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Email Marketing 101

March 29, 2023March 29, 2023 by Harriet Maxfield

Email Marketing plays a crucial role in any digital markers marketing campaign. It is a great way to nurture your leads as it allows you to communicate with those who are already subscribed to your mailing list, meaning that you are communicating with those already interested in your company. It can also increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website to ultimately reach your goals.

In 2022, Litmus found that the average ROI (Return On Investment) for email marketing was $36 for every $1 spent. With many different types of emails, you can send to your customers, email marketing is a great way for businesses to reach out to their target audience, It is no surprise that Litmus found that 79% of marketers list email marketing as their top 3 most effective marketing channels.

Getting started with email marketing

Getting started with email marketing is easy but the first thing you must do is work out what you want to achieve from your campaign. Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Convert your audience into leads? Encourage people to sign-up for an event? Establishing your goals is key to a successful email campaign and aligning those goals with your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) means that you can easily measure the success of your campaign as well.

Building a mailing list

When getting started with email campaigns companies will need to bring together a mailing list. A mailing list is a list of people to whom you want to send your email campaign. These are the people who have given consent to receive email marketing from your company. If you do not already have a mailing list you will need to start thinking of any which you can get people to sign-up for your emails. You can do this by:

Putting links/buttons to sign-up forms on email signatures, your website, your social media pages, the end of blog posts, etc.
Making sure that the sign-up form is short and easy to fill in.
Providing sneak peeks of your newsletters, this could be in social media.
Advertising offers only available through email sign-ups.

When building your mailing list you should also consider segmenting your list. You can put your audience into different categories depending on characteristics they may have stated on your email sign-up form, such as location, interests, etc.

Types of email marketing

Another thing to consider is deciding the type of email campaign you will send to your audience. There are countless types of email marketing and the type you choose to send should align with your goals to achieve a successful campaign. Types of email marketing include:

Welcome emails
Newsletters
Company updates
Job advertisements
Promotional

Different technologies

You will need to decide what technology you want to use before getting started with email. There are hundreds of different technologies available to create email campaigns, all of which have different factors which set them apart. You should choose the technologies that will help your company achieve its goals and objectives. Some examples of email marketing technologies include:

HubSpot – a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform which helps marketing teams optimise their email campaigns powered by CRM data.
MailChimp – an email marketing platform used for creating and managing email campaigns. It is best for actionable data insights to improve your strategy.
Moosend – an email marketing automation platform designed to send and manage email campaigns. It is best for creating automation and sending personalised emails.

Why is email marketing important?

There are many reasons why email marketing is important for your business. For starters people use email every day and according to Statista there were over 4 billion email users worldwide in 2020, so it is easy to connect and communicate your messages to your audience. It has many benefits, some of these include:

Boosting other marketing channels.
Keeping your audience engaged with your company.
Cost-effective
Allows for targeted messages
Generates traffic to your website

What makes a successful email campaign?

There are many things that can make an email campaign successful, these can include:

Relevant to your audience – making your email marketing relevant to your audience, whether that be through personalised/targeted content can lead to your audience driving traffic to your website and making purchases.
Engaging subject lines – subject line will be one of the first things your audience sees and this will determine whether or not they will open your email. Making your subject line engaging will help push them to open your email and click on your content.
Clearly defined goals – setting goals means that you know what you want your email campaign to achieve and it can help measure the success of your campaign.
Optimised for mobiles – according to Adobe in 2018 85% of email users use their phone to access emails.
Proofread before sending – by proofreading your email before sending you can check that you have made no errors such as spelling mistakes. Sending test emails allow you to see what your email would look like to your audience and it allows you to test that all links work and go to the right places.

Email marketing regulations

It is important to note that there are rules to email marketing. Since 2018 there have been GDPR regulations introduced that restrict whom you can send emails to. People must have given consent to receive emails from your company, whether that be by signing up for or opting in to email marketing. This means that companies need to be careful when sending email campaigns and make sure that everyone on their mailing list has opted-in to receive and has not unsubscribed.

Email marketing is a great way to connect with your target audience and it is a technique that all digital markers should consider in their marketing strategy as it is easy to do with little cost.

