It’s easy to think email marketing is dead. With the advent and rise of social media, most people will tell you to focus on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok to increase your business success. While those platforms are great for promoting your products or services and establishing customer relationships, please know that you can’t avoid email marketing.
Despite popular belief, 91% of US adults like when companies they do business with send promotional emails. According to McKinsey, email is almost 40 times more effective than Twitter and Facebook combined in helping businesses acquire new customers. eMarker also suggests that the median ROI for email marketing is 122%, making the ROI of this tactic four times higher than other digital marketing strategies.
Still, the financial benefits of email marketing aren’t the only reasons to start attracting and nurturing email subscribers. There are many other advantages of prioritizing this tactic.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
When email marketing becomes a core strategy for your startup, you’ll experience various benefits on top of a significant ROI. Some of the most prevalent results include the following:
- Money and time savings: When you’re running a business, you may have little time and limited financial resources. Fortunately, email marketing is cost-effective and easy to automate, so you can rack in big bucks without spending much time or money.
- Stronger customer relationships: When someone becomes an email subscriber, they’ve opened the door for you to provide useful, relevant content. This opportunity gives you a chance to add value to your target audience and create stronger relationships.
- Reliable communication platform: If your Facebook or Instagram account shuts down unexpectedly, you can lose access to your following for weeks or months. However, if you have an email list, you can maintain contact and connection with your target audience, making email marketing a reliable platform to lean on.
While attracting and nurturing subscribers can lead to many benefits, it’s essential to be clear: you can’t see the benefits of email marketing if you tackle it haphazardly. For this digital marketing discipline to work, you must approach it wisely.
The Best Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
Success doesn’t come easy with email marketing. For any campaign to work, it must first be persuasive. In Meera Kothland’s book 300 Email Marketing Tips: Critical Advice And Strategy To Turn Subscribers Into Buyers & Grow A Six-Figure Business With Email, a persuasive email will do the following:
- Convince subscribers to take action
- Tell a great story instead of selling
- Make the main point clear and obvious
- Include metaphors, similes, and analogies
Equally important is the second step to success: have strategic content. Most entrepreneurs are unsure of what to say in their company emails, and if you’re one of them, that’s okay. This article can help. Below is a list of five types of email marketing campaigns you can implement to attract, nurture, and convert subscribers.
1. Welcome Series
When someone becomes a subscriber, please don’t take their interest for granted. For positive results, acknowledge new subscribers by sending a series of welcome emails, with the first hitting their inbox immediately after subscribing.
This initial email should thank subscribers for joining your email list, welcome them to the club, and explain what they can expect to receive. Following that can be two or three additional emails that you send periodically. These can focus on introducing your company and values and offering educational content that new subscribers would enjoy.
In a welcome series, the main goal is to build a foundation to grow on, not to sell your products or services. Your primary objective should be familiarizing subscribers with your brand and providing helpful resources.
2. Email Newsletter
Having a blog is a great way to build relationships with your target audience. But if you want to ensure people actually read your blog, you need to consider having a newsletter. With this type of email marketing campaign, you can send a weekly or monthly roundup highlighting your company’s most recent blog content.
When doing this tactic, try to incorporate visual elements to make your newsletters appealing and engaging. For example, including a high-resolution image to accompany each headline is a great idea. Also, make sure to write a CTA telling subscribers to read more. That way, they don’t simply scroll through your newsletter but take action.
3. New Content
Does your business create a lot of content or offerings? If so, you’ll definitely want to try this type of email marketing campaign. When you have a webinar, e-book, infographic, podcast episode, coupon, or free trial, announce it to your subscribers. Doing so will drive traffic to your content and add value to those on your email list who want to learn or take advantage of a good deal.
Just make sure to tackle the email content in this campaign effectively. For great ways to approach it, take the following steps:
- Be descriptive but brief
- Convey the offer’s value
- Have a clear CTA
- Use actionable language
These tips will ensure subscribers read your email and take action, which should be your goal. Otherwise, the content and offerings you’ve created won’t get needed exposure.
4. Transactional Emails
The biggest thing you want from subscribers—and anyone in your target audience—is action-oriented steps. You want them to download your whitepaper, attend your webinar, buy a product or service, and more. But what should you do after people take a step? Send them a transactional email.
This type of email marketing campaign is simply a way of confirming and thanking someone for taking a specific action. If someone filled out a form to attend your webinar, send them a confirmation email reiterating the event details. If someone purchased a product, send them a confirmation email with shipping information and other relevant details. Doing so will give people a sense of ease, knowing they’ve been acknowledged and that everything will proceed as planned.
5. Re-engagement Emails
Over time, you may notice a portion of subscribers who don’t open or click on anything in your emails. This behavior is a sign that they’re not engaging with your email content, which means you need to target them with re-engagement emails.
For this strategy, the primary goal is to re-establish contact and a connection with your disengaged subscribers. In these types of emails, you’ll want to ask for feedback on how to improve your processes to provide the most value. If your subscribers reply, that’s great! Take their feedback seriously and implement whatever tips you can to get them active and engaged again.
The Power of Email Marketing
For your startup to grow and succeed, take time to create and implement different types of email marketing campaigns. And believe that the time you spend won’t go to waste. When your business experiences big financial returns and stronger customer relationships because of your email marketing, you’ll thank yourself for developing effective campaigns.