Email Marketing
(discover the importance of sent emails in your online marketing strategy)

Email marketing is a powerful and flexible communication tool for businesses of all sizes. It consists of sending advertising or promotional messages to a list of email addresses for the purpose of promoting products or services, building customer loyalty or acquiring new customers.

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Despite the spread of social media and instant messaging, email remains one of the most effective and widespread communication channels in the world. According to research by Statista, email users will exceed 4.5 billion in 2023, confirming the importance of email marketing as a long-term digital marketing tool.

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One of the benefits of email marketing is the ability to reach a large and segmented audience in a targeted way. With email lists, companies can send specific messages to groups of recipients based on criteria such as age, gender, place of residence, or interests. In this way, the emails sent become more relevant and interesting to recipients, increasing the chances of conversion.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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In addition to segmentation, email marketing allows you to personalize messages based on the recipient. For example, the recipient's name can be included in the subject line or body of the message, or products or services can be offered based on previous purchases or site navigation. These customizations increase recipients' engagement and perception of value, improving the performance of the email marketing campaign.

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Another benefit of email marketing is measurability. Using tools such as Google Analytics or email marketing platforms, campaign performance can be monitored in real time, obtaining data on open, click-through rate, conversion rate and other KPIs (key performance indicators). This data is invaluable for optimizing future campaigns and checking the effectiveness of the strategies adopted.

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To achieve good results with email marketing, it is important to follow some best practices:

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• Create a quality email list: it is important to collect email addresses only from people who have expressed their consent to receive promotional messages, such as through a newsletter subscription form or site registration. In addition, it is critical to keep the list clean and up-to-date, removing inactive addresses or those that have indicated they do not want to receive further messages.

• Choose a reliable email marketing platform: there are several platforms for sending emails in an automated way, such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Sendinblue. It is important to choose a reliable platform that ensures good message delivery and offers advanced features such as segmentation or personalization.

• Write an eye-catching subject line: the subject line is the first element the recipient sees when receiving an email, and it must be able to capture attention and stimulate interest. It is important to avoid spammy or misleading subject lines and to take advantage of keywords or questions to increase openness.

• Design an eye-catching layout: the email layout should be clear and easy to read, with a good balance of text and images. It is important to use readable fonts and colors that are consistent with the company's branding, and include obvious call-to-actions to incentivize recipient action.

• Optimize for mobile devices: many people today read emails on mobile devices, so it is important to optimize the layout for these devices, such as using a fixed width or responsive design. Also, it is important to test the email on different platforms and devices before sending.

• Monitor and optimize performance: using tools such as Google Analytics or the tracking features of email marketing platforms, you can monitor campaign performance in real time. It is important to check open, click and conversion rates, and use this data to optimize future campaigns.

• Follow privacy laws: it is important to comply with privacy laws, such as the GDPR in Europe

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One of the most important and underrated things when it comes to having a successful online store with real margins (that's right, we're talking about margins and not just billing...) is email marketing.

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I know, you're probably thinking, "Are you talking about newsletters and these annoying emails that I sometimes get and always move to the SPAM folder or delete without opening?"

Exactly! I mean those very emails.

Except that there is a very valuable truth that we often miss when considering an email marketing campaign in our online store, and that is:
Whether we like it or not, whether it sounds crazy or not, many people love to receive emails every week, with offers, stories and other information. In fact, almost half of online consumers say they like to receive at least one email a week from the brands they follow, to keep up to date with their news and promotions. It makes them feel part of something, and that's where we (you with our help) come in.

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Because when you receive so many e-mails, many people have the habit of directly deleting some e-mails, so your main mission will be to create e-mails that make sense, that do not overwhelm the reader and, most importantly, make the reader become a customer and that he himself buys over and over again; that is, you will be the one to turn a seemingly worthless medium into one of the most important resources of your business to generate income and increase your margin.

