Its scope and effectiveness for sales is unquestionable, email marketing is one of the disciplines that every consultant should control perfectly. Today, the vast majority of businesses, and especially those that live in the online world, have an email marketing strategy focused on branding and/or sales. As consultants, we must be able to assess its effectiveness and optimize resources to the maximum to achieve the best results.
That said, below we are going to offer you a brief introduction to the subject that you can complete by obtaining the Email Marketing, Automation and Funnels Certification from our ADC academy.
What is email marketing?
To know what email marketing is we will have to analyze the two concepts that compose it. On the one hand the e-mailwhich is an online communication channel, and on the other, the marketingwhich is the discipline in charge of analyzing the market to determine the necessary actions in order to attract, retain and retain customers through the satisfaction of their needs.
Therefore, email marketing can be considered as the art of using email as a communication channel between a company/brand and its customers or potential customers to sell, build loyalty, brand or provide support. The ideal is to use it as part of an online communication strategy, as another channel through which we want to obtain specific objectives, but also relying on other tools and channels of communication with the user.
Even before the existence of social networks, email marketing was used. What’s more, even some companies that have not yet succumbed to the 2.0 world of social networks and blogs have been using email marketing for a long time as the main loyalty system, often associated with loyalty cards in shops.
How to do email marketing for free?
To send an email marketing we must assess all the options and platforms available. Some will be free at first, if we do not have a large database, we are beginning to develop it. So I encourage you to take advantage of these tools to start doing your first tests without having to invest or have any budget.
Below, you can see a comparative table of the main email marketing tools that will help you when making the decision to which email marketing platform to use in each case:
As you can see, doing email marketing for free is possible. You just have to find the tool that best suits what you are looking for and get to work!
How to make an email marketing strategy?
Not everything comes down to sending email marketing. Behind there must be a strategy according to the objectives of the organization.
As we have already indicated, the ideal is for email marketing to form part of a global campaign where all channels (web, social networks, advertising…) are taken into account, however, the steps to follow to plan a campaign of this kind nature would be:
Previous steps:
- Goals: What objectives does the company/brand have? Do you want to attract new customers, retain current ones…?
- Database: Do we already have a database? What is its status? What information do we have on users? And if we don’t, how can we create one? What data will we require?…
Strategy:
- Strategy: What should be the path to follow to achieve the proposed objectives and taking into account the available database?
- Tactics: What specific actions are going to be implemented? Are we going to create lead magnets? Are we going to make offers? Sales funnels? etc.
Planning:
- Tools: What tools will I need? Which is the best for my task?…
- Equipment: Who is going to be in charge of the designs? Who is going to be in charge of the content?
- Calendar: When is the best time to implement it?
- Measurement: How are we going to measure the results?
Start up
- Design of emails: development of texts, images and assembly.
- Launch campaign: sending emails, timing, etc.
- Reports campaign: analysis and reports of results.
- optimization campaign: improvements to be applied based on the results obtained.
Marketing Email Examples
Below, we show you some examples of email marketing to give you an idea of how some campaigns of large and small brands are structured and work.