Email Marketing – Complete Guide & Walkthrough

Email marketing is sending content as an announcement, product, or campaign to users via email. Your visitors subscribe to your website that makes the concept we call E-Mail Marketing, that is, Email Marketing, which has been used for many years and still continues to be used. With email marketing, you send advertisements, congratulatory or promotional emails to your users.

Email Marketing is the use of email methods in promotion, information, and congratulatory messages made by brands to reach a specific target audience. Emails began to be used as a means of communication in the corporate world. This aspect is still used extensively today in the modern business era. But like all communication tools, it is pretty simple to convert it into an advertising medium. As a matter of fact, shortly after its invention, it served promotional needs rather than communication needs.

Email marketing is the act of sending any commercial text in bulk. One of the biggest problems of Email Marketing is getting the user to open the email and read the content. Brands need to increase their email open rates by using various methods to reach more users with their emails.

What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is one of the digital marketing methods with the highest ROI (return on investment) and interaction with the target audience, enabling advertising and promotion in accordance with the communication technologies of the age. Instead of dealing with writing emails one by one all day, you can get the maximum return on a solid roadmap at an affordable cost.

Growing your email list, driving traffic to your site or social media channels through emails will increase your subscribers and naturally turn visitors into customers. A good product and successful email marketing ensure that your products and services reach the customer base.

According to statistics, 34 out of every 100 people with an email address regularly check their email account. The next step is for these people to open emails with advertising content reaching their email addresses and turn to the links that promote the products or services in the email content.

 Although the percentage decreases at every stage, email marketing is one of the lowest cost marketing tools, and it is possible to reach thousands and tens of thousands of email addresses over time. E-commerce companies analyze the demographic information, requests, and data obtained from previous purchases of users visiting their websites and prepare a list of products that the customer is likely to purchase. E-commerce sites can do targeted email marketing using the data they have. Thus, it offers different products to each customer according to the users’ wishes, needs, and tastes. Compared to classical advertising and marketing methods, this method is much more successful and sales-oriented.

Mailing allows sending mass emails to people (mailers) in a certain target list through software or mailing lists created with the membership system. It is one of the e-marketing methods called mailing or emailing. It is the name given to the sending. It is usually done to inform people who are interested in a particular product or service about campaigns, new products, important developments, or updates.

What are the Email Marketing Success Criteria?

In Email Marketing, the essential elements to be considered in order to expect high returns are as follows.

1. Targeting: The success of an email marketing campaign is reaching the right people who might be interested in your email content, the people you need to be your target audience. For example, sending an email targeting the sale of football and sporting goods to an email list dominated by female users, between the ages of 15-20, with a faculty degree, is a disappointment.

2. Timing: In the marketing world, timing is everything. The situation is no different in the digital medium. It would help if you carried out your email marketing activities on special days and campaign periods without interruption. An email marketing that misses periods such as New Year’s Eve and Thanksgiving is like a shopkeeper closing their shop during the peak of sales charts.

3. Personalization: If your emails have a title and opening text that appeals to the recipient, the email will be more likely to be noticed and read by the user. Addressing the buyer by name and making them feel special is the key to success.

4. Attractive Content: Your emails should have solid messages and exciting content in the title and content. Study your audience well and make an effort to create text that will get them to read your email.

5. Reporting: You should filter the results of your emails by measuring and evaluating. Tracking the conversion will give you the essential tips for creating a better campaign.

Who Sent the First Email?

Ray Tomlinson is an American computer programmer born in 1941. Tomlinson was the first person to use the “@” sign in digital mail addresses and sent the first email in 1971 from the address “tomlinson@bbn-tenexa”. Therefore, this address is the first email address used in history. The content of the mail is the letters on the first line of the qwerty keyboard written from left to right: “QWERTYUIOP” The first public official to use email was Queen Elizabeth in 1976.

In 1997, still popular, Yahoo entered the email market. In 1998, Microsoft bought Hotmail.com, one of the most popular email providers of the time, for $400 million. In 2007, Gmail, the world’s most widely used email service, began to be used.

When was the first spam email sent?

The first spam email was sent in 1978. Marketer Gary Thuerk sent an email to 400 addresses on ARPANET. This mass email was an advertisement for Digital Equipment Corporation. It is referred to as the first spam message in email history because, like most spam, it is perceived as unfavorable. The first spam filter was developed in 1999. In 2003, “The Can-Spam Act” came into effect, with the signature of US President George W. Bush, which allows advertising content to be sent according to certain rules.

Clickthrough Rate, Open Rate, and Leave-in Email Marketing

Achieving the desired results in the mass mailing is a time-consuming process. Let’s talk about these by dividing them into the periods before and after sending an email. How you design your mail, which email marketing company you send with, whether your emails reach the address you mailed, etc., are the points that need to be discussed separately. Let’s say you did all of this correctly. If you think “everything is done”, you are wrong. Here the second part of the work will come into play. In other words, the reporting and analysis are to be made after mass mailing.

There are many e-marketing methods you can use to expand your brand’s sales volume. Email marketing among these, the least return rate but the most cost-effective e-marketing method. In email marketing studies, the return is low, but as the mailing capacity increases, the number of customers will increase even if the return rate is low. For example, sending 1000 emails per day with a click-through rate of 1% and the number of customers to be gained as a result of 1.000.000 emails is 1/1000. At this point, the quality of your emails is as important as the quantity. If you are sending emails that do not attract attention and that create the perception of fraud in people, if you send them in 1 billion emails, the result will be a failure, and the real users in your email list will cut off their relations with you, or you will be stuck in spam.

