Email marketing Archives

Mailing List 101: Why You Need One And How To Build It

Many people tend to think that mailing lists are relics when it comes to Internet marketing. While many businesses focus on social media marketing nowadays, email remains the most effective tool when it comes to online marketing.

Being around since the early days of the Internet, email is also something that is easy to use. For businesses, email marketing has proven to be one of the best ways to drive online and in-store sales.

Mailing List Benefits

A good mailing list has plenty of positive benefits for your business. Here are a few of them:

Communicates directly with your audience

A good mailing list will allow you to directly engage with your customers. Oftentimes, these people have chosen to subscribe to your mailing list so it will be easier for you to relay your message.

Because of this, mailing lists have a high conversion rate. This is a huge reason why a lot of e-commerce sites like Amazon or Lazada are still relying on email marketing when they want to offer you something.

Low Cost

Unlike brochures, flyers, and traditional mail, email marketing requires little money for it to be effective. While your promotions and designs will still require a slight budget, email marketing is really low-cost compared to the other options stated.

Broader Audience than Social Media

Social media has become one of the hottest tools for online marketing. However, when it comes to getting your message across the Internet, email marketing remains king.

Think about it, you probably know a handful of people who are not on social media, but it would be hard for you to think of anyone without an email address. This is backed up by actual facts.

According to Optinmonster, there are about 2.6 Billion email users compared to 1.7 Billion Facebook users. Add to that the fact that 77 percent of people prefer email over social media when it comes to permission-based promotional messages.

Faster word-of-mouth

Mailing lists consist of people who are your targeted demographic and are the ones who are more than likely to buy what you are selling. One huge benefit of mailing lists is that these customers are most likely to spread the word of what you are offering to other potential customers.

Buzz is one of the most prized phenomena for a small business. Having a mailing list full of people who have voluntarily joined your email list will most likely generate buzz faster than other online marketing tools.

Guide To Create Your Mailing List

If you’re convinced by the benefits of a mailing list as discussed above, it is high time that you created one for your business. Here is a step-by-step guide to creating your mailing list.

1. Look for a great email marketing service

Before you start contemplating the rewards you can reap from a mailing list; you first have to choose an email marketing service.

You need to select one that will best suit your business needs, particularly the size of your audience. Email marketing services offer different pricing models depending on your marketing size and needs. If you want to test the waters, start with Mailchimp. They have a freemium option for up to 2,000 subscribers where you can send out 12,000 emails per month, i.e. up to 6 email blasts to your 2,000 subscribers.

2. Think of a great initial offer for your mailing list

Handing over an email address is built on trust. People receive hundreds of offers everyday. You need to entice them with a compelling offer that will pique the interest of the right potential audience to join your list.

There are plenty of ideas you can implement to make growing your mailing list easier. You can give them access to a webinar, give them promotional coupons, or give them something for free. The key is to give your potential customers something of value for them to trust you with their email addresses.

3. Create an opt-in form and put it on your website

An opt-in form is something that you can put on your website for customers to sign up to. A good opt-in form can make or break your mailing list. Ask too many questions and you run the risk of people not signing up at all. If this is your first time creating an opt-in form, a field for a name and the email address should suffice. You can also use a tool like OmniKick to make your life easier.

Where you place it on your website is also very important. Placing your signups in the wrong place could mean people never see them, or worse, ignore them entirely! Here are some great places to put your sign-up form so that people are more likely to engage with it:

A splash page
Welcome gate
Floating bar
Above the fold
Blog posts
Blog page
Sidebar
Timed lightboxes
Scroll box
Footer
About page
Resource pages
Sign up page
Exit-Intent Popup

4. Get your subscribers!

You can now start collecting emails and building up your list. If your website is getting great traffic (check out our services for online marketing), then your opt-in form should have no problems getting you emails. Otherwise, there are other ways to grow your mailing list.

