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Email marketing
Email marketing is a way to promote products or services through email. Email marketing is a top digital media channel, and it is important for customers’ acquisition and retention. LIKE.TG offers its email marketing platformwith a free plan.
In this video, Anya, a LIKE.TG marketer,reveals valuable email marketing tips to boost sales. Check it out!
Why is email marketing essential?
It shows a high ROI
It’s an active channel to acquire new customers
It’s easily integrated with other communication channels
It helps your SEO
Apart from being the primary source of marketing communication, here are some other benefits of email marketing:
It shows a high ROI (return of investment). Email marketing returns $44 for every $1 spent.
It’s an active channel to acquire new customers. Email marketing is 40 times more effective for getting new customers than Facebook or Twitter.
It’s easily integrated with other communication channels. Use your chance to enlarge your audience, blending emails with your profiles on social media platforms, SMS, or web push notifications.
It helps your SEO. Create content worth sharing, send it to your subscribers, get backlinked, and drive traffic to your website.
To start an email marketing business, you’ll need to know how it works. Here is a quick walk through the core concepts of email marketing.
Email Marketing Objectives
A well-designed email marketing strategy allows you to reach lots of different long-term and short-term goals. Take a look at the most popular objectives.
Increase brand awareness. An email campaign is a great opportunity to remind clients about your brand. The more often they see relevant emails from your brand in their inbox, the more likely they are to choose your company when looking for a product. Keep in mind that sales-focused emails alone won't help you create the right brand image in your clients' minds. So, combine sales emails with educational content.
Boost sales. This is probably the A-list objective of every marketer. If your brand is credible, it won’t take much stress for your clients to purchase right from your email. You can inform subscribers about upcoming sales, hot deals, and even provide them with personalized offers.
Build credibility. If you haven’t earned credibility yet, use emails. Be honest and straightforward — customers appreciate this. Add reviews and testimonials to your campaignsso subscribers have the proof in front of them. You can also provide a link to your site page containing customer feedback. At least, your product cards should have a review section.
Drive traffic to your site.It doesn't take a ton of effort to reach this goal. Every email campaign includes links to several site pages, so if you manage to create an eye-catching subject line and relevant offer, clients will follow the links. This way, you can either boost traffic to your popular pages or promote those which lack user engagement.
Reduce long sales cycles. If you sell services or complex products, it takes much more time for your leads to make a buying decision. Here email campaigns come into play. You can share step-by-step guides, useful checklists, and video instructions to help customers clearly see the benefits of using your product.
Automate routine tasks. That is all about trigger and transactional emails. With their help, you can send campaigns automatically in response to your clients’ actions. Such emails include the following: welcome and onboarding series, registration confirmation, abandoned cart email, order confirmation, password reset email, and reactivation campaigns. This way, you will cut costs by handling these processes manually and focus on more important things.
5 Best Email Marketing Services
LIKE.TG
GetResponse
ActiveCampaign
MailChimp
Sendinblue
With an email marketing platform, you don’t need the knowledge of code and HTML skills as it has a drag-and-drop editor and ready-made templates. To save time, entrepreneurs can select a suitable solution. We’ll list the 5 most powerful platforms for you to consider and make the right choice.
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is a perfect solution for brands that want to establish connections with their target audience through chatbots, email campaigns, SMS, web push, and landing pages. The company offers a visual builder to create engaging email campaigns from scratch or use a library of over 100 ready-to-go templates. With LIKE.TG, you can integrate its CRM for free and store customer data in one place.
Segmentation allows you to organize subscribers into groups based on their gender, interests, and interactions, and send targeted offers to specific segments. It allows you to address customers’ needs. With personalization, you can modify your email content based on customers’ personal information. You can send emails with a personalized subject line to encourage opens and clicks and provide users with topics they picked when subscribed.
Email scheduler enables you to prepare email campaigns and send them to users right away or schedule the date and time of sending. Scheduled emails help you interact with subscribers in different time zones at the right time.
LIKE.TG’s email verifier helps you keep your mailing list clean. The tool verifies the email addresses on your contact list and increases deliverability. The platform empowers you to resend emails to subscribers who haven’t opened your emails. You can change the subject line and send the email again to increase your open rates.
Features:
segmentation;
A/B testing;
CRM integration;
personalization;
email verifier;
library of more than 100 ready-to-use templates;
resend to unopened;
24/7 customer support;
subscription forms.
Below you can see how to modify a ready-made template to your liking with LIKE.TG’s builder.
Free plan
The platform offers you to use its core features for free. After signing up, you get the opportunity to send 15,000 emails to 500 contacts, use 3 addresses and one domain, create one landing page, 5 flows, and one event.
Paid plans
LIKE.TG’s bulk email service offers three paid plans. The price depends on the size of your list.
Standard plan provides 500 subscribers and an unlimited number of emails for $8 per month. It allows 3 users to access the service, add 5 sender addresses, and 3 domains. You can design 3 landing pages and use five saved segments.
Pro plan starts at $9.60 monthly and covers 10 users, unlimited tags (organizing contacts into groups and providing them with personalized offers), 20 sender addresses, 5 domains, 10 landing pages, 50 flows, and 50 events.
Enterprise plan starts at $13.44 per month and offers unlimited tags, users, segmentation, landing pages, automation, and more.
GetResponse
GetResponse is a multichannel platform that allows companies to create email campaigns, signup forms, and webinars, build websites, and send web push notifications. Its email marketing software enables you to design and send various types of emails such as newsletters, automation emails, autoresponders, transactional emails, and automated blog digests to connect with your target audience and promote your product.
With the platform’s drag-and-drop builder, you can create appealing responsive emails without HTML skills. If you want to save time, consider using predesigned email templates. You can assign subscribers different tags and divide them into segments to send relevant content. GetResponse allows you to synchronize your email marketing software with CRM to store subscribers’ personal information and use it for segmentation.
Features:
segmentation;
A/B testing;
CRM integration;
personalization;
predesigned templates;
autoresponders;
email analytics;
list management;
sign-up forms;
24/7 support;
Perfect Timing and Time Travel delivery tools.
Below you can see how to work in GetResponse’s editor.
Free plan
GetResponse’s free plan includes 500 contacts, no limit on emails, one landing page with a limit of 1,000 visitors, a free domain, sign-up forms, and popups.
Paid plans
The platform provides three pricing plans.
Email marketing plan costs €16 per month for 1,000 contacts. It includes the following features: autoresponders, scheduling, Google Analytics tracking, email support, etc.
Marketing automation plan costs €54 per month for 1,000 contacts and covers marketing and event-based automation, advanced segmentation, contact scoring, etc.
Ecommerce marketing plan costs €106 monthly for 1,000 contacts and includes quick transactional emails, eCommerce segmentation, abandoned cart recovery, etc.
See the comparison of LIKE.TG and GetResponse to choose the right solution for your business. In the article, you’ll find pricing, a comparison of plans, and reviews of these two platforms.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign enables B2B and B2C companies to establish trusting relationships with customers through marketing automation. With its email campaign builder, you can send content your target audience wants to see. ActiveCampaign helps you deliver broadcast emails to everyone on your list to communicate important news, trigger emails after purchases or website visits to boost engagement, and targeted emails to specific audience segments to drive action. If you need to deliver lead magnets or send welcome emails, you can set up email autoresponders.
Sending emails to subscribers on certain events and dates is a great way to show you care. With ActiveCampaign, you can schedule email sending time. The platform allows you to integrate CRM and get notifications about new deals. To make emails feel more individual, the service provides personalization tools.
Features:
email segmentation;
subscription forms;
email automation;
subject line generator;
personalization;
A/B testing;
geo-tracking;
customer support;
site tracking;
built-in CRM;
outreach emails;
sales pipeline automation.
Below you can see how to work in ActiveCampaign’s editor.
Free plan
The platform has no free plan, but you can test its features during a 14-day free trial.
Paid plan
The service has four plans, with the cheapest one starting at $30.
Lite plan costs $30 per month and covers segmentation, one user, customer analytics, unlimited email sending, etc.
Plus plan starts at $70 per month and includes contact scoring, automations map, advanced performance reporting, access for up to 25 users, conditional content, etc.
Professional plan provides you with access to 50 users, predictive sending, one-to-one email automation, split automation, and predictive content for $187 per month.
Enterprise plan enables you to customize the features by yourself. You need to contact customer representatives to find out the details.
LIKE.TG provides the same features as ActiveCampaign but at a more attractive price.
MailChimp
MailChimp helps you design outstanding email campaigns, create landing pages, and reach the target audience with digital ads. The company offers powerful email software that provides the drag-and-drop builder and professional templates, Content Optimizer, and Customer Journey Builder. With the Content Optimizer, you can choose the best subject line for your email based on the service’s personalized suggestions. Customer Journey Builder adapts to your subscribers’ behavior and interactions to ensure the best experience.
MailChimp allows you to purchase a domain name for your company. After the verification process, you can use it as a part of the software’s email solution. Built-in CRM enables you to organize contacts into segments and assign tags. This way, you can filter customer data. After, you can create automated messages based on tags and segments. They will help target certain subscribers.
With the platform, you can schedule email sending to specific audience segments. It’ll help you deliver email campaigns to subscribers at the right moment.
Features:
email personalization;
email segmentation;
Content Optimizer;
Creative Assistant;
250+ app integrations;
marketing automation;
signup forms;
24/7 support;
Customer Journey Builder;
A/B testing;
marketing calendar;
ready-made email templates.
Below you can see how to work in MailChimp’s builder.
Free plan
After registering, you can send 10,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers every month. The free plan allows you to use basic segmentation, tags, Audience Dashboard, and single-step Automation Builder.
Paid plans
The platform has three paid plans. The price of the cheapest is $11 per month.
Essentials plan provides access to 3 audiences, basic segmentation, 50,000 contacts, and 10x plan’s contact limit emails. This plan also enables you to apply pre-built templates and remove MailChimp branding. It costs $11 monthly.
Standard plan costs $17 and includes 5 users, 100,000 contacts, 5 audiences, and email scheduling.
Premium plan costs $299 and covers an unlimited number of users and audiences, advanced segmentation, behavioral targeting, and more.
See the comparison of LIKE.TG and MailChimp to identify the most suitable platform in terms of usability, features, and price.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing software that ensures communication with customers through multiple channels like email campaigns, CRM, live chats, and transactional emails. The platform will come in handy for entrepreneurs, marketers, eCommerce companies, enterprises, agencies, and startups. With the service’s intuitive builder, you can create professional emails in no time.
To reach the right people with relevant content, you can segment your subscribers based on gender, purchase history, location, etc. Sendinblue empowers you to divide customers into groups based on interests, engagement, purchase history, and geographical or socio-economic characteristics.
Features:
email personalization;
advanced segmentation;
transactional emails;
A/B testing;
CRM;
Facebook ads;
live chat;
marketing automation;
send time optimization;
signup forms;
customer support on multiple channels.
Below you can see how to use Sendinblue’s intuitive builder.
Free plan
The service provides a free plan that covers unlimited contacts, 300 emails per day, email campaigns, transactional emails, CRM, and one user.
Paid plans
Sendinblue has three paid plans. The lowest price is $25 monthly.
Lite plan allows you to send 20,000 emails after paying $25 per month. It includes unlimited contacts, email support, and no daily sending limit.
Premium plan requires you to pay $65 per month. For this price, you’ll have the Lite plan plus marketing automation, five landing pages, phone support, access for 3 users, and Facebook ads.
Enterprise plan ensures custom volume of emails, priority sending, access for more than 10 users, priority support, and more.
If you have a small company, a limited budget, and no experience working with email marketing software, we advise you to choose a platform based on its price. This way, you’ll avoid big expenses and reap the benefits of the service.
How to Do Email Marketing
Choose an email service
Collect a mailing list
Create your email marketing campaign
Analyze the effectiveness of your email campaign
If you decided to integrate email into your marketing strategy, follow this guide. We'll walk you through creating your first email campaign and share some effective tips to build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
1. Choose an email service
You may be wondering why you need an email service if you're just getting started. The answer is simple — because of the limitations of inbox providers. It doesn't matter which email provider you use — Gmail, Zoho, AOL, Outlook, etc. — they are not intended for email marketing. So, they have certain limitations regarding email sending volume and design.
For example, Gmail allows you to send up to 500 emails within 24 hours. It's almost impossible to create an email template that will match your brand's style if you have no design skills. There are no features to manage your mailing lists, personalize emails, and segment subscribers. Besides, you won't get any reports to understand the performance of your email campaigns. In addition, you won't be able to automate sending emails since email clients do not support this feature.
That's why a professional email marketing service is a must. A service with a good reputation will make sure your emails land right in the inbox; with such a platform, you can choose the necessary plan according to the size of your mailing list; all the services provide a functional drag-and-drop editor which makes it possible to create professional campaigns without HTML knowledge. And this is just the tip of an iceberg!
You can use personalization, segmentation, A/B testing to craft relevant and valuable campaigns. Email automation functionality will allow you to put everyday tasks on autopilot and focus on more important issues.
To save time researching popular email services, we compared the free plan limits of 10 most popular services. Some of them allow marketers to send emails for free on a regular basis while others provide a free trial to test the service. Check out the comparison.
According to this little research, it came out that LIKE.TG offers the highest email sending limit on a free plan. You can send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers every month for free. With this plan, you can use almost all professional marketing features like pre-designed email templates, subscription forms, marketing automation, A/B testing, email analytics, personalization, segmentation, email authentication, and many more.
2. Collect a mailing list
This is one of the most important steps. Your mailing list quality influences the performance of your email strategy. You will only succeed if you communicate with people who are interested in your brand. So, to speak to the right audience, you need to collect a mailing list. It can include not only email addresses, but subscribers’ names, location, date of joining your list, and any other information. Further on, you’ll create personalized and relevant campaigns based on this data.
While collecting a list of subscribers the main rule is to get their permission. Never buy mailing lists. These people have never agreed to receive emails from you. They’re neither engaged nor interested in your brand. So, they may damage your sender reputation by marking your campaigns as spam.
To play fair, create a subscription form, place it anywhere on your site, and collect subscribers legally. With LIKE.TG you can create a unique form without knowing HTML in less than 30 minutes and totally for free. If you don’t want to design it from scratch, use a pre-made form, and edit it to your liking. Check out how creating a form looks below.
Follow this step-by-step guide to creating a subscription form with LIKE.TG.
After a user fills it in, they will be automatically added to a mailing list specified when creating a form. All the LIKE.TG forms follow GDPR rules. It means that users need to confirm their desire to receive emails from you twice. This results in a more engaged mailing list.
To make your form more effective, provide users with an enticing lead magnet. This is a special offer subscribers get in return for giving you their email address. It can be a short checklist, an ebook, guide, first-purchase discount — something valuable for your audience. It will help you improve your lead generation strategy.
Zendesk encourages its site visitors to subscribe to receive a live product demo. Those who really need their product will definitely go for such a trick.
3. Create your email marketing campaign
In fact, this step includes several other steps. Firstly, we strongly recommend you to create an email marketing plan to schedule email sending. It will allow you to make your strategy consistent, not to attack subscribers with random emails, effectively track your performance, and improve tactics on the go.