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WARNING!!! : I'm talking about margin (not just turnover), because email marketing is one of the cheapest tools we have at our disposal, the one with the greatest reach among potential customers (because the ads - reach all over the world, but an email only reaches someone who has previously decided to leave their details with you to receive these emails, so they are already mentally prepared to read them and have less resistance to act on their messages), which allows us to manage our contacts and customers in the most efficient way (we will see this later) and the one that allows us to increase the LTV of our customers.

 

After this small but useful introduction, let's go to see how to organize our email marketing strategy. But first we have to be very clear about the parameters to take into account when analyzing an email campaign, because (we will always repeat) we cannot achieve optimal results without a proper and complete analysis.
So let's look at the values to watch out for:

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• Open Rate: on average it should be at least 20% (25% or more is very good). This is important because the more people who open the email, the more value your email will have before Google and the more emails will be delivered to the inbox in the future; in addition to this, the more people who open the email, the more people can read the content and take action; To increase your open rate, there is only one thing to do (besides having good pre-open rates): write subject lines that attract attention. It's all about the subject line; if the subject line is well done, the person is curious and opens the email, and that's what we're looking for.

• Click rate: on average it should be at least 3.5 percent (3.7 percent in Spain and 3.3 percent in Italy), although it depends a lot on the type of email (from 5 percent is very good). It is relevant because once the person opens the email, they need to find quality, well-written content that explains in detail what the brand wants to convey, whether that message is a story, or an experience, or an offer. Also, it is important to create clear CTA (call to action) buttons and present them in strategic parts of the email; Finally, add a text link to easily reach the desired landing page.

• Paid Order Rate: the most relevant value because ultimately what we want with our email campaigns is to sell. The higher that value, the better. Potentially all emails can help you sell. Clearly, maybe for some people, an extra email received is what makes them lose interest in the brand, but it can also be the same email that allows you to make a sale with another person. And we are much more interested in a sale now than we are in a potential future customer. Why? It's easy: because once we have it among our customers and have shown them that our product is quality and unique (we talk about the product, but we refer to the customer service, the service and guarantees offered, the brand itself), that same customer, will buy from us again. And we must remember a golden rule of marketing: keeping a customer costs 6-10 times less than getting a new one. The math here is simple: better to keep our existing customers happy than to look for new ones (of course, we always have to find new customers, but the money to look for and find them comes to us from current customers).

 

A good email marketing strategy consists of these elements:

A planning calendar.This may seem trivial, but the truth is that email marketing campaigns are not prepared overnight, but are prepared in advance and the results are monitored constantly, to make gradual changes, and thus achieve perfection. Remember that a good email marketing strategy can add up to 70 percent of all your billing (and with virtually free media, so it's almost all profit).Below is the actual billing of one of our clients, where you can appreciate the percentage that comes directly from email marketing (Revenue from Klaviyo - the program we use and recommend):

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Broadcast: this is a weekly email created to tell a story to your contacts, and it must follow a certain periodicity in order for it to materialize in your contacts' heads as part of their routine (i.e., they must normally be on the same days and at the same times). Regarding this type of email, what we always suggest is to test your contacts to see when the open rate is highest over the week, and at what time depending on the day and season. But our experience suggests as general days:

Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.
Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.
Friday at 11:30 a.m.

Saturday at 11:30 a.m. (has a lower open rate, but a better click-through rate and paid order rate

Email marketing campaigns: these can be weekend campaigns, offers for specific events, product promotions or new collections. Here we have a very wide variety to exploit, and the magic word will be "unique, time-limited offer." By this we mean that all these campaigns must have some key elements that will enable you to make sales:
Discount: A good offer must have a good discount. It can be 10% or more, but it must create a clear purchase intention for our customer, caused by knowing and being aware that buying at that time will be better than buying at another time.

 

Uniqueness of the offer: the good offer is the one that does not appear every day, but appears every month or even just once or twice a year (we are clearly talking about sales campaigns and Black Friday); because the customer needs to know that if he misses that offer, he will probably have to wait a long time before he gets the same opportunity again. It is also true that no one prohibits us from running multiple promotions within the same month, as long as they are different: one time it can be a discount on the amount to be paid, another time it can be a gift product, and another time an accessory gadget.
Limited in time: any offer or promotion must be short, for the same reasons explained above. There is no point in making a discount that lasts 3 months; first, because the customer will always pay you less, and you will always lose some of the profit; second, because if the customer knows that your offer lasts that long, instead of rushing to order now, he will wait later, and in the meantime he may forget about your store and his need to buy your product.

