Great sales experts know the enormous potential of Email Marketing to affect people and close new sales even before the Internet became popular!
What no one expected is that, even with the advent of artificial intelligence and the viralization of social networks, E-mail Marketing would continue to be one of the most powerful tools in a company’s Digital Marketing arsenal!
The great benefit of this strategy, still very poorly explored by businesses (despite being implemented by every self-respecting brand), remains the same since it emerged — allowing for absurdly more communication:
- Direct;
- Customized;
- And effective when it comes to converting a potential customer into a buyer!
With each evolution from the analog world to today’s super technological scenario, E-mail Marketing has done more than guarantee its place among the most profitable modalities on the Internet.
Email Marketing has also shown that the secret to selling more, better and in a predictable way in the modern world requires returning to a simple origin:
- Identify who your right audience is;
- Educate him on what your brand can do for (or with) him;
- And ensure that this audience leaves this relationship satisfied with the results.
It is with the intention of sharing with you my more than 20 years of experience with Marketing to sell as much as water in the desert, that I dedicated this entire content to answering:
- What is Email Marketing;
- What are the types of Email Marketing;
- What are the benefits of Email Marketing;
- And how to do your Email Marketing the right way!
If you’ve heard somewhere that Email Marketing is “dead”, this content will serve as a defibrillator to prove otherwise: that with a little reality check, your strategy will be brought back to the world of the living!
Or, better yet, to the world of those who sell !
What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is a strategy used in Digital Marketing to send persuasive messages to contacts interested in the brand (or the topics it discusses) at an individual level and within a permission list, aiming to promote:
- Ideas;
- Offers;
- services
- Products;
- Or contents!
Just as Digital Marketing is not exactly new — it is just Marketing with specialized technologies for capturing and using virtual data that give the suffix “Digital” to this discipline —, E-mail Marketing is just a recent name for an old acquaintance: Permission Marketing.
Even before Seth Godin named Digital Marketing Permission Marketing, direct mail was already performing this function decades before the Internet!
The “Email Marketing” strategy of the past was limited to pamphlets, magazines and other graphic materials, sent by companies to the different segments of the target audience with the greatest potential to become customers (those considered “qualified leads” at the time) through the postal system of the neighborhood, city, state or country!
What was previously called “direct mail” — a term originating from direct advertising between a person with something to gain from the sale and a potential buyer — became “Email Marketing” when the most intimate means of communicating with another person became e-mail instead of letters.
“Email?! Intimate?!”, someone will ask with an ironic tone, adding: “How can Email Marketing be effective if no one uses email these days?”.
This is where most companies go wrong when it comes to communicating with potential customers through Email Marketing.
They think that “nobody” sees what they send — and it is precisely this thought that gives them the right to worry little about what will be seen by whoever opens the message!
Speaking of quantity, the fact is that no account can be created, on almost any social network or instant messenger, without the active use of an email account.
Not even activating a new device can be completed without adding an email address to register the account details and the applications it will use!
Ultimately, when people lose their devices, they always go back to the email address to recover bank accounts and collections of interests.
Speaking of convenience and security, when traveling to places with unstable Internet access, people communicate important matters preferably by email: the most reliable way to ensure delivery of a message to someone interested!
And more than for urgent or formal situations, emails are accessed daily by 58% of people — and, by a curious parallel, this is the same proportion of people who are more focused during the day: people capable of making informed decisions instead of procrastinating over a doubt!
The key word is “decisions”: the sign that Email Marketing is a way to take advantage of these statistics and guarantee a click, a visit or a sale is that the person is opening the email before even saying “good morning” to their partner (or the dog) in bed!
If direct mail previously depended on a printer and a postman to arrive at the lead’s door before they checked the mailbox, an Email Marketing flow has an automated system to:
- Send automatically and at the right time;
- Catching the lead when they need it most;
- And make him make the most “natural” decision at that moment.
The foundation of Email Marketing is permission — because without a lead’s permission (and email address) for your company to communicate with them, you won’t have anyone to talk to — but once you get permission, it becomes easy:
- Capture accurate data about leads;
- Segment potential customers with high accuracy;
- And personalize messages capable of triggering an action in them (click, access, download, purchase, etc.).
By mastering email marketing, you are the one who masters this narrative — you just need to know what kind of message to send!
Types of Email Marketing
I said above that Email Marketing is a system for intelligently sending messages to individuals within your company’s contact list who are interested in the product or service it offers.
The “Marketing” in the name of this tool indicates that a flow of email messages within this strategy will always be adapted to a lead’s level of awareness regarding:
- An action on his part and on something that is important in his purchasing journey ;
- To the challenge he seeks to solve with his business expertise;
- And the receptiveness of this lead in relation to your offers and future approaches.
