Email Marketing: The Secret Sauce of Business Profits

Did you know that there are 3 times more email accounts in the world than Facebook and Twitter put together? Also, emails ensure 6 times more click-throughs than Twitter alone! These are real statistics that would have a business owner sit right up. But we bet you aren’t prepared for this: In the history of marketing, Email Marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing channel ever!

You cannot do anything meaningful in the virtual world without an email account. It’s literally your passport to the digital world. Forget creating a social media account or signing up for anything without an email address. Therefore, emails are a regular necessity – much like air and water!

Virtually every brand or company in the world has engaged in email marketing. Although email marketing has existed for many years, it remains the unsurpassed champion of content marketing.

In this blog, we’ll run you by from the very definition of email marketing to tips and tricks that will make you an email marketing pro. 

What is Email Marketing?

That’s a million-dollar question with a pretty straightforward answer. Email marketing, simply put, is the use of email to promote your business. Email marketing can be leveraged to promote new products, extend offers, cultivate client relationships, keep current customers informed and much, much more! In other words, email marketing is a direct form of marketing (similar to marketing through snail mail) but in the digital realm. Email marketing was born right with the birth of the Internet, evolving considerably since then as the world’s most powerful marketing tool. 

Why is Email Marketing important?

But what’s all the rave about email marketing, anyway? And why has it attained a godly reputation? Here’s why email marketing is so important for businesses of every shape and size:

1. Email marketing helps you stay in touch with your core customers

Emails allow you to keep both existing customers and potential new clients informed about what’s going on with your business, new promotions, etc. The credibility of emails lies in the fact that most individuals on your email list have already done some business with you (or else, they wouldn’t be on your list!)  

2. Emails are more personal and engaging than other digital messages

Emails are now a part of our DNA and collective conscience. Emails, to millions, are also a habit. People tend to respond to emails in some way and therefore provides a big chance for businesses to find new leads.

3. Email repercussions can easily be measured

Email marketing is an enormously valuable tool for businesses looking to obtain real-time data about their customers. Data in terms of conversion rates, click-through rates, subscribe and unsubscribe rates, etc. can speak volumes about how the business is doing.

4. Email marketing is the most user-friendly!

It is extremely easy to run, monitor, and evaluate an email marketing campaign compared to any other marketing platform including social media. The world’s best email marketing tools are simple and user-friendly because they kept in mind users like you and me.

5. Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective

Email marketing is by far the most inexpensive of all marketing avenues on the Internet. Email marketing has the highest ROI (Return on Investment) among the various marketing channels. While marketing on social media can cost a lot, especially for a beginning company with tight marketing budgets, email marketing comes as a sigh of relief. With cost per conversion literally in pennies, it still gives the best conversion rates of all time, in a short time!

Email Marketing metrics every Marketer must know

The email marketing lexicon can be extensive. But here are some key jargon to help you measure the results of your email marketing campaigns:

1. Open rate

Open rate is the most important email marketing metric vital to understand how well your subscribers are receiving your emails. The open rate indicates the number of subscribers opened the email you sent. Open rates can give you insight into the success of your subject line copy. Most email campaigns average an open rate of a little over 24%.

High open rates indicate one of two things – a high degree of brand loyalty or fantastic subject lines. On an average, emails only have an open rate of 24%. 

For example, studies show subject lines that use subscribers’ first names are 26% more likely to be opened. Other strategies, suggest using emoticons in subject lines or keeping subject lines direct and short, which would show a considerable increase in open rates as well.

There are certain tactics that have been known to work well when it comes to subject lines. For instance, subject lines that are direct and short or use emoticons, are likely to have higher open rates. Similarly, using a subscribers first name in the subject line is known to increase open rates by 26%. 

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR is yet another common metric that measures how many people clicked on the links in your email. Click-through rates are normally much lower than open rates with an average of slightly over 4%.

3. Conversion rate

The conversion rate is a calibration of the number of people who have clicked on the link and then finished a specific action. For example, if you included a link in your email for your subscribers to make a purchase, the conversion rate tells you what percentage of people who clicked the link made an actual purchase.

4. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is a measure of how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. A high bounce rate suggests that your list may be full of fake email addresses, old email addresses, or addresses with mistakes in them.

Tips for creating emails that convert

If your email marketing is not getting enough conversions, or if you’re doing email marketing for the first time, the key lies in crafting effective emails. This section takes you through some tips and tricks of email marketing to help your business make real sales.

1. Write a catchy and unavoidable subject line 

The email subject line is the gateway to the email. A good subject line and an average subject line can be the difference between recipients opening your email, deleting it or, even worse, reporting it as spam. 

2. Pay attention to the Preview Text

It’s not just the subject line that makes an email tick. It’s also the preview text – the piece of text that tells subscribers more about the content of your email. Often, this flashes part of the first line of the email. 

3. Choose the right words

Word choice is extremely crucial to make reading your email a great experience, and since most emails are short, every word counts. If you want to stir readers’ imagination, appeal to their emotions and get them to take action, you’ve got to use words that resonate with them. And the only way to do it is to know your customer inside out. 

The right choice of words plays a big role in the success of an email marketing campaign.  Copy that creates an emotional connection with the customer is far more likely to have better outcomes. Ans understanding the customer thoroughly is the key to using the right words. 

4. Be relevant in what your email is saying

We can’t emphasize this one enough. Avoid generic marketing language, outdated content, and repetition. Sending relevant email improves open and clickthrough rates remarkably. 

Relevant content is perhaps the single most important thing when it comes to open and click-through rates. 

Email Personalization Techniques for Higher Conversion Rates

Email personalization is a way to genuinely connect with your customers by sending content that matters most to them. Personalizing emails boost open rates by 26% and generate a 760% increase in email revenue.

1. Email list segmentation

If you want your emails to be read, send it to the right people. The best way to improve email personalization is through using email list segmentation. Email list segmentation helps craft personalized emails for different groups of people, dramatically improving open and click-through rates. Using the right marketing tool allows you to automate email campaigns in a targeted, segmented and personalized way.

2. Individualized email messaging

Individualization doesn’t just mean including someone’s name in a subject line. Individualization is creating engaging content that resonates with the target audience. This may involve sending out personalized images and videos, recent purchase details, or sending out product-focused content that only relates to certain email lists. 

3. Behavior-based emails

Sending emails based on a customer’s behavior ensures that you will remain relevant to where they are in their customer journey. Email marketing automation helps you send out behavior-triggered emails to the right customer at the right time.

4. Social media integration

Including social media buttons within your emails can drive more traffic to your social channels and your website. You can actually upload your customer lists from email to your social channels. This allows you to connect with your customers in a personal way and on multiple platforms. 

Videos in Email Marketing

The future is here. According to the latest reports, 63% of businesses have started implementing video content marketing. Out of which 82% of businesses feel video marketing is an important part of their marketing strategy. Video is progressing rapidly and will reach new heights sooner than we think. This trend is fueled by 83% of businesses believing that video marketing gives them a good ROI. What makes email video marketing so powerful?

1. Video Boosts Sales

Most people understand better when they look at visual content vis-a-vis text-only content. Adding a product video on your landing page, for instance, can increase conversions by 80%.

2. Video Promises Better ROI

83% of businesses think that video provides a better return on investment. Even though video production is not yet the easiest nor cheapest task, it pays off big time. 

3. Video Builds Credibility

Trust is the very foundation of of sales. Video content makes brands and their products look more tangible, more credible, and more believable. 

4. Customers love video

Who wouldn’t love a bit of visual entertainment? Customers certainly prefer videos to content that requires reading. Videos also work with different age groups and transcend language and geographical barriers. 

How to Send a Video in Your Email Marketing Campaign

The best way to send a video over email is to embed it within the email. Here are the different tools you can use to embed your video:

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s video merge tag helps create video screenshots in your emails. The screenshot is linked to the original video on YouTube, Vimeo, or other such social sites. The screenshot that gets created is, in turn, linked to Vimeo, Youtube or whichever hosting platform the video is on. There are various tools to help you do the same.

2. TailoredMail

TailoredMail helps upload, encode and embed videos into your email campaigns for instantaneous sending. They also track each individual subscribers viewing behaviors.

