Guide to Email Marketing Methods with Best Practices for Business

In this guide, we will explore various email marketing methods and best practices suitable for businesses of all sizes. Implementing an email marketing strategy can have its unique set of challenges, regardless of the size of the business.

It is more than just sending regular news updates, announcements, or promotional emails to potential clients and customers. It requires engaging your audience and providing valuable content consistently that can keep your business or products in their minds, even if they’re not ready to make a purchase yet. To understand this more clearly, it is important to know the various types of effective emails and their various phases or methods that play a crucial role in a successful email marketing strategy.

Types of Emails

There are different types of emails that can help you engage subscribers and customers with your business. They also help in building loyalty and creating a sense of trust that will keep customers coming back for more.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails constitute a category of marketing emails that promote your products, services, or special offers to your subscribers. This category of emails often achieves higher click-through rates (CTRs) to your business or company website. It is usually the case when the promotion has a limited duration. This guide also lists some examples of promotional emails that play a crucial role in email marketing:

Flash Sales: Flash sales emails notify subscribers about limited-time sales or discounts on specific items or services which create a sense of urgency for potential buyers.
Product Announcements: Notify your subscribers about the launch of a new product, features, or updates to your products. These emails create a sense of excitement and urgency among your subscribers.
Seasonal Offers: Special deals and promotions tied to specific seasons, holidays, or any special occasions. For example, create a “Black Friday Sale” email promotion.
Cross-Selling and Upselling: These emails suggest related, higher-value items, or upgraded products to existing customers.
Product Recommendations: This category of emails makes use of data, behavior, and preferences to recommend products that are likely to interest the recipient.
Exclusive Offers: These emails provide special deals, discounts, or early access to new products to a selected group of recipients or loyal subscribers.
Event Invitations: These emails invite subscribers to attend special events, conferences, webinars, or gatherings related to your business.

Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are directly linked to your business’s interactions with customers. They serve specific purposes related to customer transactions and provide important information such as account creation, order confirmations, update notifications, or follow-ups. These emails are automatically triggered when specific customer actions occur.

Here are some examples of the transactional emails:

Account Creation: When customers create an account with your online business, they receive a welcome email containing their account information. This can be seen as a gift to customers and you can leverage it further by encouraging them to share their happiness on social media, thus boosting your brand’s visibility.
Invoice and Receipt Emails: Automated emails to confirm payment information, provide receipts after purchase, and track financial transactions for accounting purposes and reconciliation in accounting.
Order Confirmations: Assure customers that their order has been successfully received and are being processed. Provide them with order details and estimated delivery times.
Follow-ups: Emails to customers after a purchase to gather feedback, offer additional assistance, or encourage additional purchases. This ensures customer satisfaction as well as addresses any potential issues.
Shipping Updates: Send post-transaction emails with updates on delivery status, from shipping to arrival. These email types inform customers about the status, location, and progress of their shipments.
Delivery Notifications: These sets of emails notify customers when their orders have been successfully delivered. It gives them peace of mind.
Appointment Reminders: These are email reminders to customers about upcoming bookings, reservations, or appointments.
Renewal Reminders: Remind customers ahead of time, maybe multiple times ahead when their subscriptions or memberships are due for renewal.
Review Requests: After a customer has received their purchase and is satisfied, sending an email requesting a testimonial, review, or experience can be highly effective. It helps future customers to make informed decisions.

