What Is Email Marketing

In a world full of screen and information, it is hard to get your voice heard. Advertisements are everywhere and more and more tailored to target specifics audiences and being able to successfully and efficiently promote your store or products has become increasingly difficult and challenging.

Marketing is a never-ending work but the benefits can be game-changing. There are hundreds of different ways to market what you are offering in your online ecommerce store and email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to do so.

You may be wondering what is email marketing exactly, and we will try to give you as much information as possible.

We will also give you some introduction about what type of email marketing campaigns you can create, what you should pay attention to when you are preparing your future emails and we’ll introduce some of the best email marketing tools available. Let’s see what email marketing is, and why you should do it too!

What is email marketing and how it works:

Importance of Marketing

Marketing is a big word and can be quite intimidating for some people, but it is quite simple. Marketing is all about bringing exposition to your business, driving traffic to your online ecommerce business and ultimately convert the audience you brought in as customer and buyers.

Spending time and resource on marketing is important for various reasons, the first one being information. Marketing is useful to educate your potential customer and audience in what you do, what you sell, and what your brand is about. In other words, how can you expect to sell anything, if nobody knows that you are selling products or what you are selling? Marketing is an efficient way to inform people that you exist and have something for them.

Similarly, marketing is an efficient way to engage to with your audience and customers. In today’s global market, keeping in touch with your potential customers is of utmost importance. A constant contact with them will give a sense of proximity that can potentially improve your retail conversion by opening a conversation with the buyers and reminding them of your presence and offers.

Marketing is also a good way to show that your brand is still active and strong. Just like we mentioned before, by engaging with your audience, you show that your store is still online and selling products.

It might sound simple, but in a world with thousands (if not more) of online store and giants like Amazon, eBay and such, showing that you are alive and well is important to keep your clients interested and active in your store. Traffic is hard to get, it can be even harder to maintain, so you should use marketing to show your presence.

Getting to know your audience better is also one of the key aspects of marketing. With various campaigns of different format on multiple platforms, you will learn what type of advertisement your customers like, which one they click on more, which one they watch longer, and which one convert the most.

Marketing is a great way to learn more about your target. It is unlikely that every marketing campaign you will try will bring great results, some will most likely fail, but you can use the gathered knowledge to improve your next ad!

Finally, marketing is useful to bring in more traffic, and ultimately, more sales. Through advertisement campaigns and information, you will gather new visitors to your website. Marketing campaigns can be highly efficient when combined with some promotion in your online ecommerce business.

Create special offers in your dropshipping store or website, and promote them to your potential customers through various types of marketing campaigns, on social media, via videos, on Google or with some emails!

Email Marketing

As we described above, marketing is versatile and can be used in many different ways, for various purposes. Email marketing is one of the most used and proven marketing technique to reach your audience. Email marketing, in essence, is the use of email to promote your business, products or services.

It could be anything as simple as an email sent out by you that introduces your latest launch of a new product, or a current discount. Email marketing is used to inform, drive sales, building brand awareness and keep your customers engaged.

It is very easy to set up an email campaign. First, you need to build your own email list from people who have given express permission to receive any email communication from you.

For example, you can add a newsletter sign-up form on your website to collect email addresses and grow your contacts. If you are big on social media, you can also direct some of your followers to your email lists. Either way, make it crystal clear when they are opting in to receiving email communications from you.

Then, to avoid sending out those hundreds of emails manually, you can utilize email service providers such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Aweber, etc, that we will introduce more later.

These are some of the major players in email marketing that help users send, manage and track email marketing campaigns including crafting your own engaging email templates and automating the process of sending emails to a large number of audience.

These email service providers also provide some more advanced features to help you optimize your email open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate.

A/B testing is a great example of a useful feature. With this feature, you can find out the best combination to optimize your email by testing different variations for email subject lines, contents, designs, calls-to-action and even tones. Compare the results to see which one gets better engagement so you can use the same formula and approach next time.

Type of Email Marketing

There are two main types of email marketing campaigns you can consider depending on what you are trying to achieve.

Promotional Emails:

The first type of emails you can send are what we call Promotional Emails. Promotional email, as the name explains itself, is used to promote anything like special offers or any form of sales events. It offers incentives to encourage customers to make a purchase to drive sales and revenue for your business.

This kind of email usually includes a clear call-to-action. For dropshippers, you may want to create a button in your emails where you can redirect your audience to the products page so that they can make the purchase straight away.

Promotional emails are a good way to bring in traffic to your online ecommerce store when you are running some events and can help to boost sales over a short period and should be used scarcely as to not annoy your customer base and keep things fresh.

Contacting your audience every week for some new promotions might be counterintuitive and promotional emails tend to have a stronger impact when they are occasional.

Informational Emails:

You can also send what is referred to as Informational Emails. This type of emails is mainly used to keep in touch with your audience and keep them updated about your online dropshipping store novelties. Informational emails can be split into 2 different categories, such as Newsletter and Announcements.

Newsletter: with them you can share any news related to your business with a set schedule. It can be weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. The purpose of a newsletter is to maintain and build a regular connection with your audience.

It is important to create such connection with your clients to remind them of your presence online and potentially update them on some news.

Announcements: those email aim mainly to inform your customers about something new, updated, or changed in your business such as a new product release, a limited-edition launch and a special event.

