Overview

Over the last four modules on social media, SEO, SEM and display marketing, you have
learnt about the different ways in which you can bring quality and relevant traffic to your
website and engage with the visitors of your website. However, one of the most significant
ways to nurture prospective leads is a 20-year-old technology: email. In this session, we
will delve into the basics of this extremely efficient and much-talked-about marketing
channel and explore various ways to leverage emails to nurture your leads.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, you should be able to understand the following:

1. Basics of email marketing

2. Goals of email marketing
3. Components of successful email marketing
4. Building and managing email marketing lists
5. Analysing email marketing campaigns
6. Optimising email marketing strategies

Email marketing is the process of sending your prospects relevant content via email to
nurture them. Email marketing is still one of the best-performing marketing channels out
there, with an ROI of $34 per every dollar spent. Good email marketing is
permission-based marketing, where people are signed up to receive content from you. It
requires an active permission or opt-in from the user to receive emails, which can only be
achieved through a clearly defined ‘email value proposition’. An email value proposition
can be compared to the USP or key feature of any product. Ask yourself the following:

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 1. Why should my user sign up for this email list?
2. What is the tangible benefit that I can provide them?
3. How does this relate to the product or service that I provide? Is it relevant?

Now, let's take a look at some other great email value proposition (EVP) examples.

1)

2)

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The EVP is important because it is the first point of your email marketing campaign. A few
pointers to consider while creating your EVP include the following:

1. Clearly state what your product is offering: In both the examples shown above, you
can see the products mentioned in the heading.
2. Specify what makes your product different: Both products are mentioned in the
text that is given below the heading to focus on this aspect.
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 3. Avoid jargon and buzzwords: Using jargons might not enable you to connect well
with your audience.
4. Include a call-to-action button: Without this, anything you write is inefficient. So,
ensure that a proper response mechanism is in place for the users.

Email marketing is an effective way not only to reach out to customers but also to target
prospects. The objectives of email marketing depend on the nature of the product or
service and what a brand wants to accomplish, but there are a few primary goals of email
marketing, some of which are as follows:

1. Acquiring qualified leads

2. Educating audiences
3. Nurturing leads

For a brand, sending emails is useful to both prospects and existing customers. Existing
customers will want to know about any recent activity in the organisation, information
about some new product or service, or even just a greeting from the brand. On the other
hand, prospects will need a little push from the brand to convert to customers. So, there
needs to be an email differentiation between potential customers and existing customers.
There are three types of emails in email marketing, which are as follows:

1. Traditional newsletters: These newsletters are always content-driven.

2. Promotional newsletters: These newsletters are always sales offer-driven.
3. Transactional newsletters: These newsletters are always transaction-driven.

Here is a table with the key characteristics of these newsletters.

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Type of the Why Are They Sent? What Should When To Send
Newsletter the Call to Them?
Action Focus
On?

Traditional If only glimpses Set a frequency

These are sent to inform based on your
of a certain
consumers about what is product or service. If
story/news
happening with the brand you have a lot going
article/event are on and want your
General information, mentioned, consumers to know
about it,
achievements, milestones, redirect the
communicate it on a
activities, etc., are user to the page weekly basis. You
communicated with more can also set it on a
fortnightly or
information in
monthly basis. This
case they want depends on your
to read more brand

Promotional Offers, promotions, deals, It should These are sent when

daily/weekly/monthly/yearly encourage users you have a new
sales to complete a offering or
Any sort of incentive for an purchase or any something that
individual to convert/make a other type of requires an
purchase conversion immediate
conversion from
your users

Transactional These are emails that you These usually do These are emails
receive when you subscribe not require a that are a result of
to a product/service, receive CTA unless if it activity or inactivity
receipts, password reset is for a by a consumer, for
notifications, etc. password reset example, if someone
or similar has signed up or
functions someone has

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 unsubscribed

This is what a traditional newsletter looks like.

This is what a promotional newsletter looks like.

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This is what a transactional email looks like.

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Email marketing is an easy marketing channel, but as a marketer, it is important to
understand the various components of email marketing, which are as follows:
1. Sender’s name

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The different approaches to selecting a sender name for your email marketing campaign
are as follows:

i) Individual senders
If you are Richard Branson, then the world probably knows you more than the company
Virgin Atlantic, owing to a brilliant personal branding campaign. If you think that the
audience will open the emails on seeing the individual’s name, then include it. However, if
the person is not a known one, this approach will backfire.

ii) Company name

If your brand name is instantly recognisable to consumers, you can use it for your email
campaigns.

iii ) Name along with the company name

If the aim is to build a personal connection with the recipient, it is a good practice to tag a
personal name along with your company’s name.

