In a nutshell, what is email marketing?

Assuming you’re a regular human with internet access, chances are you already have a pretty good idea of what email marketing is. It’s hard not to notice it.

We’ve all had promotional emails land in our inboxes at some point or another, sometimes flagging a seasonal sale, highlighting a new product or recommending something we might be interested in based on our previous purchase. To the uninitiated, this is what email marketing is.

But it’s actually so much more than that. It isn’t just about promoting products and driving sales: it’s arguably the best way to turn prospective customers into brand loyalists.

Because marketing emails can be personalised and targeted at specific individuals or groups of people, they allow you to speak to those people directly, addressing their specific needs, wants and pain points. They’re the closest your brand can come to having a conversation with its audience, making them feel heard and valued.

A well-run email marketing campaign doesn’t just drive leads and sales – it reinforces your brand’s persona and makes every single customer want to come back for more. And the benefits don’t end there. Retaining existing customers is far cheaper than attracting new ones, and because email marketing is one of the best customer retention tools out there, that also makes it one of the most cost-effective marketing channels around.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

We’ve already touched on some of the positives of email marketing already, but it’s time to take a closer look at what it brings to the table.

It can generate rapid results

Typically, when rapid sales and revenue growth is the number one goal, businesses turn to paid media. And for good reason – search and social ads are perhaps the best way to give your brand a boost when time is of the essence. But email marketing is right up there with them in terms of its ability to generate a timely return on investment.

A well-timed sale (and a well-thought out email campaign to go with it) can work wonders, engaging customers who might not have bought anything from your site in months. Although email is known for its long-term profitability and sustainability, it can still get to work and generate revenue surprisingly quickly. When it’s done correctly, of course.

It drives traffic to your website

Even if an email campaign doesn’t generate any sales or leads, it can still drive traffic to your site and keep people talking about your brand.

Rather than simply pushing special offers and discounts week after week, you can create emails that appeal to potential customers at the awareness and consideration stages of the funnel. Share your blog content, tell the story behind your brand and showcase what makes it unique – all this stuff can not only generate traffic, but put your brand at the forefront of customers’ minds. When they are ready to buy, they’ll know where to go.

It helps build brand awareness

Most of the time, when a customer first spends money with you, they do so because of price or convenience. They’re not necessarily invested in your brand, and they might forget all about you a month or two after their purchase.

Email marketing allows you to keep in touch with these ‘floating’ customers, heightening their awareness of your brand and what it can do for them. Don’t let customers drift away and forget your brand exists: capture their attention and give them no reason to go elsewhere.

It builds trust and customer loyalty

As we’ve already touched on, email marketing allows you to connect with your audience in a way that no other medium does. Search and social ads are still just that – ads. But a well-crafted email doesn’t feel like an ad at all. That’s the key difference.

The powerful segmentation features offered in platforms like Klaviyo and Mailchimp allow you to group different audiences together based on their demographic, interests or prior purchase history. By utilising these features and showering customers’ inboxes with relevant, useful content, you can help make their lives easier and offer them something of real value.

Do this often enough – and for long enough – and customers’ trust in your brand will begin to grow. Shoppers that stumbled across your brand by chance will eventually turn into fans, simply because you’ve made their lives simpler and kept them engaged. Why would they spend their money elsewhere?

It integrates with other marketing channels

You name it, email marketing can work with it. You can use it to bolster your SEO and content marketing efforts, sharing your latest blogs and guides with your audience to generate clicks and shares. You can use it to test out your new landing pages, determining whether your latest CRO tweaks have had a positive impact. You can even use it to drive social engagement by encouraging customers to check out your latest posts and drop a like or comment.

Email marketing is the swiss army knife of the marketing world. Can it perform well as a standalone channel, used in isolation? Sure. But it works best when it’s paired with SEO, CRO and organic social, simply because it feeds into each of them.

It allows you to understand your audience better

We’ve briefly mentioned the likes of Klaviyo and Mailchimp already, and there’s going to be more on them in just a bit. But both of these platforms come with a suite of analytics features built-in, which can be a total game-changer for brands that think they understand their audience but aren’t completely sure.

Once you’ve linked your chosen email platform to your website, it will automatically pull in data about your customers. This can then be used to ‘segment’ your audience into different groups, each of which can be sent separate, tailored emails that appeal to their specific preferences.

The way your audience responds to these emails puts even more data at your fingertips. Everything from open rate to clicks, conversions and more is tracked within Klaviyo or Mailchimp, allowing you to better understand your audience and what they respond to.