Email marketing plan
In this plan, we'll outline the approximate email sending frequency. Why approximate? It would be better if you let your subscribers choose how often they want to hear from you. You can ask this question right in the subscription form or add the corresponding option to your email campaigns.
Look below to see how Feedfeed allows its site visitors to choose their desired email frequency.
After that, decide on the type of emails you are going to send during the next month. This is important so you don't bombard subscribers with promotions. Find the right balance between promotional and non-sales emails. Everything depends on your niche, still no subscriber wants to receive hot deals and sales reminders every day. Combine them with trigger and transactional emails.
Trigger emails are follow-ups. Marketers send them in response to users’ actions. Look below.
A user subscribes — receives a welcome email or an onboarding email series.
The user adds an item to their shopping cart without buying — receives an abandoned cart email.
The user makes a purchase — receives an order confirmation email and shipment status emails.
The user registers for a webinar — receives a webinar confirmation email.
The user viewed a particular product on your site — receives a discount for it.
The user’s plan has expired — receives a free plan upgrade email.
The user hasn’t opened your emails for three months — receives a re-engagement email.
Almost all of these emails tend to have a high CTR since users initiated sending them, so they expect to receive this or that campaign. Some of the above-listed emails belong to the transactional category at the same time.
Transactional emails are sent to subscribers based on their actions as well. The difference between any marketing or triggered email and a transactional email is that the latter is not about converting a client. Its aim is to build trust and increase customer retention. Transactional emails include order confirmation emails, shipment status emails, password reset emails, pricing plan upgrade emails, and more.
Since you can’t plan to send triggered and transactional emails, just take them into account. If you’re going to send three emails a week, and your client will view some products, add them to the cart, make an order, and register for a webinar — these are at least 4 extra emails, bringing you to a total of 7 emails for a particular week.
Now, when you know what you plan to send and how often, it’s time to get started. Here’s one more extremely important thing. If you have never sent emails before from this particular IP address, you need to warm it up. This means that you have no reputation yet, and if you send 5,000 emails once to a new mailing list, you run the risk of being considered a spammer.
Email service providers need to understand that you’re a legitimate sender. Only after that will your emails land in the inbox. So, building your sending reputation may take 4-8 weeks. In this article, we outlined anIP warming schedule that you can use.
Now, let’s jump to the most interesting part — creating an email marketing campaign.
We advise you to create an email template that will match your brand's style. Then, you can use it every time when sending a campaign. Still, if you don't want to create one from scratch, you can choose a pre-designed template for free from the LIKE.TG library. Here you’ll find a template for any event.
Now let’s take a look at the most important elements that make users decide whether your email is worth opening. They include your sender name and email subject line. These are the first things subscribers see after receiving your campaign.
Sender email address and name
There are several best practices to follow but firstly, we want you to remember that using a “[email protected]” address is a no-no. Addresses like this look robotic, impersonal, unfriendly and it won’t assist you in building relationships with your audience.
Instead, use your company name in the sender address. You can accompany it with the department the email is sent from or a person responsible for email communications. This implies an opportunity for your clients to interact with your business.
Take your sender name seriously as it allows you to increase brand awareness and recognition. There are several effective options. The first and safest one is to use your company name. This way, your subscribers will understand who the sender is at first sight.
Victoria’s Secret, Chanel, MAC Cosmetics, and other brands use this kind of a sender name.
Some brands use “team” in their sender name to sound more friendly. It can be simply your brand’s team or any department, for example, a marketing team. Check out the corresponding examples below.
Another option is to use the name of a representative or a person responsible for email communication. Sometime later, your customer will associate your brand with this person. This will help them interact with you and communicate with your company.
To provide a personal touch and get close to your subscribers, we recommend that you use a photo of your representative. This will help you produce an impression as if subscribers know your email sender in person.
Email subject line
Now let’s move on to the second element subscribers see in their inbox—the subject line. It provides users with some basic information regarding the email. So. your subject should reflect your email content. Your goal should not only be to inform but also to engage subscribers and motivate them to open your campaign.
Below you can see an informative subject line. This is a webinar announcement. The company used its subject line to get right to the point. After reading it, subscribers already know the topic and can decide immediately whether they’re interested in this event.
Personalize your email subject line. You can add the “Name” field to your subscription form and then address your customers by name. This will help you provide each client with an individual approach.
Look at the email below. Burberry sent an abandoned cart email to remind a user about the item they left, and they started with the client’s name to attract attention and sound more personal.
Another way to draw subscribers’ attention to your email is to use emoji. Make sure they’re to the point and that they match your brand's tone of voice. Petco managed to use emoji to announce their new items. Look below.
For better performance, experiment, and try other methods, for example, questions, numbers, a sense of urgency, allusion, and more. Find out more about subject line hacks on our blog.
Now let’s consider the most interesting part — creating an email copy.
Email copy
The first rule you should remember when creating an email copy — write for your readers, not for yourself. Do not use email as a channel to tell subscribers how great your brand is and don’t simply list your achievements. People are not interested in a brand itself — they’re looking for the easiest solutions to their problems. So, provide them with your solution, explain how it addresses their pain points.
To cope with this task effectively, keep your copy short and concise. Readers have many things to do other than read your email, so respect their time. Brevity is the best choice.Makeyour email easy to digest, stick to an inverted pyramid design. This means that you should put the most essential informationon top and finish by adding an eye-grabbing CTA.
Grammarly uses this structure in their email campaigns. Look below.
Minimalistic emails like the Grammarly’s tend to perform better. Stick to a single-column design, because an average user’s attention span is only eight seconds, so they won’t read your message from A to Z. Use white space around some important elements, for example, titles, headings, CTA. It will help subscribers easily concentrate on these essential things and your email copy will “breathe.”
Use one CTA button per email. The CTA is the action you want your subscribers to perform after reading your campaign. That’s why they may be confused if you use three CTAs in one campaign — all these buttons will distract your customers’ attention from your main message. To create an effective CTA, be straightforward. Use as little text as possible. It should be unambiguous and clearly tell users what to do next. Let the button contrast with your email background — it will allow users to notice it at first sight.
Make your email images clickable. Almost every user clicksimages when reading an email. Redirect them to the relevant site page. Write alt text for all of the images you include because they may fail to display with some email clients. This way, the users will see the text describing them.
Mind that your email should be clear for both professionals in your field and the newbies. So, don’t use an excessive amount of specific terms or slang. Everybody should understand what you’re talking about.
Create a proper email footer. Although an email footer is not about your main message, you should pay special attention to it, since it contributes to your brand's identity and helps build trust. This element is also called an email signature and it contains the following information: an explanation of a reason why the subscriber received the email, an unsubscribe link, a link to email preferences management center, your company’s logo and physical address, copyright data, social sharing buttons, and contact information.
Below you can see several examples of email footers.
These email signatures are great since they provide all the necessary information. Remember that your unsubscribe link should be visible — don’t hide it in the text and don’t use a small font. It should be easy for a user to click and the unsubscribe process shouldn’t take more than one step. This will keep your mailing list healthy. Professional email marketing services like LIKE.TG automatically add an unsubscribe link to each email to abide by the CAN-SPAM Act.
Discover more tips on how to write a killer email copy on our blog.
To make your email campaign more relevant, use segmentation. Segmentation allows marketers to send different emails to customers depending on their gender, age, location, purchase history, interests, etc.Segmented emails have higher open rates and their recipients are more engaged. To provide clients with an exceptional individual approach, send emails based on their actions: opened and clicked a link from the email, didn’t open an email, clicked several links from the email. Follow this step-by-step guide to send an email campaign using segmentation with LIKE.TG.
4. Analyze the effectiveness of your email campaign
A professional email marketing service allows you to track the performance of your campaign right after sending it. LIKE.TG provides detailed reports for you to have a clear understanding of the success of your strategy.
The basic report covers the number of emails sent, delivered, open rate, clicks, emails marked as spam, and percentage of users who unsubscribed. Check it out below.
The report “Opens by location” allows you to analyze which country or region is the most interested in your emails in terms of email open rate.
The clicks map shows the number of clicks on each link and image in your email.
The “Devices” report shows the number of emails opened on the desktop or mobile, platforms, and browsers used.
The “Error statistics” report shows all the errors that prevented your email from being delivered.
With such deep reports, you can analyze your audience, understand whether you managed to reach your goal, and identify the most effective techniques.
How to Set Email Marketing Goals
Make sure you understand why you’re going to market your business using email. Your goals need to be:
Clear — identify the target audience and how you can benefitfrom each campaign.
Achievable — Keep your budget, resources, time, and skills in mind.
Timely — set a deadline for completing your goals.
Measurable — specify which KPIs will track the success of your campaign.
How to Create a Mailing List
Register with LIKE.TG
Create a subscription form
Place your subscription form in high-traffic areas of your website
Make it easy to subscribe
The moment you understand your email marketing goals, you need to build a database of contacts to email.Follow these four steps to attract new subscribers easily:
Register with LIKE.TG. Promote youremail campaign through your website, use subscription forms. Put forms in high-traffic areas of your website — the footer, sidebar, or at the end of your blog posts.
Create a subscription form. Choose between embedded, pop-up, floating, or fixedsubscription forms. LIKE.TG allows you to create all four types of subscription formsto meet yourneeds. You can create multichannel forms to let users contact your brand via chatbots in Facebook Messenger and Telegram.
Place your subscription form in high-traffic areas of your website. Decide whether the best place is in your footer, sidebar, or at the end of your blog post.
Make it easy to subscribe. Make sure the user can type in their email address easilyand provide an excellent reason to subscribe — a discount on the first order or free shipping work well.
With LIKE.TG, you can create a subscription form with our drop-down form:
To be a GDPR compliant marketer, send confirmation emails asking users to verify their subscription. Provide the users with a clear explanation of what is going to happen after they subscribe, what content they are going to get, and how often they are going to hear from you.
If you upload an existing mailing list, we recommend you check it with our Email Verifier. It will detect and remove invalid email addresses from your list. This way, you'll increase email deliverability and your sender reputation.
How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign
Choose your mailing list.
Create your email based on an available template or make your own.
Check campaign settings and tracking.
Send a test email.
Check out a more detailed plan for an email marketing campaign on our knowledge base.
Make use of the following types of emails in your campaigns:
Triggered emails
Theseemails are automated and based on users’ behavior or their stage in the customers’ lifecycle: welcome emails, anniversaryemails, abandoned cart emails, transactional emails, and re-engagement emails.
Business-as-usual emails (BAU)
These emails make up the primary dialogue with your audience. These are promotional emails with special offers, sales, discounts, educational information, or announcements.
No matter which type of emails you choose to send, there are some standard rules on how to make an email copy your subscribers will open.
How to Write a Marketing Email
While creating your email, stick to the following tips:
Create a catchy subject line. Limit it to 20 characters and make sure it makes sense with the preheader text. This way, your subscribers will fish out as much information as possible about your email while checking their inbox.
Bring in relevant content and personalize it. Segment your audience according to their age, location, gender, and preferences to come up with relevant and useful emails in the future.
Keep it short. On average, it takes 11 seconds to read an email, so you want your email to be informative without getting boring.
Make an actionable CTA button. This button should contain a clear call to action, for example, “Buy now” or “Yes, I want to subscribe.”
How Often to Send Email Marketing Campaigns
According to statistics, companies send 2-4 emails a day. How often should you email your customers? Here’s a list of tips on how to set the email frequency:
Cover this question in the subscription form. Provide the users with an option to get your email daily, weekly, or monthly. You can do this when users subscribe to your email campaigns.
Monitor the number of open rates and unsubscribes. Change the frequency of your emails according to these figures.
Study the roots of users’ engagement. Some subscribers might not be interested in receiving only promotional emails. Others, however, are interested in your sales and will ignore your newsletters with the best blog posts. Let users specify their content preferences and plan the frequency of your emails based on their answers.
Run an A/B test. Send emails to two equal groups of your mailing list at the same time, check the open rate, and choose the winning frequency.
Email Marketing Ideas
Welcome emails
Curated newsletters
Email digests
Product launch emails
Event or webinar invitation emails
Promotional emails
Anniversary and birthday emails
Customer success emails
Abandoned cart emails
Re-engagement emails
Feedback request emails
Survey emails
Follow-up emails
Giveaway emails
In this section, we are going to share a list of ideas for your email marketing campaigns. After subscribers join your mailing list they expect to receive valuable content from your brand. With all these ideas in front, you’ll manage to build relationships with your audience, blow up sales, increase customer engagement and loyalty. Get inspired!
Welcome emails. The first impression is the last impression since it’s very important in any sphere of communication. A welcome email is the first campaign a brand sends to its new leads. Its goal is to give a warm welcome, introduce your team or products, and tell subscribers about the benefits of working with your company. To make it easier for a customer to get started, provide some introductory guide or video instructions. You may also record a video with your CEO to make your readers smile.
Curated newsletters. This is a kind of a weekly or monthly round-up of high-quality content. The goal of this campaign is to boost your readers’ engagement. You can share not only your own content but collect material from other brands. You’ll have to study tons of articles to find the best material. This way, you’ll manage to show expertise in your field, build trust and authority towards your brand.
Email digests. This email is similar to a curated newsletter, the only difference is that you’re supposed to share your own materials. An email digest is a round-up of news, articles, or updates of a particular brand sent during a certain period of time. It allows marketers to nurture and educate their leads, increase site traffic, and boost sales. We strongly recommend dividing your digest material into primary and secondary information according to its importance for your clients to perceive it better. Use white space, images, colors, alignment and different sizes for this purpose.
Product launch emails. A new product release is something you can’t stay silent about. This is your chance to build hype and anticipation for your new feature or service. It will help you re-engage passive users and increase the number of loyal clients. Still, your task is not to say that your team of geniuses has finally launched a product but to inform people about the innovation that will help solve their particular problems. Focus on your clients’ needs and the way you can satisfy them.
Event or webinar invitation emails. Marketers send this email to announce an upcoming event or webinar. Your aim is to persuade subscribers that this meeting is really worth their time. Outline its benefits and explain what skills or knowledge they’ll get after joining you. With this email, you can increase engagement, brand awareness, and build hype for your event.
Promotional emails. The name speaks for itself. Marketers send this kind of email to increase sales. They announce hot deals, end of season reminders, last-chance sales reminders, new items in stock, and limited editions of products. Very often promotional emails are personalized.Thismeans that customers receive particular offers which they’re most likely interested in. Marketers use clients’ purchase history and take into account visitors’ behavior on a site to product relevant offers.
Anniversary and birthday emails. This kind of email is sent to subscribers to celebrate a special date or occasion, for example, a birthday, newsletter sign-up anniversary or first-purchase anniversary. Marketers pursue two main goals: increasing customer retention and boosting sales. Holiday emails have a high CTR since they’re personalized and provide a unique experience. In addition, they positively influence the brand reputation.
Customer success emails. People adore these emails. They definitely help marketers build strong relationships with their clients, provide each user with a personalized approach, boost engagement, and increase loyalty. People want to know about their progress and they’re really pleased when you track it. It may be ten purchases from a brand, the first site created with this platform or the first email campaign sent, or recording progress users make when studying a language. If you have ever used Grammarly, you received a customer success email.
