Why Email Marketing is still important and why it will stay important in the future as well
Emails have been the go-to marketing channel for companies all over the world. Be it content websites or E-commerce or for that matter any industry that deals with a consistent and regular customer interface, emails prove to be an extremely productive tool.
In a recent study, Radicati Group states that the number of worldwide email accounts is projected to grow from over 4.1 billion accounts in 2014 to over 5.2 billion accounts by the end of 2018, a staggering 27% growth.
With the advent of smartphones, the user behavior changed; changing everything else in the process, including the marketing efforts. But the surprising fact that remains true even today and most probably in the times to come is – Email is one of the most important revenue generating tools.
The mobile push is a remarkably effective tool when it comes to targeting at an individual level yet email remains one of the most important mediums of interacting with customers. Particularly when it comes to e-commerce companies, aggregators, couponing merchandisers and all others – need emails to drive their revenue.
A survey conducted by Harris Interactive found that people actually like emails based on previous shopping behaviors and preferences. In fact, 81% of US digital shoppers surveyed said they were at least somewhat likely to make additional purchases, either online or in a store, as a result of targeted emails.
In this post, I’ll be sharing with you the simple mechanism of setting up your emails in a way to target your customers right from the start.
The success of email campaigns depends largely on the number of people receiving those emails. One of the basic and most effective ways of increasing your subscriber base is to add your visitors to the list. An ever-increasing subscriber list can be achieved by using simple website overlays in the header and footer of your website. Tools like WebEngage pioneer in the area and make it super-easy to create beautiful site overlays on your website to grab visitor’s attention and generate more leads and subscribers in the process.
Once you have the subscriber form ready, the next step is to pick up an email client through which you can send out emails regularly to a large audience. The emails sent out from a marketer’s end are broadly categorized as – Campaign emails and Triggered/ Transactional emails.
- Campaign Emails: These emails are the ones usually sent out in the form of newsletters, onboarding chain, product journey, activation/ re-activation emails and alike.
- Triggered/Transaction Emails: These emails are triggered by specific user actions over the website and are more important especially because of their timely critical nature.
The logical way to move forward is by setting up the Campaign mails so that you can notify your customers of the launch dates, offers and other promotional giveaways to get better traffic. The triggered mails come next in line.
How to set-up email marketing with 2 types of marketing emails
1. Setting up Campaign Emails
For campaign mailers, there are a plethora of tools available in the market to send out bulk mails, each having its set of ups and downs. I use MailChimp for it. MailChimp offers 2,000 subscribers to start with, free of cost and a monthly volume of 12,000 emails, which is a boon for startups with tight budgets and low initial volume.
The look and feel of the emails are an immensely important metric that determine the success of a campaign. The content and design should be crisp, and interesting. My thumb rule of checking it is – If I received this email, will I read it?
Second comes the volume of mails that you send across. There is a line between being informative and being irritative, never cross that line. Always be wary of the volume of mails you send to your customers, never be the spam delivery guy for your customers.
2. Setting up Transactional Emails
The transactional emails can be configured in the product itself with a static or slightly dynamic content, and they are triggered automatically by the user’s actions.
All you need to do is to connect the backend of your website with a Triggered email client such as Mandrill to start sending out these mailers. Mandrill, for instance, would require a connection with Mailchimp that would have all the templates for your Triggered emails.
There are various other options available in the market as well. You choose to switch whenever you want, but I have observed that Mandrill provides one of the most cost effective and easy to use solution out there.
I’ll be sharing with you more about email marketing and marketing in the digital space as a whole in further posts. Till then start shooting your emails and convert more every day.
Happy Emailing!
Kasturi Patra 
Diksha Dwivedi 