One idea is to leverage other people’s lists. Maybe you know complementary businesses with a similar customer profile to yours that have already amassed a substantial list. You can reach out to them for a join venture! Joint ventures are quite common in online businesses, as promoting on one another’s lists can be mutually beneficial for both businesses. Want more ideas to grow a mailing list? Ask us in the comments!

Follow these guidelines and you are on your way to building a great mailing list for your business. Email marketing is also something we help our clients with at 2Stallions(a full-service digital marketing agency), so do reach out if you’re interested.

Optimize your email marketing (BONUS!)

While the previous steps should serve you well to start building your mailing list, at some point, you’ll also want to improve conversions from your email marketing. Optimizing your email marketing should be your next step to make your emails more effective. Below are three basic tips for email marketing optimisation.

1. Test your subject lines

According to a survey posted in Hubspot, 35% of email recipients open email based on what is written in the subject line. That alone should be enough to tell you how important a good subject does for your email marketing. This is a trial-and-error process and will take some time. Try A/B testing your emails by splitting your list in two. Send them the same content with different subject headlines and track which version gets better open rates. Your results over time will help you to figure out the words and sentences that resonate more with your audience and gets your subscribers to open your emails.

2. Segment and personalize

As your marketing list grows, your subscribers start to vary from one another. Instead of sending a one-size-fits-all mass email, try creating smaller groups of subscribers based on categories like gender, location, and previous purchases. This will enable you to sell more effectively by sending each segmented subscriber group what they really need. A study has revealed that the more targeted your emails are, the better the engagement and response will be.

3. Social sharing buttons in emails

Emails with social sharing buttons generally have a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) than those that don’t. By incorporating social media sharing, your email marketing has the potential to reach out to a far wider audience.

We have given you more than enough reasons to stop mulling and start taking action for your own mailing list. As a time-tested marketing method, email continues to be the most reliable and effective tool to bet your company resources on.

Originally published: 4 April, 2017
Updated: 16 December, 2022

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Follow These 5 “Ts” to Optimise Your Email Marketing Strategy

Is your business barely getting leads from your email marketing efforts? If yes, that’s one sign that you need to optimise your email marketing strategy.

Getting through your potential and existing customers’ email inboxes doesn’t always guarantee results. Not all of your email recipients will open your emails. Some of them might leave them unread for days, weeks, or months.

So how do you triumph over email marketing challenges? We have one word for that—tactic. The good news is that there’s not just one but five tactics (5Ts) that can guide you towards email marketing success: target, tease, teach, test and track.

5 Ts to Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

1. Target

In every marketing strategy, you must create campaigns or content that resonate with your target audience. You must offer personalised experiences whilst anticipating what they need and want at the moment.

The same thing applies to email marketing. The more personalised content you provide to your readers, the more chance to engage them and convince them in taking action.

Netflix, for example, is one of the companies that capitalise on the power of personalisation. Some of its notable personalised email marketing campaigns include “[Name], we just added a TV show you might like,” and “What’s playing next, [Name]?”

By tracking the user’s activity, the streaming entertainment service giant gets to know the interests and preferences of their subscribers. The collected data helps Netflix craft emails with show recommendations or upcoming movies that match users’ cinematic tastes.

This tactic is something that email marketers could borrow and practice. Tailor your campaigns according to your prospect and current customer’s wants and needs to encourage engagement and re-engagement, respectively.

2. Tease

Teaser marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways to build anticipation and trigger curiosity. They give the audience a sense of exclusivity as if brands share a special secret with them.

Guess what? You could also embrace the concept of teasing to optimise your email marketing strategy. But before you do, be sure to tease your target audience appropriately.

Here are a few tips to employ this tactic in your email campaigns:

Write catchy, relevant subject lines. Since subject lines are the first thing people see when opening their emails, make them as engaging as possible. Avoid the click-bait route and tease your email content accordingly.