Abandoned cart emails. Users leave your site without buying for several reasons that include long checkout, unexpected additional costs, needing to register or create an account, delivery time, lack of payment options, deficient return policy, etc. Still, you can increase sales by sending them an abandoned cart email. To create a killer campaign, include the item users left in their shopping cart, add a CTA that links to the cart, provide the total price along with the shipping costs. To add more value, use FOMO, and offer a special time-limited discount.
Re-engagement emails. Your email subscribers won’t be interested in your campaigns forever. They may have already solved their problem with the help of your brand, they may consider your sending frequency or email content irritating — salesy, or subscribers may simply lose interest in your brand. Nevertheless, you still have a chance to win them back. Send a re-engagement campaign to users who haven’t opened your emails for at least three months. This way, you’ll reactivate some passive clients, keep your mailing list healthy, and IP reputation high.
Feedback request emails. Brands send this email after customers buy their products and services, or visit an event. It helps them realize which problems their users face when using their products, improve their service, discover new opportunities, and build customer loyalty. Besides, there’s no need to send each feedback request email manually — you can send it automatically using marketing automation tools.
Giveaway emails. Giveaways help accelerate your mailing list growth, increase brand awareness, engage with an existing audience, and create hype about your product. Send this email to re-engage passive users and keep existing customers engaged.
Survey emails. This email is similar to a feedback request campaign. Marketers often add a form for users to share their thoughts about the brand. They can tell about the things they like and don’t like in the brand’s products, as well as share ideas to improve it. Besides, companies always offer a discount or something valuable in return for completing such a survey. It allows brands to increase customer retention and loyalty.
Follow-up emails. These emails are sent in response to customers’ actions. They include transactional and trigger messages. The main goal of follow-ups is to automate email sending. They also help marketers segment their audience according to their site behavior, increase email engagement and conversions, build trust, and customer loyalty. With the LIKE.TG Automation 360, you can set follow-up email sending for free.
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation allows marketers to work more effectively withoutusing a lot ofresources. It implies delegating everyday tasks such as handling orders, sending welcome email series, and follow-up email, to an email service.
Email marketing automation allows you to save time and money, deal with high-level tasks, devote much more time to improving your strategy, maximize sales, increase customer retention and loyalty, better understand your clients and provide them with a personalized experience.
Services like LIKE.TG provide automation functionality. With our Automation 360, you can send both promotional and transactional campaigns automatically in response to subscribers’ actions. Send confirmation emails after users register, make an order, or book a ticket; reminders — to let subscribers know they left something in their shopping cart or don’t forget about an upcoming event; collect feedback after clients buy something or visit your event; re-engage passive clients with a special offer. There are no limitations — you can create any custom event that will trigger email sending.
How email marketing automation works
You create an event. This is an event that will trigger email sending. For example, a purchase.
You design an automation flow. Use filters and conditions to create highly-relevant messages. You can combine email, SMS, and web push notifications in one flow for better engagement. For example, send an order confirmation email and keep users informed about their shipping status via SMS. Use variables from your mailing list for better personalization.
The event is triggered and your automation flow starts. After a user makes a purchase, the event is triggered and they receive an order confirmation or a thank-you email.
Your goal is reached. Now you can track conversions.
Follow this step-by-step guide to sending automated emails with LIKE.TG.
How much email marketing automation costs
With LIKE.TG, you can start totally for free. If you have up to 500 subscribers, send 15,000 emails for free every month. With a free plan, you can create up to 5 events. If you want to send to a larger list, consider upgrading to a paid plan which costs from $6.4 per month. Visit our pricing page.
How to Measure Email Marketing Results
Choose the corresponding KPIs to track if your campaigns have any success:
Bounce rate — the number of emails not delivered to subscribers’ inboxes.
Open rate — the number of opened emails.
Click-through rate — the number of users who opened and clicked the links in your emails.
Unsubscribe rate — the number of recipients who clicked the unsubscribe link.
Spam complaint rate — the number of users who flagged your emails as spam.
Conversion rate — the number of users who performed the desired action: a purchase, a download, or a subscription.
How much does email marketing cost?
On average, email marketing costs between $9-$1000 per month, depending on the platform you use and your database size.
LIKE.TG provides its users with a free 15k email plan for a500 subscriber mailing list. This plan allows you to use the most popular and beneficial marketing instruments: personalization, segmentation, subscription forms, A/B testing, convenient email editor, resend to unopened, and many more. A more significant database of contacts won’t leave you pennilesseither — paid plansstart from $8.
Email Marketing Tips
Collect email addresses legally
Abide by the CAN-SPAM Act
Follow GDPR
Use a familiar sender name
Warm-up your IP address
Welcome new subscribers within 24 hours
Write an attractive subject line
Create a short and concise email copy
Check your email for spam
Promote your social media accounts via emails
Optimize your emails for mobile devices
Run A/B testing
Re-engage passive subscribers
Keep track of your email marketing performance
Clean your mailing list regularly
Automate your email campaign sending
1. Collect email addresses legally
Never buy mailing lists. This is forbidden. You risk not onlybeing finedbut also damaging your brand reputation. People who have never subscribed to your campaigns, won't be interested in your products.
To play fair, create a subscription form and place it anywhere on your site. With the LIKE.TG functional form builder, you can create four types of forms without any special technical skills for free. Set display options, choose specific pages to place a form on, edit it to match your brand style, add an enticing lead magnet to get more subscribers. Choose a pre-designed form to save your time. All the forms are responsive by default. Write a confirmation email and it will be sent automatically right after subscription.
Below is a subscription form created with LIKE.TG. Using our service, you can collect not only users’ email addresses but let them join your community on Facebook and Telegram.
Follow this guide to create a subscription form with LIKE.TG.
You can build an email list with the help of online and offline events, contests, landing pages, surveys, quizzes, social media accounts, and partner' websites. To make users subscribe, you can not only use lead magnets but provide social proof and let people set preferences regarding the desired email frequency and content.
2. Abide by the CAN-SPAM Act
This act regulates sending commercial emails and punishes those who violate it. The main rules require senders to clearly state who the sender is, add a valid physical address to every campaign, provide users with an obvious and easy-to-tap unsubscribe button in each email and use relevant and straightforward subject lines. According to this set of rules, marketers are not allowed to sell or transfer users' email addresses to any third parties.
3. Follow GDPR
The GDPR is a set of standards the goal of which is to protect users' data. This regulation works in the European Union. According to it, websites must tell users that they are in control of their personal information. You, as a marketer, should use a double opt-in subscription formso users confirm their desire to subscribe twice. In addition, you should review your privacy policy — receive consent to collect clients' personal data, explain the way you store and transfer it and ensure that no other third parties will have access to it.
With this GDPR compliant form our subscribers can change their personal information or request to have it removed from the database.
4. Use a familiar sender name
This will help you increase your brand recognition and build trust in your company. Do not send emails from “No-reply” or “Marketing Team”. The former sender name hints that the brand is not interested in user feedback and communicating with the clients. Thelatter sendername won’t help you build trust because people tend to believe people, not brands. Customers always want to see who stands behind great products. So, personalize your approach.
If the person responsible for email communication with the clients is not popular yet, you can add the name of your company to the sender name. For example, “Kate Miller from LIKE.TG”.
If you send the first email to a newcomer, it's a great idea to introduce yourself. Tell them who you are, what you do at the company, and what a subscriber should expect from communicating with you. This will help you set a friendly tone.
Below you can see several different variants of a sender name from the inbox.
5. Warm-up your IP address
If you are going to send emails from a new IP address, warming it up is a must. It implies a gradual increase in your email sending volume to tell ESPs that you are a legit player. When ESPs notice high email sending volume from a new IP address, they suspect that the unknown sender is spamming. As a result, emails can either bounce or land in the spam folder.
To build a good sender reputation and increase email deliverability, increase the number of emails consistently, and send emails to your most engaged users. Such a warm-up process usually takes 4-8 weeks. After that, ESPs see that you’re an authoritative sender and your email deliverability will improve.
Read this article to see a two-week IP warming schedule.
6. Welcome new subscribers within 24 hours
Do your best to provide a new contact on your list a warm welcome. After users subscribe, they expect to hear something from you. Otherwise, they can forget or quickly lose interest in your brand. Then, itwill be much more difficult to engage them again.
Explain what benefits subscribers will get communicating with your company. To set a friendly atmosphere, you can add your photo or even record a short welcome video. Make sure that subscribers know what to expect from you in the future. Let them manage their email preferences following the corresponding link from a welcome email.
For better engagement, you can create a series of onboarding emails which is called an onboarding email campaign. It means sending several emails during a couple of days to educate your clients about your product. An onboarding email series allows marketers to communicate their message consistently without being nagging.
With LIKE.TG's Automation 360, you can create an email workflow in advance and it will be sent automatically right after a user subscribes. Add as many emails as you need, use filters and conditions to add subscribers to different mailing lists. This will help you send relevant emails to every segment. Track conversions to see how your welcome series performs and improve it on the go.
Here you will find more detailed instructions on sending an onboarding email campaign.
7. Write an attractive subject line
Your sender name and subject line are the first things subscribers see in their inbox. Therefore, they use them to judge whether your message is worth reading. Make your subject reflect the main idea of the email. Keep it short for users who check their inbox from their mobile devices. Make sure that you don’t use any spammy words, excessive exclamation marks, or capital letters.
To add a personal touch, add emoji to your subject line.Remember that they should be to the point. Another powerful instrument is personalization. It’s always a pleasure to receive a personalized email rather than a mass campaign.
Emoji in this subject line attract readers’ attention at first sight. In the email below, you don’t even have to read the subject to understand that MAC is promoting a new lipstick. MAC also uses a preheader to provide an additional incentive to buy.
8. Create a short and concise email copy
When creating an email campaign, you should take into account the fact that readers’ attention span is about eight seconds. Moreover, they never read emails from A to Z — they scan the message looking for the most important information.
To create an effective campaign we strongly recommend marketers stick to the inverted pyramid design. It means putting the most important information at the top of the message and finishing it with a prominent CTA.
To make your email breathe, add enough whitespace. Using it between paragraphs will help you emphasize the necessary information. Putting whitespace before a CTA will make readers focus on the action you want them to perform.
To design a perfect CTA, make sure it contrasts with the email's background. It should be eye-catching. The CTA text should tell users what they are supposed to do next, so make it clear and brief. Make the button easy to tap from mobile devices. We suggest using only one CTA button per email so as not to distract readers’ attention from your main message.
The email from InVision below is created in accordance with the email copy best practices. Its structure resembles a pyramid so it’s easy toskim. There’splenty ofwhitespace which allows subscribers to easily concentrate on the message. The CTA button grabs attention because it contrasts with the white background.
To increase brand recognition and awareness, make your emails reflect your brand's style. Stick to the same color and font across all campaigns. You can create a master template and edit it before sending each campaign. With LIKE.TG, you can either choose a pre-designed template from our libraryor create a unique one from scratch with ourdrag and drop editor. You don’t need to code or have any HTML knowledge.
9. Check your email for spam
Get into the habit of checking every email for spam before sending it. If you use spammy words or excessive exclamation marks by mistake in the subject, your email deliverability will be very poor. To stay on the safe side, you can either choose a third-party service or run an email spam check with LIKE.TG at the last stage of creating a campaign.
Our email spam checker provides recommendations to improve your email's deliverability and avoid sending spam. Check it out below.
10. Promote your social media accounts via emails
Combine emails with other marketing channels to better approach your customers. With LIKE.TG, you can use web push notifications, SMS, and chatbots in one strategy. Welcome new subscribers with an onboarding email series, tell them about sales and new content via push notifications, inform them about their order status via SMS, and consult using chatbots.
With LIKE.TG's chatbot builder, you can create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and Telegram. Automation 360allows automatic sending of emails, push notifications, and SMS according to users’ actions.
You can add social media buttons to your email campaign to let users join you on Facebook and YouTube. This way, you’ll increase both your outreach and traffic to your profiles.
11. Optimize your emails for mobile devices
The entire world has gone mobile. You can’t ignore this fact when developing your email marketing strategy. Do your best to meet the needs of your mobile users.
Create responsive email campaigns. Responsive email design means your message looks perfect both on a desktop and mobile device. Users shouldn’t have to scroll, zoom in and out to read it. If your email is not optimized for mobile, subscribers won’t take the effort to read your message.
To create responsive emails, you don’t need HTML knowledge or any technical skills. Professional marketing services like LIKE.TG provide this functionality. When creating a campaign with our service, you don't need to worry about its responsiveness — all emails are responsive by default, so they will look perfect at any screen resolution.
Pay special attention to several elements of your campaign: the email layout, the CTA button, and your unsubscribe link. We recommend using a single-column layout since it’s easy to read and subscribers don’t need to use horizontal scroll bars. Considering a CTA button, make sure that it’s easy to tap with a finger. Make it larger than 45px. Last but not least is your unsubscribe link. Do not try to deceive your readers and hide it somewhere in the footer making it impossible to click on. In this case, they will mark your email as spam. Make your unsubscribe button easy to find and tap.
12. Run A/B testing
Practice makes perfect. If you don’t have much email marketing experience yet, run A/B testing. This is atype of marketing research that makes it possible to compare several elements of the email to discover this one that performs better. You can test your email subject line, preheader, sender data, CTA buttons, images, videos, links, colors, fonts, etc.
With LIKE.TG, you can easily create a split-testing campaign to test the element you need. Set the criteria that will determine the winning email and choose the necessary mailing list segments. The more detailed instructions you’ll find in this guide.
13. Re-engage passive subscribers
Sooner or later your subscribers may lose interest in your brand and that's OK. Send them re-engagement email campaigns if they don’t open your emails for at least three months. Remind them about the benefits of your brand and offer an incentive to win them back. If they’re no longer interested in your service, just let them go. Keep your mailing list healthy. The only thing we recommend is to ask them about the reasons why they left your mailing list. Their answers will help you improve your future performance.
14. Keep track of your email marketing performance
Sending emails without analyzing their effectiveness is a waste of time. You should know how your strategy works and which tactics bring the most results. To analyze your performance, monitor the KPIs. They include email deliverability, open rate, CTR, bounce rate, unsubscribes, conversions, etc. These metrics shed light on the way subscribers perceive your campaigns.
You don’t need any third-party services to track the basic email marketing KPIs. LIKE.TG provides detailed reports after sending each email campaign.
Below is a report that shows not only these basic KPIs but opens by location, a click map, and error stats for you to gain more insight into your work.
15. Clean your mailing list regularly
A good email list is the guarantee of healthy email marketing performance. It all starts with getting clients’ email addresses legally. Then, you should regularly review the quality of your list. Check out how subscribers interact with your emails — whether they’re engaged. If they ignore your emails for 3-6 months and re-engagement campaigns don’t bring them back, remove their addresses from your list. There’s no point in talking to people who’re not interested in your brand. This will help you maintain your sender reputation and keep your deliverability rates high because email service providers are suspicious about senders whose emails are never read by recipients.
16. Automate your email campaign sending
Email marketing automation is a must today. It allows brands to save time and resources and spend time on more important tasks. With services like LIKE.TG, you can send automated emails in response to clients’ actions on your site. Delegate welcoming new users, handling orders, re-engaging passive clients, and much more to email automation.
Create events that will trigger automated email sending. Use filters and conditions to send highly relevant campaigns. Monitor conversions and improve your workflows. You can automate your email marketing for free with LIKE.TG. Follow this step-by-step guide to get started.
