Hello Readers!
Welcome to the last chapter of our free email marketing course where we will be sharing the common set of email marketing questions asked by the marketers.
These questions can be your doubts or questions asked during your interview to test your knowledge. In either way, this chapter will be helpful to you to understand the concept.
Here we go!
Q: What’s the point of email marketing (In short, what is email marketing)?
Email marketing is an effective medium of online marketing to reach out to people at once in order to encourage them to do business with you. The business can be in any form; like purchasing your product or service, download the ebook, visiting your blogs/website, etc.
The end goal of any email marketing strategy leads to sales, conversion, web traffic, etc executed in a way that leads their subscribers to willingly complete the desired action.
This approach builds audience trust through emails that are valuable and entertaining for the reader, thus increasing the sender’s credibility and getting that sender closer to their desired goal.
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Q: How do I grow my email subscriber list?
An email marketing strategy is nothing if you don’t have a good email list or mailing list. An email marketing list is a list of subscribers/customers who are a part of periodic mailing distribution by businesses. Your email list should include past, current, and potential customers, friends, family, and past coworkers.
It is not easy to create a valid and responsive mailing list just like that. It requires regular efforts and a marketing strategy.
Learn how to build an email marketing list from scratch.
Also, 29 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List
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Q: How do I figure out what to write about?
Good content is the sword of any marketing strategy. If you are not writing as per your audience’s interest, you will lose your chance to gain subscribers as well as potential buyers. The email should contain valid information about your product or services but in a short & crisp way.
It should be tied to the short subject line that contains the agenda of your email. Find out what your readers are looking for, learn about their habits – hobbies – patterns and try to provide them a resolution for the same. There are many email marketing analytics tools that can help you to understand the behavior pattern of your subscribers/visitors. Make sure that what you write is serving their interests, not your own agenda.
Q: What are the best practices for email subject lines?
Email subject lines play a major role in deciding whether the email will get clicked or not. You get only 3-4 seconds before your reader decides to open the email or not. Best practice is to personalize your subject line and share what is the email all about.
Also, 30-50 characters are considered as good and safe to follow. However, people have seen great success with subject lines over 70 characters and less than 49, so feel free to experiment. All you should follow to design short, specific and compelling subject lines.
For an example, you can read 15 Amazing Email Subject Lines You’ll Probably Want To Click
Subject Lines
The newsletter is one of the types of email which is usually an email on one topic promoting a piece of content, products, or services. Email newsletters may also feature ads or special offers, but they’re usually not prominently featured.
A generic email of your email campaign can even be considered a newsletter. Most people think they need an email newsletter, but often your email marketing program will be more effective for building your business if you send really specific content tailored to your marketing strategy.
Q: What are the laws of email marketing?
An email marketing law such as CAN-SPAM never approves phishing as well as the purchased mailing list. Any ideal marketer is never approved of buying lists because there are laws in place to protect people from receiving certain types of unsolicited communications.
Readout complete guide to the laws of email marketing.
Email Laws
Q: What’s the best time and day to send emails?
This is the most debatable question of all time – When to send emails? Ask as many people as you can, you will get different answers. Even many trusted brands and resources have different opinions:
Kissmetrics says early mornings and weekends … but also says those days/times are also the most likely to get you unsubscribes and bounces.
Experian’s benchmark study says that 8 p.m. to midnight is optimal.
Wordstream thinks that Thursday from 8-9 a.m. is best.
MailChimp says that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. are the surefire winners.
Q: Email deliverability and email open rates: what do these mean?
These are two important email marketing metrics that decide the success of your email marketing campaign.
Email deliverability rate is the success rate of your email marketing campaign where getting an email delivered to a person’s email address is measured. For same, all you need is to take the number of emails delivered and divide it by the number that was sent.
Whereas, an email open rate is the percentage emails opened that have ended up in the inboxes. These metrics have an important impact on how your email marketing campaign performs. If someone doesn’t open your email, they never even have the chance to engage with your content.
Q: What’s a good email open rate?
There is no definite answer to this question. Every business or campaign has their own requirements. Statistically speaking, Silverpop’s email benchmark study revealed that across 3,000 companies in 40 different countries, the average open rate was 20.2 percent.
Typically if you’re getting 15-25 percent email open rates, you’re up to industry standards. Over 30 percent and you’re nailing it.
Q: What other metrics should you track for email marketing?
