What Is Email Marketing And How Does It Work?

In this article, you are going to learn what is email marketing and how does it work for your business?

If you are a beginner at email marketing, by the end of you reading this article you will have an understanding of what this digital marketing strategy can do for your business.

Let us start by looking into...

What is email marketing?

• In its simplest form, it is electronic mail sent to communicate with your customers.
• In other words, it is marketing using email.
• Is sending emails from your business to customers with the aim to promote your products and or services, events, and branding. This allows businesses to develop long-term relationships with customers.
• Is a marketing channel that can be used to run your business on autopilot by using autoresponders and automation.
• Is a direct and personal way of getting in touch with a targeted audience.
• Email marketing is a digital marketing channel and it is used to deploy your marketing strategy and achieve business goals.

The different types of emails you can send are:

1.  Welcome emails
2.  Discounts
3. Promotions
4. To inform
5. And educate among other things.

How does it work?

• For email marketing to work you need autoresponder software.
• And your business needs to offer leads something of value in order for them to give you their email addresses.
• Your business goals should align with your email marketing strategy.
• These 3 will enable email marketing to work for you.

Now that you are up to speed with what email marketing is and how does it work.

This marketing strategy will benefit your business as I will show you below...

Email marketing will help you achieve some of these business goals:

1. Increase sales
2. For brand awareness
3. Lead generation and nurturing
4. Increase loyalty and customer lifetime value

Let us delve deeper into the business goals so you have a clear understanding of how email marketing can drive those outcomes for you.

So Increase sales:

• It is one of the advantages of using email marketing that you can easily increase sales.
• By sending your leads or customers in your list, emails that are called abandoned carts.
• Which you can easily create and set up using automation and you set them in an autoresponder sequence.
• You can also set up conditions in your autoresponder that if an email is not opened then resend the same email after a day and that will increase your sales.
• Setting up campaigns you can use for retargeting any website visitors who showed an interest in your brand.
• This will convert some and thus increase your sales.

Now brand awareness:

• This is easily achieved because customers already want to hear from you.
•  So you can educate customers about your products,  services, and business opening hours.
• This all depends on the nature and type of your business.

Email marketing will help you in achieving your lead generation and nurturing goal:

• By offering the traffic that comes to your site or landing page with something of value commonly known as a lead magnet.
• You can create nurturing sequences to move the leads down the funnel.
• This is when you educate and inform so that you build trust which will result in sales.

Email marketing enables your business to move customers through the buyer lifecycle and that will increase loyalty and customer lifetime value:

• If you provide your customers with what they want, they will be loyal to your brand.
• You can offer them other solutions to their problems.
• This will result in increased customer lifetime value for your business.
• They will add more to their cart because of the level of trust they have for your brand. 

Let us talk about why use email marketing in the first place...

• Email marketing is as important to your business as inventory is because once you have an email list.
• You are able to email those leads forever or until they unsubscribe from your list.
• An email list is an asset to your business and so goes the saying that the money is in the list.
• So this marketing strategy enables you to build a customer database and the good thing is that you own the list.
• Email gives you the ability to communicate with your customers on a one-to-one basis in their inboxes and by personalising your messages.
• It allows your business to build long-lasting customer relationships, create brand awareness and increase sales and revenue.
• This digital marketing channel can deliver the highest return on your investment commonly known as ROI.
• The return on investment for email marketing is, for every $1 spent you receive $36 back. This is according to Megan Moller of litmus.com here!

So the benefits of email marketing are many but below is a few:

1. It is the most effective channel to retain customers with high open rates.
2. You can build a highly targeted audience which is a win-win situation for you and for customers.
3. This channel allows customers to open emails when it suits them and their inboxes are private.
4. Email marketing is permission-based meaning the messages you are sending are being received by customers who voluntarily want to hear from you.

You can read more about the 17 advantages of using email marketing in small businesses here!

How to do email marketing the right way.

Earlier on I mentioned that your business needs an email marketing autoresponder.

• There are so many to choose from but as a beginner, you can test the waters by signing up for a free plan and working your way up the platform.
• Before deciding on an autoresponder you need to figure out what your desired outcome is for your business.
• This will help you choose an email software with the features that support your business.
• For example, if you have an e-commerce store you need an autoresponder that integrates with your platform.
• The other example will be if you are a nonprofit business you need an email marketing service that cares by offering you a discount.

I have this article about the best autoresponders for beginners here!

After you have got your email autoresponder, you need a lead magnet.

This is something of value that you will give to your leads so they can voluntarily give you their email address.

 As part of building your email list so you start enjoying that ROI.

• You need to create or provide your leads with something of value and this is called a lead magnet, for example, a checklist, cheatsheet, toolkit, free download, coupon code, free sample and etc.
• The format in which this lead magnet should be can be in video, pdf, and many more.
• To find out more about lead magnets, this is all referenced in this article written by Mary Fernandez here! 

You have now seen how email marketing is important in your digital marketing efforts.

And to make it work for you, these 3 things which are email marketing software commonly known as an autoresponder, lead magnet, and your business goals have to be aligned.

Conclusion:

So far I have covered what email marketing is, the different types of emails you can send, how email marketing will help you achieve your business goals, why you should email marketing in your business, the benefits you can derive from this marketing channel and how to do email marketing the right way.

Below are a few takeaways about using email in your business:

1. An email marketing autoresponder and a lead magnet will get you started with this digital marketing strategy and channel. 
2. Most of the autoresponder software is fast becoming an all-in-one platform, for example, GetResponse. You can read more about this autoresponder here!
3. You are able to use their conversion funnel for leads, build a website using their AI builder if you do not have technical skills for website building.
4. Create landing pages using prebuilt templates and embed opt-in forms.

All these are email list-building tools that you can use, in most email marketing autoresponders.

There we have it about email marketing in your business and if you are new at email marketing.

This strategy needs to be implemented right away.

So that you can reap the full benefits of using it in your business, as I have already mentioned.

This has been an article about what is email marketing and how does it work? 

I hope if you are a beginner at email marketing you have found this helpful.

Thank you so much for taking your time to read this article and more on email marketing tips and hacks coming soon!

Please let me know in the comments section what your thoughts are and anything you need me to help you with.