Send email campaign
Email marketing ROI
Return on investment (ROI) is a common profitability ratio. Email marketing ROI refers to the indicator that assesses the efficiency of the investment in the specific email marketing campaign or to compare the effectiveness of different investments.
How to Measure Email Marketing ROI
Billions of emails are sent daily, according to multiple resources. Does this mean that all of them have positive ROI?
For each dollar invested in email marketing, most businesses can expect an average return of $32, as reported by DMA in 2018. How can you estimate your ROI? Let’s start with a formula as this is the most common approach for estimating email marketing ROI:
(Gained− Spent) ÷ Spent = Return on Investment represented as a percentage
"Gained" refers to the estimated amount of money that an email campaign has brought. If your email service provider has Google Analytics integrated into their dashboard, it is simple to trace every sale resulting from an email.
"Spent" stands for the cost of the email campaign.
Estimate the value of a lead – it’s the simplest approach. Some SEO tools can help with this task. You can follow this manual method:
Identify a lead. A lead is a qualified site visitor: a user has not purchased your service or product yet, but they are prospective buyers interested in your offer;
Come up with a formula. It might seem a bit complex at first glance. The formula is the average sale × conversion rate. Imagine that you sell USB cables. If an average sale is $150 and your site converts at 3%, the value of a lead would be $150 x 0.03 = $4.5. In other words, every lead your business obtains is worth $4.5. Put simply, every individual who stumbles upon your site – via search, clicking an advertisement, or from social media – possesses a value of $4.5.The less frequently used formula is:
Sales derived from email marketing− Cost of sales derived from email marketing− Email marketing costs) ÷ Email marketing costs
Have a closer look at each element of the first formula. You need to estimate the amount of money that you invested in email marketing campaigns. The simplest way to do this is to consider the time that every email marketing team spends on the creation and conversion of emails. Use a rate per hour for this purpose. In case all expenses of this type come from the ESP and time, the total amount spent will be ESP + team efficiency.
The next factor is simple and quick to calculate for online sellers. Experts recommend integrating Google Analytics with your ESP to see your numbers faster. The most common method used to estimate gain is to take into account the value of a lead:
The number of conversions× Value of a lead
If you cannot accurately track the revenue generated from every email, estimate the average ROI. Do the following:
Number of conversions made via email× cost of an average order
For those who are not sure about the accuracy of their estimations or lack some information, the best way is to try email marketing services that involve analytics.
LIKE.TG provides reports and deep analytics for each campaign that you send.
If you have no desire to waste time on manual calculations, you may benefit from using online email marketing ROI calculators. If you decide to use one like Sleeknote, consider the following:
the necessary currency;
total number of subscribers;
the final cost of the campaign;
open rate;
click-through rate;
conversion rate (look for it in Google Analytics);
the average value of a conversion (look for it in Google Analytics).
Additionally, there are two more ways to assess your ROI. Lead acceleration refers to estimating how long it takes a nurtured lead to transfer from the awareness phase to making a decision. As for the impact on revenue, this measure represents the value of every engagement across the specific marketing campaign.
How to Improve Email Marketing ROI
Automate email marketing
Personalize emails
Set timing wisely
Optimize content for mobile devices
Many companies face writer’s block when trying to prepare and launch email marketing campaigns. You should know that ROI depends on the quality of your business emails.
Automate email marketing
It’s critical to minimize the workload associated with emails because it’s not your core business activity. The best way to reduce your email workload is with email automation. Then, you'll be able to optimize your email marketing quickly on the go.Try to utilize as many automation instruments as possible for the best results.
Besides, email automation allows marketers to put nurturing leads on autopilot as well as answer users’ frequently asked questions so that your technical support team can deal with more important issues.
To boost your sales and fuel up your business, LIKE.TG developed Automation 360, which enables you to send emails triggered by users’ actions.
Below is an abandoned shopping cart email that allows businesses to increase sales. You can send it automatically after a user adds your product to their shopping cart, but doesn’t complete the purchase. Follow this step-by-step guide.
Personalize emails
Everyone likes feeling special. That is what your clients expect to feel from your business. Start by adding the client’s first name and use the original greetings. Add the rest of the information based on the needs of a specific group of clients. Buyer personas may be useful in this case. LIKE.TG will help you create personalized emails based on the data users share with you.
Check out below how Grammarly congratulates its users on setting personal records. This is a great example of email personalization.
Set timing wisely
Figure out the optimal time for sending your messages. Pay attention to the specific days and hours when most subscribers open emails from your company. The tools and stats from LIKE.TG will help you detect the best time to send your email campaigns. Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons are currently the winners.
With LIKE.TG, you can schedule email campaigns and send them during non-working hours or just to save time.
Read more about the best time and day to send emails on our blog.
Optimize content for mobile devices
More than 50% of users open emails on their mobile phones, as statistics from the Campaign Monitor show. So, you should do your best to provide users with the best email experience. Make sure that your campaigns look awesome on both desktop and mobile.
If you’re not a tech-savvy marketer, create emails with the LIKE.TG drag and drop editor. You don’t have to know HTML to create stunning emails.
Below is a screenshot made from LIKE.TG editor. All you need to do drag the necessary elements into your working field. Try it right now!
LIKE.TG offers a wide choice of tools that will help you improve your email marketing ROI. Give us a try with a free trial. Send 15,000 emails each month totally for free!
Email newsletter
Email newsletters are the most common type of emails in email marketing. As the name suggests, they often contain news and updates, aiming to keep the audience engaged. At the same time, they are designed to gently push users towards the conversion.After registering with LIKE.TG, you can send email newsletters for free.
In this video, the LIKE.TG marketer explains how to come up with newsletter ideas for marketing campaigns.
Some marketers claim that newsletters are not much of a leap to set up, but newsletters that are created with attention to detail are sure to pay off. The role of an email newsletter in your overall email marketing strategy may be significant.
Why are Email Newsletters Important for Your Business?
Coverage
Effectiveness
Personalization
Credibility
Relationship
Let’s discuss how email newsletters can help your business prosper.
Coverage. Over 3.8 billion people use emails. Every day people send and receive 281 billion emails on average. Business emails make up a majority of emails sent daily, around 109 billion. If used wisely, email newsletters can cover enormous audiences in a short period.
Effectiveness. Email marketing yields a near 4000% return on investment, and the email newsletters are a crucial contributor to that success. It proved to be the most commonly used type of email for engaging with the clients.
Personalization. Email marketers usually take their consumers’ behavior and preferences into account. That approach pays off because personalized emailsoffer products that people are very likely to purchase. As a result, we have email newsletters that help meet the needs and expectations of various social groups.
Credibility. Why not utilize newsletters to share upcoming trends in your niche or a behind-the-scenes look at your manufacturing process? That is a fair opportunity to highlight your expertise in a certain field and increase subscribers’ understanding of your credibility at the same time.
Relationship. The overwhelming competition in internet marketing stimulates brands to get more creative and genuine. Businesses that give more, tend to get more in return. Email newsletters are an excellent channel for building long-lasting relationships with the audience.
Create a newsletter yourself!
Design a beautiful email newsletter in an hour— for totally free and without knowing HTML. Personalize, segment, and schedule it to get the best results with LIKE.TG.
Register and send an email newsletter!
What is the purpose of an email newsletter?
Brands send email newsletters to inform their subscribers about recent news and updates. These emails have nothing to do with selling — they’re about building customer loyalty with the help of useful content. Below we considered several goals that you can reach by sending newsletters.
Traffic increase. Email newsletters usually contain useful tips, how-to guides, short checklists with links to original articles and posts where users can study the subject in detail. This way, you can easily increase traffic to your website or blog.
Brand awareness and recognition enhancement. If you share valuable and unique content, your subscribers will wait for your next email newsletter. They will associate your brand's logo and sender name withthe positive experiences they get from your emails. This is one of the steps to build brand authority.
Increased sales. Despite the non-commercial nature of email newsletters, they can help you increase sales indirectly. For example, you can share a detailed guide on how to use your service more effectively or offer your recipients a case study of one of your successful clients. If this material looks reasonable to your audience, those who haven’t yet decided to buy will have more reasons to do this.
Social media profiles promotion. If you have just created a profile of your brand on Facebook or Instagram, you can easily promote it by adding links to your email newsletter. Mention why your account is worth following and tell the recipients what information you share in social media. Note that you should create different content for each channel, otherwise, there’s no value for subscribers to join your community.
The Best Time to Send an Email Newsletter
This question is still disputed by marketers. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but note that sending too many emails is one of the main reasons that users unsubscribe.
According to the research, 60% of people want to receive promotional emails from brands weekly, and more than 80% — monthly. A little over 10% of people would like to get an email every day. Take into account that these stats apply to promotional emails. An email marketing strategy usually implies sending not only advertising emails but newsletters, trigger, and transactional emails. This means that you should thoroughly plan the entire number of campaigns you send so that you don't scare away your audience.
To send consistently but not to overdo it, we strongly recommend creating an email marketing calendar. It should contain all the emails you’re going to send users each month. This way, you will have a clear picture of your marketing activities and you will be able to make changes on the go.
The best option is to ask subscribers how often they would like to hear from you. Provide each email newsletter with a link to an email preference center where users can set up the desired frequency. Also, it's a great idea to inform leads about your email sending frequency in the subscription form. This way, they will be fully aware of your email marketing strategy.
Now let'sdiscussthe email structure.
Email Newsletter Structure
Template
Design
Copy
Subject Line
CTAs
Sender’s name
Unsubscribe link
Before we learn how to create and send email newsletters, we need to understand their components:
Template.A web designer creates an HTML-template for a future email newsletter. It must look professional and conform to the brand’s visual identity to achieve specific targets. You can start with the basics by taking advantage of LIKE.TG pre-designed templates.
Design. The recipient should recognize the brand by the colors, forms, and fonts used in the email newsletter. Every image and piece of text needs to be informative and intelligent, and by no means irritative.
Copy. A better part of an email newsletter should entertain and educate customers. The rest of the email should focus on promotion. A little promotion contrasting with a good portion of high-quality content is an excellent choice. Remember, with most email newsletters less is more.
Subject Line. It is the first thing people consider when they open an email, so make it count. The perfect length of the subject line is around 30-50 symbols, and it depends on your style and goals. Whatever the length, an email newsletter is more likely to be opened when the subject line is creative, funny, and intriguing.
CTAs. The promotional part of email newsletters should contain a call-to-action — a button with a link to a specific website page. Yet don’t add too many of them to avoid looking pushy. A good CTA clearly reflects what action the reader should take: “Learn more,” “Make an order,” “Get discount.”
Sender’s name. It is the first thing recipients see alongside the subject line. It’s okay to use your real name, it makes your email newsletter sound more friendly. It's another way to cut the distance between a business and its customers and humanize communication.
Unsubscribe link. It may seem odd, but the doors should always be opened for consumers — in both directions. It's hard to say goodbye to your leads when you’ve just put so much effort to bring them in. Well, guess what’s left after your click the unsubscribe link — genuinely interested people who will form a community around your brand.
Email Newsletter Size
Your email newsletter's success depends not only on the content you share but on the technical side of things which include email size. It's extremely important since it influences user experience. If a reader needs to scroll left and right to read your email, your CTR will dramatically decrease. The bigger the height of your email, the higher the chances are that recipients won’t read it to the end. The larger your image file size, the higher the probabilityis that they will either take a long time to load or won’t load at all.
So, to stay on the safe side, keep the following effective tips in mind.
Stick to a 600px email width.600 pixels is considered the email width standard for any device. Of course, you can change the size, but test if it displays well on any screen resolution and across the devices your subscriber use.
Try different email length. There are no strict rules regarding this measure. Still, email marketers recommend putting vital information above the fold since the average readers’ attention span is eight seconds. Besides, the more topics you cover in your email newsletter, the less your readerswill be able to focus on each of them. So, you’d better work on data quality rather than quantity.
Keep the size of the email to 102 Kb or less. Email size best practices suggest that your HTML file of the email shouldn’t exceed 90 Kb. Note that image weight doesn’tadd to the actual HTML file.
To eliminate any trouble with email newsletter size, choose a professional email service like LIKE.TG. The service provides pre-designed email templates that are responsive by default. It means that the email will look great on any screen resolution. If you create a template with the drag and drop editor, it will be responsive as well.
Free Email Newsletter Services
LIKE.TG
MailChimp
Sendinblue
GetResponse
ActiveCampaign
Lots of email marketing services assist small companies and big corporations in streamlining communications with their audiences and automating converting leads into clients. In this section, we'll review the top 5 services that let marketers lean back in their chairs and reap the benefits of email marketing.
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is a multifunctional platform that enables marketers to deliver relevant and timely messages to their customers via several channels: email, SMS, web push notifications, chatbots, and landing pages. There’s no need to code since a visual drag-and-drop email editor allows you to create a stunning email campaign without breaking a sweat. Ready-to-use segments and advanced personalization tools let you design highly tailored emails based on the data you have about your subscribers and their engagement level. With a flexible automation tool, you can develop triggered email flows that will bring back users to your site or shopping cart, remind them about upcoming events and sales, ask clients to leave a review, etc.
LIKE.TG features:
email personalization;
email segmentation (+ready-to-use segments);
subscription forms;
100+ ready-made email templates;
marketing automation;
24/7 multilingual customer support available by chat, email, phone;
A/B testing;
multi-user access;
webhooks for transactional emails.
LIKE.TG integrates with many popular platforms like Google Analytics, Stripe, Bitrix24, OptinMonster, WordPress, Opencart, Drupal, etc. LIKE.TG email verifier allows you to check email addresses on your list to improve deliverability and sender reputation. The service provides a free and easy-to-use CRM platform to manage and contact your leads and clients from one place.
Below you can see what creating an email campaign with LIKE.TG looks like. You need to drag the necessary elements to your working field and design them to your liking.
Free plan
You can send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers every month. Create 5 automations, make 100 verifications per month, and add up to 3 sender’s addresses and 1 domain.
Paid plans
Paid plans start at $6.40 per month. At this price, you can send unlimited emails to 500 subscribers, create 10 flows, save 5 segments, and access email testing.
Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you $16/month; 5,000 subscribers — $28; 10,000 — $42.40.
You can also buy Pay As you Go plan.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that lets you send the right campaigns to the right audiences via several channels, increase sales with email automation, use creative tools for designing original content, and reap the benefits of the audience tools to create a smart strategy. MailChimp Customer Journey Builder enables you to convert more prospects into clients with flexible experiences. With the Audience Dashboard, you can gain valuable insights into your subscribers; check out top tags, trends, and locations, and uncover email marketing engagement.
MailChimp features:
email personalization;
email segmentation;
subscription forms;
100+ pre-designed email templates;
Subject Line Helper;
Content Optimizer;
Customer Journey Builder;
Send Time optimization;
A/B testing;
Content Studio;
smart recommendations.
MailChimp integrates with lots of services to let you make the most out of your strategy. You can integrate with Shopify, Stripe, Squarespace Commerce, LiveChat, Zendesk, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, etc. MailChimp data-driven tools allow marketers to predict purchase likelihood, customer lifetime value, and best prospects to target.
Below you can see how to create an email campaign with MailChimp. You can drag any of the blocks below into the campaign preview on the left and edit them to your liking.
