Your business knowledge should be questioned if you are still ignoring email marketing as a strategy to boost sales and increase the customer base. While there have been various technological advances that might have seemingly made this marketing strategy look archaic, it’s simply not the case. Statistics reveal that people still use email more than any other online platform. This is the time to reconsider your stance on email marketing.
How to start email marketing
Email marketing is a campaign strategy that is used to send commercial messages to a group of people via email. This strategy leverages on your ability to get these people to allow you to send messages to their inbox. This group of people you are sending messages to could contain customers you are trying to encourage to buy from your business again and potential customers you are trying to attract to your brand. Building a quality email list is a priority.
To run a successful email marketing campaign, you require the right tools. Once you have your email list, this list of tools should begin with an email verification tool and an email drip campaigns tool. The importance of these two tools will be discussed extensively later in this article.
Of course, there’s more than just tools that weigh into whether or not your campaign will perform well. To run a successful email marketing campaign, you have to do it the right way: be polite in your emails, always remember that, after all, you’re a guest in their inbox and your audience can always block you if your presence becomes unnecessary or annoying; let your recipients understand the purpose of your emails right from the start; make sure that you supply them with great content and mix business with a few updates and simple messages.
Why you need an email verification tool
Email verification is a form of security for your email marketing campaign. Deliverability in email marketing is extremely important, and your sender score influences your deliverability. It determines whether your messages are delivered to the inbox or the spam folder.
A high sender score helps you on your way into your audience’s inbox, and to keep it high, you need to know and work on the factors that it. These are the two most common ones:
Hard Bounces
Hard bounces happen when you acquire a list with fake email addresses, email addresses that are no longer in use, or email addresses that are permanently unavailable for any other reason. As a result, your emails simply can not be delivered an receive a hard bounce. An email verifier helps you clean your list and identify these emails, reducing the number of hard bounces and preserving your high sender score.
Spam Complaints
The higher your spam complaints rate, the lower your sender score. Ideally, you want to keep your rate lower than 0.1%. Sending quality content to your audience simply might not be enough, as there will always be people making these complaints. This is where your email verifier comes in handy. It flags and filters out users who often mark emails as spam for no real reason and helps you dodge a potential bullet.
The importance of email drip campaigns
Drip campaigns are a set of automated email messages that are sent to users based on conditions, schedules or triggered by an event. A drip email campaign consists of a list of pre-written emails, so there is no need to manually compose the messages each time you want to send the next step. You create your campaign once – and reap the rewards.
An advantage of using drip marketing is that while the messages are automated and pre-written, you can add a touch of personalization to the message by customizing it with the recipient’s name, company, job position, or any other info.
What’s even better, you no longer have to worry about forgetting to send a follow-up at the right time. You can use triggers to make sure the follow-up email is sent exactly when the lead is most likely to convert. For instance, you want to send a new subscriber a welcoming message while nurturing your current customer base. You wouldn’t want these two messages to get mixed up. Drip campaigns are very useful for these purposes, as you can create multiple flows for multiple groups of leads within the same campaign.
An email drip campaign tool can also provide detailed real-time analysis on how your campaign is performing with your audience. You can monitor conversions, open and click-through history, and see how many people unsubscribed from your newsletter.