3. HTML5

HTML5 is another great way to incorporate video content in your emails. It is also the latest popular technology for embedding videos into emails. It offers significant benefits with rich media experience to viewers.  

Being one of the newer techniques, HTML5 provides a far richer viewing experience for users. Here is a list of some email marketing services you can use in 2019.

4. Embedding videos to play perfectly on all devices

It’s important to remember that an embedded video can behave differently on different devices even within a mobile responsive theme. The embed code for videos is not always designed to meet the criteria that allow all mobile devices to display the video correctly. While the website’s graphic components are adjusted to the width of the device, the videos are not automatically adjusted to fit the screen size, which can make viewing unprofessional and difficult. One of the best solutions for this is by using the right plugin. If you use WordPress, for instance, Responsive Video Light is a plugin that will help you resolve this problem and allow you to display the video correctly on all devices. 

How does Video Email Marketing work?

At the end of the day, email marketing has the same goal as every other marketing activity — lead generation. So any video email campaign is designed with the ultimate objective of generating and nurturing leads. Here are some important things to keep in mind while executing a video email marketing campaign:

Journey goals

This is the first step in any successful email marketing campaign — understanding what you want out of it. A campaign can focus on any of these areas of the customer journey — awareness, interest, desire, or action — or a combination of them. Once you decide your overall goal, it’s time to break it down into smaller, measurable objectives. Of course, make sure you include both quantitative goals (eg. Increase sales cycle speed by X%, or Boost upsell rates by Y%, etc.) as well as qualitative ones(eg. Build more trust among existing leads).

Build drip campaigns

An effective drip campaign is the key to good email marketing. Drip campaigns are automated emails that go out to users based on specific timelines and/or user actions. Here’s what the structure of a drip campaign looks like:

This example shows that a drip campaign is all about giving the right information at the right time. For instance, if someone has just subscribed to your email list, the first welcome email should go out immediately, with a follow-up email of some of your best content in the next few days. Similarly, if someone has been hovering around your upgrade page but hasn’t yet made a decision, a targeted email video explaining the top 5 advantages of upgrading can tip them over the edge.

Tips to make a great email marketing video

Creating an effective email marketing video necessarily entails following some basic principles around audience understanding and messaging. Here are some proven tips to keep in mind while creating your video:

1. Tell a specific story

Like any good marketing video, an email marketing video needs to tell a compelling story and one that forms an emotional connection with the audience. At the same time, emails tend to be targeted and specific so the video content has to align with the specificity of that email.

2. Create a punchy title and an outstanding introduction

First impressions really matter when it comes to video marketing. This is especially true when your video is in an email as a user is only going to scan it for a few seconds before making the decision to watch the entire thing. Make sure the title is stimulating and the introduction impactful.

3. Include a CTA (Call to Action)

Make sure your video ends with an effective CTA based on the objective of the campaign. For instance, if the video is a teaser for a new e-book, make sure the link to the e-book is included at the end. Even if your email has a CTA it’s important to include the CTA separately in the video as well.

4. Quality matters

Unless it’s a UGC (User-Generated Content) video where authenticity is the most important, quality is something a marketing video really needs to have. Customers will judge the reputation and credibility of your brand by how professional your video is, and you cannot afford to go wrong on this one. If you can’t afford to hire a good video designer, use a video creation tool like Rocketium to build a professional-looking video.

5. Email video personalization

Email personalization is not a new concept. We’ve all received marketing emails addressed to us, and sometimes with our name included within the copy. “Merge tags” help you achieve this effect quite simply. Yet, having that same level of personalization in an email video takes things to the next level. Luckily, you don’t have to manually create a new video for every customer. Video creation platforms like Rocketium have the tools that allow you to add a personalized touch to each of your videos.

5 Tools for Email Marketing

There are two types of tools you need to make email marketing campaigns more effective: tools that help you create email marketing content and tools that help you plan and execute the marketing campaigns.

Email Creation Tools

1. Rocketium

One of the most effective marketing content formats today is videos. Yet, most companies don’t have the resources to produce professional videos and choose to stick to traditional text-based formats. Rocketium provides a solution to this problem. It essentially automates the work of a talented video designer, allowing you to build world-class, professional videos without needing any technical expertise. You can embed videos into your emails and take your email marketing to a whole new level with Rocketium. 

