Email Marketing Services FAQ

Email marketing provides many advantages over other online communication channels. While social media is becoming increasingly popular, there’s no guarantee that your posts will actually appear on your followers’ feed. On the flip side, if you do things correctly, you can be sure that your emails will arrive in your customers’ inbox. Since almost everyone checks their emails at least once a day, this is an excellent opportunity to engage with your clients by providing content that will direct them to your website and, hopefully, buy your product. This way, email marketing is the perfect tool to convert customers, increase their loyalty, and improve your brand awareness.

However, for you to run effective email marketing campaigns that aren’t automatically redirected to your subscribers’ spam box, you need to understand how email marketing services work, and what you need to set up the platform.

What email marketing services can do

Basically, email marketing is the process of sending emails to various people simultaneously. That doesn’t mean you should just start sending emails to everyone randomly. In fact, email marketing requires as much strategy as any other type of marketing. The email marketing services’ job is to provide tools to help you apply those strategies in the easiest and most effective manner. That’s why these platforms offer more features than just allowing you to add countless contacts and send them an email with a few clicks.

Subscribers segmentation

One of the first things you need to do when coming up with a marketing strategy is defining your target audience, and email marketing is no different. Email marketing services usually allow you to segment your subscriber list, depending on both demographic and behavioral factors. Consequently, you can set up newsletters aimed at those who are most interested in the topic you’re discussing or have specific behaviors such as a decent opening rate.

Help you create eye-catching newsletters

Many companies are sending newsletters nowadays. This means that you’ll have fierce competition when sending your emails, as it will be in the middle of dozens (if not hundreds) of other messages. Therefore, the only way to ensure that your subscribers will open your email is by sending outstanding newsletters with attention-grabbing subject lines, breathtaking designs, and insightful content. By providing newsletter templates and intuitive drag-and-drop builders, email marketing services help you create dazzling emails in a few quick steps. Moreover, some companies offer A/B testing that allows you to try different versions of the same message with altered subject lines and content. This will help you pinpoint the email that delivers the most engagement.

Marketing automation

It’s not effective to send newsletters manually. It’s better to plan everything beforehand and have your messages be sent depending on different conditions. You can schedule emails to be sent on certain days or when specific behavioral parameters are met. At the same time, some email marketing services also provide the ability to send transactional emails. These are necessary when you need to send automatic messages, like when a customer places an order or asks for a password reset.

Convert subscribers through landing pages and web forms

Of course, before you even create your first newsletter, you need to have people sign up. By providing builders for landing pages and web forms that can be integrated on your website, email marketing services allow you to create comprehensive subscription forms that automatically integrate with your contact list for a smooth workflow.

Buying email lists might seem like an easy way to jump-start your email marketing campaign with a large contact database. However, we strongly recommend against this. There are various issues attached to buying email lists – both legal and business-related – that will hurt your email marketing strategy in the long run, even to the point of tarnishing your business altogether.

Buying email lists is illegal according to GDPR laws

If you do business with European clients, you need to follow GDPR laws. Briefly, this policy’s main objective is to give people full control of their personal information, including email. In other words, it’s illegal to send emails to a European citizen who hasn’t given you explicit permission to do so, and they can rightfully sue you. So, buying an email list that might have European contacts is a big no, as it can subject you to various legal complications.

There’s also the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S. to consider. Although it doesn’t explicitly state that buying email lists is illegal, those contact databases can still violate CAN-SPAM rules, as companies might have illegally obtained the information in the first place.

It’s impossible to guarantee an email list’s quality

Companies that sell email lists are usually a bit dubious, which means you can never be sure about the quality of the list. Even when these organizations claim their lists are revised, include all the necessary information, and have the contacts’ permission, there’s a high chance that’s untrue. These email lists usually come with incomplete data, out-of-date information, and email addresses illegally harvested from the web. Therefore, you can end up investing in something that will provide little to no return.