Simply put, email takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing. By A/B testing different email layouts and content, segmenting your audience and using analytics to your advantage, you can understand your customers like never before.

It’s cost-effective

As we’ve said previously, email is arguably the best-performing marketing channel out there in terms of ROI. And what other metric is a better measure of success than that?

Ultimately, any marketing channel you invest in needs to deliver more in terms of revenue than you put into it. Email not only has a virtually unbeatable ROI (provided it’s done correctly), it also delivers results more efficiently and more predictably than many other marketing channels, making it a winner for brands large and small.

It’s here for the long haul

Email isn’t going anywhere. Since the rise of instant messaging and social media sites in the early 2000s, we’ve seen dozens of them come and go – but email has maintained a consistent presence in our lives. It’s used by businesses and individuals alike, covering all demographics and every nation you can think of.

And crucially, email has moved with the times. Popular email clients are now easier to use than they’ve ever been, and the majority of emails are now read on mobile devices. There’s no sign of email’s popularity waning, even decades after its first introduction, making it the perfect medium on which to build a long-term marketing strategy and achieve sustained, consistent growth.

Are there any disadvantages I need to know about?

You’ve probably gathered by now that we love email marketing – we’ve seen first-hand how it can turbocharge the growth of small to medium-sized businesses. But it’d be remiss of us not to acknowledge its shortcomings.

Yep, shock horror: email isn’t perfect. Although its advantages massively outweigh its disadvantages, you should still keep the following in mind before you branch out into email marketing for the first time…

• Too much content (or the wrong content) can alienate customers: It’s true that sending customers well thought-out, helpful and interesting emails can boost engagement, drive conversions and help build brand loyalty. But if you get things wrong and send too much content – or the wrong type of content – your efforts could easily have the opposite effect. Running a successful email marketing campaign is all about balance.
• Emails don’t always deliver correctly: According to Email Tool Tester, emails deliver to our inboxes as intended around 85.7% of the time. Some email services are more reliable than this; Gmail has an average delivery rate of 95%, while AOL’s is just 76%. What this means is that you could spend hours crafting the perfect email, only to later find out that a proportion of your audience never received it.
• Designing an email that’s on-brand can be tricky: Because emails can be viewed on a whole host of different devices (and on a range of different apps and websites), creating an email that looks consistent and on-brand – and that works on every device – is a tall order. It’s a skill that comes with experience and lots of testing.
• There are rules and regulations to keep in mind: You don’t want to fall foul of GDPR regulations. Ensuring your email marketing output complies with all relevant laws can be time-consuming, but it’s a must.
• You’ve got to get people to subscribe first: Before you can send any emails, you’ve got to build an audience. That means enticing them to subscribe when they create an account or make their first purchase. You might need to offer customers something enticing in order to get them onboard, like a discount code, early access or exclusive content.
• There’s a steep learning curve: Even though platforms like Mailchimp and Klaviyo are pretty user-friendly and unintimidating, there’s still an awful lot to learn before you can extract the most out of them. That’s why so many brands turn to experienced agencies like us!

Email marketing examples: five popular formats to start with

You’re still reading, so you must be serious about this whole email marketing thing. That’s why we’re going to start delving into the specifics a little more from now on. What kind of emails should you send to your customers, and how should you format them? Here are a few ideas to get you started…

The newsletter

A classic. We’ve all seen newsletter emails hundreds of times, and it’s this format that perhaps embodies the spirit of email marketing the best. Why? Because it is what you make it.

A newsletter is your chance to be authentically you, giving you the freedom to share industry insights and expertise, some tips and tricks or even a personal message from a member of your team.

Newsletters aren’t necessarily the best revenue drivers, but they’re the perfect way to foster brand loyalty and keep your customers engaged. Hand-picked content and an impactful design are the keys to success here.

The welcome

A customer has just made an account on your site or completed their first purchase. This is your chance to welcome them and thank them for their business.

The right welcome email can really help your brand get off on the right foot with customers. By making them feel at home and subtly guiding them towards the next step (like leaving a review, for instance), you can make welcome emails a surprisingly powerful conversion driver.

The abandoned basket reminder

Otherwise known as cart abandonment emails, these automated messages are sent to potential customers who get halfway through their purchase before backing out.

The goal here isn’t to beg for their business or to push them too hard, it’s to make sure they have all of the information they need to make a purchase. Perhaps they missed the fact that you offer free shipping, or that there’s a limited-time offer on right now? Or maybe they just need a little clarification on what the product is and how it works.