Free plan
You can send up to 10,000 emails to 2,000 contacts per month. Create 1-step automations, use subject line helper, design surveys, and get email support for 30 days.
Paid plans
The service offers 3 plans that start at $11. Using the “ Essentials” plan, you get 24/7 support, create A/B tests, schedule your email sending, and access smart tools.
Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you $34/month; 5,000 subscribers — $59; 10,000 — $87.
You can buy email credits on request if you don't send emails regularly.
On average, LIKE.TG is two times cheaper than Mailchimp — see for yourself!
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a multichannel marketing platform that lets brands communicate with their audience via email, SMS, Facebook, chat, and CRM. This service allows small businesses to grow faster without much investment and dedication to the technical side of things. If you’re not a tech-savvy marketer, Sendinblue is just for you. Its straightforward interface enables you to build beautiful emails with a drag-and-drop editor, personalize their content, create segments, and optimize the sending time with the machine learning functionality. Design automated email workflows to save time, boost conversions, and build strong relationships with customers.
Sendinblue features:
email personalization;
signup forms;
customer support via chat, email, and phone;
send time optimization;
transactional email management;
A/B testing.
To extend the platform functionality, you can integrate with lots of platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, Optinmonster, Stripe, Intercom, PayPal, etc. You can manage all customer interactions via a single CRM platform provided by Sendinblue.
Check out below how to create an email campaign with Sendinblue. Drag the necessary elements to your working field and go to the “Design” tab to edit them.
Free plan
You can send up to 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts. Send personalized emails and SMS, create customized sign-up forms, and get email support.
Paid plans
The service offers 3 plans that start at $25 per month. Using the “Lite” plan, you can send 20,000 emails to unlimited subscribers and receive email support.
Sendinblue charges its clients by the number of emails regardless of the number of subscribers on the list.
Compare Sendinblue with LIKE.TG.
GetResponse
GetResponse is a simplified tool to increase your outreach, engage customers effectively, and blow up sales. It fits entrepreneurs, marketers, and large companies. GetResponse provides a list of solutions to generate more leads, sell your knowledge, and engage clients. The platform lets you send email newsletters, automated emails, transactional emails, etc. With intuitive design tools, you can create professional emails or make use of ready-made templates. Custom segments, dynamic content, and perfect time sending enable you to send relevant messages to the right people at the best time. GetResponse allows you to make your emails shoppable to boost sales and run multichannel campaigns to drive more traffic to your site.
GetResponse features:
email personalization;
email segmentation;
sign-up forms;
ready-made email templates;
automation emails;
autoresponders;
24/7 multilingual customer support available by chat and email;
A/B testing;
Perfect Timing and Time Travel.
GetResponse integrates with a great many tools to streamline your communication with clients. You can empower your strategy by integrating the platform with Google Analytics, WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, WooCommerce, Shopify, etc. You can visualize your automated customer journey by building a workflow based on a client’s data and behavior.
Look below how creating an email newsletter in GetResponse looks like. Drag the elements to your field and go to the “Message style” tab to design them.
Free plan
You can send unlimited emails to 500 contacts per month. Create sign-up forms and use pre-designed templates. You can try the following premium features for 30 days: marketing automation, advanced segmentation, get 24/7 access to the customer support team via email or chat.
Paid plans
The service offers 3 plans that start at €13.12 per month. At this price, you can send unlimited messages to 1,000 subscribers and use basic segmentation and email scheduling.
Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you €22.14/month; 5,000 subscribers — €39.36; 10,000 — €56.58.
On average, LIKE.TG is twice cheaper than GetResponse — see for yourself!
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign helps B2B and B2C companies build meaningful connections with their audiences and improve customer experience. With ActiveCampaign, you can develop a powerful email marketing strategy, reinforce it with automation tools, boost sales and keep track of leads using a built-in CRM. Send broadcast emails to talk to wide audiences at once, increase subscriber engagement with trigger emails, send the right messages to the right people via targeted emails, and nurture leads effectively with email autoresponders. The platform lets marketers use clients’ data from every touchpoint to send timely messages when they’re most likely to convert.
ActiveCampaign features:
email personalization;
advanced segmentation tools;
sign-up forms;
ready-made email templates;
automation emails;
autoresponders;
multi-user editing;
geotracking;
customer support available by chat and email;
A/B testing;
sales pipeline automation.
ActiveCampaign integrates with over 800 services to bring the most value. These platforms include Shopify, JotForm, WordPress, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Prestashop, etc. With ActiveCampaign, you can get a complete customer view, score leads effectively to identify their position in a buyer’s journey, and predict sales.
To create an email campaign, you need to drag the necessary elements to your working field and edit their design.
Free plan
ActiveCampaign has no free plan, but it provides a 14-day free trial to try the benefits of the service.
Paid plans
The service offers 4 plans that start at $15 per month. At this price, you can send unlimited messages to 500 subscribers, use segmentation and create subscription forms.
Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you $61/month; 5,000 subscribers — $99; 10,000 — $174.
On average, LIKE.TG is cheaper than ActiveCampaign — see for yourself!
How to create an email newsletter for free?
In this section, we’ll walk you through creating an email newsletter with LIKE.TG. You don’t need any coding skills or technical knowledge. Follow these 7 steps.
Step 1. Register or login
If you don’t have an account, register. Alternatively, you can sign in with Facebook or Google.
Then, click “Create a campaign.”
Step 2. Add the information about your campaign
Choose a mailing list, sender email address, and name, and write your subject line.
Select one or several mailing lists.
You can use segmentation to provide subscribers with personalized offers based on their personal data.
Write a creative subject line to increase your email newsletter open rate. You can add emoji and personalize it by clicking {}.
Step 3. Design your email copy
You can design an email template from scratch or edit a pre-designed template with the help of a drag-and-drop editor.
Add images, text, buttons, videos, and social links. Edit each element with the right menu.
Step 4. Add email preheader
Email preheader lets you provide more information about your campaign before subscribers click through your email. It’s another chance to drive their attention.
Step 5. Set campaign parameters
You can monitor opens and clicks and provide each link with the tags to check out the sources of a click-through. Create a custom unsubscribe page or link to a default one. Choose the language of an unsubscribe form.
Step 6. Double-check
Preview your campaign before sending it. To avoid the spam folder, our Wizard provides anti-spam recommendations. Check them out to improve email deliverability.
Step 7. Send your email or schedule it
You can either send your email newsletter immediately or schedule email sending. Write a new subject line to resend an email to subscribers who haven’t opened it.
When everything is ready, click “Start.”
Congrats, your email newsletter is sent! Check its status and statistics after sending.
Email Newsletter Examples
We’ve gathered three great examples, hoping that it will help you create emails of the same quality.
Grammarly. Here is an excellent example of a highly personalized email newsletter based on how the user interacts with their service.
TED. This company sends weekly recommendations based on the topics you like, and the content you’ve previously watched or shared.
Growthrocks. Their newsletters are always in plain text, being brilliant, funny, and to the point.
Let's now review the tips which will help you create excellent emails, too.
Email Newsletter Best Practices
Clean your mailing list regularly
Segment your subscribers
Be brief but informative
Inject fun, suspense, and cliffhangers in your subject lines
Put your grammar on
Avoid spammy words
Don’t forget about alt text
Care about people’s visual perception
Make it mobile-friendly
Schedule your emails intelligently
Analyze
We’ve collected a list of the most vital tips to help you create great email newsletters and skyrocket engagement with subscribers. Here they are:
Clean your mailing list regularly. Try to reactivate users who haven’t shown any signs of activity for three months or more. Some will react, but you’d better remove the rest from our list. Why? Because email service providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) denote your newsletters as irrelevant, which harms your sender reputation.
Segment your subscribers. Segmentation will give you a chance to make slightly different email newsletters within one campaign to fit every social group more accurately. With LIKE.TG, you can segment your mailing list according to gender, occupation, location, age, subscribers’ actions, and more.
Be brief but informative. Make your copy clear and concise, people usually don’t have very much time to read complicated clusters of text. Try to approach your audience in their language. Remember, you should be a friend to your customers. A friend they will rely on, trust, and want to buy from.
Inject fun, suspense, and cliffhangers in your subject lines. Create a subject line with a sense of humor to increase the open rate. Make it relatively short, but add some flair. Intrigue recipients, so they are dying to know what’s inside. Try A/B testing with LIKE.TG for free to get the most of your subject lines.
Put your grammar on. Double-check your grammar before sending your email. It would be a pity to make mistakes in your email newsletter.
Avoid spammy words. Falling into the spam box is the worst-case scenario for your email newsletter. Even though current spam filters are more sophisticated and able to analyze the context of your words, you’d better be careful. Avoid any of these spammy words.
Don’t forget about alt text. If an image isn’t loading for some reason, alternative text saves the day and describes the missing image. It gives you a chance for your message to be understood even without pictures.
Care about people’s visual perception. When the copy, images, and CTAs are set up, leave a lot of white space in the message. This way, your email newsletter will be easy to read.
Make it mobile-friendly. Make sure your email looks good on different mobile devices because about half of all email users open emails on mobile devices.
Schedule your emails intelligently. Develop a schedule based on your customers’ lifestyle. Find out when it’s convenient for people to read your emails. Keep on sending emails regularly, but let the people breath. Otherwise, they’ll unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.
Analyze. Monitor how effective your emails are. Keep an eye on your click-through, open, and unsubscribe rates. Rely on these metrics when implementing changes if anything goes wrong.
Here's a detailed instruction on how to create perfect email newsletters with LIKE.TG.
Send email newsletter
Email marketing automation
Email marketing automation is sending relevant emails to subscribers based on events and triggers. This strategy allows marketers to send personalized messages to prospects and customers on a schedule or when specific conditions are met. With LIKE.TG Automation 360, you can automate sales andcommunication with clients, combining emails, push notifications, and chatbot messages for better performance.
In this video, a LIKE.TG marketer explains how to get email marketing automation.
Email marketing automation is all about making promotional campaigns an automated process. How is it useful? Automating emails saves marketers the hassle of creating and sending new emails each time when a prospect shows interest in a brand, a customer abandons a cart, business launches a sale, and so forth. Apart from that, studies have shown that using marketing automation software leads to an 80 percent increase in the number of leads and a 77 percent boost in conversions.
Why use email automation for marketing?
Create segmented mailing lists
Convert prospects into customers
Maintain engagement with prospects and existing customers
Increase efficiency
Improve engagement
Here are five reasons why every marketer should implement email marketing automation. One can:
Create segmented mailing lists
Email marketing automation enables businesses to create highly segmented mailing lists. Marketers can segment their lists based on subscriber activities and Customer Relationship Management data (entire purchase history, last purchase, lead stage, etc.)
From effective segmenting, marketers can reap highly-targeted marketing automation workflows that maximize both sales and engagement.
Convert prospects into customers
Email is a perfect tool for lead nurturing. Email automation helps marketers to nurture the leads that they need to convert through their sales funnel effectively. It ensures that they avoid the labor-intensive task of sending marketing emails manually.
Maintain engagement with prospects and existing customers
Email marketing automation provides online marketers with click-through data that enables them to identify which assets or links within their emails get favorable responses. By taking this information into account, marketers can then optimize the effectiveness of the messages in their emails to avoid complaints, build positive brand impressions, and reduce the number of unsubscribes and bounces. In the end, marketers get to maintain healthy levels of engagement with both prospects and customers.
Increase efficiency
With email automation, online marketers can computerize repetitive CRM tasks and save a lot of time and effort. Some of the activities they can automate include: storing and tracking customer data, determining the level of interest of their customers and their intention to buy using lead scoring, re-establishing contact with inactive leads, calculating return on investment (ROI).
Improve engagement
Email automation enables marketers to provide appropriate, personalized, and timely messages to their subscribers. In turn, marketers boost the engagement subscribers have with their brand.
Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
Increased transactions
Effective segmentation
Increased revenue with transactional emails
Integrate with the customer buying cycle
Email marketing automation has several advantages. These are:
Increased transactions
Email automation allows marketers to provide personalized fields, for instance, name, location, company name, and so forth, in email messages. Customizing marketing messages in this way results in open rates increased by 26%. Also, worth noting is that emails with personalized messages lead to a transaction rate that is six times higher.
Effective segmentation
Email marketing automation helps marketers to send out relevant messages to their subscribers. It allows brands to segment (based on data) both leads and customers into different groups to ensure that they receive the offers they’re interested in. According to MailChimp's study, segmented email campaigns have 100.9 percent higher click-through rates and 14.3 percent higher open rates.
Increased revenue with transactional emails
Transactional emails are messages sent to website visitors automatically after they perform a specific action, for example, downloading an eBook, purchasing, and so forth. Email marketing automation allows proactive marketers to use transactional emails to take other measures. For instance, an email for confirming an order could also include “Similar Products” at the bottom of the message. With transactional emails alone, businesses can earn up to six times more revenue.
Integrate with the customer buying cycle
Email automation allows marketers to sync their business activities with the purchase cycle of their customers. It enables them to send emails right about the time a customer needs another of their products. For instance, if a customer purchases bleach once a month, a marketer can schedule a promotional email that goes out to the customer after four weeks.
How does email marketing automation work?
Email automation is all about triggers and actions. When a particular event is triggered, a specific email or set of emails are sent. The length of an automated email series depends on the number of marketing actions the business wants to automate. The marketer can, therefore, be as creative as they want in the type of content they send to subscribers. To enable email marketing automation, a marketer creates an email flow using an email service.
An email flow is a series of automated messages sent to a subscriber based on their data or specific behavior.
Using workflow, businesses can send the right emails to leads at the right time based on the information they have about them.
By tracking the activities of leads when they are engaging with the brand, marketers can gather insights and use them to set triggers that will send the most relevant messages. An email service such as LIKE.TG helps to set up and customize these triggers or events according to the marketer’s specifications.
Email marketing automation can be used for both B2B and B2C companies. Both types of businesses can use automation flows to send welcome emails, re-engagement emails, or feedback request emails. B2B brand set triggers for the following actions:
A visitor views a particular page ona business’ website.
A prospect starts following the business on social media.
A potential client shows repeated interest in specific products or services offered by the company but does not make direct contact.
B2C brands, on the other hand, end automated emails when:
A potential buyer views a particular product but does not add them to their shopping cart.
A customer added products in their cart but didn't purchase them (abandoned cart).
New or existing customer converts.
Businesses should take advantage of email marketing automation to not just reach prospective customers but also to enhance relationships with existing customers.
How to automate email marketing in LIKE.TG?
Go to the Automation 360 tab
Choose an event
Create an automation flow
Monitor conversions
LIKE.TG allows businesses to set up and monitor workflows quickly and conveniently. To get started, sign up in LIKE.TG.
Step 1: Go to the Automation 360 tab
On the user dashboard, click on “Automations,” then “Create new automation” and select Automation 360. This tool allows the marketer to set up automated emails, SMS, and web push triggered by certain events or conditions and send to a subscriber on an existing mailing list.
Step 2: Choose an event
Select a start event or condition. It could be a particular date such as a birthday, a contact webhook, or a custom event set by the user. When this start event is triggered, the automation flow immediately begins. For a successful campaign, set a trigger based on the behavior of recipients on the database.