Email marketing, when used correctly, is the fastest marketing method that turns into sales. At this point, knowing what happens to the emails you send gives you insight. When you send bulk emails, you can determine what kind of reactions your customers show. How many people clicked on the email you sent, how many people opened the clicked email, how many seconds did the users look at your email, what are the email stay and closing times? It is possible to learn all these statistics by working with an email marketing company or by using software that will allow you to access these statistics.

Open Rate of Sent Emails

Open Rate shows who opened the email you sent. In other words, your email has entered the Inbox, the subject line has attracted the attention of the user, and the user has looked at the email. If there is an image in your email content and an anti-spam or virus program installed on the user’s email account or computer allows you to see this image, the images have been uploaded. Everything looks good so far, but just because it’s been read doesn’t mean your email marketing is successful.

Click To Rate

Click To Rate (CTR) allows you to see who clicks on the email you send, that is, the click-through rate of your e-newsletter and how many people reach your website. The goal of some email marketing activities is limited to the users included in your email list, clicking on the link in your email, and visiting the target site. So the purpose is to attract visitors. However, the goal of some email marketing efforts is to sell a product or service.

Dropout Rate

The dropout rate is called Unsubscribe. The person to whom you sent an email no longer wants to receive emails from you, so they press the “End membership” button. At this point, you lose a follower. Email marketing should evaluate the actions of leaving notifications such as feedback loop, unsubscribe list, hard and soft bounce and stop sending emails to members who have chosen to leave.

What are the Advantages of an Email Marketing Strategy?

• Compared to other advertising budgets, the cost is much lower.
• It allows you to get feedback in a short time.
• Since your target audience will become your bone mass over time, the desired recycling rates do not deviate from their purpose.
• It is a useful tool for keeping a statistic and thus guiding your future plans.
• If you have a product & service sale, having direct access to your potential customers will increase your sales.
• Email marketing does not waste trees like paper-based physical mail and flyers. It is an environmentally friendly initiative and refreshes your brand image.

Email Marketing Techniques

The answer to how to do Email Marketing is to create a Pop-Up Newsletter Subscription on your site and encourage your visitors to subscribe to your notifications. Posting engaging content on your site will make your visitors want to be aware of the following content. It is the first choice of many users to be added to an email list, where they can be notified when a new post is published, rather than bookmarking the site. In parallel with the number of visitors to your site, you can increase your email list. Following the recommendations listed below while mailing prevents mails from falling into spam, if the content you offer to visitors is interesting and the presentation of the content is successful, you can see that your email marketing strategy will be successful.

Tips for creating an email list and increasing the number of members:

• Do not bore members or users with continuous and long messages! Pay attention to sending short and straightforward messages at regular intervals.
• Focus on the subject you want to draw attention to in your email contents. Feel free to use large fonts on the points you want to emphasize in the message content, but do not do this with caps lock.
• Please write your email content carefully, do not publish it without an editorial check. Follow the spelling rules and avoid word repetition.
• Look for alternatives to common referral words such as “free, free; you won” that make members feel dishonest. These words attract attention but cause a loss of confidence.
• Check your posts periodically to make sure the links in your posts are working, and the images are open.
• Do not prefer link shortening services; let your members see the address they will go to when they hover over the link.
• Take care that the images and colors you use in the email content are compatible with your site and the email text content.
• Make sure your email content and your pop-up window are linked. Do not clickbait i.e. fake redirects.
• Check if the responsive design of your site works correctly on mobile phones and tablets.

Email Marketing Techniques Checklist

Email marketing is an e-marketing method that is low cost, easy to set up, and has satisfactory conversion rates. Measuring ROI allows you to measure the success of your email activity. The following list allows you to measure and evaluate the results of your email marketing effort.

1. Email List Growth Rate

2. Unique Click-through Rates

3. Clickthrough Rate

4. Unsubscribe Rate

5. Heatmap Monitoring

6. Delivery Rate

7. Returned Email Rate

8. Complaint Rate

9. Landing Page Visit Rate

10. Conversion Rate

11. ROI

Optimize Your Email Campaigns

After you prepare an email marketing campaign for your customers and send the first email, you can see statistics such as how many people opened your email, how many people clicked on the link in its content, how many people unsubscribed, using the reporting features of your email service provider. These statistics will give you clues about what to do in your next campaign.

You can improve your email campaign based on your data and get better results in the next post.

1. Rearrange Your Posting Time: By making the first few posts in different time zones, determine which time intervals your target audience opens the most incoming emails. For example, if you send emails to office workers, emails you send during working hours will receive more conversions.

2. Optimize Subject Line: The subject line represents the most important point in terms of email marketing. A user checking their Inbox will first see the subject line and sender ID fields. So, an engaging subject line gets the email clicked.

3. Optimize Your Buttons: The message you gave in the email subject line and content of the email attracted the attention of the user, clicked on your email, read your message. The next move will be to click on the link that will redirect to your site, that is, the button. Pay attention to every detail, including the button’s design, its location on the page, the text that describes the button.

4. Optimize Texts and Images: The images and texts that make up your email content should consist of simple, understandable, and eye-catching content that will grab the user’s attention, be easy to read and perceive. In terms of email marketing, preparing text and images is key to the success of your campaign.

Best Email Marketing Examples

Bonobos is An interactive and simple email campaign that encourages customers to take action. The customer only needs to select the size with a simple click.

Every Cook Smart’s newsletter has three distinct options for the subscriber to choose from (i.e., menu, culinary how-to, and info).

PayPal documents the customer’s journey before, during, and after processing the payment.

At a glance, you can see that the email is short and full of benefits. Dropbox sent the message with an obvious headline that provides tremendous value to the user if they come back.

Runkeeper understands email communication pretty well. In every communication, the brand aims to bring back its users by being very friendly.