Every day in France, over 1.4 billion e-mails are sent by 42.2 million users. Nearly 6 out of 10 consumers are influenced by emailing in their purchasing decisions. E-mail marketing is an essential lever in a successful digital strategy. It is widely used by brands to acquire and retain customers.
In this guide, we give you all the information you need to know aboute-mail marketing.
What is e-mail marketing?
Wondering what emailing is? It's a digital marketing strategy based on sending regular e-mails to a list of customers or prospects. It's one of the oldest online marketing levers.
What are the advantages of emailing?
Discover the major benefits of e-mail marketing:
- A low cost with a good return on investment (ROI). It's around 3,800%. This means that for every €1 spent, you can earn up to €38.
E-mail marketing is a very affordable tool. Expect to pay between €9 and €1,000 per month, compared with €10,000 for Google Ads. Most professional software packages offer free registration and the possibility of launching a first campaign free of charge. After that, you can opt for a package tailored to your needs.
- Extremely easy to use. Sending marketing e-mails doesn't require advanced technical skills. Email creation and delivery platforms are intuitive. They generally feature easy-to-use content editors.
Many of them offer a selection of templates. If you prefer, you can insert the content of your choice and organize it as you wish.
- Precise targeting. The success of a campaign depends on the accurate segmentation of your data base.
- Send personalized messages. To boost your contacts' engagement, you can, for example, include their first name in the subject line. It's the ideal way to grab their attention instantly.
Another possibility is to personalize the products or content integrated into the body of the e-mail marketing message. You can display specific elements to your recipients according to criteria such as purchasing behavior or age.
- Speed to create, send or schedule marketing emails. Setting up an email campaign takes a maximum of one working day. Once the campaign has been launched, reception and reading times are virtually zero. Your e-mailings reach your contacts, wherever they are, 24 hours a day.
- Easily measurable performance. On your e-mail marketing software, you have access to precise statistics on open rates, click rates, deliverability, etc. You can run A/B tests to compare different variants of your e-mailings with your target audiences. They help you to easily determine which elements perform best.
- Responsive e-mails. Professional email marketing software enables you to create emails that are suitable for display on all terminals.
- Easily automated campaigns. One of the benefits of emailing is the ability to automate the sending of marketing emails. This is what we call marketing automation. By creating automatic scenarios, you can support your customers throughout their purchasing journey.
What are the objectives of e-mail marketing?
Email marketing is used to inform and retain a base of contacts who have shown an interest in your products or services. It helps generate sales by encouraging your contacts to visit specific pages on your website. By launching emailing campaigns, you reinforce your presence in your targets' daily lives. The e-mails you send arrive directly in their inboxes.
E-mail is used at every stage of the customer journey for prospecting, conversion and loyalty. It fulfills 3 main objectives:
- Notoriety: make yourself known.
- Image: position yourself as an expert.
- Action: sell your products and/or services.
At Dataventurewe adapt to all your objectives: traffic, conversions, sales (performance), collections, etc.
The different types of e-mail marketing
There are two types of emailing:
- One-off marketing e-mails. This type of e-mail is anchored in time. You design and send them as you go along. They follow the rhythm of your business.
Examples include newsletters and promotional e-mails.
- Automated e-mail marketing. They save you precious time and reduce your budget. There's no need to press the "send" button every time. You define a template which is then sent directly to your targets, without human intervention.
This category includes transactional or marketing automation e-mails.
Discover a panorama of marketing e-mails that can be sent to your contacts:
- Notification e-mails or trigger e-mails: this category includes welcome or birthday messages.
- Newsletters: regular e-mails usually containing the latest company news. Messages can be sent daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, etc. Newsletters are ideal for keeping in touch with your audience while keeping them informed. What's more, they drive traffic to your website.
- Reminder e-mails: sent to customers who have not completed their action. For example, they may invite them to finalize their purchase, after having placed items in their shopping cart.
- Retention e-mails: their purpose is to build customer loyalty. You can send them after x orders have been placed or x amount spent.
- Promotional e-mails: aimed at rewarding loyal customers, but also at boosting sales. In most cases, they are precisely targeted. They are sent according to company news.
- After-sales follow-up e-mails: after a purchase, the company sends e-mails with advice on how to use the product. They can also invite customers to order by-products, recommend the brand or sponsor friends and family.
- lead nurturing e-mails: offer prospects useful content such as white papers, guides or blog articles. The aim is to convert them into customers.
- Prospecting e-mails: this is the first e-mail sent by a company to a prospect. They are an alternative to telephone canvassing, which is becoming less and less effective. Their purpose is to acquire new customers.
- Transactional e-mails: as the name suggests, these are linked to a transaction. They provide new or existing customers with information about their orders and payments. They are sent at key moments, such as account opening, shipping, delivery, etc.
- Reminder e-mails: these are designed to contact inactive customers who haven't placed an order in a given period of time.
- Invitation e-mails: you can send them to your contacts to announce the date of an event.
5 KPIs to analyze when measuring e-mail marketing performance
- Deliverability rate
It shows how many e-mails have reached the mailboxes of targeted recipients. To calculate it, simply perform the following operation:
Deliverability rate = (number of e-mails delivered/total number of mailings)*100.
The deliverability of your marketing e-mails is affected by :
- Technical aspects: identification protocols, incorrect e-mail addresses, etc. Some easy-to-implement optimizations can generate positive results very quickly.
- Behavioral factors: inactive e-mail addresses, low open rates, etc. Working on these problems is more complicated. It all depends on your audience's engagement. This is impacted by the quality and relevance of your e-mailings.