Step 3: Create an automation flow
Begin creating the automated flow starting with the event set. There is a settings panel where one can change specifications about the automation flow. Use “conditions” to set the next step in the automation flow and “filter” to personalize emails based on gender, location, and so forth. Automation 360 also allows marketers to manage their mailing lists. One can copy, move, update, or delete contacts on a list.
Step 4: Monitor conversions
Conversion is the accomplishment of the goal, as specified by the marketer. It can be open rate, clicks-through, or purchases. In this case, the event is the goal, and if achieved, it becomes a conversion. After the email is sent, add a condition and choose the intended target, for example, purchase. When a customer buys, it will count as a conversion. Thus,you can track how many conversions are made against the emails sent.
Email Marketing Automation Best Practices
Design a branded email template
Send an onboarding series
Segment your mailing list
Nurture leads
Send milestone emails
Bring clients back to their shopping carts
Upsell and cross-sell automatically
Send transactional emails
Re-engage passive clients
Manage your mailing lists
In this section, we'll share automated email ideas and tools that you can use in your strategy. They will help you boost user engagement, establish long-lasting relationships, and increase sales.
Design a branded email template. We strongly recommend you create a unique email template and use it every time you send a campaign. This will help you save time and increase your brand recognition. With the LIKE.TG drag and drop editor, you don't need to know HTML to create a professional email template.
Send an onboarding series. This is your chance not only to welcome new subscribers, but to create a good first impression. Let users know how your brand can help solve their problems. For this purpose, provide links to the top-rated content, most visited pages, or your best products. Share a guide on how to get the most out of your service. Create several emails that will be sent according to your subscribers' behavior.
Segment your mailing list. You can start grouping your list into segments with your welcome series. Add a link to your Preferences Management Center where users can choose the frequency and type of emails they want to receive from your brand. Then, subscribers with similar choices will automatically be added to the corresponding lists. You can also let them choose the topics or products they're interested in, and send different emails to each segment. This way, you'll boost customer engagement, email CTR, and sales.
Nurture leads. Lead nurturing helps marketers turn prospects into clients by providing valuable content in each stage of the sales funnel. You can effectively nurture leads with automated emails. An onboarding email series is part of this process. You need to understand your leads’ level of engagement, whether they are aware of the benefits of using your service and if they actually realize how to use it effectively. Provide them with relevant educational content and offers in each stage.
Send milestone emails. These emails are sent on special days such as your client's birthday or the anniversary of their sign-up, first purchase, or any other important day. What's good about these emails, is their CTR. People appreciate brands that approach each customer individually. All you need is to keep the record of significant dates in your mailing list and then send automated emails using the necessary variable, for example, a user’s sign-up date. As a result, you'll increase your email CTR, empower your client relationships, and boost customer loyalty.
Bring clients back to their shopping carts. Abandoned shopping carts are a pain point of each store owner. Still, you can remind customers about their carts and increase sales. Set up and send automated emails a day or two after a user added the item to their cart. Add a photo of a product, its price, delivery expenses, and the total. You can incentivize customers by offering a time-limited discount.
Upsell and cross-sell automatically. With these marketing techniques, you can make a customer spend more money. Upselling means promoting a better and more expensive product of the same category, for example offering an iPhone 9 instead of the client’s initial choice — an iPhone 8. Cross-selling means promoting complementary products, for example, a case or earphones together with a phone. So, you need to create a list of products that you can promote with each item. After that, you can set automated email sending right after clients place an order.
Send transactional emails. These emails include order confirmations, shipment status updates, password reset emails, and pricing plan expiration emails. It would take you much time to send them manually to each customer. So, you can set up automated email sending once and maintain customer retention.
Re-engage passive clients. Users may lose interest in your brand or simply forget about it. If they haven't opened your emails for at least three months, send them a re-engagement email campaign. Ask them if they want to receive your emails and provide a unique offer to win them back.
Manage your mailing lists. Every email you send influences your client's stage in the sales funnel. So you need to move them to different mailing lists to send relevant emails. For example, if users change their email preferences, they should be added to the corresponding list, or when they make a specific number of purchases. The good news is that you don't need to do this manually. Just tick this option when creating an email flow and choose the necessary list.
Email Marketing Automation Examples
Here are some examples of common automated marketing email:
Welcome email
An automated welcome email is the first interaction that a business has with a new subscriber. The purpose of this email is to welcome the new contact to the group and encourage them to engage with the company further. An example of a welcome email:
Abandoned cart email
Sometimes a customer may add items to a shopping cart but abandons them during checkout. An abandoned cart email is a follow-up message sent to such customers to remind them of the products that they left in the cart. It allows customers not to miss a sale.
Order confirmation email
An order confirmation email is sent immediately after a customer makes an order. It gives the customer essential details about the purchase to check.
Thank you email
A thank you email is sent after a visitor subscribes or makes a purchase. It is a strategic way for a business to foster personal client relationships.
Sign up and automate email marketing with LIKE.TG!
Email marketing strategy
An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer identifies and follows to achieve desired marketing goals with email advertising. This plan of action gives the businesses a direct channel of communication with prospects and customers for brand promotion.
In this video, Caleb Smith, marketer at LIKE.TG, explains how to design an email marketing strategy.
Given that for every $1 spent on email marketing, a business earns at least $40, more and more marketers are increasingly implementing this marketing approach. Nonetheless, it is important to note that weak marketing strategies are bound to fail and thus do not deliver the return on investment (ROI). A well-planned strategy with explaingoals and be an easy-to-follow roadmap for a successful email marketing strategy. Online business owners use LIKE.TG to effectively work through all the stages of making successful email marketing strategies.
Why isit essential to have an email marketing strategy?
A strategy is vital for several reasons. The most important and significant of them are as follows.
A business plan
Having an email marketing strategy in place allows marketers to layout their email advertising process ahead of time. In turn, other business stakeholders can know what they need to do at each given time, thus ensuring synchronicity while implementing an email campaign.
With an email marketing strategy, a company can plan when to send time-based promotions or non-promotional emails. Time-based promotions are emails containing time-sensitive messages which prompt recipients to take action, for example, purchasing a discounted product, registering for a new class, or booking an appointment. For these promotions, marketers should consider planning a short three-part marketing email series comprising of an announcement (preferably two weeks in advance), a reminder (1 week to the event), and the last chance (1 or 2 days before the event.)
Non-promotional emails are less timely and sales-driven. They are more for establishing relationships and giving value to customers. Contrary to promotional emails that tend to boost sales, non-promotional emails enable marketers to determine the interests of their subscribers, thus helping withmailing list segmentation. In turn, they can follow up with more personalizedmessages that aid in nurturing and strengthening relationships with prospects and customers, respectively.
Gauge your results
Email marketing strategies spell out all the goals businesses intend to achieve. A company needs to have marketing objectives beforehand to give it a sense of direction when implementing an email campaign. Other than that, email marketing strategies enable marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns.
Pick the best tactics
In this context, tactics refer to the tips and tricks that a marketer uses to push their strategy and thus achieve the set goals. An example of a tactic could be “to start a cart-abandonment program to cut down on the number of lost sales.”
Let's implement your strategy!
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Register and create a campaign!
How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy
Set email marketing goals
Pick the necessary email marketing tools
Determine the target audience
Identify the appropriate list building tactics
Divide your mailing list into segments
Identify the types of emails to send
Create a schedule for sending emails
Format the email content
Optimizeyour emails
Conduct split-testing
Monitor email performance reports
We will now look at the essential steps that marketers should follow to develop excellent marketing strategies.
Set email marketing goals
Marketing emails serve to fulfill the following purposes:
increase customer engagement
raise loyalty
maximize ROI
maintain relationships with your clients
Marketers thus need to create emails that are in line with any of these or other desired goals.
Pick the necessary email marketing tools
Finding the right tools is the first step to setting up an email marketing strategy. A marketer needs anEmail Service Provider (ESP) with an automation tool, among other useful features.
LIKE.TG allows you to create, organize, and send emails in a breeze. With Automation 360, marketers can follow up on their customers and send the right emails at the right time. For instance, you can set up welcome emails for onboarding new customers, abandoned cart emails to get customers to take action about the items they have left in the cart, and so forth. Register right now to launch your email marketing strategy with LIKE.TG.
Determine the target audience
Next, the marketer needs to build their email subscriber list. To do this, you have to identify the target audience your company serves. Case in point, if a specific business deals with baby clothes, then its target audience primarily comprises mothers-to-be. Thus, it makes sense to use conventional means to get the email addresses of this demographic.
Identify the appropriate list building tactics
An excellent way of building mailing lists is through subscriptions. With LIKE.TG, you can add subscription forms to your site and collect quality subscribers who are ready to hear fromyour brand. You can embed subscription forms on high-traffic sections of your website.
To increase your online presence, create multichannel subscription forms with LIKE.TG. They allow users to subscribe to emails, SMS campaigns, and chatbots in Facebook Messenger and Telegram. All you need is to add the link to your chatbot. Look below.
Divide your mailing list into segments
Segmenting is an effective tactic that allows you to send highly targeted email campaigns. With LIKE.TG, marketers can segment their mailing lists based on location, gender, occupation, age, behavior, etc. In turn, you can be sure that you are delivering appropriate and customized messages that appeal to customers.
Identify the types of emails to send
There’s a great variety of different emails that marketers send. The choice of email style depends on the aim of each specific campaign. For example, if a user has just joined your mailing list, send them a welcome email. This is a great chance to explain the benefits of working with you. If clientshave added some items to their shopping cart and didn’t buy them, send them an abandoned cart email to increase sales. Discover more about email campaign types.
Create a schedule for sending emails
To ensure that subscribers read your promotional emails, find out the best time for sending emails. It is, therefore, necessary to experiment and determine the time when subscribers are most engaged. A/B testingproves useful.
Format the email content
For email marketing to be a success, messages in promotional emails should be presented perfectly. Marketers should choose formats, fonts, and text sizes depending on the type of emails that they are creating.With LIKE.TG,youcan use a drag-and-drop editor to create beautiful email templates that are customized to matchyourbrand.
Optimizeyour emails
A 2017 study by Adestra concluded that 83.8 percent of mobile device owners open emails with these devices. It, therefore, makes sense to optimize email content for mobile to reach this audience. Some of the ways for assuring that email content is mobile-friendly include:
Creating short subject lines.
Limiting emails to a width of 600px.
Using single-column templates.
Displaying small images.
Writing distinct CTAs.
Testing on multiple mobile devices.
Avoiding menu bars.
Using a large font size (ideally 13-14 pixels).
Conduct split-testing
With A/B testing, marketers can determine what copy of their email works best by swapping out different aspects of their email, such as subject lines (the most popular option), images, CTAs, headlines, offers, and so forth.
Monitor email performance reports
Adjusting your email strategy based on reports and feedback that you have gathered is the last step for developing an email marketing strategy. LIKE.TG provides users with a set of analytics that aids in gauging the effectiveness of email campaigns. Track email open rate, unsubscribe rate, click-through rates, email deliveries, email bounces, spam complaints, and more.
Techniques to Improve your Email Marketing Strategy for eCommerce
Provide an incentive in exchange for an email address
Segment subscribers right from the subscription form
Send a welcome email
Segment clients based on their behavior
Upsell and cross-sell
Send milestone emails
Run re-engagement campaigns
Reward loyal customers
In this section, we'll share some effective tips and best practices to empower your email marketing strategy. These techniques will help you boost sales, increase customer satisfaction, and build loyalty.
1. Provide an incentive in exchange for an email address
This is called a lead magnet. With this tool, you can significantly increase the number of subscriptions and make a lead's first purchase a less stressful experience.Giveyour site visitors an incentive they can't pass up. Remember that it should be valuable for your potential clients. You can offer free shipping on users' first order or a coupon to get a discount on their first purchase. To speed up your leads' decision-making process, create fear of missing out and limit the duration of your offer.
Gap uses this technique as well. The brand offers a 25% discount for signing up for their emails. They also promise to tell subscribers about new arrivals and exclusive deals via emails.
2. Segment subscribers right from the subscription form
Segmentation is a must for eCommerce. Your store may have a variety of categories for men, women, and kids. If you send emails promoting kids' wear or women's stuff to men, your email open rate and user engagement will suffer. With segmentation, you can send targeted and relevant campaigns to each user on your mailing list. Provide some additional fields to get the information you need. You may request users’ gender or information about the categories of goods they’re interested in.
After subscribers fill in your form, this data will be added as a variable to your mailing list. Then, you can choose either a specific variable or a mailing list segment to send your email campaign to. As a result, every subscriber will receive the offers they’re interested in.
Look at the Puma’s subscription form. They provide a first-purchase discount in exchange for an email address andinvite users to share their date of birth and shopping preferences to receive special offers.
3. Send a welcome email
A welcome email is your chance to make a positive first impression on your potential clients. You can send either a single email or a series of three messages to better educate your audience.
There are so many goals you can achieve with a welcome email series. You should set a friendly tone of communication with your brand, tell subscribers about the benefits of choosing your company, share top-rated goods, or make a special offer.
Сheck out this sweet welcome email from Petco. Every sentence and every image in this email is all about loving animals. The message starts with a cute greeting that definitely brings a smile to your face. The brand shares links to the most important categories and encourages subscribers to complete a pet profile to receive customized news, offers, and even a free birthday gift for a pet. This welcome email won’t leave anyone indifferent.
4. Segment clients based on their behavior
Go beyond standard segmentation based on information about your subscribers. Hundreds of customers visit your online store every day, browse product cards, add items to their shopping carts and wishlists, and make purchases, of course. You can track their behavior and create corresponding segments for cart abandoners, for users who view the same pages and add the same goods to their shopping carts. Then, you can send them promotional campaigns and increase sales.
LIKE.TG provides pre-made segments if you don’t want to specify the conditions manually. Divide subscribers into groups based on their actions and engagement: users who joined your list in the last 30 days, active users who opened five recent emails from you, and inactive subscribers.
You can also divide users into groups based on their interaction with your campaigns: opened an email but didn’t click the link, didn’t open an email, opened it, or followed a particular link.
With this information, you can send highly targeted campaigns, increase customer retention, and boost sales.
Here’s how segmentation based on behavior looks.
Follow this step-by-step guide to send emails using segmentation.
5. Upsell and cross-sell
With these marketing techniques, you can build customer retention, loyalty, and increase sales. Both tactics imply selling more than a customer intends to buy.
Marketers use cross-selling to encourage users to buy complementary products in addition to their order. For example, brands often offer a case or earphones together with a smartphone. These items are used together, so this promotion is always to the point.
Upselling means promoting more expensive, upgraded, and better products instead of the customers’ initial choice. For example, marketers promote TVs with larger screens, the latest iPhone, or a paid plan instead of a free trial. The challenge here is to explain why this product is a better choice and cover the benefits a client will get after purchasing it.
Below is an example of a cross-selling email sent by Amazon.
With LIKE.TG's Automation 360 system, you can send cross-selling and upselling emails automatically right after the purchase.
6. Send milestone emails
Milestone emails help build long-lasting relationships with clients. This type of email usually indicates a certain stage of the customer lifecycle. It can be a client’s birthday or an anniversary. These campaigns have great open rates and CTR due to their personalized nature. To send a milestone email, you need to collect data such as customers’ birth dates; date of subscription, first purchase, or any other significant events.
