Based on the 2019 DMA study, it seems businesses tend to receive an ROI of 42 USD for every dollar spent on their email marketing. This proves that this kind of marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing disciplines.
Email marketing basically means sending a commercial message through emails. The commercial message sent to a group of email users refers to every email sent to a current customer or a potential one. This act can be considered as email marketing which includes sending donations, advertisements, request business or similar, using email option. The goal which email marketing strategies seek to achieve include trying to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Building these objectives means sending email messages in order to improve the relationship and cooperation between a merchant and their previous, current or potential clients, or all of them together. With purpose of repeating business and expanding the market, this method can help enhancing a merchant’s relationship with his current or previous customers convincing them to purchase something immediately. When it comes to increasing the number of new clients, email marketing can enhance this aspect as well using a technique of sharing third-party adds and testimonials.
Since digital literacy and presence on almost any platform requires having an email account, this fact is completely understandable and logical. In other words, the main advantage of email is its ubiquity which dictates and conditions the existence of other channels, social media accounts or even apps. In everyday life it reflects in everybody’s need for an email account, from professionals to students, in addition, anyone who wants to use the internet in any form. With approximately four billion people have at least one email address, which makes email second to none when it comes to potential outreach, how there can be a better global online marketing strategy than email?
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is closely tied to automation platforms which have multiple purposes. Such purposes like driving sales, increasing conversions, providing qualified leads and other factors also enhance global email marketing strategy.
As much as traditional platforms essentially allow you to send email blasts and track parameters like click through and open rate, adding automation to your email marketing campaigns will provide setting conversion goals, and secondly, automate many of the elements of an email campaign. These elements include sending “thank you” emails after a purchase is made; sending abandoned cart reminders; sending special offers including discounts or, simply gaining insight as to which emails contacts open. The capability of marketing automation software for monitoring every digital interaction a lead has with your business, makes this platform more refined and sophisticated than traditional email marketing platforms, and therefore more efficient and effective.
Email Marketing Tools
In order to apply the previously said, an individual who wants to get the best from email marketing may resort to email marketing tools such as Sendinblue, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Benchmark, HubSpot, Drip, Campaign Monitor, Active Trail, Constant Contact or GetResponse. Different tools provide different service and outcomes of their employment. For example, Sendinblue is considered all-in-one Sales & Marketing Platform which is a user-Friendly automation tool and a landing page builder. The next one, Mailchimp, is recommendable for advanced segmentation, comparative reports and multivariate testing. However, ActivateCampaign is a dynamic, customized lead scoring which enables unlimited, flexible segmentation, while the of the most famous marketing tools, Benchmark, is applicable as a code editor, an engagement automation platform or a photo editing one.
An important and inevitable component of email marketing and automation is lead scoring. The process of assigning a value to leads which represent the stage they are at within your conversion funnel is referred to as lead scoring. It can enable more targeted marketing efforts and compatibility between the marketing and sales team, leading thus to increased sales.
So, what leading score actually is? It is a marketing methodology for ranking leads with purpose of determining their sales-readiness. Leads are being scored based on the interest customers, or potential ones, show in your business, their current place in the buying cycle and how they fit regarding your business.
Scoring leads can be obtained by assigning points, implementing rankings or using certain terms. What is significant is that marketing and sales increase their joined efficiency and productivity adhering to the clarity of a sales-ready lead. The scoring systems that can be regarded best rely on demographic and firmographic attributes, like company size, industry, and job title.
Identifying which leads are ready to move to sales and which leads require further nurturing, with no lead left behind, is the ultimate goal of scoring systems.
When comparing and selecting the best email marketing software for your marketing needs, a few elements are deemed useful and recommendable, among which are pre-designed Mobile-Responsive Templates, Third-Party, Apps/Integrations, List Segmentation Abilities, Personalization Capabilities, Advanced Analytics Tools and A/B Testing Tools, Heatmaps, 24/7 Customer Service, Lead Collection Tools and Ease-of-use.
Email marketing can be related to as permission marketing. It has been considered a direct way to offer value to the people who have already shown interest in the product or service you have to offer. They would usually like to have more information which can be achieved by sending out educational resources, special offers or discounts when available. What makes the whole situation desirable is the fact that the audience is definitely interested in what they are being sent to and will not consider such pieces of information spam. On the contrary, they will be grateful for having them.
However, these valuable data may end up in a subscriber’s spam email collection or, in some cases, they can be blocked by the email services provider. To avoid your marketing strategies turn into ineffective ones, you need to avoid this happen, or downsize it to a negligible amount.
As much as good lists of emails is important in marketing strategy and sales increase, nourish them by offering value. And value can be provided by improving yours product and service high quality, by enabling users to unsubscribe if they wish to and by removing invalid addresses who do not show any interest in what you offer. No matter how much you want to expand your business, remember that quality wins the battle over quantity. Therefore, do not be annoying and unethical like some who do not refrain from buying email lists of potential customers. This attempt often ends up as a one-way ticket to a blacklist and eventually to all your subscribers’ spam folder.
To make sure your offers are delivered to the right subscribers, start creating a different list for each location, and garnering leads through different landing pages. Then, approach the usual segmentation process.
Another unavoidable step is localizing the website where the products or services are being better informed about, as well as all your marketing assets. Localizing your website, which is far more than just a translation of the website content into a required language, you enable your website meet and satisfy the linguistic and cultural, as well as regulatory and technical standards of the target audience.
In making and keeping this process sustainable and more successful, email marketing automation platforms provide tools to manage multilingual campaigns and international subscribers.
As an example Mailchimp can be listed as a platform which automatically stores your subscribers’ location information. In this way it makes segmentation not only possible, but easier as well. The platform also includes auto-translation features, which help with creating and organizing translated versions of the website content. The benefit of the auto-translation option is that it shows the relevant translation according to the user’s browser language, and this characteristic is not the main feature of Mailchimp only, other like HubSpot and GetResponse as well.
With all known and discussed, we realize that the help of localization expert is highly demanded if we want make our email campaigns internationally successful and profitable. The message we want to convey will be given the ideal tone, subject line length, and imagery by a localization professional who can even provide help in meeting the target of the regulatory and technical standards of the locale.
In order to reach the goals of gainful email marketing campaigns, make sure you send the emails when they are most relevant. To know when is the right time to hit the sending button, make some assumptions considering who your target demographic is, and thus adapt your email campaign to it, providing some useful and lucrative data. Make sure your customers need what you offer and in the way you offer. Make sure the moment or season of your offer coincides with the necessities of the customers during that period. If the time is not your ally in the process, then give discounts, gifts or pre-subscriptions to updated versions of your product or service, or simply pre-subcriptions or an eased purchase in the season when they might need. Whatever you do, keep the cycle going and do not let be thrown out of the marketing game.