 

Below I report the results of one of our client's summer 2022 sales campaign: as you can see, all emails generated at least one sale and, in some cases, up to 6 sales, which resulted in a total revenue of almost €2,500 from a sales campaign of just two and a half weeks.

 

 

 

SMS and WhatsApp campaign: this type of campaign is more sophisticated and will be the subject of another lesson, but for now it is important to know that SMS has a much higher open rate and click-through rate than email campaigns (although they are also more expensive ). ) and especially a higher conversion rate. The only thing is that they are often seen as SPAM, so we can only play this card at certain times of the year and not abuse it.

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CREATE MAILING LIST

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To proceed with email marketing campaigns, it is important to know your contact/email/customer list well.

This concept is actually part of a much broader marketing concept that has always remained relevant, and which turns out to be fundamental for any business, especially when it comes to growing and scaling for real: we are talking about SEGMENTATION. We will devote a specific paper to this general topic, precisely because of the role it plays in a successful marketing strategy (and which I recommend you see if you have not already done so); Below, however, we are going to go into detail with the "segmentation" side of email marketing with the famous lists.

 

Now, if you've never done email marketing or if you haven't done it for a long time, don't worry; In the first case, you'll have to start by activating the automatic flows (explained in another document) to create your list and make a sale at the same time; in the second case, you'll just have to do a good cleaning and see which emails are really active and which ones to do other kinds of reprocessing work on.
On the other hand, if you already have a well-organized list, you can now go to the part where we explain the different campaigns (weekend campaign, new collection campaign, broadcast...)

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About the mailing lists, which are needed from the beginning (it is clear that if we do not have the mails, we have to wait until we have at least 100-200 contacts before doing this kind of classification, because otherwise we would be limited our campaigns) are the following:

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• Engagers 90 days: all those contacts who have opened an email in the last 90 days. For this list even if we do not have many contacts, we can create it in 30-60 days and then update it. The idea is basically to differentiate the contacts who usually open our emails and those who usually don't; The reason is always the same: to make sure that the open rate is as high as possible, so that Google recognizes us as a safe and valuable email, and thus bring us to more people without going through the SPAM folder.

• Customers who haven't opened in 90 days: this list of contacts, although it seems useless, is not completely useless, because we can try to create a play-off campaign and see if a portion of these contacts can be brought to the 90-day Participant List. Sometimes, for example, we can have people who are sale buyers, that is, people who buy only at certain times of the year when they know there will be a sale. I mean Christmas or Black Friday or Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. And they are contacts who, therefore, usually don't open emails unless they come at these times of the year. Our job here is to wait for the right time to try to win them over with a can't-miss offer; 

• All customers: this is a list that includes all of our contacts; We can't use it often because it would affect our average open rate, but we will use it in those campaigns that we know everyone might be interested in; It is also a way to try to retrieve some contacts from this list that are not yet on the 90-day Engagers list.

 

Once the lists are created, we can see in detail the email marketing campaigns we will launch and the appropriate times, as well as find a list of issues that usually have a great open rate and some tricks for placing CTA buttons that really convert.

 

TIP: I recommend using KLAVIYO as your email marketing management program, for these reasons:

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• It is the most widely used on the market (there must be a reason...)

• It allows you to easily create automatic flows (which can generate up to 45% of your billing (as you saw in the actual image above) - and remember we are talking about flows that work on their own, you only program them with our help and then they make money without any work)

• Easily added to most web platforms on the market

• Allows you to create highly customized lists (based on demographics, order amounts and more), which help you create more targeted automated cross-sell and upsell flows

• It is relatively inexpensive considering that for a total list of up to 5,000 contacts it costs only about €100 per month (below we leave you a pricing table updated to 2022)

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