Relational Emails

Relational emails are messages designed to maintain a positive relationship with customers, clients, or subscribers. Unlike purely transactional emails, relational emails focus on adding value to your products or services. They add a more meaningful interaction between your business and your customers. Here are some examples of relational emails:

Newsletter Emails: Regular emails that businesses send to their subscribers. These include updates, news, and information about your business or industry. They help keep your brand and products top of mind for customers.
For instance, a real estate company might use newsletter emails to share the latest in real estate investing strategies, offering valuable insights and tips to investors. This approach can be adapted to fit any industry, providing targeted content that resonates with your audience.
Survey Emails: Send simple emails with specific questions about your product or service. These emails engage subscribers and also help businesses gather insights to improve their products or services.
Company or Business Updates: These emails inform subscribers about significant developments, changes, or events within the company, or other important company updates such as new employees, rebranding, partnerships, and press releases. This ensures awareness and transparency.
New Content Emails: Notify your subscribers whenever you publish fresh blog posts, articles, videos, or other content to drive traffic to your website.
Birthday or Anniversary Emails: Send emails for personalized greetings and offers to celebrate birthdays or any special occasions.
Thank You Emails: Express gratitude to customers for their support, recent purchases, or subscriptions. This builds a positive relationship and encourages repeat business.
Customer Feedback Emails: Request feedback and suggestions from customers after their interaction or purchase to show genuine interest in their experience and utilize their feedback to improve your offerings.
Exclusive VIP Emails: Send special emails to your most loyal customers and provide them with exclusive offers, sneak peeks, or personalized rewards.
Social Update: Social update emails are a great way to keep your business followers and customers in the loop about your product or service developments. These emails heighten their excitement and ensure awareness of what to expect from your brand.

Series of Phases or Methods for Email Marketing

Email marketing is not just about sending promotional messages. It involves a series of phases or email marketing methods that are essential for delivering the right message to the right set of subscribers at the right time. It includes sending the right marketing emails to new, existing, or inactive subscribers as well as new and existing customers.

These methods or phases of email marketing are designed to guide subscribers from first contact to loyal customers and brand ambassadors.

The following are the series of phases or methods for email marketing:

1. Welcome or Introductory Phase

The introductory or welcome phase of email campaigns serves as a warm welcome to your subscribers or potential customers. Its primary goal is to introduce your brand, establish trust, and set the stage for a long-lasting relationship. Here are the steps to take:

Share Brand Story: Start by sharing the story of how your brand started. This lays the foundation for trust.
Set Expectations: Clearly communicate what your subscribers can expect from your brand, such as valuable content, offers, and insights.
Establish Authority: Use this phase to establish your brand’s authority and inform prospects about the value you offer. If done right, this phase can make your brand recognizable to them and encourage engagement.
Greet Warmly and Introduce Products/Services: Greet new subscribers warmly and introduce them to your products or services.
Highlight Key Features/Benefits: Make use of clear points to highlight the benefits they will receive as subscribers and encourage them to utilize your solutions. Focus on how you solve their problems.
Explain Value Proposition: Summarize the tangible value customers get from your brand that competitors can’t match. Make your differentiators clear.
Encourage Engagement: Prompt subscribers to take simple actions like visiting your website, following social media, or contacting you. Give them easy ways to interact.

2. Interaction or Engagement Phase

The interaction or engagement phase follows a lead magnet that includes free signup offers, free coupon codes, downloadable resources, eBooks, etc. to strengthen the connection with subscribers and guide them toward the next steps in your sales funnel.

Here’s how to approach this phase:

Acknowledge the Decision: Begin by acknowledging the subscriber’s excellent decision to download your content. Thank them and express gratitude for their engagement, making them feel valued and appreciated.
Provide Quick Wins: Share easily actionable tips, insights, or valuable strategies that subscribers can immediately apply. Offer a taste of the value they can consistently expect to build confidence in your content.
Reinforce Trust: Emphasize the trustworthiness of your brand and clarify further the benefits of the lead magnet they’ve received.
Share User Testimonials: Feature positive reviews, case studies, and success stories from current customers. Social proof builds credibility.
Guide the Next Step: Clearly state the next logical step for subscribers to take and provide them with a sense of direction within your email marketing ecosystem.