I mean that the categories of messages vary, and can cover areas:
- Promotional: with offers, discounts and promotions to encourage consumption by leads;
- Transactional: to confirm recent purchases, update accounts, or keep the lead informed about the steps of shipping a product, or applying a service;
- Multimedia: involving announcements and newsletters, blog updates and other content relevant to the target audience among the contacts.
Because this technology accurately collects data including reading time, the number of message openings, and even the number of links clicked, it’s easy to cover the most important areas for your business with the most personalized type of message possible to generate openings — or whatever your goal is!
It’s not hard for an email marketing stream to drive conversions — and by a “stream,” I mean a series of messages that vary the areas they cover in an effort to start and nurture a relationship with leads.
Just to give you an idea, a recent study showed that, in the year 2023, 30% of marketing professionals worldwide stated that their email marketing campaigns had an open rate that varied between 10 and 20%. Another 58% reported that their open rate was between 20 and 50%.
The public’s openness to a message sent by email is so great that it didn’t take long for Email Marketing to separate itself from other strategies to be planned with extra attention.
After all, this is where a good part of the income for most Internet businesses comes from!
Email Marketing as a Digital Marketing Strategy
You can achieve a higher net profit percentage on top of automated Email Marketing strategies — a rate that competes head-to-head with other types of manual initiatives altogether!
It’s such a large amount that Digital Marketing has embraced Email Marketing and made it work better than ever by expanding the impact and increasing the effectiveness of messages with:
- Content Marketing, directing contacts to informative articles, relevant videos and digital lectures (webinars), increasing public engagement with the brand;
- Social networks, allowing the sharing of content that is increasingly personalized to the type of follower being converted into a buyer;
- The company’s positioning as an authority in an industry by sharing not only its product and service offerings, but also its passion for solving the problems it sets out to solve;
- And making Customer Success a reflection of the brand’s own success!
The benefits of an email marketing strategy
As if increased conversion rates weren’t a good enough reason for someone like you to give Email Marketing the attention it deserves, I have other benefits to share — all based on decades of practice!
When it comes to a lifelong Digital Marketing strategy — one that is sustainable and capable of attracting, capturing and converting leads in an automated way — Email Marketing plays a fundamental role in making the tactic work.
When Email Marketing is thought of strategically, your company gains the opportunity to experience the achievements (which I have listed below) like never before!
Starting with the most important one…
Direct reach
Unlike the ever-changing algorithms and privacy policies on social media, your emails are guaranteed to land directly in your recipients’ inbox!
In addition to providing an effective way to communicate with your audience (whether en masse or at a detailed segmented level), you make the promotion of your services or products immune to the moods of third-party platforms — and guarantee a flood of sales with each new submission!
Effectiveness
It is precisely because it has such a direct reach that the effectiveness of Email Marketing becomes higher than other forms of promoting sales, offering an excellent ROI (which is the return on investment)!
This effectiveness is multiplied by segmenting the audience into groups to receive different types of content, ensuring personalization that guides leads to act in accordance with your business’s financial objectives.
Email Marketing also ensures that you keep your business relevant to each different group within the general audience you serve — providing new sales opportunities even to those who have already purchased from you!
Engagement and retention
Loyalty is a very important element in a successful Digital Marketing strategy, as keeping customers engaged translates into:
- Greater profitability in the medium and long term;
- Better positioning of your company’s website in search engines and on social networks;
- New sales to old buyers.
When it comes to retention, Email Marketing keeps leads glued to your brand through content and offers that matter to build a lasting relationship with it — inside and outside of messages!
Increased brand authority
An “offer that matters” is any relevant and valuable content to make a potential customer’s life more informed and easier as a result!
By making rich materials, such as e-books, available to the audience most likely to buy what your business sells, you position your brand as a reference figure in the sector in which it operates.
In general, the more influential your referral is — and the more valuable content from your company appears in front of potential customers as they search for answers to their questions, desires, and problems — the more authoritative you will be on the Internet!
This trust has a positive impact on the purchasing decision of every new lead that comes across your business in the digital landscape, and will also tell search engine algorithms what position your content deserves among global search results!
Email Marketing flows are a way to ensure that your audience’s expectations about the authority of your business will be met, and that:
- New business opportunities will be generated and nurtured;
- Mature relationships between customers and your company are converted into sales;
- And sales already completed will lead to the generation of new sales to the same people.
Easily measurable
Speaking of people, one of the main advantages of Email Marketing is the way it can track and analyze the most detailed metrics about your audience.
You can know:
- What is the message open rate;
- How many clicks they receive to be read;
- How many people access the links in the messages;
- What is the conversion rate from strangers to buyers;
- And basically any other data that describes the engagement (or lack thereof) between your perfect audience and your business’s offerings!