Also, long subject lines usually get chopped off, so keep it short and sweet. While the length is crucial, you should also consider adding words that reveal what’s inside your email content, like:
- “First look at your new fashion piece!”
- “Our makeup MEGA sale is back!”
- “Here’s our birthday treat for YOU!”
- “FREE SHIPPING for a limited time only!”
Know when to send your email(s). Teasing can be harmless fun, or it can be hurtful — it’s the same in email marketing. Your email teasers might trip up your efforts, especially when not sent at the ideal time. Timing plays a pivotal role in the success of your email marketing campaigns. If you don’t get the timing right, you’re doomed. Here’s when you should send out your email campaigns:
- New product release – two to four months before the product launch. Reveal details one at a time to instil excitement.
- Special event – two weeks to one month before the event.
- Upcoming sale – days or weeks before special sales (i.e., Christmas Sale, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.)
Use compelling visual elements. Like subject lines, email campaigns with an eye-catching design promotes engagement. Play with colours and make the email copy visually appealing to boost your email engagement and conversion rates.

3. Teach

Most email marketing campaigns don’t generate results because they lack an essential element: the takeaway. Campaigns should always touch the recipient’s questions like “What’s in it for me?” or “Can this product/service solve any of my problems?”

If your campaign fails in this category, it’s about time to optimise your email marketing strategy. Begin working on fulfilling your target customer’s needs by leaving them with helpful information.

So how can you incorporate the teaching tactic into your email content? Here are a few tested ways to do it.

Avoid hard selling. Approach your email recipients with education insights, rather than pushing them to buy your product or service.
Provide solutions to problems. The idea is to present the benefits of making a purchase and not to enumerate the product’s features.
Offer informative content. Writing valuable content pieces that follow a trend or recipients can use in the future. Suppose you run an e-commerce fashion store. You may send a newsletter on how to dress like Lily Collins in ‘Emily in Paris’ Netflix show.

4. Test

Any email marketing strategy can never be proven effective unless tested. This is why you should test your emails to determine the best way to connect with your email recipients.

There are several email testing methods—and A/B testing is one. As the name implies, it works by sending two variations (A and B) of your email to two sets of subscribers.

Once the test has concluded, you will find which variation of the campaign garnered the best results.

Let’s take a look at the example HubSpot Academy cited in its “Testing Your Marketing Emails” lesson.

Source: HubSpot Academy

AdairHomes used A/B testing to optimise their email subject lines. The results show that version A, the more descriptive subject line has higher email open rates than the shorter subject line.

Running email tests like this lets you understand how your prospects or customers want to receive the information. Not only does it enable you to maximise open rates and click-throughs (CTRs), but it also helps you establish customer trust.

5. Track

Like testing, tracking your email campaigns also contributes to email marketing success. Constant tracking enables you to take the next necessary actions based on the collected customer data.

You could gauge the effectiveness of your emails using email marketing tools, such as Google Analytics (GA), MailChimp, and Bloom. If you’re already using Google Analytics in tracking website performance, might as well use the tool in tracking your campaigns too.

Follow the steps below to start tracking your email open rates and clicks using GA:

Log in to your Google Analytics account. If you don’t have an account yet, click here to create your account with ease.
Create a trackable URL. Google Analytics works with JavaScript code to track the user’s actions. For example, a recipient clicks the marked link in your email content. Google Analytics records the actions taken (i.e., clicks, downloads, video plays, etc.). Here’s how to make a trackable URL:
- Go to Google’s Campaign URL Builder or any free link-building tool to build your custom URL.
- Enter your website URL.
- Enter your campaign source.
- Input your campaign medium.
- Add your campaign name.
- Copy the URL.
- Add the URL to your emails.
Start monitoring your email campaign results in your Google Analytics account by doing the following steps:
- Open your GA account, then select Acquisitions.
- Click Traffic, then go to Source/Medium.

Email campaign tracking isn’t something you can set aside, especially if you want to optimise your email marketing strategy. So, take a good look at everything to keep your target audience at the core of all your efforts.