Piktochart is an online design solution for companies and individuals. Instead of having
only a corporate name or an individual name, the company decided to opt for a
combination to create a personalised touch with its users. Their mails also have a tone that
makes customers feel like a concerned representative is corresponding with them.

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iv) Business casual

This is an attempt at humanising the brand’s email relationship with its consumers. If a big
MNC or a corporation has a tough or serious image, this approach will help the
corporation soften its image while sending out an email.

Sometimes, brands select names such as Team Unify or Unify Community to establish this
image among the audience.

v) Exclusivity

The rationale behind such sender names is to portray that the email group is exclusive and
aspirational for many consumers. This can help make the reader feel important, and such
sender names are accompanied by a sense of power.

Look at the difference in the example given above. Oyo usually sends emails using its
brand name. However, the company sends select customers mails from its exclusive Oyo
Plus sender name, which creates curiosity among consumers; so, they end up opening the
mail.

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2. Subject Line: Authentic subject lines that align with your email content is of great
importance to achieve high conversion rates. It should be noted that subject lines should
compel people to open your email, but don’t trick people into opening your email because
if you do, you may not accomplish the actual goal. And, the actual goal should never be
'open read', but it should be 'click-through rates' and the conversions on your website
landing page or your e-commerce portal.

Apart from these, an email has the following components:

● Header: This section contains information about the sender, the recipient and the
subject of the email.

● Content: This section contains the main message of the email.

● Call to action: The CTA is the goal of the email, one that drives the reader of the email to
undertake the task. The CTA could range from ‘Sign Up Now’ to ‘Buy Now’ depending on
the objective of the email.

● Footer: The footer contains legal information about the sender, the terms and
conditions as well as the unsubscribe options if needed.

Lastly, there are two types of email content. They are as follows:

1. Generic content: This is a very general email, wherein everyone receives the same
email, and no importance is given to personalisation.

2. Dynamic content: This is used to create a more personalised email using existing
information about the person.

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The quality of an email list is more important than the quantity of the list. An email list
with 100 relevant subscribers will outperform an email list with 10,000 irrelevant
subscribers any day. By following the right strategy, you can convert an interested visitor
to an eager subscriber. Every channel is an opportunity to build an effective email list. You
can use the following email subscription strategies:

1. Website pop-up: Pop-ups on a website can attract instant attention from a visitor, and
with the help of a strong call to action, you can actually convert up to 15% of the traffic on
the website.

2. Discounts: Offering an incentive to a visitor will motivate them to subscribe instantly. A

discount voucher with a limited offer is usually an extremely effective way to get people to
sign up.

3. Pathways across channels: Integrating triggers on various touch points such as a

website, blog or social media page will allow visitors to take decisions at the various levels
of their journey.

4. Sign up with a transaction: Every time people make a transaction on your website, you
can automatically add them to your email list. This can be done in a less aggressive manner
by asking users to notify you through a checkbox if they are interested in receiving emails
from your company.

5. Offline contests: Running a contest is an effective pull strategy where the user is
self-motivated for the subscription. This method is very time-efficient and inexpensive.

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After building a relevant email marketing list, the next challenge that every email
marketer has to go through is managing and optimising the email list. Managing an email
list is partly technical and partly based on common sense. Even after people opt in to
receive emails from a company, there are good chances that they will not get the emails or
they will not respond to them. Email bounce is one of the main reasons why emails do not
get delivered to users’ inboxes.

Email bounces are of following two types:

a) Hard bounce: A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender
because the recipient's address is invalid, or the domain name does not exist, or the
recipient is unknown.
b) Soft bounce: A soft bounce is an email message that bounces back either due to a
server issue or because the recipient’s inbox is full.

To ensure a good deliverability of your email campaigns, you should practise the following
strategies:
a) Remove hard bounces: A hard bounce denotes a permanent reason for which the mail
cannot be delivered. To keep the mailing list clean, you should always remove the hard
bounces after every campaign. A large number of hard bounces will lead to:
i. A drop in the sender’s score,
ii. A drop in the reputation score, and/or
iii. Poor derivability.

b) Isolate inactive users: Removing inactive users from your mailing list will help you cut
unnecessary costs while sending emails. If a user is not responding to your emails for more
than three months, they can be moved to a separate list.