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Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing

March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Timera Rowe

An email icon with two notification on a mobile device

Email marketing is a strategy for the promotion of commercial messages and is a great way to increase brand awareness and generate sales. With people regularly checking their emails and opening on average 34% of promotional emails Constant Contact (Jan, 2023), email marketing is an easy and affordable way to share content and messages to a mass audience at one time.

Check out some of the do’s and don’ts below that will help you reach success in the implementation of your email marketing campaigns.

1. DO keep your emails short and concise

Statista (2021) found that on average people spend 10 seconds reading emails from brands. Therefore, is it important for the content of your email to not only draw people in with compelling copy but to be short and sweet. Recipients should be able to scan the emails you send and get the gist relatively quickly.

2. DON’T send too many emails per week

We all know the feeling of receiving too many emails from a company… it can be frustrating as nobody wants to be bombarded with promotional emails every day. We recommend a maximum of 2 emails per week, but it is always good to test what works for your audience and to adjust accordingly.

3. DO optimise emails for mobile

Email Blaster UK found that in 2018 at least 50% of emails were used on a mobile device, which is a significant amount. Therefore, it is important that you are optimising your emails for mobile use. You can make your emails mobile-friendly by:

Using device detection – many email providers such as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor offer device detection where emails can detect and adapt to different devices.
Length of subject line and pre-header text – It wise to check the length of both the subject line and pre-header text and keep them short and succinct. This will be the first thing a recipient will see before opening an email. If the most important messages are cut off when viewed on a mobile, people may be less inclined to open it.
Testing emails – a good way to ensure your emails are mobile-friendly is to send a test to yourself and open it via mobile.

4. DON’T forget to segment your audience

Email marketing isn’t a one size fits all, so make sure that you are tailoring your emails to specific groups. Different demographics will want to receive different information. For example, if you work in e-commerce and were building an email about the women’s online clothing sale, it wouldn’t make much sense to send that email everyone in the database i.e. men. Ensure you are sending relevant emails to the relevant people; you can do this by creating segmented lists for different audiences based on demographics or interests e.g., age, gender, location and interests such as sales, accessories, new season.

5. DO personalise your subject lines

Personalising subject lines typically includes a recipients first and/or last name. By making an email personal it can help to gain the curiosity of the recipient and thus increase email open rates. But don’t just take our word for it, Klenty has found that personalising subject lines doubles email open rates. For non-personalised subject lines, the average open rate they found was 16.67%. For personalised subject lines their data indicates an average open rate of 35.69%. So, the next time you send an email, add a touch of personalisation.

6. DON’T include multiple call to actions (CTA’s)

Depending on the context of the email, be wary of bombarding your email with too many call-to-actions. For instance, a newsletter may include a few CTA’s for people to find out more information, but for more sales-led emails 1-2 CTA’s will suffice e.g. ‘Check out our new sale’ and/or ‘Read our blog on the hottest trends this Spring’.

For more helpful tips and tricks on digital marketing, take a look at our other blogs here.

Email Marketing Tips For Digital Marketing Apprentices

February 11, 2023February 13, 2023 by Panashe Tapera

Have you felt struggled trying to create an email marketing campaign? Email is a complex aspect of marketing. The landscape always changes. We have listed our top tips on how digital marketing apprentices can improve their email campaigns.

Choose the right email marketing software.

Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool, so it is important to make sure that you are using the right software to improve your marketing campaign. Email marketing software’s include tools that are able to increase your audience, segment your lists and provide reports to grow your business and earn more revenue. Below is a list of 10 free email marketing campaigns to help you save both time and money:

Promotions aren’t everything.

While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to grow your business, you need to realize that promotions are not the core of email marketing. The most important aspect of your email marketing must be to establish and nurture healthy relationships with your customers. It is these healthy relationships that will result in customers providing lifetime value and act as the driving force of your business’ growth.

A/B testing is a must.

Always test important elements in your campaigns to help you constantly improve your campaigns. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a way of working out which of two campaign options is the most effective in terms of encouraging opens or clicks. In an A/B test you set up two variations of the one campaign and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. Half of the test group is sent to Version A, while the other half gets Version B. The result, measured by the most opens or clicks, determines the winning version. This is then sent to the remaining subscribers.

Preview your emails before sending.

As every subscriber is important to you, using previews will help you find the optimal format and layout for different platforms. You want to avoid any mistakes in your campaign

Experiment with send times.

