If your online marketing is smoldering, you can easily turn up website traffic with email marketing.

Regardless of the product or service you offer, email marketing is a proven technique to increase website traffic and convert visitors into online sales.

This blog post outlines the five key points to establish a successful email marketing practice. Plus, I will provide my research in comparing email marketing service providers to save you the time of doing it yourself.

“56% of marketers implement mobile-friendly emails in their email marketing strategy.” ~ Forbes

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing happens in two ways. The first one is collecting subscribers at your website. You have seen this on established online businesses where there is a button or quick form to collect the name and email address of people who want to hear more from your business. The other method requires purchasing a list of your target audience or manual labor of searching websites to find your potential customers and collecting email addresses.

An advanced email marketing strategy includes automating replies. This is accomplished using a variety of tools, some are free, and others are not. The cost depends on the volume of email and how detailed or personalized your automation will be. Two tools are Zapier and Make, which are not included in the comparison below. That tool integrates with Gmail and additional mail providers to make it very malleable. Those two do not require coding and can be setup with our using the AI feature, a cost, they offer.

SUBSCRIPTIONS

The optimal method is to encourage website visitors to subscribe to your website or social media with your website design. With these, you know they are qualified contacts since they visited your content and want more information. There are free tools, and one favorite is Airtable, which allows you to set up a subscriber form and supplies the code to paste into your website to display the form. When a website visitor subscribes, you receive an email, and the subsriber receives an email which you customize. Plus, subscriber data is stored in an Airtable database where you retrieve it to use in your email campaign.

There are multiple methods to set up a subscriber form on your website pages. Google Docs is another tool, and plenty of email marketing service providers do the same process I described using Airtable. The caveat is thus: how much do you want to pay to use a provider? The method with Airtable is free. You can compare those provider costs using my research.

CREATING AN EMAIL LIST

The second method involves buying a list or searching websites to collect email addresses. Keep in mind that using this method is similar to cold calling, and there is one significant downside. Sending an email to people on a list may cause them to assign it to spam, which means the AI that runs services like Gmail and Yahoo will identify your website address as spam. When that happens, your email(s) are deposited into the spam box instead of the inbox.

Another aspect to consider is that sending to a list means people have not opted in to your list; they have not consented to receive your email. Someone who subscribes to your website has “opted in,” meaning they know you are going to send them periodic emails.

“53% of small business owners in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia used email marketing as the most frequent strategy for finding new and retaining repeat customers.” ~ Constant Contact

HOW TO ESTABLISH SUCCESSFUL EMAIL MARKETING

There are five widely recognized elements to success with email marketing.

AUTOMATE Set up your email marketing process to require less labor, which means it’s sustainable. Depending on what you want to accomplish with your email, it can be done using integration with other platforms, which I briefly described, mentioning Zapier and Make. There are dozens of integrations possible, and more will come along in the natural evolution of email marketing. Only using a gmail account to send emails and receive them, means more labor is required: pasting the subscriber info you receive into an Excel sheet to use in your email campaign.

TARGETING Send your email to people who can benefit from your content. If your potential clients are barber shops, there is no need to send an email to bakeries or homeowners.

TIMING Send your emails at an uptime time. For example, I never send an email on a Monday. Sending email over a holiday can end up being a waste of resources since people are taking time off from work.

TRUST Provide content in your email that benefits the reader. Use appealing subjects in your email subject that pique the interest of your email recipients.

TRACKING Understand who is opening the email and who is not opening it. This step will require using an email marketing provider instead of the method I described using Airtable.

COMPARE EMAIL MARKETING SERVICE PROVIDERS

The provider worth considering, but not included in the comparison below, is AMAZON SES. By far, it’s the least expensive provider to use. Its benefits include all the ones shown in my comparison chart. The downside is that it requires more tech skills to establish. However, once the setup is completed, it's very sustainable and intuitive to administer.

I compared the least expensive plans on each of the providers below. When you pay a higher subscription rate, you receive additional features. AI services vary from platform to platform, so drilling down on those adds confusion.

One advantage of using a provider is the ability to integrate with other platforms, which removes many of the technical hurdles. One instance, if you want to send a price link and have funds deposited into your Stripe account, it's simple for the email recipient to click the link in your email and make the payment.

Some of the providers below do provide SMS marketing at an additional cost. However, there are many pricing options available by connecting with a professional SMS distribution service. There is so much on SMS marketing, it requires a separate blog post in the future.

SUMMARY

Email marketing needs to be done in such a way as to produce results without tarnishing your website by becoming designated as a spammer. That designation is a variable that is used to evaluate your domain authority.

Overall, to be a winner in email marketing, you must create trust with the people who receive your email, which relies on quality email content.

Be sure to always provide educational content. This is easily accomplished by demonstrating how your services and products help email recipients solve issues or improve their lifestyle or business processes.

Sending emails about this sale or a specific promotion is not quality content. We have all seen this type of email, and they are boring. Don’t be one of those email senders. Build your online reputation so that when people see your email, they expect to learn something important and useful.

Make your email important. The only way this is done is by using a conversational tone that communicates you are interested in helping them.

Including your website link to display your content will not contribute to your being rated as a spammer; use that page on your website to offer your promotion or sale, maybe in a pop-up window.

AI features in email marketing service providers are going to make marketing easier. One significant benefit I see is the ability to drill down in data automatically. As an example, Omnisend provides a Google Customer Match service and Facebook (Instagram) Custom Audiences. Those seem to reduce, even eliminate, a wheelbarrow of manual labor; you just have to figure out what level of ROI they will bring you.

If you are not doing email marketing and want to get started, let’s have a conversation. My expertise will reduce your learning curve and improve your email marketing results.