Best Email Marketing – Rules for Email Marketing in 2021
Entering the e-commerce scene entails getting acquainted with lots of terminologies that can sometimes be hard to grasp. Digital marketing strategies- it’s a broad term that people most often only link to paid ads and promotions, nothing more. In reality, though, it involves Search engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Marketing Analytics, and Email Marketing.
You must be wondering why email marketing is still counted as a digital marketing strategy. I know, right?
In this evolved digital era where people are mostly living half their lives on Google, Shopping sites like Amazon, and especially on Social media, is email, or email marketing for that matter, still relevant?
You might not believe this, but despite the continuing popularity of messaging apps, there are still four billion email users worldwide. And it’s still growing! In 2025, Statista predicts that email users will reach the 4.6 billion mark.
If you’re thinking that reaching this large audience through email marketing will not yield profit or brand building because people mainly use email for work and studying, you’re definitely wrong.
In fact, 61% of consumers prefer for brands to contact them via email.
Moreover, small businesses claim that email marketing is the second most effective strategy for building brand awareness, and it also gives the highest return on investment (ROI).
In addition, according to McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective in gaining new customers than Facebook or Twitter.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to
1.) Generate brand awareness,
2.) Establish brand loyalty, and
3.) Increase sales through advertising products or services.
It is the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages- or those that promote your brand, products, services, and any other company messages that inform the receivers of your brand’s existence and activities and help build customer trust.
You usually send these emails to previous clients or customers you wish to win over, prospective customers, and customers that are already loyal to your brand. In other words, you can use this strategy for customer retention and remarketing.
How it works:
Usually, companies have a subscriber list, which is a list of people who voluntarily signed up to receive commercial emails from them, where they address the letters and email messages.
These people are otherwise known as email subscribers.
People usually become your email subscribers when they sign up for newsletters, journals, e-books, limited-time vouchers, and other promotional materials from your website.
If you want to try new avenues for leveraging your business, email marketing would be a good start. You can implement and apply in-store and fee-based apps that prompt email newsletter sign-ups on your e-commerce store or website.
Three Types of Marketing Emails
There are different types of marketing emails you can use depending on your marketing goals. But they all fit into three main types. These are email newsletters, transactional, and engagement or behavioral emails.
- Email Newsletter
The most important aspect of an email newsletter is its content. Email newsletters help raise awareness of your brand and strengthen your brand image.
Therefore, you need to consider the type of content, its length, and the call-to-action you will include in it.
Effective email newsletter content examples are your brand’s recent blog posts, industry news, best practices and tips, loyalty programs and memberships, and recent surveys.
You can also get creative with how-to videos and upcoming webinars.
- Transactional Emails
From the word itself, transactional emails are emails that concern transactions with your customers. A transactional email’s main goal is to close a deal and make a sale.
You can use transactional emails to follow up on orders that are not yet checked out by customers and urge them to finish the action.
Aside from this, you can use transactional emails to send receipts or billing updates, cart abandonment reminders, and limited-time offers or time-sensitive promotions like one-day sales or vouchers that will expire soon.
- Engagement or Behavioral Emails
Engagement or behavioral emails are target-oriented emails based on user behavior. These are personalized emails relative to where your buyers are in the buying cycle. Unlike other marketing emails, you are free to modify these emails and be creative with them.
The main goal of an engagement or behavioral email is to build the brand through storytelling.
Some examples of engagement and behavioral emails are:
- Welcome Emails
- Store and Product Review Requests
- Product Recommendations
- Re-orders or Replenishment
- Re-engagement
- Customer Stories
- Brand Stories
- Tutorials, Tips, and How-Tos
- Cross-selling
Rules for Email Marketing in 2022
To guide you in preparing a successful email marketing strategy for 2022, here are some of the most important tips and rules you can use.
- Keep an updated email list.
Keeping your email list up-to-date seems like the basic and most obvious rule. Yet, many still don’t understand just how important it is for your business.
Although it may sound like work that takes time, updating your email list helps you avoid risks that might cost you or hinder you from achieving your email marketing goals.