Experimenting with send times is a great way to get to know your audience. Try sending email campaigns at different times and see what email receives the most engagement. Over time, you should start to see patterns and be able to pinpoint what works best for your email marketing.

Have a personalised message.

Personalisation is one of the most important elements you need to strive to nail in every campaign. However, many people have misunderstood personalisation to mean addressing a subscriber by name. While that is part of it, there’s more to personalisation such as:

Being relevant
Sending timely emails
Anticipating your subscriber’s needs

Add GIFs to your email campaigns.

Adding GIFs to your email is a great way to grab your subscribers attention, point them toward an action you want them to take, or keep them scrolling to make sure they get your whole message.

Pay attention to subject lines.

Subject lines are one of the most important aspects of email marketing. The subject line of an email is the single line of text people see when they receive your email. This one line of text can often determine whether an email is opened or not, so make sure it’s optimized for your audience.

Keep on doing tests on your emails.

Testing your email campaigns is important because it ensures that your campaign looks the way you want it to. This way, you know how the campaign will display on different browsers or email clients. Furthermore, testing lets you figure out what’s working with your campaigns and what’s not.

Conclusion.

In summary, email marketing is an effective marketing method when it is done correctly. By following these tips, digital marketing apprentices will be ready to create amazing email marketing campaigns.

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8 Email Marketing Tips for Digital Marketer Apprentices

January 6, 2023January 6, 2023 by Laura Nightingale

Have you felt overwhelmed trying to create and send an email marketing campaign? When it comes to email marketing, there are a lot of elements to consider. We’ve listed eight of our top tips on how digital marketer apprentices can improve email marketing campaigns…

Get personal

With email marketing continuing to be an effective way to communicate with target audiences, a great way to stand out amongst the crowd is by personalising your email campaigns. Including someone’s name in a subject line or the preview copy can help to grab people’s attention and ultimately get someone to open your email.

Pay attention to subject lines

In addition to testing personalisation, it’s also essential to pay close attention to the subject lines of your email campaigns. As mentioned previously, there’s a lot of competition among people’s email inboxes, so it’s important to write a subject line that will be eye-catching and engaging. Make sure to keep them short and sweet!

Give A/B testing a go

A great way to find out more about your audience is by giving A/B testing a go. A/B testing (also known as split testing) is when you create two variations of one email campaign and send them to a small percentage of your email list. Half of the test group gets sent Version A, and the other half of the group gets sent Version B. The winning email is then determined by identifying which one receives either the most opens or clicks. A/B testing can help you better understand your audience and the type of emails they engage with most.

Try adding GIFs to your email

Using GIFs in your email campaigns can really help attract people’s attention and consequently improve engagement. Just remember to make sure they are the correct size to ensure they display correctly in recipients’ inboxes. Canva is a great digital tool to utilise when it comes to making creative GIFs.

Optimise your emails for mobile

Optimising your emails for mobile is another important top tip for digital marketer apprentices. Now that such a high percentage of people usually view emails on their phone, it’s more important than ever to make sure your emails are designed for both mobile and desktop views.

Apple email app on a device with notifications

Experiment with send times

Another way to learn more about your audience is by experimenting with send times. Try sending email campaigns at different times and see what email receives the most engagement. Over time, you should start to see patterns and be able to pinpoint what works best for your email marketing.

Preview and test your emails before sending

This is probably the most important tip we can give! Do not forget to preview and test your emails before sending. The last thing you want to happen is a typo or the wrong image in your email campaign…

Monitor your email marketing performance

And last but certainly not least, make sure to always monitor and review your email marketing performance. The best way to learn about the success of your email campaigns and audience is to track and analyse their performance. Pay particularly close attention to your open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate as these metrics will indicate whether people are reading and engaging with your emails.

Conclusion

To summarise, email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to communicate with audiences. By following these top tips, digital marketer apprentices will be more than ready to create amazing email marketing campaigns.

For more advice and support for digital marketer apprentices, take a look at some of our other posts here.

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The Fundamentals of Email Marketing

December 19, 2022December 19, 2022 by Madison Lockwood

With a such a vast variety of marketing tactics to use. Why do we bring up email marketing?

To start off email marketing is a way of keeping in touch with your clients. Customers tend to have to use their email to purchase a product or service, which gives you access to advertise to them regularly via their email.