5 steps to improve the deliverability of your e-mail marketing campaigns
- Clean up your contact lists regularly. Sorting them out prevents you from lowering your deliverability rate with inactive addresses. They can become inactive for a number of reasons. For example, if your e-mails land directly in the spam folder and are not seen by the customer.
Another possibility is that the contact is no longer interested in your products or services. Or they may be receiving too many e-mails and not have enough time to browse through yours. Beware: e-mail service providers will penalize you if your marketing e-mails are not opened. All the more reason to manage your out-of-date contacts! You can try to re-engage them by launching a specific campaign, or delete them permanently.
- Remove non-existent e-mail addresses. There are two types: old customer addresses and misspelled addresses. Are many addresses blacklisted by your emailing software? There may be a problem with data collection. To find out, take a look at the registration forms on your website.
The problem may also lie within contact management. For example, if the date of collection of the email address is very old.
- Respect good e-mail marketing practices. These include, of course, consent. Contacts to whom you send an e-mail must have given their consent to receive it.
Another important point is to choose your sender name carefully. Choose one that's easily identifiable (your company or website name). You can also personalize it with the first name of one of your colleagues.
- Implement identification protocols. Suppliers use these standards to ensure your authenticity. To show them that you are indeed the sender of your marketing e-mails, use SPF, DKIM and DMARC protocols.
- Simplify the unsubscribe process. When faced with e-mails they no longer wish to receive, contacts have three options: unsubscribe from the mailing list, no longer open them, or report them as spam. If your e-mails are regularly placed in the spam folder, your deliverability rate is likely to drop. If the contact simply no longer opens your e-mails, your deliverability rate may also drop.
As you can see, unsubscribed customers are preferable to inactive ones. To make unsubscribing easier, remember to include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in all your e-mails.
- Unique opening rate
The unique open rate gives you an idea of the number of users who have opened your e-mail marketing. It depends on factors such as the type of e-mail sent, the size of the mailing list, the sector and the target. Find out how it's calculated :
Unique open rate = (number of e-mails opened/number of e-mails delivered)*100.
A good open rate is between 15% and 25%.
We give you 3 tips to increase your opening rate.
- Exploit the potential of the preheader. This is the preview line just below the e-mail marketing subject line. It's another opportunity to encourage your contacts to read your messages and boost your open rate.
By default, the first sentence of the e-mail is often displayed in the preheader. Think about personalizing it to intrigue your readers.
- Include the recipient's first and last name in the subject line. Personalization has the power to make your contacts want to open your e-mails. This tip won't take long, but it's highly effective.
- Send your marketing e-mails at the right time. Timing has a direct impact on your open rate. To choose the right day and time, put yourself in your customers' shoes. Do they get up early? Do they go to bed late? Do they have office hours? Then carry out tests on different time slots.
It's ideal for finding out when your opening rate is highest.
- Click-through rate or CTR
The click-through rate measures the proportion of recipients who click on a minimum link in your e-mail marketing. To obtain it, perform the following calculation:
Click-through rate = (number of clicks on a link/number of e-mails delivered)*100.
There are two CTRs:
- Unique click rate. This refers to the number of people who have clicked on one of the links in relation to the total number of e-mails delivered.
- Cumulative click rate. This is the ratio of the total number of clicks to the total number of messages delivered. It takes into account all clicks, even if a recipient has clicked several times on a link. The interest of this KPI is to know whether your contacts return to your e-mails several times.
Want to know if you have a good CTR? If it's less than 1.60%, it's bad. An average click-through rate ranges from 1.60 to 3.06%. You have a good CTR if it's between 3.06 and 6.46%. If it exceeds 6.46%, it's excellent.
Looking for ideas to boost your click-through rate ? We recommend :
- Take care of the appearance and text of your call-to-action or CTA ;
- Keep the content of your marketing e-mails clear and concise;
- Creating responsive e-mails ;
- Grab your contacts' attention with a striking object.
- Bounce rate
The bounce rate refers to the proportion of messages sent for which you receive an error message. It is calculated as follows:
Bounce rate = (number of e-mails returned/number of e-mails delivered)*100.
This is an indicator of the quality of the e-mail files used. Two types of bounce can be distinguished:
- Hard bounces. These are definitive error messages sent by the server of the domain receiving an e-mail. They can also be sent by the e-mail server sending an e-mail marketing campaign.
- Soft bounces. Unlike hard bounces, soft bounces are only temporary. They may be due to the temporary unavailability of a mail server or a full inbox.
- Conversion rates
The conversion rate measures the ratio between the number of contacts who have completed the desired action and the total number of recipients. The desired action can be :
- Buying a product or service;
- Click on a link ;
- One entry ;
- A download, etc.
To calculate it, simply divide the number of contacts converted by the number of e-mails delivered. Then multiply the result by 100. A conversion rate of 4% is considered satisfactory. Want to boost the conversion rate of your e-mail marketing campaign? Call on the expertise of Dataventure.
4 good reasons to choose Dataventure for your e-mail marketing campaigns
- Our company Data & Performance Marketing has 400 exclusive opt-in bases.
- We implement tracking management adapted to your needs: CSV, FTP deposit, webservice, etc.
- Our experts can offer you a variety of business models: CPC CPL , CPM, CPV, CPCL, Hybrids. They guarantee total control over your acquisition model.
- In-housecreative studio. We integrate the design, integration and hosting of your marketing campaign's visuals.
Got an e-mail marketing project in mind? Launch your campaign with Dataventure !