With this data, you can congratulate your client on these important events and thank them for being loyal to your brand. Reward them with a unique offer. They will definitely appreciate your care and come back to your brand.Mud Pie sends this milestone email to celebrate a users’ anniversary and give $10 off on their next purchase.
You can easily set automated milestone email sending with LIKE.TG Automation 360.
7. Run re-engagement campaigns
This is a critical task to keep your mailing list healthy. Your subscribers may lose interest in your brand, no longer need your services, or simply forget about you. But don’t hurry to remove them from your mailing list. You can win them back with a re-engagement campaign.
Use this email to find out why your subscribers aren’t interacting with your brand. After users follow the unsubscribe link, you can provide a form with multiple reasons for them to choose from. If you’re not ready to give up, offer an incentive to win them back and remind them about the benefits of being a part of your community. It can be an exclusive offer or a discount.
Virgin Experience Days sent this re-engagement email and supported it with a special offer — 20% off the next order.
8. Reward loyal customers
These people help your business grow, bring you much money, and spread good reviews ofyour brand. You keep such clients and reward them since it’s much more difficult to acquire a new customer.
You can create a special loyalty club for those clients who make more than X orders, give them points for each purchase depending on their check and offer to exchange them for a product or a discount.
PetSmart encourages subscribers to join its loyalty program to earn points and get exclusive treats for every $1 spent. Besides, they promise to give each pet a surprise on their birthday and send special deals via emails.
Email notification
An email notification is an email sent to inform your subscribers about changes or updatesto a website or service, like new products, features, or scheduled website maintenance, etc.
Why should I send email notifications?
They have a high open-rate
Keep the customer up to date
They help with customer retention
They have a high open-rate. Email notifications draw more attention compared to promotional emails or newsletters since the notifications naturally contain only essential information thatinfluences the user directly. A higher open rate, in turn, boosts the server's reputation and ensures higher deliverability for your emails in the future.
Keep the customer up to date. Changes to a website or service functionality can derail the usual routine of your visitors, better make them prepared if they need to adjust their routine for you. Sharing news on updates will minimize the possible adverse effect of changes.
They help with customer retention. With regular notifications, visitors and customers can't forget about you. An email notification is a way to say, “Hey, buddy, I’m still here for you, no matter what.” Keeping your audience informedand being transparentnurtures trust and loyalty in people.
Email vs. Push Notifications
Both email and push notifications are instant messagessent to many subscribers at once, and both are available with LIKE.TG. Let’s explore their differences and find out whichmedium is preferable for your situation.
No length limitations. In terms of text and images, email notifications are unlimited in length, while push notifications do have some limitations depending on the browsers and devices: from 30 to 50 symbols for the title text, up to 125 symbols for the body text, and one added image.
Tolerance threshold. Many inactive subscribers who ignore or even delete your emails, don’t unsubscribe from emails. Even this cold audience is of value because you can retain and re-engage them. At the same time, web push notifications have a much lower tolerance threshold. Once a user feels overwhelmed with your push notifications, they unsubscribe.
Harder to A/B test. Having less content and fewer variables in your notifications lead to fewer things to test. So it is much easier to polish up web push notifications since there is so little content to monitor.
How to Create an Email Notification
LIKE.TG offers different tools for creating email notifications. You can build triggered notifications for sending automatically or set up and schedule a one-time email campaign. You can also use an SMTP server.
Use Automation 360
You can trigger emails based on specificuser actions or special dates with the Event Manager. For example, if you need to remind a customer that their free trial is going to expire, a factor that varies for every subscriber, send an automatic email notification. Detailed instructionsaboutcreating triggered emails are here.
Send a regular email campaign
If you want tomake a one-time notification (like changing a privacy policy), a simple email campaign is the best solution. Use our handy drag-and-drop editor, fill the email template with all the necessary content, and send it right away or schedule itforthe required time. Documentation for creating an email campaign is here.
Email Notification Tips
Create subject lines that convey the essence of your notification
Make one statement in the email
Add one call-to-action
Use personalization
Send immediately
Follow your brand identity
Create subject lines that convey the essence of your notification. The subject line forms a recipient's first impression of your email notification, so it’s a good idea to grab attention with the direct information about what's inside your email. For example: ‘We’re updating our Private Policy“, “Derek Bailey mentioned you ina post,” or “Your free trial is ending soon.”
Make one statement in the email. Be short and provide users with only essential information regarding the issues or changes you have. For scheduled website maintenance, explain what you are changing, whyyou're changing it(to test new features), and how long the changes will take (overnight from May 21st to 22nd).
Add one call-to-action.Make sure not to overdo it with CTAs in a notification email, include one clear CTA in your email. Any extra information aside from the main idea of your email can confuse and distract your subscribers. When you send comments or chat notifications, the CTA button is usually something like “Join the conversation,” “Answer the comment,” etc.
Use personalization. Personalization is a vital tool forfosteringfeelings of trust and loyalty inyour subscribers. In the context of newofferingsfrom a clothes store, personalize your subject line with the variable {{name}} and prepare slightly different content for men and for women, to ensure your message resonates with everyone.
Send immediately. The sooner you inform your audience about changes, the better. For instance, if your website has some technical issues, it’s a good practice to warn subscribers about the issue and ensure that your team is working to solve the problem.
Follow your brand identity. Make sure the look of your email notification is consistent with the writing and design ofyour other emails. If a red horizontal line is part of the design of your emails and website pages, remember to add it to your email notification, too.
Email Notification Examples
Uber. This is a kind of mixture of notification and promotion email as Uber not only explains the new features in its service but also glorifies its contribution is the transport industry.
Google Docs. Pretty much everyone using Docs has a couple of these in the inbox.
LIKE.TG. This email notification tells recipients about an update in web push technology with a brief instruction on the next steps the user should complete.
Send email notification
Email list management
Email list management is a set of actions to collect information about subscribers, analyze their behavior, ensure their email addresses’ validity, clean an email list from inactive users, etc. These actions will help you maintain a healthy email list, which is crucial for gaining success in email marketing.
Why is email list management important?
Healthy relationships with your audience
Resource saving
More accurate results
Companies that seek instant benefits overlook the importance of email list management. It’s hard to build long-term relationships with subscribers unless you manage your email list by paying attention to every member of your audience. It is better to have an email list that consists of genuinely interested subscribers to get the most ROI.
Here is what your business can get in return for using sensible email list management practices:
Healthy relationships with your audience. Email marketing works best when companies take into account subscribers’ interests. The more quality content and relevant offers you share with your audience, the better long-lasting relationships you’ll have.
Resource saving. An appropriately managed email list consists of interested people with valid email addresses. It results in better email deliverability, sender reputation, level of user engagement, and fewer bounces. Your goal is to spend less time and money by avoiding sending emails to people who don’t want to receive them.
More accurate results. You can track your email campaigns’ efficiency by analyzing metrics like open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate, etc. With a healthy email list, you can rely on these metrics since you only communicate with engaged subscribers.
As you can see, email list management is worth your time because it allows you to better control your email marketing strategy. Let’s learn where email list management starts.
How to Build an Email List
Create a subscription form
Use a lead magnet
Go viral with giveaways
Use an opt-in page
You need to create subscription forms, lead magnets, giveaways, or opt-in pages so that users can leave their email addresses and initiate communication with your company. To attract more people, marketers add valuable incentives that encourage users to join their email lists.
Let’s see what you can do to gather subscribers.
Create a subscription form
You can place it on your website or blog and ask users to share their email addresses in exchange for relevant and engaging content from your brand.
Creating a subscription form is easy with LIKE.TG. Just choose the layout of your form, add all the necessary fields, insert text, an image, and a CTA button. Follow this guide to create a subscription form, like the one below, in half an hour.
Use a lead magnet
A lead magnet is a lead generation technique that adds more reasons to join your email list. Marketers usually offer something valuable, like a free e-book, guide, product sample, etc., in exchange for a user’s subscription. It is a sort of a modified subscription form, but it can be more interactive and eye-catching.
This pop-up wheel of fortune is a magnificent lead magnet on Neil Patel’s blog. It draws attention and encourages users to try their luck.
Go viral with giveaways
A giveaway is designed to attract attention and encourage sharing on social media. To run a giveaway, a company puts something valuable at stake, like an online course or a new product, and announces the rules for participation. Usually, they are simple: users leave their email address and share the giveaway post with their friends to win a freebie. After that, the company sends giveaway emails to share more details and later announce the winner.
Here’s an example of an email from AppleMusic. The company allows subscribers to win a music festival ticket, get exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes access, and artist-created playlists as bonuses for participation.
The challenge here is attracting interested people and preventing them from unsubscribing after the giveaway is over.
Use an opt-in page
It’s a landing page that is explicitly designed to convert visitors into subscribers. The opt-in page is similar to a lead magnet, though it takes a separate webpage to say more about what users will get after subscribing.
Below is an opt-in page from Hitenism. The company offers an e-book and uses social proof to encourage visitors to subscribe.
Now that you’ve learned how to create an email list legally, let’s finish this guide with some crucial best practices!
Email List Management Best Practices with Examples
Only communicate with opted-in users
Use a double opt-in method
Create smooth onboarding
Segment your email list
Allow users to manage their preferences
Send re-engagement campaigns
Verify email addresses
Encourage subscriber loyalty
Here are eight actionable tips that will help you improve your relationship with your subscribers.
Only communicate with opted-in users
Let’s review: the opt-in approach is not an option, but a legal requirement. The most common way to collect subscribers legally is by placing a subscription form, like the one below, on your site.
Use a double opt-in method
A double opt-in approach requires users to confirm their subscription via a confirmation email. Since they need to complete one more action to subscribe, only interested people will join your list.
Here’s an example of a subscription confirmation email from Leica.
Create smooth onboarding
This is the way you greet new subscribers on your email list and get them acquainted with your brand. You can easily set up sending automated emails, including onboarding emails, with LIKE.TG’s Automation 360.
Check out the example from FairyGodBoss. It highlights the brand’s expertise in the field and specifies how it helps women find the right job.
Segment your email list
Segmentation allows you to divide your email list into groups based on common characteristics, like age, gender, location, etc. It helps you provide the audience with personalized emails and improves user engagement.
The email from National Geographic below is based on users’ interests. During the subscription, recipients of this email specified that animal life is one of their interests.
Allow users to manage their preferences
This is equally beneficial for both senders and recipients. Preferences management allows your subscribers to have control over the frequency and types of emails they receive. At the same time, it allows you to tailor your messages to specific segments of your audience.
Below is the Email Preference Center of UncommonGoods. Subscribers can choose the type of content they want to receive and share their interests with the brand.
Send re-engagement campaigns
Send these emails to re-engage users who have ignored your campaigns for 3-6 months. Some people return after you remind them about the value you share. However, there’s no point in keeping users who ignore this email. It is best to remove them from your email list immediately.
Check out this brilliant example of a re-engagement campaign from GrowthRocks. It’s simple, funny, and unique.
Verify email addresses
Your subscribers may abandon or change their email addresses for various reasons. An email verifier is a tool designed to ensure your email list consists of valid email addresses. It’s easy to use: you just need to upload your email list, and the service will run numerous validation checks in a minute. Once the validation is over, you can remove invalid email addresses from your list and spend less on email delivery.
Here’s how the Snov.io email verifier works. It runs verification checks for a hundred email addresses in a blink of an eye.
If you use LIKE.TG for email marketing and don't want to use a third-party service, check your mailing list with our in-built Email Verifier.
After the validation, you'll receive a list of valid email addresses.
Encourage subscriber loyalty
It’s much cheaper and easier to sell to a loyal customer than it is to acquire a new subscriber. Being on your email list should be a privilege, so you need to make subscribers feel special. Send anniversary emails, say a few warm words on your subscriber’s birthday, and offer exclusive discounts for loyal customers.
Here’s an anniversary email from Asos. It is sent a year after a user joined their email list.
Congratulations, now you know how important it is to do email list management. Start building your healthy email list and send relevant email campaigns with LIKE.TG today!
Email marketing metrics
Email marketing metrics are indicators that help assess the success of email campaigns. One can specify two categories: the first is standard engagement metrics, while the second category is focused on conversion aspects.
In this video, Alex dives deep into the world of email marketing metrics, shedding light on three crucial metrics every marketer should be tracking.
Why is it important to monitor email marketing metrics
Email is a customizable marketing channel, which makes it super-effective when developed smartly. Tailoring messages to buyer personas is simple, especially when one interprets email metrics correctly. Metrics provide useful data on current campaigns and may show approaches to solve existing problems.
Take a look at the metrics below. This is a list of the most influential factors one should consider when evaluating an email campaign.
9 Most Important Email Marketing Metrics
Email deliverability rate
Email open rate
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Spam complaints
Email bounce rate
Unsubscribe rate
Revenue per email
List growth rate
Email Deliverability Rate
This is the vital metric for any marketer because it tells you whether your email makes it to recipients or not. The email deliverability rate represents the number of emails that reach the users’ inbox.
How to Calculate an Email Deliverability Rate
Number of emails delivered÷ Number of emails sent
The following factors have an impact on this metric:
IP address reputation and sender reputation;
choice of an email service provider;
mailing list quality;
user engagement with your previous campaigns;
spam-like words in the email subject line;
spam complaints.
To find out how to eliminate these problems and increase your email deliverability, follow these tips.
With LIKE.TG, you can monitor your email deliverability rate after sending a campaign.
Email Verifier allows marketers to check their mailing list and remove invalid email addresses. As a result, you'll increase your email deliverability and sender reputation.
Email Open Rate
This metric indicates the number of emails opened. A high open rate means that many people are interested in receiving your campaigns.
How to Calculate an Email Open Rate
Percentage of contacts who opened an email÷ Number of users the message was sent to
The influential factors include:
the field your business operates in;
whether you are a B2B or B2C organization;
mailing list segmentation;
email subject line relevancy;
email sending frequency and timing;
sender authority.
When considering your email open rate, take into account opens by location to get a better picture of your strategy.
Track the email open rate after sending each campaign with LIKE.TG.
In this article, we’ve collected a list of tips that will help you improve your email open rates.
Click-Through Rate
This metric defines how many users clicked on the links inside an email. As Forbes fairly noticed, 64% of marketing experts agree that their top priority is to increase their click-through rate. The click-through rate may show whether a business has to boost email marketing and sales conversion rates.
How to Calculate a CTR?
(Total clicks ÷ Number of delivered emails)×100
The factors that impact click-through rate involve:
mailing list segmentation;
imagery;
ad positioning;
CTA prominence;
content quality.
To improve the CTR of your email campaigns, follow these 13 tips.
Check out your email CTR with the LIKE.TG reports.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link and did what the sender was expecting them to do. For example, they ended up buying your product. This metric depends on the open and click-through rate – it is the third stage of a buyer journey.
How to Calculate an Email Conversion Rate?
(Number of users who took the expected action ÷ Total emails delivered)×100
The factors that influence conversion rate are:
email responsiveness;
personalization;
CTA
To measure the conversion rate, you need to integrate your email service with an analytic system.
LIKE.TG allows to track statistics using Google Analytics. Find out more.
Spam Complaints
Those are so-called spam complaints that users may send to the server. You should pay attention to these because they have a negative impact on both the email campaign and your sender reputation. This metric shows the chances of a sender being blocked by an email provider.