Some people believe that email marketing is a thing of the past. But it could be the future of marketing for businesses. Simply because people use email to access offers and discounts. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage with a large audience and is a great way to retain strong customer relationships.

The Importance of Email Marketing within Digital Marketing

There’s a good chance only a handful of people don’t have emails. Both older and younger generations all need emails to sign up for discounts, create an account or apply for newsletters. From 2019, over half the world’s population have been using email and is expected to increase by more than 4.3 billion by 2023. The mean average of the UK population who uses email between ages 15-64 with 85% percent of UK adults using email to send and receive emails daily.

This presents a great opportunity for your business to reach an even bigger audience. By using email marketing as a part of your digital marketing strategy your business can improve visibility and improve your digital strategy. Email marketing can also specifically target people and allows you to create more personalised messaging based on each customer’s action. This could be whether they’ve abandoned a cart or there’s a flash sale on their favourite shirt. Segmenting your audience and understanding customer relationship marketing ensures you’re giving each customer the right leads to what they want as well as giving insightful information that will grab their eye every time, they look at their emails.

If you haven’t started email marketing, we highly suggest you do as your competitors probably are. If you want to remain competitive, you need to start reaching out to your audience.

Why are Emails Good to use for Marketing?

It’s Personal: Customers like being seen, heard, and acknowledged. Personal emails can increase revenue by as much as 760%. Having a more personal direct email to your customers is a marketer’s secret weapon. Giving your customers this added touch can help build relationships and therefore gain more trust leading to more sales for your product. This keeps a healthy customer lifecycle by being more personal so the customer feels seen and is more likely to purchase items and/or services from your business.

It’s Cost Effective: Setting up email marketing is extremely cost effective. According to an American study, for every $1 spent on email marketing, you receive $36 meaning it has a conversion rate of 2.3%. You can decide how much you want to spend on your marketing whether that’s hiring an email specialist and/or graphic designer or simply doing it yourself.

Reach a Vast Audience: Having an active email address is mandatory for an account on any digital platform. Purchasing goods on any website tends to require an email address of some sort. Research shows that 61% of customers choose email as their preference to hear from brands. If the customer agrees to receiving emails, you will be able to automatically advertise what’s currently on offer with your business and/or service.

With Email Marketing, you can greatly improve your SEO due to it driving traffic to your website and increasing conversions. Gaining relevant traffic via emails means you get a lower bounce rate which positively effects your website quality score.

Mobile Customers and Email Marketing

Seeing as over 50% of users are on mobile devices, you cannot ignore mobile marketing strategies. Businesses need to find a quick efficient way of interacting with mobile consumers if they want to compete with other competitors. Two-thirds of emails are being read via phone or tablet which seems like a lot but how many times do you check your phone for emails or other messages?

To ensure that email messages work well on mobile you will need to create content with a responsive design: providing subscribers with the option to view images and videos. Any imported content like images and video must be small so they are quick to load.

Keeping your emails concise, (or the KISS method – Keep It Simple Stupid) links that can be accessed and having those lead pages be mobile friendly will all lead to having higher change of having a conversion from the customer.

Automating Emails

Email automation is the only digital marketing strategy that can be automated successfully. Automating emails helps to improve relevancy on your campaigns. Let’s say a user visits your site and looks at different items to add to their cart. They then leave without purchasing but now there’s an abandoned cart. With automation emails, an email can get sent to them after the cart has been left for a few days to remind the user that there’s items still in their cart. This will therefore give a chance of higher conversion rate.

Email marketing turns a possible missed opportunity into a strong relationship and then eventually making a sale. Creating automated emails means there’s no need to waste time or money trying to reach out to them. Emails are viewed between 6am-10am on average, so you don’t need to wait around for that peak time instead, automated emails do that for you as well.

Interactive Email Marketing

With a more interactive email marketing campaign, the higher chance it will gain appeal and response to various target market groups. Providing interactive content straight to inboxes not only keeps the user engaged but also is more cost effective than other marketing tactics. These forms of interactions could be video content, email carousels or a mini poll. Having interaction means you can also integrate other channels into your digital marketing strategy. This could be sharing the content in the email to help boost your social media networks.

