Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of getting in touch with your audience and engaging with them in a way that is personal and unique to each individual. The effectiveness of email marketing in generating leads is unquestioned. According to HubSpot Blogs research, 64% of businesses who used email marketing reported that they gained new leads compared to those who did not.
However, successfully utilising email marketing requires a bit of technical knowledge as well as a significant amount of planning and creativity. If you are looking for a simple way of sending emails to your customers with little to no effort required, then you have come to the right place. In this article, we will teach you how to find the best email marketing services that allow you to become an affiliate for a company and how to use those services to efficiently and effectively promote products and businesses you are passionate about.
The Advantages Of Using An Email Marketing Service
The main advantages of using email marketing services are as follows:
- You don’t need to have your own email server to use their services.
- You can manage all your email campaigns from one place.
- You can segment your audience based on interests and demographic data.
- You can target your audience based on geography.
- Their tools make sending campaigns simple and effective.
- You can monitor the performance of each individual email.
These are just some of the advantages of using an email marketing service. Let’s take a quick detour and discuss each one separately.
You Don’t Need Your Own Email Server To Use Their Services
One of the significant advantages of using email marketing services is that you don’t need to have your own email server to use their tools. You can either choose to use their own infrastructure or host your emails on a WordPress blog or any other similar platforms. You’ll receive all the support you need from their customer service team should you run into any problems.
Even if you run a small business with just a few employees, you should still consider investing in your own email server. The main reason behind this is simple. Once you outgrow your current server, you’ll have to upgrade and expand it to accommodate your growing business. This is a seriously expensive and time-consuming process that involves hiring IT experts to handle the task. Plus, you’ll have to continually pay for the service.
Hosting your own email server allows you to avoid all these costs. Moreover, you have full control over your email content and who sees it. You can choose to implement a spam detection system and use professional email filters to ensure your emails are delivered only to the intended recipients. This way, you can maintain full ownership of your emails and content.
Managing All Your Email Campaigns From One Place
Another significant advantage of using an email marketing service is that you can manage all your email campaigns from one place. You no longer need to log in to different platforms to send an email, set a drip campaign, or create a new list. Instead, you can do all these tasks from within the platform itself. If you’re new to email marketing, this feature alone could save you a great deal of effort and time as you learn how to use the service effectively.
Even if you’re a seasoned entrepreneur who has been successfully engaging with customers through email marketing for years, using different platforms to manage your campaigns can become extremely confusing and time-consuming. By using a tool that is designed specifically for email marketers, you can ensure that all your campaigns are linked and tied together, and that you can easily reach any campaign or segment at any time from the dashboard.
Segmenting Your Audience Based On Interests And Demographics
An important factor behind the effectiveness of email marketing is the ability to segment your audience based on their interests and demographics. A company called Hello Fresh offers a fresh meal delivery service in the UK and has been using email marketing to effectively target potential customers. The food company’s email marketing strategies focused on encouraging past customers to purchase their products and get-mate fresh products as frequently as possible. To do this, they used simple but effective segmentation based on interests and demographics.
For example, let’s assume you are a woman living in Dublin, Ireland. You are passionate about fashion and style, and you follow several fashion blogs and websites. One day, you’re enjoying a coffee with a gal pal when he mentions a website he designed for men’s fashion. You click the link and discover a collection of stylish t-shirts for men that are being sold at a decent price. Realised that this is exactly what you were looking for, you place an order and follow the instructions to create a new mailing list.
As soon as this order is processed, a copy of your new mailing list with the products you purchased will be emailed to you. Based on this example, you can see how segmenting your audience based on interests and demographics can be extremely effective when using email marketing. You’ll find that your marketing emails are more likely to be read and responded to by your target audience than broadcasts sent to a collective group of contacts.
Targeting Your Audience Based On Geography
One of the significant advantages of using email marketing services is that you can target your audience based on geography. If you are a UK-based company who wants to reach men in Dublin, Ireland, then you can do this by creating a Dublin mailing list. By using tools such as MailChimp’s advanced segmentation, you can choose an interest-based approach to segmenting your audience or you can choose a location-based approach to target individuals in a particular area.
MailChimp’s interest-based segmentation uses your email address and other information provided to create custom interest groups. For example, if you are a sports company who wants to target men who play sports, you can create a sporting interest group. This way, you can communicate with this audience through tailored newsletters and other marketing materials.
MailChimp’s geotargeting allows you to choose from one of the following options:
- Fixed placements
- Population densities
- Demographics
- Current weather conditions
- Advertorial segments
- Travel behavior
- Unique interests
- Automatic collection
Which one you should choose depends on your specific needs. If you are looking for a way to reach more people, then a fixed placements approach is best suited. This means that you will target individuals in a predetermined area regardless of where they live. For example, you can create a Dublin mailing list and target men who live in Dublin. The great thing about a fixed placements approach is that you know exactly how many people you are reaching and who they are.
However, a population density approach is best suited if your goal is to target individuals in a certain area but you don’t know exactly how many people live there. Say you are a fitness company who wants to target residents of Dublin who play sports. With a population density approach, you would create a mailing list and target those individuals in Dublin who live within a five-mile radius of North Dublin. This way, you’ll ensure you reach as many people as possible while not having to guess at the size of your audience.
MailChimp’s demographic segmentation allows you to choose an audience based on the general characteristics of a certain group. For example, you can choose to target men aged between 35 and 44 who live in Dublin. With this approach, you’ll choose participants from a larger group (in this case, all men) and segment them based on specific criteria (aged 35 to 44 in Dublin). You can also choose to target individuals with a certain gender or ethnicity.
Travel behavior segmentation targets individuals based on the travel habits of frequent travellers. For example, if you are a package holiday company who wants to target travel agents, you can create a travel behaviour segment and target individuals who work in the travel industry. The great thing about travel behavior segmentation is that you can choose to target individuals with a specific job or you can choose to target everyone within a certain group. For example, if you want to target men who play sports, you can create a sporting interest group and target individuals who frequently go to sporting events or who follow sports on social media.