Email Marketing

What is email marketing?
What are the types of email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of marketing that allows businesses to promote their products and services to people through email, with the combined benefits of digital, direct, content, and funnel marketing.

Modern email marketing tools make it affordable even for small businesses to automate, personalise, and send out emails suited to every stage of the customer lifecycle, from awareness to consideration, conversion, and beyond.

The four main types of email marketing include:

Subscriber emails

Emails sent out to subscribers on your email list, which can be used for a variety of purposes, from notifying them of new products or features, to sharing newsletters or your latest blog posts.

Behavioural emails

Emails targeted at specific users based on “triggers”, which are certain behaviours or actions that users perform on your website or app. These behaviours are tracked using software, which then automatically sends out relevant emails to those users.

Examples include abandoned cart emails when users add products to check out, but do not complete the purchase, or browsing history mails that show users other content they may be interested in based on content they recently browsed on your site.

Promotional emails

Emails focused on sales and revenue, such as those announcing sales, launches, or upselling / cross-selling offers.

Transactional emails

Emails sent specifically in response to a transaction initiated by a customer, such as a shipping confirmation mail, password reset mail, opt-in mail, shipping confirmation mail, and so on. Unlike all other forms of email marketing, transactional emails do not require consent from recipients. Mails notifying your existing subscribers and customers about important legal changes to your policies or terms of business are also considered transactional emails.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

As a versatile mode of marketing, email can help businesses with a variety of objectives:

• attracting leads
• promoting brand awareness
• increasing conversions
• reducing churn
• improving customer success and retention
• building brand loyalty
• warming cold prospects

What is an email marketing funnel?
How do I set up an email marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel, also called a marketing sales funnel, is a term used interchangeably to refer to, both, the model that describes the process through which potential customers (“leads”) turn into actual customers, as well as the marketing tactics and strategies based on this model, intended to improve the ratio of, and speed at which, leads become customers.

An email marketing funnel is a set of techniques intended to generate, nurture, and convert leads, with a special focus on email.

Studies show that less than 2% of people complete a purchase on first contact with a product or service; the average consumer needs eight or more separate interactions with a product or service before they become a customer. Depending on the nature and cost of the product / service, the process between first contact and purchase can take anywhere from a few hours or days, to several months.

Below is a highly simplified example of the steps that a typical consumer goes through before they become customers:

• Searches on Google for solutions to their need / problem
• Explores various websites
• Compares suitable products / services from different providers
• Shortlists the products / services they like the most
• Buys the finally selected product / service

In reality, there may be several additional steps, such as sending enquiries to clarify various questions, trying a demo, checking for reviews from friends or social media, shopping around for deals / discounts, and so on.

All of these steps are grouped into different stages, representing a typical consumer journey or ‘lifecycle’ for a given product, service, or brand, as follows:

1. Awareness: Potential customers are attracted through ads, trade shows, blog posts, social media content, or other marketing methods. ‘Lead magnets’ such as free downloads, giveaways, deals, guides, or courses, obtain consumer information, thereby generating leads.
2. Interest: Leads are ‘nurtured’ through useful emails and content that is targeted to the lead’s interests, thereby building the brand’s relevance, credibility, and top-of-mind recall with the lead.
3. Consideration: Leads become prospects, taking a step closer to becoming customers by making an enquiry, signing up for a trial, or request for a demo or quote.
4. Conversion: Prospects make the decision to buy, transforming into customers. If they continue to enjoy a positive experience, customers become repeat customers and brand advocates, who refer your business to others.

Accordingly, a good email marketing funnel consists of four key ingredients to propel consumers along this journey.

• Effective “lead magnets”,which are incentives for consumers to provide their email to your business, thereby becoming leads.
• Opt-in forms or landing pages, which are web forms or pages that are specially designed to promote lead magnets and obtain email addresses.
• A sequence of emails intended to convert leads into customers. These emails are sent based on a lead’s interests, behaviour, and position in the customer lifecycle, which are attributes determined from analytics data of your website visitors and email subscribers.
• Powerful, appropriate calls-to-action, suited to each specific interest group and lifecycle stage, to keep leads engaged and / or promote conversion.

Why should I choose Lime to design and run my email marketing campaigns?

In a nutshell, businesses choose Lime to craft their email marketing because our knowhow and experience gives them campaigns that fulfil key objectives, rather than mails that get consigned to the junk folders of recipients. Here’s an overview of the key advantages of Lime’s approach to email marketing.

Campaigns that build trust

To really understand what separates successful emails from unsuccessful ones, think about the emails you most recently opened, as opposed to those you did not. As an example, this author most recently opened these emails:

• Bank: Credit Card Statement for the Period [MMYY] to [MMYY]
• Customer: revised project brief
• Skyscanner: Price alert — low fares on [city] to [city]
• innocent drinks: wake us up when September starts

Meanwhile, here are the most recent emails that the author didn’t open:

• Amazon: Your order #[number] has been dispatched
• Bank: Exclusive Offer for You!
• LinkedIn: [User] shared a new post
• Michael Strauss: Welcome aboard!

As a marketer, you want to know what it is that makes the difference. What gets some emails opened but not others?

