Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing (series 1 of 5)

Email Marketing Overview

Why is email marketing so important?

Email marketing is much more than just sending out a quick email. It is an easy, inexpensive and effective way to reach a large number of your consumers within minutes. No matter the size of your business, email marketing is a vital marketing tactic as many have voted as 'most effective type of digital marketing and the least difficult to execute' (survey completed by Ascend2).

What are the benefits of Email Marketing?

Customer Retention
It is obviously extremely important to make sure you don’t lose customers. Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your customers to let them know your still in business. There are many different types of emails that you can send, ranging from invitations and limited offers to company updates and after sales emails. All of these will help to keep in contact with your customers to ensure your brand is still something they will continually recognise.

Improve Customer Relations
An inbox can be a place of excitement as you can lighten up someone's day with a simple invite, exclusive offer or a bargain they will actually be interested in. It's vital that you know your audience and once you know their preferences, whether that be the type of email client they use, products they're interested in or simply their location you can then create a targeted email just for them. Using our segmentation tool together with personalisation means that you can make a huge difference with very little effort to ensure your subscribers are receiving emails which are relevant to them.

Increase Sales
Email is well known for being one of the most cost effective marketing tools with one of the best ROI. Even if you have a small budget, email marketing can still help you achieve those all-important sales, and when sending personalised emails to targeted lists you immediately increase your chances of a sale. When you combine that with A/B testing to ensure you are using the most effective subject line your open rates will increase and therefore your potential sales will do so too.

Why use an Email Service Provider?

If you want to send out nice, professional looking emails and don’t want to have to worry about coding it (or learning how to code!) then using an Email Service Provider is important, as well as many other reasons.

Email design
Select from a wide catalogue of ready-made fully responsive templates, which will looks great no matter which device it is viewed on, whether it’s a tablet, mobile or desktop.

It is incredibly simple to customise your chosen template using the drag-and-drop editor included within the ESP which means that you can add your company’s own brand identity with ease, and insert your content and images at the click of a button.

Creating great looking emails could not be easier using an ESP as all of the hard work has already been done for you, all you really have to do is add your own content to the template and you’re ready to send it out to your consumers.

List management
One of the main reason why you should be using an Email Service Provider is that your mailing list will be managed automatically. Therefore if one of your subscribers decides that they want to opt out of your newsletter, rather than having to manually remove them from your mailing list, all they have to do is click a link within the email and they will be removed automatically.

It really is that simple.

You can even place a subscription form on your website or Facebook page which can also be created with an ESP. This process is also completely managed as any of your visitors that sign up to your newsletter using these forms will be automatically added to your mailing list, meaning you never have to go through the painstaking process of adding them to the list yourself.

Delivery
If you are constantly sending your emails in bulk from your Gmail, Yahoo or even Outlook accounts there is a high likelihood that your emails will begin to get rejected by your recipients email servers, or your email address may even be shut down by your free email provider as it is probable that it will look like you are spamming.

Whereas Email Service Providers are highly trusted by the major ISPs which will mean that your emails will get delivered as intended. As you will be using their powerful servers, your newsletter will be delivered into your subscribers inbox in no time at all.

Statistics
In any form of marketing it is important that you know how effective your campaign has been and therefore statistics are crucial. Sending to your subscribers through your Hotmail or Gmail account means that you don’t even know if it has been delivered, never mind the depth of analytics that an ESP provides.

Within the reports and statistics of an ESP you can find out which emails have been opened, how many times a specific link has been clicked within your email, if they have shared it and even whether they have viewed your newsletter in Gmail, Outlook or on their iPhone.

Knowing this type of information about your subscribers will help you to make changes to future email campaigns helping to achieve the best possible results. An example of this is, if most of your subscribers are opening your email on a mobile then you can make it more user-friendly by using buttons rather than hyperlinked text.

Free to try
The vast majority of Email Service Providers offer a no-obligation free trial which you can sign up to in order to try out the platform before you make the decision to sign up. For a limited period, these trials give you all of the advanced features of the paid account so why not make use of it and see what it’s all about?

You can sign up for a 30 day free trial with GraphicMail here; http://graphicmail.co.uk/get-your-free-trial

Even after you’ve reached the end of your trial period, you can take advantage of our free account which has a contact limit of 500 and allows you to send to them up to 10 times a month.