Email Marketing 101: Our Guide to Email Marketing in 2022

Email marketing has been a staple in the digital marketing field since the first email marketing campaign was launched and sent out in 1978! For more than 4 decades, marketers all around the world have utilized this instant form of communication to get their message distributed to their target audiences.

Since then, the medium has evolved greatly along with the supporting technology that we in marketing are blessed with today. From tracking metrics to market research to improvements in copywriting, email marketing has never been easier and yet still remains a fundamental aspect of any strong digital marketing campaign.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is as simple as it sounds (on the surface)- marketing campaigns using email to reach your audience and convey a specific message. But skilled marketers know that while it may seem easy enough, it actually requires a deep understanding of your audience and how to best communicate with them.

After all, every one of us has a spam folder filled with nonsense emails we have received from companies we’ve never heard of that are trying to sell us products or services we neither need nor care about. These emails are all perfect examples of what email marketing should NOT be. Generally, these emails are stuffed with bold text, emojis and keywords; sometimes they make promises of a once-in a lifetime opportunity to buy now and be ahead of the game (a game that you do not, and will not ever need to participate in). Sometimes they’re even filled with threats or scams in an attempt to deceive the unsuspecting and uninformed consumer- thankfully our many email platforms send the majority of these directly to our spam folder.

But with the basic understanding of what marketing is not (or rather, what bad email marketing is), what is true and effective email marketing? We’ll discuss how to properly execute a successful email marketing campaign in just a moment but for now, remember that strong email marketing consists of the same main components of all content marketing strategies.

First, you need an exceptional understanding of your target audience and the “buyer persona”. This is important because to be able to communicate effectively, you need to understand how your consumer base views and interacts with content. Knowing what they like and dislike will be hugely important in creating effective messaging. Beyond that, you will need to actually plan your email campaign. This sounds simple enough, but you would be surprised at how often a “strategy” is put into action without ever actually sitting down and writing out what that strategy is.

Without properly designing the campaign with appropriate KPI goals and benchmarks, you will have no way to know if your campaign is successful. Finally, you will need to be consistent and see the whole process through. Giving up halfway ensures you cannot achieve success while remaining consistent in your efforts gives you the ability to modify a campaign based on your goals and metrics so that you might be able to salvage the campaign and find success later on, even if that success is just finding ways to improve for your next campaign.

Benefits of Email Marketing

With the basics explained, let’s dive into the purposes of launching an email marketing campaign in 2022. We know that the cons are low response rates, often high time consumption because of content creation, and maybe even ending up in a lead’s spam folder. But what are the benefits of email marketing?

• Over 4 billion people worldwide use email

  • One of the primary considerations in marketing is “where” (through what channels) you will push your content. Utilizing a lead base of 4 billion people is a pretty good way to start.

• Improved customer relationships

  • Email marketing offers an easy and instant way to communicate with your customers and improve brand favorability.

• Lead generation

  • Offering customers exclusive deals via email is a great way to bring in new leads and increase conversions.

• Control your message

  • Similar to social media and your own website, email marketing enables you to fully control how you portray your brand and make the best pitch possible.

• Promote content

  • What better way to distribute and promote your content than to send it directly to prospects and current subscribers? Email marketing allows content managers and marketers to accomplish exactly this.

• Marketing effectiveness

  • Nearly 80% of marketers surveyed in 2020 said that email marketing is one of their top 3 most effective marketing channels.

How to Execute a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

So we know the basics and we know the pros and cons of email marketing; now it’s time to explain how to successfully plan and execute an email marketing campaign.

1. Define Your Audience

   • If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times, the first step in any marketing campaign is defining and understanding your target audience. How can you begin to promote your product, service, or brand without knowing who you’re promoting to and how they want to receive said promotion?

2. Establish Your Goals

   • Starting a campaign without having any way of measuring success means there is no way to know if you’ve been successful or failed miserably. A few common KPIs (key performance indicators) you should definitely track are Open Rate, Reply Rate, Click Through Rate, and Conversion Rate. Tracking metrics is important because it can influence how you improve and adapt your campaign and content. Even if you do fail miserably, you can use this information to come back stronger in your next campaign.

3. Build an Email List

   • This should be obvious, but the important part is knowing how to do this. There are many ways to accomplish this depending on your campaign strategy, but it’s widely agreed that this list should always be opt-in. You can utilize lead magnets, attractive opt-in forms on your website or attached to receipts on customer purchases, and offer incentives such as discounts. A healthy mix of a few methods will also be beneficial.

4. Plan Your Campaign

   • We can’t tell you how often a company will choose to simply start firing off emails to recent customers or anyone on a mailing list they’ve found, only to end up in a spam folder or block list. The way to avoid this is to plan your content! Along with the previous steps, you need to plan what your content will be, when and how frequently you will distribute it, and how you will want your subscribers to interact with it. Always have a plan.

5. Launch the Campaign & Track Results

   • After everything is planned and ready to go, all there’s left to do is launch the campaign and begin measuring your results based on the KPIs you’ve selected to measure your success. Be ready to adapt and tweak your campaign as it progresses, but try not to overthink or second-guess yourself too much. The results will speak for themselves and then you can use that knowledge to improve in future campaigns.

Contact Nxt Era Marketing to Begin Your Email Marketing Campaign Today

The best way to ensure your marketing success and the success of your email marketing campaign is to partner with a highly skilled and highly experienced marketing agency such as Nxt Era Marketing. Our team will plan, develop, and execute your campaign from start to finish so you can rest assured that you can achieve your goals. Contact us today to discover why so many companies have chosen Nxt Era Marketing to grow their businesses and drive results.