High conversion rate
Once you’ve captured all the most important data about your leads’ behavior, it’s easy to increase your conversion rates because:
- You know very well who your audience is;
- Understand what type of content makes him act according to his objectives;
- And ensure that this action is satisfactory for the customer too (and not just for your company).
Email Marketing has one of the highest conversion rates among all forms of Internet advertising because, when recipients like the content published for free by your brand in a Digital Marketing strategy, and choose to sign up for your mailing list, they give permission for your brand to contact them!
This situation is the opposite of what many companies do: they try to capture as many emails and phone numbers as possible, to approach people who have never heard of the brand and who have very little (or no) interest in what it has to sell!
Since it is the visitor who chooses when to become a buyer, Digital Marketing ensures that this lead will feel seen, while Email Marketing ensures that they will feel heard!
The result of this combination is fantastic: you point to a product or service, and your customer goes there and buys it!
Don’t let your Email Marketing die! (contains irony)
It is obvious that the incredible benefits of Email Marketing require overcoming a series of challenges to become a reality.
Starting with the most obvious barrier: producing an email subject line that stands out in a lead’s inbox is a task for titans!
Not to mention that despite being immune to the privacy policies of third-party platforms (such as social networks), email communication is still subject to data privacy regulations that must be followed at all costs!
In addition to these technical and bureaucratic aspects, being able to create a human connection with the lead on the other side of the screen — and making them feel like they are talking to another person in a close but non-invasive way — requires some practice.
Look at the image below and consider the following points that transform any email into a strategic sales piece:
Use a personal sender address for the sender’s address;
Create an eye-catching subject line to make someone select the subject line of your email in their inbox;
Think of the subject line of your email as your chance to announce an idea , product or service, but in a subtle and indirect way;
Consider using a greeting and farewell that demonstrates respect for the lead’s time;
Take care when presenting facts, data, information and other variables that will personalize the message to the perfect segment to generate results;
Speak like a real person;
And A/B test to find the best version of an important message!
The ingredients I listed above are the best to bring your Email Marketing back from the dead — and this time to track your sales to infinity and beyond!
I will explain how to develop each of them in the step-by-step guide below!
How to do Email Marketing: campaign steps
1. Define your goals
Setting clear goals for your campaign will ensure you know:
- What type of segment of your target audience you will need to reach;
- And what action will need to awaken in him!
For this reason, starting your Email Marketing planning by defining an objective with a beginning, middle and end will give you absolute control over:
- The results to be achieved;
- The size of the investments to be injected into this mission;
- And the simplest way to make them a reality!
The objective varies by campaign, which in turn are groups of messages with a specific narrative, sent in an attempt to take the potential customer from point A to point B.
This goal could be increased sales, increased lead generation, or expanding your brand recognition and authority!
Try to stay focused on achieving the objective until the end of the campaign and use this initial definition to compare your results and identify where you got it right and where you need to improve for the next attempt!
The important thing is to know where you want to go — and head towards it!
2. Build your contact list
Knowing where you want to go, the next step is to build or hire a platform to collect, store and categorize your Email Marketing contacts!
One of the easiest ways to take the first step in this task is by creating a capture form on your website: a page or element where your visitor can introduce themselves with at least a name and an email address.
This capture can also be done by registering for webinars, classes, lectures, or digital seminars — as well as registrations for other events that take place online, such as a symposium or a live video session!
Since a visitor only becomes a lead after they give your company permission to contact them, the possibility of converting this relationship into a sale only becomes realistic after you start working on your contact list.
Email Marketing strategies have all the tools you need to do just that!
3. Choose an Email Marketing Platform
Capturing the first few email addresses in your contact list isn’t everything: you need a platform that helps you use them!
Many people imagine that when they create a database with their leads’ contact information, all they have to do is copy and paste the addresses into the recipient field of Gmail or Outlook, and send the message en masse.
The reality is quite different!
To ensure that emails are sent only to the right people, at the right time, and with the lowest chance of the message being filtered as spam, you need to choose an Email Marketing platform with authority in the market.
These Email Marketing managers are usually part of Digital Marketing technology packages with extra tools for:
- Create landing pages;
- Analyze the behavior of leads;
- Get insights into content performance;
- Manage contact data;
- And even manage sales data!
The brands I will present below are famous both in Brazil and around the world. They are safe, fast and prepared to ensure that each message from your company will reach the user who matters most: the one who buys!
Start by checking out these three great options:
- The RD Station;
- Mailchimp;
- And HubSpot .
4. Create relevant content
Setting goals and choosing a sending platform to build your contact list for Email Marketing means nothing without content:
- Valuable;
- Relevant;
- And irresistible to your audience!
