Email Marketing and How to Use it – Tips & Tricks

Email Marketing is another powerful tool in your arsenal that must be used carefully in order to attract customers. If you use this tool successfully, it will be able to attract many customers and help business boom. With just a few missteps in handling this tool, however, it may not attract any customers at all – or worse, it may convince potential customers to NOT do business with you. With such a high apparent risk, it can cause one to wonder why people decide to use this form of marketing. Fear not, however – for with proper use the risk of this tool decreases dramatically, and I am here to help you to understand how to properly use email marketing.

Why is email marketing even important?

Simply put, a lot of people use email. HubSpot notes that the first email was sent in the 1970s, and that since then the number of email users has grown astonishingly. HubSpot has estimated that there are over three billion email users as of 2020. With a user base as large as three billion people, it may seem more understandable all of a sudden as to why marketing firms want to tap in to email as a place to advertise.

With an estimate of 3 billion users, it’s no wonder companies want to tap into the global email market.

Are there not risks to marketing to such a large audience?

Marketing always comes with risks, not matter where or how you send your message to people. Sometimes your messages simply fall on deaf ears. However, we can work to minimize this risk as much as possible. First, we will need an email marketing strategy. An email marketing strategy can be used to market products and services as well as nurture relationships with people through the medium of email. It is important to remember that on the receiving end of your emails is a real person and not some drone that only exists to be marketed to. How you interact with potential customers in this space matters, and can make or break sales. Inbound methodologies are great at this – that is, methods that attract, engage, and delight customers in order to provide value to and build trust with your customer base.

With a simple three step inbound methodology such as “attract, delight, engage”, we can get our customer base satisfied and growing quite easily.

How do I use each of the stages?

The stage of attraction requires a bit of teamwork from a few different departments of a company. Marketers need to use gained knowledge to create helpful experiences and content for whatever email you may need to send out as a company. Anyone on the sales team may need to anticipate any questions that a curious customer may think of reading an email. The services team may need to provide information about your company inside of the email to make sure that customers can easily find more about what your company is and how to find it, along with how to find more information.

The stage of engagement involves building a relationship between you and your customer, and getting them to click whatever you send them. Mailchimp suggests that there are multiple tiers of relationship with a customer that one can have, depending on how long the customer is subscribed to your emails and how often they perform activities with your emails for them. A metric such as this can be useful in evaluating how well your emails are doing at engaging customers.

The stage of delight is when a customer finally buys in to the subject of your marketing efforts, and hopefully enjoys the subject enough to become a sort of marketer themselves, providing info to others about your subject by either word of mouth or more emails. You will not need to do anything for this particular step – by now, you have built enough trust in the customer that they will do all the hard work in this step on their own.

What tools do I have to make an effective inbound marketing strategy?

You do have a few tools at your disposal to make an effective inbound marketing strategy. The first is segmentation. This is the ability to send the right email to the right person at the right time. Using this tool can be tricky, but looking back at past tools can help you better understand this one. Specifically, personas and the Buyer’s Journey are useful tools to navigate the segmentation tool. Personalization of emails and data-driven analysis are also important tools for making your inbound marketing strategy effective.