Apart from email deliverability and open rate, there are many other metrics that marketers should measure for larger goals whether it’s B2B or B2C campaign.
However, there are four other foundational metrics that you should measure in order to get high email deliverability:
Inbox Rates: which determines how many delivered emails actually made it into someone’s inbox (rather than their junk folder).
Bounce Rates: It is the percentage of emails that were rejected by recipients’ mail servers.
Spam Reports: It depicts how many times your emails were marked as junk mail/spam by recipients.
Unsubscribes: states how many people unsubscribed from your emails.
Q: What are the best ways to encourage opt-in?
I recommend brainstorming alternative techniques for capturing email addresses. Map out all the opportunities available for capturing a buyer’s information between your different channels and audience segments (shown in the matrix below) and use this to generate new ideas. Take a look at what you and your competitors are currently doing and then do a ‘gap analysis’ to select options you aren’t currently using
Q: Should I be using pop-ups? What about the quality of the people from pop-ups?
Pop-ups are increasingly being used in many industry sectors, particularly retail, publishing, and travel. This is because, when well-defined and tested, they will almost always give you significantly more new contacts in your database.
If you use pop-ups to boost your subscriber numbers, it’s inevitable that there may be some decline in quality as not every subscriber is ready to allow and make changes in their settings. Some subscribers are not even aware of the benefits as well.
To maintain the quality, it’s important to be able to profile visitors efficiently. Also, follow the best practices to be sensitive to the user experience and don’t display a pop-up too quickly.
Q: How much do I need to profile subscribers?
Asking too much information can be turned off for subscribers. Try to ask the limited but important question to subscribers that are important for enabling your business to send more relevant emails. For example, in Digiperform, we ask Name, Contact Number, Email, and City, so that we can discuss the course as per the location and send the necessary details as well.
Q: Where can I begin to improve email targeting?
Ideally, you need to begin with these basic techniques to achieve the best results from your email marketing campaign:
- Try A/B testing, also known as Split testing, where you create two version of your campaign with slight changes and record the success rate. Learn more about A/B testing – How to use A/B tests to improve your email campaigns?
- Creating two (or more) alternative versions of your standard newsletter. For example, if you are a lifestyle writer, then you can create the separate newsletter for men clothing and women clothing. And, then send according to gender segmented list.
- Changing your welcome email content to be relevant for different audience segments.
- Sending post-purchase emails to promote similar products or related products in different categories (cross-sell and upsell).
You can also manage these things with automation where you can send Welcome or Thank you emails whenever any subscribers start following your services. Automation is very quick and efficient way to handle your email marketing campaigns.
You can learn How to get started with Email Marketing Automation?
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Q: Should I buy a list just to kick off my email marketing?
The answer is Big NO.
You should never be buying lists. This is totally against Email Marketing Laws. Even you will buy these subscribers list and people opted into those lists, they didn’t opt in to hear from you. This means when they get an email from you, they’ll not just be less likely to open or click on it because they don’t know you. Then you will be marked as SPAM.
You could also be mucking up your deliverability score by buying lists, which will affect the success of your email marketing long term. And these are just a few of the dangers of buying a list.
Q: How do I make sure I don’t land in the spam folder?
The biggest thing you can do to stay out of the spam folder is not to buy subscribers’ list. Earn the genuine subscribers with your efforts.
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, cleansing your lists, and not bombarding your recipients’ inboxes with too much email.
Q: What’s the difference between a hard and a soft bounce?
When an email bounces, it means that your email couldn’t deliver in recipient’s email address.
A hard bounce means that it is failed to deliver due to major reasons such as fake, blocked or invalid email address. Whereas, in soft bounce, the email is failed to deliver to temporary issues such as a full mailbox or an unavailable service.
To keep your list healthy, make sure you’re removing all hard bounces and keeping an eye on the soft bounce addresses.
By not cleansing your list, you may end up hurting your other emails’ deliverability.
Q: How do I prevent people from unsubscribing from my emails?
If you don’t want to break the law, you should never prevent someone from unsubscribing from your emails. CAN-SPAM, one of the most important laws you need to follow as a marketer, says that email marketers should always make it easy for people to unsubscribe from their emails by providing a clearly visible link in every email message and honoring those unsubscribes in a timely manner.
These are the list of few questions that can help you to understand the process. Let us know in the comment section if you have any questions related to email marketing campaigns. We will definitely try our best to answer them.
Chapter 11