3. Nurture or Advancement Phase

The advancement phase is triggered when your email subscriber makes a purchase. This phase serves as a crucial phase for making one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Here are the key points for this phase:

Create a Strong Desire: Keep customers wanting more by highlighting the benefits of your offer. You can also provide them with complementary products or services.
Understand the Value Loop: This value loop increases buyer frequency and lifetime value. Focus on offer appeal, presentation, and traffic quality.
A Delicate Approach: Avoid pressuring your clients or rushing them into additional purchases. It’s essential to nurture them slowly until they are ready for your offer.

4. Segmentation Phase

The segmentation phase is a way to further categorize and engage your email list based on subscribers’ interests and preferences.

The steps to consider are as follows:

Refine Audience Segmentation: Segment your list based on the varied interests and preferences of your subscribers.
Analyze and Promote: Create a promotional email campaign and analyze subscriber interactions to determine who has clicked, opened, or reacted to your email content. The promotional content may include blog posts, webinars, lead magnets, special offers, and promos.
Engage Targeted Audiences: Create engagement campaigns that are specific to the set of subscribers’ needs. The goal is to encourage subscribers to opt-in and express interest in your products and services. Also, identify those who engage with your email messages and place them on a separate list for future follow-up.

5. Re-Interaction or Re-Engagement Phase

The re-engagement phase helps to revive interest in your emails from subscribers who have stopped opening them. It allows you to reconnect with them.

Here are the steps you can take:

Revive Inactive Subscribers: Offer exclusive incentives, or discounts to inactive subscribers as a way to reignite their interest to re-engage with your brand. You can also provide a free gift or exclusive content to incentivize inactive subscribers.
Reminder of Benefits: Remind them of the benefits of your products or services they might be missing out on.
Segment and Target: Separate inactive users into segments and craft targeted content that speaks to their specific interests.
Adjust Frequency: Consider altering the frequency for inactive subscribers. Sending too many emails might be why they’re not engaging. Try sending fewer emails to see if that helps. You can test a different frequency.

Best Practices of Email Marketing

In this guide, we also list some best practices that you should follow to get the best results from using different email marketing methods or phases. These practices are as follows:

Subject Line, Email Design, and Call-to-Action

Write subject lines that can grab attention and entice subscribers to open your emails. It’s important to avoid using clickbait language and focus on communicating the value or benefit your email provides.
Make sure your emails display correctly on different devices and email clients. Also, use white space effectively to ensure all emails have a clean and visually appealing design, with clear and concise content as well as possible call-to-actions.

Email Deliverability and Security Practices

Follow email authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Monitor spam complaints and use reputable email service providers.
Maintain a healthy and up-to-date email list using a reliable bulk email verifier.
While doing email marketing, it is crucial to protect your business from advanced email threats by using a cloud-based email security solution. This defense is essential to protect against phishing, malware, spam, and other harmful content.

Email Segmentation and Personalization

Segment and personalize your emails by addressing recipients by name and aligning content with their interests.
Customize email content based on subscriber preferences whenever possible.
Tailor offers to specific segments of your email lists.

Respect Privacy and Regulations

Obtain explicit consent before sending marketing emails.
Comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, etc.
Keep an eye on spam complaints and unsubscribes to avoid issues.
Provide clear unsubscribe options and honor subscriber preferences.

Monitor and Learn

Track email metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. It helps to identify your most and least effective emails.
Check link click-throughs to see which links get the most clicks to understand subscriber preferences.
Check metrics for different subscriber segments to refine targeting.
Ask subscribers directly what they like/dislike and what they want to see.
Analyze the data to identify trends, understand subscriber behavior, and refine your email-sending strategies.
Compare results to the goals and metrics you originally set for each campaign.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this guide explains the importance of understanding marketing email types, the series of phases or methods, and the best practices for email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is a versatile and effective tool for any business to connect with its users and customers. It also nurtures customer relationships and drives sales.

By having a clear understanding of the different types of emails, successfully implementing various email marketing methods or phases such as from introductory to re-engagement, and following best practices, you can deliver measurable results in your email campaigns.