Turn every email into a unique customer experience

Email marketing is the action of marketing your brand’s product or services via email messages. This can be sales alerts, content-led newsletters, and anything in between. Email marketing lets you communicate with your customers and prospects at scale.

The channel allows you to personalize and automate messages, so it’s a super effective channel. It’s popular too, 333.2 billion emails are sent and received everyday in 2022 (Radicati Group). Here are 5 email marketing best practices to consider if you’re just starting out.

Email marketing is a complex industry, and unfortunately not one we can sum up in a few lines. Plus, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal. Our learning page is full of free resources, webinars, videos and blogs to get you started.

Dotdigital provide training and account management to help you stay on track, speak to your Customer Success Manager if you’re an existing Dotdigital customer, or book a demo today to discover how we can help.

Email marketing software is the technology which takes your email from an idea, to a beautifully designed campaign that lands in your subscribers’ inboxes. Email marketing tools work from the creation and design of your email, to implementing the delivery of your campaign, and finally, providing reporting - so that you can analyze every send in order to optimize future ones.

Email marketing software allows marketers to send customers highly relevant messages, at the right time, in order to capitalize on every opportunity. Technology enables you to activate a large volume of complex campaigns, that simply wouldn’t be possible if done manually.

Email marketing automation is the use of technology to create email programs which are set up to send email campaigns automatically, based on a trigger. This could be a customer signing up, making a purchase, abandoning a cart, etc. Email marketing automation allows you to communicate information with your customers, just when they need it most. It lets you be there for your customers 24/7, without actually working 24/7.

Marketing automations can be split into two groups: transactional, and marketing. Every time you get a password reset email, or an order confirmation - that’s a transactional automation campaign in action. Marketing automation programs are those which require consent. These are campaigns such as welcome emails when you first sign up to a brand, birthday campaigns, and win-back campaigns.

If you’re new to the world of email marketing, you might not know where to start. The first thing to do is check out our free learning resource library. There you will find tons of articles and lookbooks designed to inspire your next campaign. Signing up to your competitor’s emails is also a smart move.

Dotdigital’s 2022 Hitting the Mark report analyzed emails from 100 brands across four regions, it’s a great place to get some informed inspiration.

Email marketers are copywriters, designers, data analysts, strategists, and first and foremost, communicators. Email marketers bridge the gap between a brand and its customers. A typical day in the life of an email marketer will vary depending on their industry and company set up.

Email marketers create email campaigns that send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Email is a flexible channel, so it can communicate any message you need it to. That said, the three main categories of email are:

• Transactional emails that keep customers update on important information.
• Marketing automations that catch and nurture prospects and customers with programs such as welcome, reengagement, and nurture.
• Engagement emails such as promotional messages or curated content sends, used to get customers to site, grow brand identity, and offer value.

An email marketing strategy is the backbone of your email marketing calendar. Like any strategy, it should be based on data. You should research email as an industry (our Benchmark Report is a great place to start), your own sector, and of course, your own customers.

A successful marketing strategy is based on data, learnings from your own unique customers. Your email strategy should tie in to your overall marketing strategy, creating a cross-channel strategy that results in cross-channel marketing that is both in-tune, and compliments each other.

The short answer is, yes! With ROI at $36 per $1 spent, email marketing is one of the best channels there is. There are around 4.2 billion email users worldwide, so it’s a safe bet your customers and prospects use the channel. The combination of personalization, segmentation, and automation mean that you can send tailored messages to your customers at scale, without spending hours creating each email send.

Email marketing lets you target customers with the messaging they need, based on their position in your customer journey.

Email marketing does come with a cost, but this varies greatly depending on your needs. Some email service providers (ESPs) are a low budget option, which will work if you need a straight-forward platform to send emails to a small amount of customers.

If you want to have automation programs, integrations with your website or CRM, and a ton of functionality, it will cost. However, with an ROI of $36 per $1 spent, email is a smart investment. Plus, the smarter your email marketing, the better your ROI. Email marketing revenue is only predicted to grow, it’s expected to hit $17.9 billion by 2027. Get in touch to see what package works best for you here.