They can be complementary to the newsletter and are a great way to put forward a product you just started selling. It might sound very close to the promotional emails, but announcements first goal is to inform your users, not to directly drive sales.

Dos and Don’ts

Like any marketing campaigns, there are things that you should consider doing and avoiding. Pay attention to the followings and you will have more chance of success:

Never Buy Email Lists

For beginners, building an email list can be very slow and buying one seems to be a really tempting shortcut. But trust us, it is a terrible idea not only because many email service providers have a strict policy that prohibits sending emails that are not permission granted, it also violates email regulations and legal requirements from applicable laws such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Can-SPAM Act. Make sure you are familiar with related laws and follow legal requirements before you start your first email campaign.

Write an Intriguing Subject Line

The subject line is one of the most important elements of an email campaign as it is the first impression to your audience that determines whether they are going to open the email or not. So try to come up with a short sentence that is creative, eye-catching and limited to 50 characters to highlight the main topic of your email.

Avoid Using Words That Can Trigger the Spam Filter

You want your audience to read your emails and you don’t want your emails to end up getting flagged as spam. The easiest way to stop that from happening is to avoid using spam trigger words in your subject line.

Some of the examples are no catch, free money, risk-free, no obligation, etc. Think twice and carefully choose the words you use in your subject line.

Personalization

It is always nice to have some small tweaks to your emails that let your audience feel they are noticed. Never underestimate the impact of those fine personal touches as it helps emails avoid getting triggered by spam filters.

Furthermore, people pay attention to those small details and they appreciate that you are willing to go the extra mile for them.

Optimize Sending Time

You need to be strategic if you want to succeed in email marketing. Schedule the campaign to be sent out at a right time is critical.

Imagine your email is delivered at 5:00 PM, yet your audience only check their emails in the morning when they get to work.

Test different times to find out the most optimized sending time if you want your email to be the first in the inbox.

Optimize for Mobile

Most of the emails are opened on mobile devices. Be aware that mobile and desktop devices can display the same email in different ways.

In addition to that, if your email can’t display correctly on mobile devices, it will affect your brand image and make your audience think you don’t know how to properly craft a professional email.

Avoid Simple Mistakes

Don’t let your small mistakes ruin everything. You don’t want typos or incorrect links to damage your brand image. Always proofread and go through your emails multiple times to make sure there are no more flaws left.

There we are! You have finished reading the article. We hope that you are armed with enough knowledge about email marketing.

Email Marketing Tools

As we mentioned before, some tools are especially designed to help you run your email marketing campaigns and can help you automate and run them more successfully, let’s review some of them and their benefits.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a online marketing tool to help manage and connect with clients and customer. You can easily set up different audience with a list of your customers in which you can edit their details and add more information.

Mailchimp will also allow you to create and customize signup forms and campaigns. You wiil be able to get detailed reports of each of your campaign. The subscription fee is scalable depeding  on the number of contacts you hqve and you can easily find guides online

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign describes itself as a marketing automation software. It helps to automate your emails and improve your customer experience.

You can create different type of emails such as broadcast emails (similar to informational emails), triggered emails (that are sent after a certain action), target emails, auto response and more. The subscription is also scalable; similar to MailChimp, and you can request a demo for more details.

Omnisend

Omnisend is one of the top email & SMS marketing tools that’s dedicated completely to ecommerce businesses.  Omnisend helps you understand your customers better, so you can communicate with them in the right words, at the right time.

You can build your list easily with their popup, landing page, and other list-building tools. Their email builder is easy to use, and their Brand Assets features means your branding (logo, colors, and fonts) are automatically included in your emails. Their most powerful feature, however, is their automation, which allows you to set up high-converting flows like Welcome or Abandoned Cart emails that automatically get sent to customers.

Omnisend offers a generous free plan with all of its features included, and their paid plans easily scale with the needs of your business.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is another popular tool for automating your emails campaigns. It is used by a huge variety of content creator and retailers to advertise their products and creations.

Like the two previous platform we introduces, you can easily design emails and create some automations to integrate to your website. It also includes landing pages creations and email sign-up forms. It is feature-full and perfect for beginners with it’s free plan (up to 1000 subscribers).

Aweber

As other email marketing tools we describer, with Aweber, you can create personalized emails and automated sequences to send to your audience automatically.

You can easily manage your audience with tags to better target your emails accordingly. Like ConvertKit, you can enjoy a free plan (limited to 500 subscribers) so it’s perfect to get started and learn the basics.

Mageplaza Follow Up Email

Mageplaza Follow Up Email is one of the most powerful and flexible tools for Magento 2 stores that helps increase conversion rate and effectively boost your business sales.

This extension enables you to create a chain of emails that are sent to customers based on their activities automatically. This will assist you in building productive relationships with your customers to create more repeat orders. Also, this module allows sending cart abandonment emails, subscription confirmation emails, etc., to motivate your customer to come back to your store as well as make purchases. Last but not least, you can completely customize email templates and manage your email dispatch dramatically with the help of this ideal tool.

Last words

As you can see, marketing is vast and should not be forgotten is you wish to grow your business and keep your user base active. Email marketing is one of the most efficient tool to easily set up and keep your audience informed.

Different type of campaigns can be created and distributed regularly and you can try the different email marketing tools we list above to get more familiar with the subtleties of each of them.

Email marketing can help you achieve a strong bond with your subscriber and allow you to generate constant sales for your online dropshipping store!