You Can Measure Your Email Marketing

The only way to know if your strategy is working is measuring the results. Email marketing is efficient because its metrics are easy to track and measure over time. So therefore, you always know where to improve on it and where to add and remove aspects of content. With email marketing analytics you as a business can see which users opened emails, who clicked on linked and who made conversions.

This information is valuable as you can build a strategy to see where you need adjustments and improvements. With the right software, you can run A/B tests which allows to see which elements provide the best results.

How to get Started with Email Marketing

Choose Your Email Service Provider (ESP)

To start your email marketing campaigns you will need an ESP to help you to create and store your subscriber lists, templates and provide your insights. There are a variety to choose from but choosing the right one is important to optimise your email’s deliverability.

Building an Email List

Most ESPs will create a subscription form embedded on your website. One of the easiest ways to drive sign-ups is by creating an action or incentive for example, ‘Get a discount on our services when you sign up your email’. The quality of your leads if crucial in your capture phase. If you are actively recruiting people who are in the market for your brand, it’s going to be much easier to get your message across.

Define Your Goals and Messages

Email marketing can deliver a vast variety out outcomes, whether it’s discount codes, reminding a cart has been abandoned or nurturing new leads; before constructing your email, make sure you understand which objective you’re focusing on and who you’re focusing it to.

Craft an Engaging Email

Your subject line and preheader will essentially be your advertising point. It will determine whether your email gets opened among all the others. Making them strong and engaging can get people to click onto it and to read further if it had information that would benefit them. Making an email have a call to action is what all emails should aim for. For example, giving a discount code or a discounted flight they can book for or going back to their abandoned checkout. Don’t waste time writing huge bodies of text, get it so it keeps them engaged the whole way through, so they follow whatever action needs to be completed.

Check out our recent blog on the best free email marketing tools </a> to start your emailing strategy.

Dos and don’ts in email marketing

December 14, 2022December 14, 2022 by Mollie Elson

Are you working on an email marketing campaign and have no idea where to start? Or maybe you’ve done lots of email marketing before, but the campaigns have never been very successful? I’ve collated a list of do’s and don’ts especially for you, to help you utilise and optimise email marketing as a channel for your overall marketing strategy.

Do send emails at certain times

My first piece of advice would be to think about the times you’re sending these emails. It really does affect the performance of your email marketing campaign depending on what day or time of day you send an email out to the world. Research has shown that Tuesdays are the best day to send an email to receive the highest open rates, followed shortly by Thursdays.

Thinking more specifically into the time of day, 10am is a really great time to engage most audiences, as the majority of people are beginning their work days and are shown to be open and receptive to email marketing at this time of the morning. However, after lunch at around 2pm, engagement spikes again for emails.

Using this knowledge could really help increase open rates for your campaigns, and ultimately, lead to an increase in site traffic. Consequently, site traffic will result in higher click through rates and conversion, encouraging more customers to the point of purchase or completing whatever the call to action is for your campaign.

Don’t over-send

It’s extremely important that within your weekly marketing plans, you aren’t scheduling emails to be sent repeatedly every day or more than three times a week.

This is especially crucial if your company has lots of different marketing teams and products or services. There should be complete clarity and alignment between all teams in the company to avoid bombarding customers with hundreds of emails as this will lead to a lack of interest and could lead to them unsubscribing completely.

Do personalise content

If possible, personalising content is always a great way to engage your audience, as it makes customers feel a lot less like just another number, and can really help them feel valued by your company.

Whether this is by using the customer’s name in the opening of the email, or just focusing on what you know about them (e.g. age, gender, likes, interests), to make the email less generic.

Another brilliant way to keep this personalisation throughout the customer journey, is by then personalising the landing page to be specific, depending on what email the person clicks through on. For example, if someone is being targeted by a clothing company who knows they’re female and particularly interested in shoes, when they click through on the email, they could be taken directly to the shoes section of their website or even land them directly back into their shopping cart to persuade them to purchase.

This is a strategy called ‘Abandoned Basket’ emails where an existing customer who may have added a product to their basket, hasn’t gone through with the purchase. A specific email can then be sent to retarget that customer, as they clearly had a high ITP (intent to purchase), making them good people to go after.

Don’t make it too long

Keeping your emails concise but still detailed enough to be relevant is a skill for this form of marketing.

