10 Beginner Email Marketing Questions Answered
Email marketing sounds straightforward enough, but there are actually a number of questions you’ll likely have when you work on your email marketing campaign. Here are the answers to some of the most commonly asked email marketing questions.
- What’s the go with email newsletters?
There are lots of types of emails you can send and email newsletters are just one of them. An email newsletter is usually on one topic, but it promotes different pieces of content. The goal of an email newsletter is to get your subscribers to click on those pieces of content. Your email newsletters may also include ads or special offers.
While email newsletters can be effective, often your email marketing strategy will be more effective if you send really specific and tailored content to your marketing funnel. You should take the time to segment your lists and send emails that feature just one piece of content as this will likely be more successful.
- I don’t have a large list of subscribers yet, should I buy a list to send my emails to?
No. You should never buy a list. When recipients on those lists get an email from you, they’ll be more likely to mark you as spam than read it. This will affect the success of your email marketing down the track too.
- Ok, so how do I grow my email marketing list organically?
People must opt-in, in other words, subscribe, to your emails. One way to do this is to create an offer and ask for people to give you their email address to access that piece of content. You can also offer incentives such as a discount code which people will receive when they subscribe to your emails.
- How do I make sure I don’t land in the spam folder?
The first step is to only use your organically grown list of email subscribers. You should also follow best practices like identifying who you are in your sender name, making unsubscription easy, segmenting your lists and tailoring your content to those segments, and not bombarding your recipients with too many emails.
- How do I ensure my emails will look right when delivered?
Email providers render HTML differently. What this means for you is you’ll need to test out emails over and over again to make sure they work for each outlet. You can use tools that help you to test different email providers in one place, or you can create a number of email accounts, send yourself test emails, and keep checking until you’re happy with how the emails look.
- How often should I be sending emails?
There’s no definite answer to this question. The rule of thumb is to send emails as often as people want to hear from you. You’ll only find out how often that is by running tests that help you determine how much is too much.
- What do open rates and clickthrough rates mean?
Open rates and clickthrough rates are the most common benchmarks when measuring email marketing success. An open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email from the total number of people that received it. The clickthrough rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email from the total number of people who opened it.
- Are there any other metrics I should be tracking besides those?
This depends on your marketing goals. If you are trying to generate leads through your emails, you might want to measure how many people filled in a form through your newsletter.
- What’s the difference between a hard and a soft bounce?
When an email bounces, it means that someone in your email list didn’t receive your email. A hard bounce means that it failed for a permanent reason which could be something like a fake email address. A soft bounce means that it failed because of a temporary issue such as a full mailbox. If you do receive a hard bounce, it’s important that you remove that email address from your list. Not doing so could make your list unreliable and lead to more soft bounces.
- How do I prevent people from unsubscribing from my emails?
Legally, you need to provide a way for your subscribers to unsubscribe. However, if you notice more and more people unsubscribing from your emails, it might be time to review your strategy. Is your content engaging enough? Are you emailing too often? Segmenting your email list and sending tailored content can also help lower the number of unsubscribes.
Your email marketing strategy will need to change and adapt to your subscribers’ needs so don’t forget to continue to measure and monitor the success of your emails.