With an outdated email list, you may be sending emails to an audience that is no longer interested in your content.
You may also be emailing your content to the wrong or already irrelevant audience, which leads to high bounce rates. A bounce rate pertains to the number of people who view only one page of your website and leave instantly.
The worst effect of an outdated email list is the risk of your email being flagged as spam. It means you will be banned by email software from sending any more emails from your website or business domain.
- Don’t use no-reply for email names and addresses.
You might think a no-reply email is better for sending transactional or promotional emails because they prevent customers from asking questions and instead keeps their curiosity enough to go to your website. However, no-reply emails bring more harm than good to your business.
Firstly, it defeats the purpose of email marketing which is building customer relationships because customers cannot communicate with you.
Secondly, it risks your email being filtered as spam since people generally see no-reply as spam emails. Lastly, it is just unfriendly and unwelcoming. It doesn’t sound inviting, so you’ll find customers harder to engage.
If you don’t want to use your brand or website name on your email name and address, consider replacing a no-reply with positive and inviting words.
- Consistency equals brand recognition and retention.
Whether in brand voice, copy, design, or messaging, your email campaigns should echo consistency.
Being consistent means aligning your email design and copy to your brand image and reflecting the overall branding on your website.
Consistency helps achieve two main goals of email marketing which are establishing brand identity and increasing trust within the customer base.
It also helps customers become familiar with your brand and therefore increases the retention of your brand and products in their minds. Consistent branding makes you easily recognizable to your audience.
- Personalize your emails.
Now more than ever, customers want personalized experiences when it comes to using software and buying products online.
In fact, a study by Liveclicker, a provider of email personalization solutions, revealed that brands that apply deep email personalization achieve better scores on key consumer metrics.
The metrics include abandoned cart emails, multi-email onboarding series, and emails that include the closest retail location relative to the customer’s location.
Personalized emails make it easier for customers to relate and identify with brands when they are presented with experiences tailored to their needs.
Therefore, you need to see eye-to-eye with customers on their level in the consumer buying process.
- Develop or implement an Automated Email Sequence.
An automated email sequence, also known as an email auto-responder, is a series of emails automatically sent to your email subscribers that responds to certain buyer actions in your store or website.
It is triggered by buyer actions and browsing behavior and it can also be time-based.
For example, a certain segment of people in your email list has already reached a milestone, such as a year of subscription. Or maybe they’ll receive a 30-day after-purchase email sequence.
Or a right after opt-in. An automated email sequence can come in other forms too. It can be about shopping cart abandonment, reading and downloading content, subscribing to your email list, or buying a product.
It will help you close on sales, improve customer experience through seemingly personalized content, enhance subscriber engagement, and build immediate customer trust.
Lastly, it helps you save time and energy for other business matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
What tools can I use for email marketing?
There are a lot of free, plan-based, or fee-based email marketing tools that you can use to build your brand. You need email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo mail. Then you can use email marketing tools like MailChimp, Sendinblue, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, and GetResponse.
Why should you use an email marketing strategy for your business?
Email marketing allows you to build customer relationships and win over previous and past customers. It strengthens brand loyalty, raises awareness for your brand, and establishes brand image. It also helps your brand become relevant to customers through personalized customer experiences.
What are the common challenges in email marketing?
The most common challenge an email marketer face is reducing spam complaints. Sometimes, email service providers filter marketing emails as Spam, and sometimes, it’s the subscribers in your email list who report them as Spam. This happens because of irrelevant content from your email. Other challenges include low click-through rates and issues of deliverability.
Conclusion
You might think that email marketing is too old for you. But think again.
Despite being a classic, marketers go back to it again and again because it has proven itself more effective than certain social media marketing strategies.
It is one of the oldest digital strategies that grow in efficiency with time, with all the new tools developed and improved over time to make it more effective and relevant.
To develop an email marketing strategy that will guarantee business success, study, explore, and work within set rules, then decide the best practices that work for you.
To know more about Email Marketing and other marketing strategies for your business, read more on Sellers Planet.