Often, customers will be quickly put off by a long email, and won’t even bother reading it, meaning their engagement is minimal and the email was useless in getting them to go to your company’s website.

When writing an email, ensure it’s around 200 words – this may sound like very few, but according to research it’s always best to keep them as short as possible for the greatest chance of engagement.

Do measure success

Lastly, no matter how well your campaigns perform, it’s vital you keep track of their success.

The most important KPIs (key performance indicators) for an email marketing campaign are:

Open rates
Click through rates
Conversion rates
Bounce rates
Unsubscribe rates

You must analyse all of these and can even compare your emails against one another, in order to understand what ones are driving the most engagement among your target audience, and why this may be.

Conclusion

So, emails are one of the most effective forms of marketing when they are done right!

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How to communicate successfully as an Apprentice.

November 28, 2022November 28, 2022 by Ella Krohn

Do I use an emoji in this teams message? How do I sign off? -‘ KK Els x’ . Am I sounding friendly enough? All of a sudden Teams and Email are you main source of communication. Which can be scary! Not all of us email on a daily.

Honestly, getting used to office lingo can be HARD! Not knowing how to assimilate at the start is something everyone worries about when starting a good company. Making judgements in communication can definitely be tricky. I am here to give you some advice on best practices when you start in the office

Communication is one of the best tools you can have as it will allow your team to function more efficiently and smoothly.

Work place communication

Workplace communication is any type of communication you do at work about work. This includes things like communicating about individual tasks, sharing project status updates, or giving feedback to managers or employees. Knowing how to communicate in the workplace is a key part of effective collaboration—because if you can’t communicate clearly, then you risk miscommunication, confusion, or even unintentionally hurting someone’s feelings.

Communication in the workplace can happen face-to-face, in writing, over a video conferencing platform, or in a group meeting. It can also happen in real time or asynchronously, which happens when you’re communicating about work over email, with recorded video, or in a platform like a project management tool. Some examples of workplace communication include:

Team meetings
1:1 feedback sessions
Receiving information
Communicating about project status or progress
Collaboration on cross-functional tasks
Nonverbal communication

Picture of Discussion, potentially about search marketing engining

What makes good communication?

1 . Clarity

Whether you’re sending a Slack message, drafting an email, or giving an off-the-cuff reply, aim to clearly communicate your message. making things concise and easy to read is the aim!

2. Aim to create solutions, not problems

The reason you’re communicating is to solve a problem or promote effective collaboration on a project or task. Good communication in the workplace can bring up blockers or provide feedback—but make sure the goal is to get to a better place than where you are now.

3. It goes both ways

Every instance of communication in the workplace is an exchange of information—even if one person is only communicating nonverbally.

How to make sure you’re improving?

Ask for feedback.

Feedback will be important to check in with your team and see how your communication skills are actually working. By putting all these practices together you will become a better, stronger and more confident communicator in the workplace.

Now Practice!

Now it is time for you to put some of this points into action, to help you become a better communicator. We will continue to build upon these skills. More information and tips can be found by signing up to our weekly emails which are packed full with useful info!

What Is Email Marketing and Why Is It Important?

October 5, 2022October 5, 2022 by Macy Pavey

Email notifications coming through to devices

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that can make the customers on your email list aware of new products, discounts, and other services. It can be used to persuade your email list to carry out an action, such as making a purchase or signing up to a newsletter. Furthermore, email marketing convert prospects into customers, and turns one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Emailing is so powerful and it’s easy to use, accessible and effective when sending messages from one person to the other. Email has long been a go to communication channel for individuals and will continue to be so in years to come.

Mailchimp is a popular and common tool that I use to build email marketing campaigns. Click on this link and look at this guide on how to use Mailchimp – https://www.apprenticetips.com/how-to-use-mailchimp-for-email-marketing-in-2022/

According to Hubspot “77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months”

Types of Email Marketing

Welcome emails – This type of email welcomes customers and encourages them to learn more about your product or service. It is used to introduce a potential new customer to the business.

Newsletter emails – This type of email usually include articles, blogs, and customer reviews. Usually, there will be a call to action to move the reader to do something, whether that is reading a new blog post or checking out a new product.

Promotional emails – These type of emails go out to a large audience. They are usually used to maintain awareness and may tease new products and services.

