It has been a long time since email was a simple message service. Today, it is a multi-purpose tool, profusely used for marketing campaigns. Email marketing campaigns are presently the most effective and affordable form of advertising. The first and simplest reason is that they are free for customers. They don’t pay to access their inbox, leaving you with only one obstacle: making certain that your offers actually keep reaching their inbox.
Set Up Your Email for Business Success
Choosing a Business Email Address
Forget about generic addresses (Gmail, Yahoo, and so on), and make sure to use a business-branded email. But, again, there’s no need to expand overall on this: such a business address will show your customers that your brand is trustworthy, reliable, and serious in its operations.
When choosing a business email address, think of your audience. Since you expect your business to grow further, new clients will join the existing ones (a simple tip, but often overlooked). In addition, businesses commonly create different addresses for different aspects of the day-to-day operations, which should be understandable to the clients, too. I.e., for inquiries, you may choose [email protected]; for payments, [email protected] yourbusinessname.com, and so on.
Tip: If you run a large business, shared email addresses are a good idea. I.e., [email protected] may be made accessible to all customer support personnel (which is common practice).
Choosing an ESP
Email service providers (ESP) come in three shapes: free email service providers, web hosting providers, and online office suites.
- Free email service providers – Free email service providers include some of the most popular brands, such as Gmail and Yahoo. Small businesses often choose them, as they offer the convenience of forwarding and checking private and business email in a single centralized location.
- Web hosting providers – Web hosting providers also offer managed email services. When purchasing a domain for your business, choose a package with a preferred number of business email addresses. Mind the storage limit, though.
- Online office suites – These are among the most popular choices, such as Amazon’s Workmail, Office 365, and Google Apps for Work. Because they offer additional tools, allow for the creation of unlimited email addresses, and have a 99.9 percent uptime, they are a convenient choice for medium and large businesses.
Trivia: The @ symbol is called “little mouse” in Chinese.
Things to Consider When Choosing an ESP
Nobody knows your business needs better than you. Therefore, there is no magic option suitable for every company. When choosing an ESP, keep the following in mind:
- How many email addresses will your business need (now and in the future)?
- Do you use or plan to use personalization, dynamic content, and transactional emails?
- What type of segmentation are you looking for?
These three basic questions will set you on the right track when choosing the optimum ESP. They are, however, not sufficient to determine the best choice. Scilicet, a couple of factors should be considered when making the final decision, all of which deal with ESPs’ offers. The most important factors include the following:
- Deliverability and authentication – All emails should reach your customers’ inboxes and not be blocked by spam filters or ISPs.
- Usability – The ESP platform should make creating emails and templates seamless.
- Reporting – Reporting tools that monitor the effectiveness of marketing campaigns are of immense importance. They should be easy to understand and include at least: the format of data exports, the ability to export data for offline analysis, the ability of multi-campaign analysis, and the ability to integrate reports with website analytics.
- Email automation – Choose an ESP that makes creating welcome emails, dynamic content, and shopping carts as easy.
- List Management – A good segmentation of the lists will make tracking multiple marketing campaigns seamless. Make certain that the ESP of your choice offers at least the key criteria — behavioral and demographic data.
- Multi-channeling – Most emails are being accessed via cellular phones. A good ESP should allow for social media platform integration.
Email Campaigns in a Nutshell
To understand the importance of your business emails, we bring you the most stunning stats:
- Email marketing has an ROI of 3800 percent/
- Fifty percent of small- and medium-sized businesses use marketing automation software for email campaigns.
- For every $1 spent, email marketing generates ca. $44 in ROI.
- The average order value per email is approximately three times higher than social media’s.
- Seventy-seven percent of ROI is generated through segmented and targeted campaigns.
- Revenue per email rose from $0.11 in Q1 2014 to $0.10 in Q4.