The answer: trust and timely relevance.

If recipients trust you (i.e., they know who you are), and believe that the email you’ve sent will be of value (i.e., it’s relevant to them right then), your mails will get opened.

In the example above, the author recognises their bank, the customer, Skyscanner, and innocent, all very well. The first three subject lines indicate clearly what the emails contain, and this author trusts that they will actually contain what they claim to.

In the fourth case, the subject line is a bit mysterious, but the sender has built a reputation (in this author’s mind) as a brand that consistently sends amusing and entertaining emails. This was strong enough to open the email anyway (it did not disappoint, further cementing that trust).

In the latter set, even though the first three senders were well-known, the emails did not seem relevant at the time. People already expect that an item purchased on Amazon will be shipped on time, so there is little need to open that email unless something goes wrong (like a delivery delay).

Prior promotional emails from the bank were of little value, so this too was consigned to that category, as was LinkedIn’s notification mail. And this author doesn’t recognise Michael Strauss, nor know what he is welcoming them to — so that email stays ignored.

At Lime, we’re experts at building trust through marketing, especially with email campaigns. Here’s how we do that.

Segmentation and lifecycle marketing

As was clear in the example above, a successful email is one that recipients trust and perceive to be of relevance at the time they receive them.

Trust is built over time, by sending emails that are relevant, each time, every time. And the key to relevance — knowing what to send to whom, and when — is intelligent campaign design, based on interest-based segments and predictive lifecycle traits.

At Lime, we achieve this in three ways. First, we study your business to understand the distinct stages of a typical customer journey with your business: one-time website visitors, returning visitors, active enquiries, current customers, past customers, and cold leads, for example.

Second, we segment each of these groups based on what aspects of your marketing and products / services they are most interested in. For instance, let’s say yours is a corporate events business, with a blog / newsletter focused on HR- and team-management, offering resources improving productivity and employee satisfaction.

Effective segmentation allows us to identify subgroups in your email list that have distinct interests, and design emails that are of interest to individual groups, based on their interest history on your website or past emails, and their current position in the lifecycle journey.

This means that a person most interested in recruitment techniques will not be sent emails primarily about transforming workplace culture, while an existing customer will not be sent welcome discounts to sign up for your services.

The third ingredient that helps Lime ensure your success is that we choose the most effective email marketing software platforms to suit your specific needs. Successful email marketing requires a level of tracking and automation that are not possible with simple mail clients like Outlook and Gmail; at Lime, we evaluate your business needs and goals, and choose the most cost-effective tools (like MailChimp, Moosend, and MailJet) for your unique use-case.

Superior email copy and design

A study of over 2 billion marketing emails found that more than 17% of permission-based emails end up in spam. At Lime, we help customers outperform that benchmark, thanks to intelligently designed and segmented campaigns backed by powerful subject lines, compelling copy, and beautiful design.

Not only do these email campaigns let you beat the competition, they also strengthen your customers’ relationships with your brand.

What are some examples of effective email marketing?

The responsive chart-making tool, Datawrapper, sends out a newsletter that is a great example of how to educate users while at the same time showing off product features with beautiful images.

An online tea brand uses behavioural emails to send an abandoned cart mail that not only addresses possible concerns, it also retains the brand’s tone-of-voice to keep customers engaged and invite them back.

The UK nutrition brand is on the ball when it comes to promotional emails, taking advantage of popular events and calendar days to get users’ attention.

The web app, Zapier, shows how to do simple, clean transactional emails that also include a link inviting recipients to check out their blog, or apply for a job.

What are the laws around email marketing in Australia?

Email marketing in Australia is governed by the Spam Regulations and the Federal Spam Act of 2003. Any business sending marketing messages by email must ensure compliance with these regulations. Here is a summary of the most important dos and don’ts:

Do:

• Make sure that you have consent from each recipient email address to send your marketing mails to that address.

• Maintain proof of each recipient’s consent in the form of a filled physical or digital form, a checked box on your website or app, or other documentary evidence for verbal consent.
• Check that each marketing email clearly identifies you as the sender, with your business’s legal name, ABN, as well as valid address and contact information.
• Ensure all marketing emails contain an easily visible and functional unsubscribe link.

Don’t:

• Send any form of electronic message to obtain consent, as this constitutes unsolicited marketing communication.

• Send emails to addresses that have been compiled by web-scraping or through the use of robotic email-harvesting software.
• Let the address or contact details mentioned in a marketing email fall out of use in less than 30 days from the date it was sent.
• Allow an unsubscribe link to become non-functional in less than 30 days from the date on which it was sent.
• Take more than 5 business days to process an unsubscribe request.
• Require a login, payment, nor levy any extra fee, for processing an unsubscribe request.

Note that if a recipient has an active and ongoing relationship with your business, such as a membership or a subscription, it is permissible to send marketing messages that are directly relevant to that specific relationship. An example of this is a business sending a customer an offer towards the renewal of an existing subscription, or a car dealership that notifies a customer of an upcoming maintenance check.

However, this does not include sending marketing mails to people who have only made a one-time purchase from a business, without express permission in the forms outlined in the bullet points above.