Confirmation emails – This ensures the consumer that the information has been received and they are on the list to receive additional information.

Invite emails – These types of emails often announce upcoming events, new product launches, and seminars. Companies use these emails to gain attention and increase awareness.

Survey emails – Sending out these emails communicates to your customers that you value their opinion and want to create a good experience for them.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Creating personalised content – Your content can be highly personalized to your audience’s needs. Your emails might have variations including different images or subject lines to increase your engagement by segmenting your audience.

Generating traffic to your site – With email marketing campaigns, you’ll send traffic to your site and improve your SEO. Plus, you’ll keep your audience engaged with your brand and your site.

Collecting feedback and surveys – Keeping a pulse on customer experience is very valuable if you want customers to continue to interact, engage, and purchase from your brand.

Measuring metrics and KPIs

Click through rate – The percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in each email.

Conversion rate – The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out sign up form or purchasing a product.

Bounce rate – The percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

Open rate – The percentage of email recipients who open an email.

Unsubscribe rate – The percentage of email recipients that unsubscribe from your send list after opening an email.

Email sharing/forwarding rate – The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email content to a social network, or clicked on a “forward to a friend” button.

Conclusion

In conclusion, email marketing is an excellent way of communicating and marketing your products and services. The core skills covered in using email marketing will open a wide range of business opportunities. Some examples on creating email marketing are Mailchimp, HubSpot and Sender. Also, Employers are keen to see how apprentices can use these tools to a good standard. The type of job roles that will open over the coming years could be endless for anyone that commits their future to a career in marketing!

How to use MailChimp for Email Marketing in 2022

August 18, 2022August 18, 2022 by Jack Hobson

MailChimp is a common tool for email marketing as a digital marketing apprentice. This is due to its current prevalence, alongside the specialist areas competency. However, if you’re brand new, it can be confusing – we’ll break it down to the basics so that you can be an email marketing expert in no time!

Phone screen showing the email icon with notifications.

What is MailChimp? And the Basics.

MailChimp is an email marketing tool that allows you to send slick, designed emails to your audience. Through MailChimp you can track how well your emails do with open rates, click rates, and bounce rates. And the best bit? You can do this all for free, making it the perfect tool for beginner digital marketers.

What is Bounce Rate?

Click and open rates are fairly self-explanatory but you might be wondering what bounce rate is. Simply put, an email ‘bounces’ when it isn’t delivered. This means it didn’t reach the recipient’s inbox. This could be for various reasons. For example, their inbox might be full, you could’ve entered the incorrect address, or the email was blocked. It’s important this stat remains low and to investigate it when it’s high.

Create an Email Campaign

To create an email in MailChimp simply press Campaigns, All Campaigns, New Campaign, then Design Email. This will open a new draft. In this window you can choose who to send your email to, the address it comes from, the subject, and the content. The email can be sent straight away or scheduled for a chosen time.

How to Build a Mail List

The first stage of sending an email is to have an audience to send it to. If you already have an audience, you can easily add subscribers one at a time by going to Audience, All Contacts, Add Contacts, Add a Subscriber.

But what if you have 20, 50 or hundreds of contacts? MailChimp also enables you to mass import contacts through CSV files. You can create CSV files with Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets by going to file, save as, save as (dot)CSV file. You can also copy and paste contacts from a spreadsheet.

If you don’t already have an audience, we suggest adding a sign-up form to your website. Creating buttons on the most homepage which direct to this form further the potential exposure and audience it reaches.

Using Mailchimp to Create an Email Marketing Campaign that Works

The design of an email matters a lot. You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of the reader before they make the decide to either continue reading or exit. The design should be professional, concise, and on brand.

Call to Actions

CTAs need to be direct and immediately pop out from the rest of the design. A great and simple way to integrate one is to use a button with a background that contrasts the rest of the design. Buttons draw attention and entice the reader to click them.

Layout

A good email design is generally image based with minimum copy.

Luckily, MailChimp has a selection of templates which greatly reduce your time thinking about layout. If you are on the free plan, two templates are available. These save time when designing an email and are generally good layouts to stick to when starting out. Think of them as tried and true formats. If do you want to get more fancy with your email, MailChimp even has its own design tool – a simple alternative to Photoshop if you don’t have access to it.