Our advice? Cherrypick a few stand-out USPs and FAQs to include and prompt customers to get in touch if they have any questions.

The promo

Everyone loves a bargain, and there’s no better way to get the word out about your latest sale than by sending out an email to your subscribers.

To start with, write a powerful headline to pull customers in. Once they’ve opened the email, you can then use urgency and scarcity to your advantage. Reminding customers that your sale is only on for a limited time (and while stocks last) can push them to convert on the spot.

The announcement

Got a new product that’s about to launch? It’s time to shout about it! You can build excitement and anticipation before your product even launches, sending out teaser emails that drip feed new information to your subscribers each week.

Then, when launch day arrives, deliver the knock-out blow with a final email that prompts subscribers to head over to your store and get their hands on your latest product. Announcement emails are a great way to not only drive traffic to your site and generate sales, but to keep customers engaged with your brand.

How to get started with email marketing

Build and segment your audience

The first step in any email marketing campaign is to build a subscriber list. Without a reasonably-sized group of subscribers to market to, it’s unlikely your email campaign will achieve much – so growing your list of contacts as much as possible is key.

Once you’ve put together a list of subscribers, you can start to organise them into categories. You can segment your audience by demographic, content preferences, purchase history, interests… the options are pretty much endless.

Choose an email marketing platform

Now you have a list of subscribers, it’s time to get your campaign up and running. It’s at this point you’ll need to consider whether you want to go it alone (and try managing your campaign in-house) or speak to an email marketing agency like ourselves.

Whichever platform you choose, be prepared for a steep learning curve. There’s a lot of different features and quirks to get your head around when you first start out, which is why so many small to medium-sized businesses take the agency route.

If you’re on the fence about what to do, why not book a call in with us? It’s free!

Establish your goals and schedule

So, you’ve got an audience at the ready and your email marketing platform is all set up. Before you get carried away and start sending emails, it’s important to set out your goals and put together a schedule of which emails you’d like to send out, who they’re being sent to and when.

Managing any marketing campaign successfully is all about strategising and forward-planning. Sure, there will be times when you need to think on your feet and deviate from your plans, but every email you send needs to be well thought out and intentional. The basis of success is a thorough email marketing strategy – the more time you spend here, the more likely you are to see results right from the outset.

Create content and build your emails

Here’s where it gets interesting. Let your creativity flow and come up with some content that you feel will resonate with your audience and help you achieve the goals you set out earlier.

Once you’ve put some text together, select (or create) appropriate imagery and head over to your email marketing platform to put the final email together. Make sure you send a test email to yourself before it goes out to your subscribers to catch any typos or layout issues.

See what happens

Once your campaign kicks off, the real work begins. Track every metric and keep an eye on what your subscribers are doing, how they’re interacting with your emails and how well each one performs in terms of clicks and conversions.

The more data you collect, the more you’ll be able to refine your campaigns to suit your subscribers’ preferences. Eventually, continual refinement should help you create a well-oiled, conversion-driving machine.

Organic traffic: What is it and how do you analyse it?

But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s cover exactly what organic traffic is and how you can keep tabs on it.

Put simply, organic traffic is all traffic that arrives on your website via search results on sites like Google and Bing. Every time someone clicks on a link to your site through an unpaid search result or AI citation, their visit is an ‘organic’ one – not a paid one.

By contrast, paid traffic includes all visitors that land on your site by clicking on an ad (this could be a Google Shopping ad, a social media ad or any other paid piece of content you’ve put out there).

The main drivers of organic traffic are SEO and content marketing, which work hand-in-hand to boost your site to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to track and analyse your site’s organic traffic 

Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics are SEO go-tos, allowing you to keep a close eye on hundreds of different metrics. As well as allowing you to study organic traffic (and compare month-on-month and year-on-year performance), they allow you to track everything from conversions through to bounce rate, search engine rankings and so much more.

Google’s own analytics tools are essential for all eCommerce businesses, but third-party offerings from the likes of SEMRush and Ahrefs allow you to go even more in-depth. Which tool you choose is up to you – but always double (and triple) check that your site’s tracking is set up correctly. If you’re struggling to get started, we can help with that!

Why did my organic traffic drop? 

So, now we’re clear on what organic traffic is and how you can track it, let’s get to the meat of this article. Below are some of the main reasons for a drop in organic traffic​, some of which are quick fixes and some of which… aren’t.

There’s been an algorithm update

On the subject of quick fixes, they don’t get much simpler than this. Often, search engines like Google carry out algorithm updates, allowing them to provide more relevant, specific results that answer users’ queries and save them time.

