expressed by 5% higher open rate and CTR
- collect meaningful information about subscribers to improve segmentation
- increase ROI from promotional campaigns by 10% by the end of the year
You will want your goals to be ambitious but also achievable. But before you go short, be sure to follow these email marketing best practices and you'll be well on your way to achieving even the most ambitious goals.
Target audience
Who are the most likely people to become your customers? Make sure you know your target audience well. The more you know about their needs and preferences, the more effective your email marketing campaigns will be.
Competitive advantage and key USPs
Do you know your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? Do you know your competitive advantage? I hope. Otherwise, you'll struggle to create email marketing campaigns that will persuade your target audience to buy from you.
Your USP should answer the question "why us?" » Analyze your product or service and identify the benefits to the customer. Be brief and precise. Clearly explain your solutions and adapt them to the needs of your customers.
Also contact your current customers and ask them about your competitive advantage. Find out why they chose you over all the other options.
A clearly defined competitive advantage and USPs will go a long way in planning your overall marketing communication and CTAs in individual emails.
Resources
Define the resources you need to run your email marketing campaign. Think about the people (e.g. email marketer, graphic designer, content specialist) and tools (email marketing platform, project management tool, etc.) that will help you plan and execute your strategy.
Metrics and KPIs
There are a lot of metrics to track. The trick is to link them to your business goals and define the KPIs that will help you make better decisions.
Below are the most important metrics you should monitor when running your email marketing campaigns.
Keep in mind that to get a complete understanding, you'll want to look at various email marketing metrics simultaneously. Otherwise, you may be missing an important piece of the puzzle that's holding you back from achieving a high ROI.
You'll also want to track the average engagement metrics seen in your industry or geographic location. You can find this information in the Email Marketing Benchmarks report.
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| Chart from the Email Marketing Benchmarks report showing the average email engagement rates for different industries |
Mailing list size
The number of email addresses on your list is one of the metrics you need to pay attention to. Since you are building your email list organically with your target audience, you can be sure that it will translate into business results. In this case, the longer the list, the greater the total results.
Open rate
The percentage of total subscribers who opened your email. Remember that opens can only be calculated in HTML messages, as they require a tracking pixel.
Some marketers say it's a vanity metric, but tracking email open rates has multiple benefits. For example, it gives you a quick overview of the quality of your email deliverability or the quality of your email list.
When you run your email campaigns, you want to make sure your open rate exceeds the industry standard and doesn't drop.
The three main things that affect open rates are the sender name, subject line, and pre-header text. Naturally, your deliverability or the timing of your email marketing campaign also plays a role.
To learn how to improve your opens and get more people to read your emails, follow this article on increasing email open rates.
Click-through rate
The percentage of the total number of clicks on a given link in your email. It is expressed as the total number of clicks on a given link divided by the number of emails sent.
Now, this one is an actionable metric and the one that comes closest to actual conversion. Marketers all over the world want to make sure their click-through rate (CTR) is high, otherwise it means their content is not interesting.
Making your calls to action more visible, placing them above the fold, or using engaging content formats – these are just three ways to increase your CTRs. For more ideas, check out our article on increasing your click-through rates.
Click-to-open Rate
Comparison of the number of unique clicks and unique opens giving you a better idea of the engagement in your email marketing campaigns.
A high click-to-open rate (CTOR) can indicate that subscribers find your email content interesting or that you've delivered on the promise you made in the subject line.
A low CTOR suggests otherwise. It could mean that your subject line was misleading or the email message wasn't compelling enough to click through to your website.
Conversion
A specific valuable action like visiting a landing page after clicking a CTA button; visiting a thank you page after purchasing a product, etc.
Sometimes expressed as a ratio, the conversion rate gives you an accurate signal of the success of your email campaign.
Set up your first email campaign
This section contains a short step-by-step guide on how to set up your first email campaign. If you've never done this before, just follow these steps and be sure to record your observations and track your results.
Email marketing is a long game and you'll want to make sure that with every campaign you roll out, you learn something new about your audience and what makes them “click”.
1. Set a measurable goal
First, decide what you want to achieve.
For the purpose of this article, let’s say you want to create a welcome email that’ll greet your new subscribers and offer them a discount code for their first order in your online store.
According to our Email Marketing Benchmarks, the welcome emails have the highest engagement, open rate, and click-through rate:
In order not to set the bar too high, let's say that your objective will therefore be to deploy a welcome email campaign that will generate an opening rate greater than 60% and a CTR greater than 15%.
2. Choose your target audience
You will now need to decide who you are going to send your email campaign to.
In this case, it's simple - the target audience will be every new person who joins your mailing list.
But it could just as well be anyone else, e.g. people who visited your store in the last 30 days but didn't place an order or people who recently bought from you but didn't leave a review.
Keep in mind who your target audience is before creating copies and designing your email templates.
3. Create your email template
Now is the time to put on your creative hat and craft that email.
Don't worry though, you don't have to be a designer or copywriter to create email campaigns that drive results. The most important thing is to always think about your target audience and the goal you have set for your campaign.
If you use an email service provider like GetResponse, you can either use the drag-and-drop email builder or customize one of the ready-to-use templates out of the box. Using pre-made templates will save you a lot of time and ensure that your emails will look great on all devices and email clients.
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| Some of the emails templates available in GetResponse |
In our case, we want to welcome new email subscribers and convince them to click through to the site and use the discount code we gave them. This means that your email should be welcoming but also draw the recipient's attention to the main action you want them to take.
To do this, you'll need to follow email design principles, such as making your CTA prominent, important, surrounded by a reasonable amount of negative space. You'll also want to pay attention to your copy and make sure it communicates the key benefits of your offer.
To dive deeper into these topics, consider reading these two resources:
4. Schedule your email campaign
Once you've created the emails you want to send, it's time to schedule them so they reach the right audience at the right time.
If you need to send a one-time email, you can send it immediately or schedule it for later. Additionally, you can adjust the send time to match your subscriber's time zone.
In our case, we want to set up a simple welcome email, which we can do using a marketing automation template called "Simple Welcome Message".
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| Simple welcome email workflow in GetResponse |
The workflow consists of only two blocks, where we have to specify which email template we want to send and which list it should be applied to.
5. Measure and improve
As we mentioned earlier, you can't run a good email program if you don't measure your campaign results.
If you're sending a one-time marketing offer, give yourself at least 24 hours before you start analyzing your open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This will give your recipients enough time to respond to your message and place their order.
When analyzing your results, keep in mind all the major factors that could have affected your results: the subject line, your offer, your target audience, the email template you used, the time you sent the campaign, as well as any external factors. it can also be important.
Take the timing of your email campaign as an example. In our recent study on the best time and day to send an email, we identified which times and days correlated with the highest opens and clicks:
Equipped with this, you can start coming up with new ideas and planning your future campaigns that will drive even higher results.
Time to send your own email marketing campaigns
Now that you've learned the basics of email marketing, it's time for you to take action.
If you feel ready to start running effective email programs — to build and segment high-quality lists, design high-converting email templates, and continually test and optimize your campaigns — I have good news for you.
You can do all this inside a single tool. And it's completely free for 30 days - no credit card required.
If this all sounds good to you, just sign up for a free trial and start getting real results.
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