You also need to consider how it’ll look on various devices. To help with this, MailChimp lets you preview your designs on desktop and mobile.

Subject Lines and Previews

To create an effective and engaging email, MailChimp automatically suggests alterations to your subject lines and content. This will help your email get more exposure through encouraging people to click on it, increasing your open rate.

It’s also important to track the performance of your emails in the long term. This is because you could find certain trends and things that do well compared to others. These can then be targeted to develop strategies.

Access metrics for your emails through the campaign tab. Click View Report for your desired campaign. It’s important you check this often and for all campaigns. Which campaigns are getting lots of clicks? Which aren’t being opened often? Break down what emails are doing well and examine why.

Interested in learning more? Consider an apprenticeship in Digital Marketing where you can learn and earn as you go. Find more info on marketing here or visit our Digital Marketing category.

The importance of email marketing

August 4, 2022August 2, 2022 by Chloe Greetham

*The definitive guide to email marketing*

What is email marketing?

Today you will be finding out everything you need to know about email marketing and just how important it really is.

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that uses personalised emails to educate your email list about your product or services. It can be used to persuade your email list to carry out a certain activity, such as making a purchase, scheduling a demo, signing up for a trial, or signing up for an event.

Sending emails is such an effective way of digital marketing, helping generate sales, enhance customer engagement, acquire customers, create brand awareness and reward customer loyalty.

According to Hubspot “86% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with at least monthly”

Types of email marketing

Limited time offers
These emails come with promotional codes or discounts that expire within a certain timeframe and are typically targeted to customers in sales.

Welcome messages
These emails are often sent to new customers when they register online, but they can also be used to generate sales, follow up with leads, or spread brand awareness.When a welcome message is coupled with a special offer, it typically works best to increase customer attention or action.

Birthday or anniversary messages
This programme increases client loyalty and retention. This kind of communication features significant brand or customer achievements and frequently includes a unique promotion or discount code that recipients can use.

Newsletters
Newsletters are a good way to keep your clients informed about your business. They often include an introduction, a description, links, and images that inform clients about new goods and services, business updates, major announcements, and news from the industry.

Abandoned cart emails
Sending an email to customers about their abandoned carts can persuade them to finish their purchases if you work in e-commerce. These emails may be automatic requests for the customer to finish their transaction within a certain amount of time.

The benefits of email marketing

Enhance customer loyalty – You can frequently communicate with consumers and website visitors by using email marketing. Proven customers also value being informed of new items and promotions. According to studies, acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than keeping an existing one.
Better customer outreach – Email marketing has a higher chance of being viewed compared to social media updates, as users may miss notifications and just scroll up their news feeds. Emails to thousands of users can be sent with a few clicks. These individuals are free to read whenever they want, whether online or off.
Build up customer enthusiasm – Customer interest is effectively raised through email marketing. When executed properly, a newsletter is an affordable, quick, and easy way to inform and excite clients about new product launches or promotions.
Inexpensive and easy to maintain – Email marketing is affordable and reasonably simple and inexpensive to maintain. Email marketing services such as MailChimp or ActiveCampaign have simplified the process, allowing for greater automation and customisation.

The ultimate email marketing glossary

Subscriber	Anyone who has opted in to receive email marketing
Opt in (verb)	Choosing to receive marketing emails from a business or brand
Optin (noun)	An incentive for people to join your mailing list
Group	A group of subscribers the company or brand has created
List	A selection of email subscribers
Segment	A categorised group of customers based on their subscription activity
Broadcast	A single email you send to certain segments or groups on your list; e.g. newsletter
Automation	An automated series of pre-written emails that responds to subscriber activities, e.g. abandoned cart

The top 3 most important metrics to track

Deliverability – The percentage of emails that successfully reached the inbox of your intended recipient
Click-through rate – The percentage of subscribers that clicked a link in your email is shown by the click-through rate (usually to a landing page on your website)
Open rate – The number of recipients who opened your email

Summary

Creating a solid email marketing strategy will enable you to more effectively and affordably engage with your target audience and improve revenue. Email marketing solutions enable your company to connect with clients more effectively than before, much like other platforms and media have transformed.

It is proven to be one of the most crucial and successful methods for connecting with clients and developing long-lasting connections. With the help of email marketing statistics, you can learn how other companies are use email to engage with customers and increase ROI.