To increase your click-through-rate (CTR), first of all, experiment with subject lines to get more people looking at your email. From there, test your email copy, sometimes less is more, and ensure your CTAs are clear and obvious.

Also consider the content of your email, if you’re sending to everyone, it’s not going to appeal to many. Utilize segmentation and dynamic content to ensure your email campaigns are appealing to the people you send it to, piquing their interest so that they click through to site.

Far from it. Email has been a key marketing channel for a long time, and it isn’t going anywhere. Email continues to evolve as a channel, keeping up with the digital landscape at large.

The channel has so many features these days, such as artificial-intelligence (AI) powered tools, automation of email programs, and dynamic content blocks. Email is a powerhouse, it’s a constant in any marketer’s strategy, and it isn’t being left behind.

Click-through rates are calculated by taking the number of clicks the campaign got and dividing that by the amount of emails that were delivered. The average CTR in email marketing is 1.99%.

There is also CTOR (click to open rate), which is simply unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens a campaign receives. The average CTOR sits around 10.81%. CTR and CTOR vary by region and industry, you can learn more about this and get exclusive tips in our Benchmark Report.

Our research has found the global average open rate for email is 18.4%. It’s also worth noting that open rates vary by industry and region. Discover the average open rate for your industry and region, and check out a whole host of metrics in our Benchmark Report.

That said, open rates aren’t the most reliable metric out there, something accelerated by Apple’s iOS 15. But don’t panic, there are much better metrics to measure your success upon, and Dotdigital is geared up to optimize based on these more reliable metrics too.

Email marketing is what keeps your customers feeling connected to your brand. Email offers a well understood and trusted channel to communicate with your customers. There are over 4.2 million email users, so it’s likely to be a channel your audience are familiar with.

Email marketing ticks a lot of boxes for businesses. The flexibility of the channel allows it to send out transactional messages, ad hoc sales or communication messages, and automated programs to nurture customers.

Customer engagement is the name of the game. Email marketing lets you communicate with your customers, no matter the message. Whether you want to send a sale alert, a new year message from your CEO, or send out a review request, email will work for all.

Dotdigital lets you create effective customer engagement by utilizing personalization, segmentation, and automation to create email marketing campaigns that feel personal, but are delivered at scale. Saving you time, and making your customers feel valued.

Email marketing is the key communication channel between your brand and your customers. It helps build engagement, positive relationships, and loyalty between your brand and it’s customers. It’s also a great driver of traffic to your website or app.

Email marketing has a great ROI, and is a truly flexible channel, meaning it can cover a lot of your marketing needs all in one place. Especially if you use a cross-channel platform like Dotdigital. Having your marketing channels aligned makes them more effective, simplifies your workload, and makes the most out of your marketing budget.

An inbound strategy built on content goes hand-in-hand with email marketing. Gating your content, or having an email signup prominent on your content pages, such as blogs, ebooks, and so on, is a great way of capturing the email addresses of interested prospects.

Once you’ve got their email address, you can work on nurturing them into a conversion by use of nurture programs. Use email automation to send a nurturing welcome series which includes your brand’s USPs, builds the relationship, and points them in the right direction for next steps.

Writing a marketing email isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. It depends on the content, the relationship with the customer, and your brand’s usual tone of voice (TOV). Remember that the customer is not a faceless entity, they’re a human just like you and I.

Write like you would in any other situation, and take into account email design, scan-ability, overall readability, and your existing TOV. If you’d like to learn more, read our blog on how to write the perfect email.

This depends on your customers, and will likely vary greatly from business to business. Luckily Dotdigital has the technology to work it out for you. Send Time Optimization tools will optimize the time of individual sends to maximize engagement based on your contacts' historical click behavior.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) crunches the numbers so you don’t have to, making your sends more impactful, and saving you time.

Spam is synonymous with email marketing, but email marketing is a lot more sophisticated than it used to be. There are rules to abide by, but this isn’t a bad thing, they not only keep you out of the spam folder, but are also best practice.

The key things are consent, and respecting the inbox - so don’t buy email address lists, and don’t inundate the ones you do have with a high volume of generic emails. To learn more, check out our blogs on email marketing and consent and how to avoid spam traps.