If you’ve noticed a drop in rankings and traffic, it could be because of one of these updates – rankings often fluctuate each time the algorithm gets tweaked. There’s nothing you can do about this, besides revisiting your SEO strategy to make sure you’re checking all of the boxes Google and Microsoft want you to check. With a bit of luck, the fluctuations will end next month and your site will climb back up the rankings again.

Once the update has finished rolling out, monitor your rankings and organic traffic for a few days; if things don’t pick up again, further investigation is required.

There are incorrect readings in your analytics platform

Besides algorithm updates, this is the first thing you should check for when you notice a decline in your organic traffic. If you have access to any other platform, cross-reference the data to check if there’s a discrepancy. If your other tool says everything is normal – and there’s no other indication that anything is amiss (like a drop in revenue), you’ll know the issue is with the tracking tool.

Tracking tools like Google Analytics also depend on people accepting cookies on your site (unless you have server-side tracking). If they don’t accept cookies, their data won’t appear in Google Analytics, as per GDPR rules. 

You’re ranking for a lot of zero-click searches

With the rise of Google’s AI Overviews (and AI mode), zero-click searches are becoming far more common – particularly for informational keywords. If your site ranks for a lot of informational keywords, it may be that users are getting their questions answered in the AI overview and aren’t clicking through to any websites, hence the term ‘zero-click search’.

If your content is appearing in one form or another in the AI overview, it might not be getting many clicks – but you’re still winning from a brand awareness perspective.

Your SEO strategy is failing and you’re being outranked

This is pretty much the worst case scenario for SEOs – and the one thing that nobody wants to hear. Unfortunately though, it’s one of the main reasons for rankings trailing off over time.

The reality is that SEO and content marketing move fast, and if you haven’t been adapting your strategy to keep pace with your competitors, you can easily get left behind. Once you’ve ruled out some of the other potential factors listed here, it might be time to give your strategy a second look.

There’s a tech issue with your site and it’s not indexable

If your rankings take a nosedive seemingly out of nowhere, it could be because there’s something wrong with your site from a tech perspective. Search engine rankings depend on bots being able to crawl your site and digest the content that’s on there – so if they can’t crawl it for whatever reason, your content won’t appear in the SERPs.

You’ve been penalised by Google for using ‘black hat’ SEO 

This is a little less common nowadays, but it still happens from time to time. If you’ve been caught using so-called ‘black hat’ SEO techniques (things like keyword stuffing or hidden text), there’s a chance your site has been penalised by Google. If you’ve noticed a sudden drop in rankings and you’ve got some outdated, spammy content on your site, this could be why.

Your site contains poor quality content

SEO isn’t just about keywords and technical optimisations any more: a site can’t rank consistently well on Google or Bing nowadays without good quality content. Successive Google algorithm updates have rewarded great content (and punished poor quality content) more and more as time has gone on, so if your rankings are gradually dropping, it might be time to get rid of some old content that’s no longer up to scratch.

To turn things around, focus on creating relevant, well-researched and well-written content that showcases your brand’s expertise and comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

You’re up against increased competition

Remember when the only thing on the SERPs was a list of 10 blue links? That was a long time ago now, and gradually it’s become more and more tricky to get clicks even if you’re ranking at the top of page one.

With the prevalence of Google Ads, the creation of featured snippets and now AI Overviews, the SERPs are more competitive than they’ve ever been. You might have multiple position one rankings, but you’re now up against stiff competition from paid ads, AI and more. If you’ve noticed your rankings dropping gradually over the last few years, this could be why.

You’ve recently completed a site migration

Website migrations are an absolute minefield from an SEO perspective, and it’s common for rankings to falter after the migration is carried out. If you’ve recently moved to a new website and your rankings have dropped, go back and make sure that everything has migrated across correctly – and verify that there are no technical issues with the new site that weren’t present on the old one.

Your site has lost some backlinks

If your site relies heavily on backlinks to bolster its position in the SERPs, losing some of those backlinks can have a dramatic impact on rankings. If you’ve recently changed your site’s URL structure (or the site that’s linking to you has been taken down or altered), this could be why your organic traffic has dropped.

Seasonal fluctuations or changing trends are having an impact

The internet never stands still. Trends come and go day in, day out, from brands falling in and out of favour through to new products taking the spotlight and old ones going out of production. Throw seasonal fluctuations into the mix and it’s easy to see just how many variables there are at play here. 

This is where year-on-year comparisons come in handy. If there are historical peaks and troughs from season to season, there’s a good chance history is repeating itself once again.