2. Canva

With Canva, you can design all kinds of email marketing templates, from newsletters to recommendation emails to new product features alerts. Canva has tons of templates and you can pick the ones that suit your brand aesthetic. Canva also has an extremely simple drag-and-drop interface that can help any marketer build professionally designed email templates. It’s the one tool you must have in order to create outstanding emails without having to hire a professional designer.

Email Scheduling Tools

3. MailChimp

MailChimp has been around for a long time but is still an industry leader when it comes to planning and executing email marketing campaigns. It’s an all-in-one marketing platform that works really well for SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses). It has a number of email templates as well as advanced features like audience segmentation, email personalization, scheduled campaigns, and so on. 

4. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is one of the best email marketing and marketing automation tools out there. It has a wide range of features that only help you create, schedule and send timely emails but also track your marketing efforts. These include features like automation goals, maps, attributions, segmentation, split testing, and subscription forms. 

5. SendInBlue

If you’re looking for a value-for-money solution, SendInBlue is a good option. Their basic plan (which is free) has most of the important features needed in an email automation tool and is ideal for small business who don’t send out too many emails. It also has a range of free plug-ins, a high delivery rate, responsive design emails, and a great drag-and-drop editor.

Our 5 favorite Emails

While tools are important to scale up any email marketing strategy, like all other forms of content marketing, the key to effective email marketing lies in the content. If the copy itself is unappealing, there’s simply no way to make the campaign work. Here are some of our favorite email copies. Although widely different, they’re all examples of email copy that enjoy fantastic open rates and CTRs.

1. Spotify

This email from Spotify is everything good email copy should be — personalized, aspirational, and actionable. It takes personalization to the next level by making the user feel like they’re being rewarded for their usage of the app and well, their taste in music! From the “top listener” label to the “special access to passes”, the whole email has an air of extreme exclusivity. The kicker is that even the mention of Lady Antebellum’s new song and the link that takes the user straight to the app has that same feel of exclusivity.

2. JetBlue

Here’s another example of personalized email copy, but with a very different approach. JetBlue uses something as simple as the date that someone became a subscriber to create a customized email. The email has so many different elements— from personalized references to the user’s journey to a CTA to book their next holiday. But what really stands out is the wit and humor that’s used. The email leaves you with a smile on your face throughout and without your even realizing it, JetBlue has successfully built a great brand image for itself.  

3. Twitter

Emails are one of the most effective tools to engage customers through every step of their user journey. Recommendation emails are the key to this; the right recommendations can take a newbie user and turn them into a product advocate. Effective recommendation emails are something Twitter does really well. The moment you choose to follow certain accounts, their algorithms are able to filter similar accounts and curate a list of recommendations that just make users go back for more. A user who followed her favorite place for brunch on Twitter got this email with carefully curated recommendations.

4. Netflix

Netflix is another great example of effectively using email marketing to keep customers hooked to the product. Everyone knows that Netflix has so many choices that it takes far too long to search for exactly what you want to watch. Through its email marketing, Netflix does exactly that for you. Based on everything you’ve watched before, Netflix sends an email with just one show that has been recommended specifically for you. In one stroke, it does away with the problem of plenty, shows you something you’re interested in, and makes sure you don’t cancel that subscription. 

5. Nike

A lot of the times less is indeed more. And Nike’s email copy is a perfect example. With minimalism, classy visuals, and to-the-point content, Nike’s email conveys its core message effectively. Given its demographics, the CTA focusses on Men’s Shopping but it has other options like Boys’ Shopping and Girls’ Shopping as well.

In an extensive survey, a whopping 59% of respondents said that emails influence their purchase decision. This just goes to show that emails are still among the most powerful marketing tools out there. Given the fact that every business out there is jostling for space in a person’s inbox, your messaging becomes extremely important. Building quality email videos that are personalized, professional, and add value, can be the ultimate differentiator. Whatever you do, remember that a good email campaign is a combination of two ingredients — great copy, and seamless execution.