Summing It Up

Email is far from dead, so is email marketing. You may be struggling now to generate results thru email, but that doesn’t mean that the marketing tool is no longer valuable.

The solution to your problem is pretty easy—take your email marketing efforts up a notch. Incorporate the five Ts (target, tease, teach, test, and track) into your strategy to achieve your desired goals.

If you need expert help, 2Stallions would gladly take the challenge. We will help you reach out to and grow your community of fans and customers through email marketing.

Learn more about our complete line of digital marketing services here.

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AI in Email Marketing: Reasons to Jump on the Bandwagon

Did you know that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t limited to the healthcare, manufacturing, entertainment and gaming industries? You can also integrate AI in email marketing to drive your business forward.

More and more marketers are utilising AI technology to reshape their email marketing strategies. Email plays a crucial part in business communication, so it’s not a surprise that almost everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.

If you’re not confident about AI’s ability to hit the gas pedal on your email marketing efforts, let these statistics do the talking:

Still not convinced? Here are four ways AI can optimise your email marketing campaigns.

First, What Exactly Is Artificial Intelligence?

In its simplest form, artificial intelligence leverages computer systems to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human brain. It delves into the rational thinking and acting approach, where conclusions are drawn based on symbolic logic.

Here are the major branches of AI:

AI systems have numerous real-world applications. The most common applications include speech recognition, customer service, computer vision, recommendation engines, and automated stock trading.

4 Ways to Use AI in Email Marketing

1. Create Personalised Email Campaigns

Like social media, the email also offers a wealth of benefits. This digital marketing channel allows you to establish brand awareness, promote your products or services to a specific audience, and drive traffic to your blog without worrying about the character limits.

On top of these, sending emails can also help build and nurture relationships with your current and potential customers—specifically millennials.

According to Adestra, younger consumers prefer email as a primary medium for communicating with brands. The report showed that 73% of the millennial generation find email ubiquitous despite the explosion of newish digital channels.

So if your customer base is comprised of teens and young adults, use email marketing campaigns to engage them more and make them repeat customers. Here’s the good news: artificial intelligence can help you do just that.

Using AI in email marketing allows you to create messages based on your customer demographics or interests. AI technology predicts customer behaviour by segmenting customers into groups and analysing data from previous brand interactions.

The predictive analytics of artificial intelligence enables you to customise your email campaigns. For example, you can suggest recommended products or mail specific content that meets the customer behaviours, expectations, and wishes.

2. Write Catchy, Relevant Subject Lines

Did you know that emails with personalised subject lines have higher open and click-through rates than those without? The reason behind this is simple—subject lines that give a sense of exclusivity make people more valued.

Human beings are hardwired for connections. We are naturally inclined to engage with information that we find appealing and relevant. To back this claim, Dr. Rachna Jain, a psychologist, mentioned the concept of selective attention in a Social Media Examiner article.

“Most commonly, reticular activating system (RAS) is associated with the concept of selective attention, which means that we naturally orient to information or ideas that we are invested in.”

Since people cling to personalised experiences, work on writing better email subject lines. Note that subject lines are the first thing that recipients recognise, so make them more relevant and appealing to boost engagement.

Below are three ways to make your subject lines more interesting:

Use your customer’s data. Aside from sending an email with a subject line that mentions your readers’ first names, it also makes sense to mention their interests briefly.
Check their transactions history. Offer a relevant product that your customers previously bought. This technique never fails in converting them into returning paying customers.
Use FOMO to trigger urgency. “Our SALE is ending soon,” “Your subscription is expiring,” “Few items left,” “Last chance for 50% off”. Subject lines like these use fear of missing out (FOMO), which triggers urgency and scarcity.

Oh, did we mention that artificial intelligence can aid in writing better email subject lines? AI-powered tools, such as Phrasee, write and test email subject lines by analysing email data.

But if you don’t want to use AI technology in generating optimised subject lines, you can use it to gain insights about your customers. That way, you can create the best subject lines based on data.