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c) Monitor the sender and reputation scores: Always keep an eye on your sender score
and your reputation score, and if these drop, you should act immediately and ensure that
your IP address — which you use to send emails — has not been blacklisted.

d) Segment email subscribers: This is the practice of dividing your email list into groups
based on characteristics such as interests and demographics. There are three quick ways
to segment any email list. They are as follows:
i. Identify the commonality.
ii. Identify the demography.
iii. Identify the behaviour.

As a marketer, you need to consistently send out your emails; this keeps the engagement
alive and helps consumers move closer to the attract, consideration or closure stages of
the funnel. This is certainly difficult to accomplish manually and can be automated
through drip campaigns. A drip campaign is an automated series of emails that are
targeted at users in sequential order. For example, a drip campaign can include an email
from a brand when a user signs up on its website, which can be followed by an email three
days later informing the subscriber about some of the products offered by the brand.
After a week, the brand can send an email to the user with lucrative offers for the
products mentioned in the previous email, and so on. This series of automated emails,
intended to nurture a lead, is called a drip campaign.

There are two types of drip campaigns, which are as follows:

● Action-based drip campaigns

● Timed drip campaigns

In the real world, however, most drip campaigns are a combination of the two types. The
different steps of the drip can be governed by either an action undertaken by the
subscriber or according to a fixed time, e.g., the first two emails might be timed for day one

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and day three, and the third email may be based on a user action, i.e., depending on
whether or not the second email was opened.

Planning a drip campaign requires some understanding of consumer behaviour because

the communication is triggered based on certain actions. Hence, you need to follow a
step-by-step plan to strategise drip campaigns, which can include the following steps:

1. Determine the number of emails in the campaign.

2. Ascertain when each of the emails is to be sent.

3. Create the sequence of each email.

4. Decide the timing of the emails.

5. Make sure that the trigger conditions are relevant to the emails that will follow.

You can measure and compare the performance of drip email campaigns through open
rate and click through rate (CTR).

Tracking active and inactive users should be a monthly or bi-monthly activity depending
on your business. For instance, if you own an online food-ordering business, you should
constantly track users who are inactive and those who have not ordered food in the last
two weeks. This is because certain users regularly order food online, and if they are not
using your services, then it means that they are using your competitor’s services. If you are
in the business of booking travel packages online, you should track users who have not
booked tickets with you in the last six months. This is because users usually travel at least
once in every six months.

There are two categories of email marketing analysis with sub-categories. They are as
follows:

1. Primary

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a. The click-through rate indicates the amount of time each user spends on your landing
page. It is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who
view a page, email or advertisement.

b. The conversion rate indicates the goals set by the website to be achieved within a
certain period of time, e.g., purchases made through a website, signing up for newsletters,
signing up for trial sessions, etc.

2. Secondary

a. The open rate is indicative of the activity that continues after you send an email. It is not
a hard metric; it is a soft metric.

b. The click-through rate is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of
total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is used to measure the success of
online advertising campaigns.

c. The conversion rate is the ratio of the number of consumers who have completed a
specified action or achieved a goal (taking up trial sessions, signing up for newsletters, etc.)
on the website to the total number of website visitors. It is a metric that measures the
efficacy of the website’s marketing.

d. The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from a website
after they receive your email.

e. The forward rate also means the ‘refer-a-friend’ rate or the ‘member-get-member’ rate,
which is indicative of the number of people who forward a website over to another viewer.

A/B testing is widely used across the email medium. A change in the subject line to make it
more appealing to the user’s interest or making the call to action clear changes the way
marketers optimise their marketing efforts to gain the maximum ROI.

One of the best examples of A/B testing for email marketing was given by former US
President Barack Obama.
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During his second campaign in 2012, Mr Obama’s team conducted several rounds of A/B
testing on aspects such as subject line, time of delivery and content. Let's take a look at
how his team conducted A/B testing on the subject lines they sent out to the users.

You can see from the illustration below that they tested various subject lines on various
sets of people and then projected how much money each of these subject lines would
bring into the campaign.

Image credits: Campaigner

Eventually, the winning subject line was used, and it raised more money than what was
expected. You can read more about A/B testing used in the Obama email campaign by
clicking here

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Some of the optimisation opportunities that exist in an email are as follows:

1. Identifying and focusing on the most valuable asset (in the body of the email)
2. Call to actions that are chosen must be benefit-driven. For example, ‘Read more’,
‘Click here to learn more’, etc.
3. Appropriate email frequency, which refers to the time of the day or the day of the
week when you decide to target a customer with your email by sending across the
relevant email, must be followed
4. Follow-up emails that are sent to everyone who did not click on your email help to
improve the click-through rate of your website.
5. Content of the email must include both graphics and text that are educational,
instructional, informative, entertaining, related to the offer, etc.

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