Because it’s such an intimate chance to get in touch with a lead, there’s not much room for error in the content of the message sent to them.
Knowing this, keep in mind which content corresponds to the interests of each segment of your audience that the messages will be sent to!
Take care with the subject titles of your content to attract attention, but do not fuel controversy or lie about the material contained in the email.
In fact, the more authentic your message, the more clicks your company will generate simply by being who you are — and that’s the kind of result that Email Marketing can generate for businesses like yours!
5. Test and optimize
I recently talked about A/B testing emails: a simple way to send two versions of a message, but with only one difference between them, to find out which version performs better!
There is no better place on the Internet to do this type of preference testing than on Email Marketing!
Knowing what pleases your audience allows content and layout to merge into one, unifying the lead’s content consumption experience (which begins with them opening the email) with the natural act of purchasing (guiding them to the urgency of closing a deal immediately after a narrative that is relevant to them).
With A/B testing, you can test all sorts of things to create an email (or an ad) with the lowest bounce rate — and the highest conversion rate — by tweaking details like:
- The subject of the messages;
- The best time to send;
- Different subtitles;
- Different CTAs (calls to action);
- And other structural elements to optimize your campaign’s performance!
Speaking of performance…
6. Analyze the results
It is essential that your team keeps an eye on the biggest metrics of your Email Marketing actions:
- The opening rate;
- The click rate;
- And the conversion rate.
Without recording these rates, you will not have any realistic comparison of how your strategies and investments are bringing the results they should (or not).
Worse still: you won’t know how to adjust current efforts to save resources and multiply results at the same time!
Most Digital Marketing platforms record all types of important events in the construction of metrics that inform the results you need to know to make the right choices, but to summarize briefly:
- By analyzing your open rate, you will understand both what prevents someone from accessing the subject of your message, and what makes someone prefer to access it;
- By identifying what generates the most clicks (click and tap are the same thing in this case, just so you know), it will lead you to understand what causes reactions in the audience;
- And by increasing your conversion rate , it will be a sign that something in your message will have influenced the increase in people taking the action that your brand asks for in the body of the message: access, find out or buy!
By analyzing the results, you will have complete information about what content to produce next to achieve the objectives that were pending last time or go beyond the records previously broken.
Email Marketing is an extraordinary tool for this because it is truly personal — unique and non-transferable!
Email Marketing Trends
When we talk about trends, start by knowing that everything people predicted for Email Marketing was wrong — except for those who said that the tool would become frighteningly profitable, which is what happened!
With that in mind, know that the predictions of success — and the evolutions — of E-mail Marketing as a strategy to increase sales, point to a powerful future!
Starting with the implementation of artificial intelligence: algorithms can now analyze millions of micropoints of behavior, in microseconds, on the way a lead consumes your message!
Telling the difference between a message written by a bot and one written by a loved one is going to become increasingly difficult — that’s a fact! As far as crime goes, this is terrible news.
When it comes to ethical and regulated sales methods such as Digital Marketing, this personalization only does good for the customer to leave this relationship satisfied:
- Having the answers you need;
- Whenever you need;
- And explained in a way he understands.
Optimization and increasingly responsive design will mark the place of email as an extension of the physical world: almost like a drawer on your office desk, where you keep everything important, but connected to the entire world 24 hours a day — and it fits in your pocket!
These ultra-technologies can also automate a huge workflow that currently falls on your human teams and prevents them from doing what they do best: actually selling!
Keeping an eye on these changes is a complicated challenge, since new tools emerge all the time and Email Marketing evolves at a faster speed than ever seen before.
One of the solutions I recommend in a case where planning Email Marketing is an inconceivable task for your team at the moment is to hire an agency like Enjoy Minder as a partner.
Letting someone keep an eye on these trends — and apply them to your business without you having to spend resources on it — maximizes your results (and always at the lowest possible cost)!
Go beyond the inbox!
Email Marketing is not dead!
What is dead is my desire to not try to convince people who are inexperienced in Digital Marketing to:
- Knowing that Email Marketing has more to do with relating to a lead in depth than the email tool itself;
- Understand that there are promotional, transactional and multimedia types in E-mail Marketing flows and that these types mix in the long journey of customer relationships;
- But, they come down to benefits that cannot be found in other modalities, such as reach without depending on third parties and the highest conversion rates on the Internet!
If my tips for implementing these tactics are too complicated to follow here on the blog, I recommend that you take our free Digital Marketing Diagnosis + Consulting.
The process is carried out by experts here at Enjoy Minder — all handpicked by me — to ensure you are using the best tools available to grow:
- More;
- Better;
- And in a perennial way!
Get in touch and secure your place among the most profitable companies on the Internet! I, and the thousands of future fans of your brand, are waiting for you!