3. Predict the Best Time to Send Emails

In email marketing, timing is a paramount concern. Your campaigns must get to your customers’ inboxes at the time where they’re likely to open them. Otherwise, your business will fall short of securing leads or purchases.

So, when’s the best day to send an email? Studies have found that discovered clicks and pen rates were highest on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Another research also uncovered the ideal time to send an email campaign on a given day—10 a.m. and between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.

These times make a lot of sense because of two reasons. First, people prepare to work or start working at 10 in the morning. Second, others are about to end their workday around 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon. This means they have some time to spare to check their email inboxes.

However, that’s not always the case because not everyone has the same 24 hours. Let’s take work-at-home mothers (WAHMs) as an example.

Many of WAHMs juggle work and household chores at the same time. Most of the time, they get to check their personal emails in their spare time, either during the evenings or weekends.

So does sending an email on a Tuesday at 10 a.m. make sense for them? Probably not.

If you tap into artificial intelligence, you will not have to worry about uncovering the perfect time and day to send an email to your target audience. AI technology takes the guesswork out and suggests the best times to send emails based on your subscribers’ data.

For example, AI found that most of your subscribers open emails at the start of the day. The extracted data allows you to fine-tune the schedule of sending out your emails. Now, isn’t that amazing?

4. Automate Repetitive Email Responses

The use of AI in email marketing is truly encompassing. With the technology’s ability to collect data and define patterns based on data collected, marketers can use all the information to improve their overall email marketing performance.

But if you think artificial intelligence only helps with analysing customers’ behaviours, you’re mistaken. It can also automate your mailbox and answer your customer inbound emails as quickly as possible.

This automatic email response function saves your marketing or customer support team a hefty amount of time, helping them focus more on other work that matters.

So how does AI technology write automated emails? Advanced AI tools use a generative pre-trained transformer or GPT-3, OpenAI’s newest language model. This model is pre-trained on several unlabelled texts and for a variety of different language tasks.

If that’s too technical to understand, here’s a demo from OthersideAI, a budding company that uses GPT-3 to shorthand notes into written emails.

An email composed by OthersideAI

In this demo, Matt Shumer, a cofounder of OthersideAI, typed short lines in response to a mock email asking what features coders should build next. It turns those or notes into a complete email like the one above.

What’s also great about this GPT-3 powered AI technology is that you can generate a new email over and over again. If you don’t like the first two suggestions, simply click the ‘generate’ button, and you will get a tweaked text.

Wrap-Up: Use AI in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Integrating AI in email marketing can benefit your company in the long run; it can promise increased leads, engagement and conversions.

The next time you map out your email marketing strategy, consider tapping into artificial intelligence. Use the AI technology to your advantage to study your customers’ interests, figure out the best time to send emails, and tailor the experience for them.

If you don’t know how to get started, 2Stallions has you covered! We offer email marketing and marketing automation services to help you get data-driven decisions, nurture leads, and drive sales quicker.

Contact a 2Stallions representative to learn more.

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Email marketing

Mailing List Benefits

Communicates directly with your audience

Low Cost

Broader Audience than Social Media

Faster word-of-mouth

Guide To Create Your Mailing List

1. Look for a great email marketing service

2. Think of a great initial offer for your mailing list

3. Create an opt-in form and put it on your website

4. Get your subscribers!

Optimize your email marketing (BONUS!)

1. Test your subject lines

2. Segment and personalize

3. Social sharing buttons in emails

5 Ts to Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

1. Target

2. Tease

3. Teach

4. Test

5. Track

Summing It Up

First, What Exactly Is Artificial Intelligence?

4 Ways to Use AI in Email Marketing

1. Create Personalised Email Campaigns

2. Write Catchy, Relevant Subject Lines

3. Predict the Best Time to Send Emails

4. Automate Repetitive Email Responses

Wrap-Up: Use AI in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

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