The Anything but Basic Guide to Email Marketing in 2024

We're going to cover

• How to nail email marketing basics (if you’re already an expert, you can skip to the next chapter!)
   
  • An email marketing deep dive, covering:
  • Copywriting tips
  • How to plan and launch email campaigns
  • Email marketing tools
  • How to optimise campaigns and improve deliverability
  • Email marketing metrics

• How we’re reinventing email nurtures with on-demand nurtures
• The two types of emails we send at Cognism (with a bunch of examples)

Why use email marketing?

It’s a fair question - with fewer emails getting to our intended readers’ inboxes. And even fewer of them are being read due to the sheer volume everyone receives every day… there seems to be a diminishing return on emails. 

But, on the bright side:

• They’re inexpensive to send. And in today’s climate, cheap sounds great. 
• You can send targeted messaging to specific segments of your audience. Better personalisation should help to influence more conversions.
• Email is super easy to use and measure.
• It CAN - if used well - drive revenue. Email generates billions of dollars of revenue every year.

Email is an effective way for marketers to communicate with prospects on a global scale. And, with a 4,200% average return on investment, it’s not something to ignore. 

But where to start?

The Basics of Email Marketing: Easy First Steps

1. Establish your email marketing goals

A successful email marketing campaign won’t go very far unless you have goals, such as why you’re emailing and who you’re emailing. They’re your guide to all your decisions and content.

• Looking at past campaigns - what’s worked and what hasn’t?
• Establish your target audience and segment them into lists.
• Decide where you want to target.
• Ask yourself what your ideal outcome will be.

Once you know these factors, you can start creating emails that do more than drive lead generation but create valuable customer relationships and brand awareness, too.

Emily McGuire, Founder and Chief Email Marketer of Flourish & Grit, said:

“Email marketing has the power to bond your leads and customers to your brand at every stage of the customer journey. You just have to leverage it well.”

2. Create email marketing lists

Take the info you’ve gathered and create lists of all your prospects who you want to target for each product or service.

We’re big believers in segmenting your lists at Cognism.

Not only are you likely to see an increase in open, click, read and response rates, but:

• It allows you to send more relevant content.
• It ensures you don’t send too many emails (ruining your domain reputation).
• It progresses your prospects down the funnel.
• It helps you achieve more response rates, leading to increased revenue.

Segmenting your lists makes it easier to run campaigns for each target audience. It also ensures your emails won’t get marked as spam.

Plus, you’ll gain a better understanding of who you’re targeting.

This allows for a more personalised experience; you won’t be sending your prospects emails they don’t want.

3. Plan your campaign

For each campaign, map out ideas for your cadences by deciding on:

How many sequences will you include in each: one, three or five? What are the major pain points your customers experience and how will your solution solve them?

How will you spread that information across each sequence?

Do you have any valuable content to share that relates to what you’re selling?

Remember, prospects don’t want to be sold to. They want value.

And more often than not, if you offer value in an email you’re going to get a happy response.

We live in a digital age where people are constantly being asked if they want to sign up, subscribe and provide their credit card details. They can see sales emails coming from a mile away.

What makes yours different? Value.

Offer them an ungated piece of content, a link to a blog you think they’d enjoy, coupons, invites to free courses and webinars, access to gated content or a free product trial.

This will help build better relationships with your prospects and, in the long haul, do wonders for your brand.

4. Automate your email marketing

The next step is investing in the right tools for the job.

This means taking advantage of one of the many fantastic email marketing tools available today.

Not only can they help streamline your workflow, but they also allow you to automate a large part of the email marketing process – freeing up time for you to focus on other areas of your business.

Email marketing automation allows you to send triggered/timed emails to your prospects on a schedule, or when they’ve followed certain steps that trigger the next email.

The best part?

This kind of marketing intelligence does all the hard work for you!

You don’t have to sit there clicking send all day long. And you don’t have to manually enter a list of recipients each time you want to reach your Total Addressable Market!

Automating your email marketing process will save time and cut costs for your company. What’s more, you can engage with your audience more often, but more importantly, at the right times.

For example: 

Using automatic ‘abandoned cart’ emails can increase conversion rates due to their personalised content and attractive offers.

With this said, let’s get on to the good stuff: crafting your emails!