Buying email lists will make you a spammer

When you buy an email list, you’ll be contacting many people who simply aren’t interested in your product, meaning that your newsletters won’t have much engagement. Worse than that, many people may report your messages as spam – something that email providers like Gmail or Outlook consider when applying automatic spam rules. If your marketing emails are labeled as spam, your emails will go straight to your customers’ spam boxes, regardless of if they’re interested in your content or not. Moreover, the best email marketing services don’t allow the use of purchased lists on their servers either.

Buying email lists can ruin your reputation

Considering all the problems discussed so far, it isn’t difficult to conclude that buying email lists can literally ruin your company’s reputation. Consumers can easily express their opinion online nowadays, and you can be sure they will warn everyone when they aren’t happy with a particular company. This includes when they receive unsolicited emails. What’s more, when consumers get these types of emails in their inbox, they usually think they’re from a suspicious company trying to scam them.

In short, you should never buy an email list. First of all, due to the nature of these email lists, they usually don’t provide any value. Secondly, they can undermine all your hard work by ruining your reputation or even put you in substantial legal trouble. Organically building your email list may take longer, but you can at least be sure that you’re sending emails to people interested in your brand.

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing where you send emails to your clients to promote your products or services. It can be a way to raise awareness about your latest offers (and special promotions) or increase customer loyalty by providing insightful content with answers to their issues. Basically, you can see it as the evolution of direct mail where companies would send letters directly to their customers’ addresses.

While businesses are the ones who use this kind of marketing tool the most, it can be used by everyone. Bloggers can share their latest or most popular posts, educators can send extra study materials to maintain their students’ engagement, etc.

Email marketing service providers offer platforms that allow you to come up with email marketing campaigns. They not only provide everything needed to send emails to your target audience, but they also offer tools to enhance your newsletters as well as create landing pages and web forms. Moreover, most of them come with a comprehensive analytics dashboard to help you understand what your subscribers do with your emails and how to improve your email marketing strategy overall.

As the name implies, email marketing automation is the act of sending automatic emails to subscribers or leads. For example, when you request to reset your password for an online account, the website will send you an email with a recovery link within seconds – this is done via email automation. In short, the company has set up transactional emails to be sent when someone clicks ‘reset password’.

But email marketing automation goes far beyond transactional emails. You can set up full email sequences to go out after a certain period or when a particular trigger condition is met. Welcoming new subscribers with a free ebook or reminding customers they left products in their online shopping cart are just a few examples of what you can do with email automation.

Benefits of email marketing automation

Email marketing allows for a personalized customer experience, which increases retention and loyalty. For instance, you can easily set up a trigger on your email marketing platform to send a special discount when it’s someone’s birthday.

It also nurtures leads. Imagine that someone downloads free material from your website – that doesn’t mean they want to get a call from your sales team right away. However, you can use that download as a trigger to start an email workflow that sends further information and resources that your new email subscriber finds useful. This way, the lead will stay warm for longer and be more receptive to a sales agent call down the road.

Like in any other industry, automation saves time and money. Your marketing team only needs to set up the email workflow once. From there, they just need to check on the analytics to see if any adjustments are required. This takes less time than contacting each customer manually, freeing your marketing team to focus on what’s important: the company’s marketing strategy. Moreover, since employees don’t have to do the same task over and over again, there’s a lower chance of human error.

How to take advantage of email marketing automation

All companies can take advantage of email marketing automation. But which email sequences work best depends on your business type and marketing strategy. While transactional emails are required for any website that requires an account, ecommerce stores are the ones that need this kind of email automation the most. Customers expect to receive an order confirmation after purchasing something, as well as a message when their item is shipped and a reminder on the day their package is arriving.

You can also take advantage of email marketing automation to send discounts at the right moment, bring back customers by sending a coupon a few weeks after they stopped using your service, send special discounts on birthdays, and more.

Setting up email sequences to keep leads warm increases conversion. You can send several free resources when a prospect signs up for something on your website, such as a newsletter, and ask them if they want to be contacted for a quote at the end.

These are just a few examples; there’s a lot more you can do and how far you go depends on your creativity – with marketing automation, the sky’s your limit.