There is no special formula, the service provider usually tracks and displays the spam complaint rate to a sender. LIKE.TG provides this information after a campaign is sent.
The factors that influence this metric include the following:
illegal list-building tactics;
single opt-in subscription form;
spammy words in a subject line and spam-like email content;
high email sending frequency;
poor email content;
absence of an unsubscribe link;
easily recognizable email sender name.
Here you’ll get to know how to send bulk emails without spamming.
LIKE.TG takes measures to keep its users’ reputation high and provides an email spam checker.
Email Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is a metric that shows whether a message was or was not delivered to the recipient. There are two types of bounces: soft bounce and hard bounce.
Your total bounce rate should not exceed 2%. Also, understand the difference between hard and soft bounces. The first occurs when an email could not be delivered for permanent reasons, while the second one means that messages could not be sent due to the temporary circumstances. Find out more in this article.
How to Calculate an Email Bounce Rate
(Number of bounced emails÷ Number of all emails sent)×100
The major factors that impact this metric include:
the large size of an email;
invalid email address;
inconsistent email sending;
no SPF and DKIM signatures.
You can find bounces along with their causes in the “Error statistics” tab in your LIKE.TG account.
Unsubscribe Rate
This metric defines how many users lost interest in your emails for different reasons and you may need to target another audience or change something in the existing offer. Unsubscribe rate is, perhaps, the simplest metric to evaluate. Contact your email service provider to get this information or check email analytics at your email service. After that, you’ll have to fine-tune your subscribers by segmenting your mailing list.
How to Calculate an Unsubscribe Rate?
(Unsubscribed numbers÷ Email delivered)×100
Factors that make users unsubscribe include:
poor mailing list segmentation;
high email sending volume;
lack of unsubscribe link.
After sending an email campaign with LIKE.TG, you can track this metric in campaign analytics.
Revenue per Email
This is the most critical indicator as it demonstrates the overall performance of the emails: were they successful or not? With this email marketing metric, you can find out which types of emails work best for your business and develop your strategy accordingly.
How to Calculate Revenue per Email
Total income generated by the campaign÷ Number of all emails that were successfully delivered
This metric depends on both, your overall email marketing strategy, and the quality of your list.
List Growth Rate
This metric tracks the rate at which your mailing list grows. It may show how to engage subscribers and make them more loyal.
How to Calculate List Growth Rate?
(Number of new subscribers− Number of unsubscribers)÷ Total number of email addresses on a list× 100
Do you find that some of these metrics do not satisfy you at all? Try sending your campaigns via email marketing services like LIKE.TG. They allow you to keep track of crucial metrics and improve them on the go.
Email list cleaner
An email list cleaner is a tool that identifies invalid email addresses in your email list. Marketers use it to save resources and only pay for email delivery to active subscribers.
Why should I use an email list cleaner?
Users may switch to another email provider
Users may create a new account within the same provider
Users may change their place of work
Their domain may run out of service
Even if you use a double opt-in approach to collect email addresses, it doesn’t mean your subscribers will keep their email address active forever. There are several reasons why some email addresses on your list may become inactive and result in email delivery errors:
Users may switch to another email provider. Users mostly register their email addresses with providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. These services differ by design, functionality, and limitations. Some users may abandon their email address and register a new one with another provider for their comfort.
Users may create a new account within the same provider. Initially, a user may have registered an email address for personal usage. If it’s informal, like “[email protected],” it’s inappropriate for business needs. In this case, a user may change it for something more official. Usually, it’s their real name, like “[email protected].”
Users may change their place of work. This is a common problem for a B2B community. For business communication, professionals often use an email address registered on a corporate domain. It means the company’s name alters email providers’ name after the “@” symbol, e.g., “[email protected].” Typically, people change their job every 3-5 years, so there’s no way for your emails to reach users who changed their place of work.
Their domain may run out of service. All email addresses that are registered on a corporate domain can’t receive emails if it’s closed. It usually happens when the company closes.
You can see that using an email list cleaner is a good idea to identify all invalid email addresses on your email list, remove them, and save money on email delivery. Let’s figure out how this tool works.
How does an email list cleaner work?
Syntax check
Domain existence check
MX record check
An email list cleaner runs three types of verification checks to detect invalid email addresses:
Syntax check. It is the simplest check that scans if the email addresses are written and structured correctly. An email address should be like “[email protected],” where “jeffreyblack” is a mailbox name, “@” symbol stands for the domain, and “gmail.com” is the domain’s name. A syntax check finds email addresses that do not match this structure.
Domain existence check. This process runs the domain address through millions of domains to find out if it exists. When the company closes its domain, an email list cleaner will identify all email addresses registered on that domain as invalid.
MX record check. The Mail Exchanger record identifies which server receives emails on behalf of particular email addresses. It checks whether this server is registered and functional.
Let’s find out how to choose the best email list cleaner to fit your business needs.
How to Choose an Email List Cleaner
You need to compare the functionality, pricing, and free plan availability with various email list cleaners. We’ve compared four popular email list cleaners for you, so checkthem out.
Snov.io
Functionality. The service runs syntax, domain, and MX record checks, detects disposable and temporarily unavailable domains, identifies catch-all-emails, and duplicate email addresses. It allows you to verify email addresses en masse, one-by-one, or with the help of an email verification API.
Snov.io offers a convenient email finder, verification, and tracking tools with their Chrome extensions. You can also export data with CSV, XLS, TXT, and Google Sheets documents. Besides, you can take advantage of professional email list management tools and send drip campaigns to your cleaned list.
Here’s the verification of 100 emails in Snov.io. It takes just a few clicks to verify your email list.
Free plan. You can verify up to 100 email addresses and detect catch-all emails.
Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 emails is $69.
Hunter
Functionality. Hunter runs syntax, domain existence, and MX record checks in bulk, one-by-one, and via email verification API. It allows you to identify temporarily unavailable and disposable domains, catch-all emails, and duplicates.
Hunter provides three Chrome extensions to search, track, and verify email addresses. You can use CSV, XLS, TXT, and Google Sheets to export your cleaned email list. In addition, you can use email list management tools and send email campaigns.
Here’s the verification of email addresses in Hunter. The service is fast but only allows you to verify corporate email addresses.
Free plan. You can verify up to 50 email addresses.
Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 emails is $199.
ZeroBounce
Functionality. This service only focuses on email verification features. It runs syntax and MX record checks, identifies temporary unavailable and disposable domains as well as catch-all emails. You can also verify emails in bulk, one-by-one, or via API. ZeroBounce allows you to export your cleaned email lists as CSV or TXT files.
Here’s the verification of five email addresses in ZeroBounce. After the operation is over, you can see a table with details about verified addresses.
Free plan. You can verify five email addresses anonymously or up to 100 email addresses after you register your account.
Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 addresses is $65.
LIKE.TG
Functionality. If you use LIKE.TG for sending email campaigns, you don't need any third-party service to check your list. The service offers Email Verifier. With the help of this tool, you can remove outdated and invalid emails from your list along with the spam traps. You can run single email verification, check an existing list, or upload a new one in several formats.
After the verification, you'll receive a detailed report with the status of each email on your list along with a separate mailing list that only contains valid email addresses.
Free plan. You can verify100 email addresses each month.
Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 email addresses is $48.
How to Use an Email List Cleaner
Upload your email list
Lunch the verification
Export the cleaned email list
You need to take three simple steps that require no technical knowledge to verify all email addresses on your email list:
Upload your email list;
Lunch the verification;
Export the cleaned email list.
You can also follow some email list management practices to keep your list healthy. Let’s finish this guide by reviewing them.
How to Clean Your Email List
Use a double opt-in method
Send re-engagement emails
Verify emails with an email list cleaner
There are three basic ways to clean your email list from inactive and unengaged subscribers:
Use a double opt-in method. If you allow users to subscribe without confirming their email address, the chances are that they will input random addresses just to get a freebie or a discount from your brand. By delivering emails to these invalid email addresses, you will spend extra money sending emails for nothing.
Send re-engagement emails. You can send a re-engagement campaign to users that weren’t active for the last 3-6 months. Some subscribers will return to you once you remind them about the value they can get from your company. You can remove those who ignored this campaign from your mailing list because they are very likely to keep ignoring you.
Verify emails with an email list cleaner. Neither a double opt-in method nor re-engagement campaigns can prevent users from changing their email addresses. As you already know, it’s a handy tool to detect invalid email addresses, making it the key email list management practice.
Congratulations, now you know that having a cleaned list that consists of verified emails ensures more efficient email campaigns with better email deliverability and engagement.
Email marketing plan
An email marketing plan is a set of tactics used to build structured, effective, and mutually beneficial communication with your subscribers.
You can’t simply create an email campaign, send it to a thousand random email addresses, and hope it will make your business prosper. You need to have a well-defined strategy.
Email marketing brings the best results when a brand builds relationships with customers based on trust, value, and assistance. Nurturing quality relationships takes a long time. Naturally, you need to plan your email marketing on a few levels. This article will help you work out your overall strategy and plan each step in detail.
Let’s find out first why planning an email marketing strategy is worth your while.
Why are email marketing plans necessary?
Resource optimization
Understand your audience
Personalize the customer experience
Consistent buyer journey
Here are the goals that a well thought out marketing plan will help you achieve:
Resource optimization. Having a plan helps you run your email marketing more accurately, spend less time and money on guesswork, and build relationships with the right, precisely targeted audience.
Understand your audience. No planning is possible without data. To develop a strategy, you need to learn a lot about your audience, their tastes, preferences, and behavior. Developing a plan will motivate you to gain fresh insights about your subscribers.
Personalize the customer experience. The results of previous campaigns will help you learn when your subscribers are most likely to read your emails. To determine the best time to send an email, you need to gather a lot of behavioral data based on how users respond to your emails. With this data, you can produce high-quality content and use personalized offers.
Consistent buyer journey. With an email marketing plan, you can guide subscribers, from the very first touchpoint, to make a purchase — and even further! You don’t need to push them towards your goals, but to help them solve their problems, that’s the essence of the buyer’s journey.
So, in general, planning helps better organize your email marketing efforts and produce more concise content. Getting in the habit of planning effectively will make you a more sophisticated email marketer.
How to create an email marketing plan?
Choose a reliable email service
Generate leads
Choose your style
Nurture leads
Schedule email campaigns
Use automation
Analyze email performance
Upon closer view, it turns out that email marketing is a quite complex channel, so you need to master various aspects to succeed. We’ve collected a set of email marketing best practices, so you have something to start with.
Email marketing plans differ from business to business. Say, you repair musical instruments and want to sell them online. Let’s review some options that you may consider when planning an email marketing strategy.
Choose a reliable email service
Сhoose a reliable bulk email sender with an emphasis on marketing, and make sure that it offers advanced tools. Then set up authentication parameters like SPF and DKIMrecords to improve your email deliverability. If you start from scratch and your IP-address is new, gradually increase the number of emails you send to warm it up.
Generate leads
Create a subscription form so users can share their email addresses, like in the example below.
You can create one of four types of forms with LIKE.TG for free! You can add a form to any page of your website or blog. Here’s how to do it.
To reach your audience on socials and in messengers, create multichannel forms. All you need is to add links to your Facebook Messenger or Telegram chatbot. Check out below such a form created with LIKE.TG.
Choose your style
Use a style of communication that is most comfortable for your subscribers. For an online music shop, an informal and friendly tone is a perfect choice.
Pay attention to your email design because it should be closely associated with your brand and consistent throughout all of your emails. For our music store example, using bright colors and high-quality, breathtaking images of the instruments should do the trick.
Nurture leads
“Content is king.” In modern email marketing, you need to come up with the right mix of promotions and educational materials. For example, you can send a weekly newsletter containing helpful information about which guitar is suitable for beginners, which strings to choose, how to learn to play the guitar, etc. Carefully include your products in an educational context.
Read more about lead nurturingtactics here.
Schedule email campaigns
To save time and be prepared for marketing holidays in advance, you can schedule your email campaigns. Scheduling email campaigns is also helpful when parts of your audience are located in different timezones.
Create an email template and schedule it like with instruction.
Use automation
One of the most crucial parts of your strategy is automation because it allows you to set up many processes that will work without lifting a finger. You can make user’s actions work as triggers and launch a sequence of emails you’ve previously built.
It is easy to set up automated emails with LIKE.TG. It takes little time to get acquainted with the service and create great email workflows. In the example below, an abandoned cart triggers the sequence. The first abandoned cart email is sent an hour after the user leaves the site.
There are plenty of types of emails you can send using automation:
welcome email;
abandoned cart email;
confirmation email;
drip email campaign;
anniversary email;
event invitation email;
follow-up email.
For instance, it’s nice to welcome new subscribers with a quiz that will help you gain useful insights about their preferences.
Analyze email performance
You can check emails for spam before sending them to improve their results. With LIKE.TG, for instance, you will get actionable recommendations, like in the screenshot below.
Once an email is sent, there are some metrics like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and more that allow you to track your progress. You can see statistics for every campaign you’ve sent with LIKE.TG, like in the screenshot below.
Remember to track your conversion rate, which indicates the effectiveness of an email marketing plan. You can define a conversion however you want, for example, how many guitars were bought as a result of a specific email campaign.
Now that you’ve learned how to create your email marketing plan, check out three more steps for successful email marketing:
Remove inactive users from your mailing list. As time goes by, some email addresses on your mailing list may become invalid. This means that your emails will never be opened and read. Unopened emails harm your sender reputation.
Run re-engagement campaigns. Some subscribers may lose interest in your brand and ignore your emails. Try to re-engage with them by offering a discount, and if they don’t respond, remove them from your mailing list.
Ask for feedback. It’s fine to ask people what they think about your emails. Their feedback will give you some insights and help improve your overall email marketing success.
You can find more information about internet marketing and email marketing in particular, by reading our blog.
Email header
The email header is a code snippet in an HTML email, that contains information about the sender, recipient, email’s route to get to the inbox and various authentication details. The email header always precedes the email body.
In this video produced by 250ok, the speakers explain what an email header is, the way to make it work to your advantage and how to analyze its elements. Check it out!
What purpose do email headers serve
Providing information about the sender and recipient
Preventing spam
Identifying the email route
Providing information about the sender and recipient. An email header tells who sent the email and where it arrived. Some markers indicate this information, like “From:” —sender’s name and email address, “To:” — the recipient’s name and email address, and “Date:” — the time and date of when the email was sent. All of these are mandatory indicators. Other parts of the email header are optional and differ among email service providers.
Preventing spam. The information displayed in the email header helps email service providers troubleshoot potential spam issues. ESPs analyzes the email header, the “Received:” tag, in particular, to decide whether to deliver an email or not.
Identifying the email route. When an email is sent from one computer to another, it transfers through the Mail Transfer Agent which automatically “stamps” the email with information about the recipient, time and date in the email header.
How to Find an Email Header
Viewing an email header in Gmail
Viewing an email header in Outlook
Viewing an email header in Yahoo
All ESPs allow curious users to see how the email looks from the inside, in HTML code. This function looks and works the same waywith everyESP. Let’s take a closer look at it.
Viewing anemail header in Gmail
Open an email. Find “More” (three vertical dots), choose “Show original.”
Viewing an email header in Outlook
Open an email. Find “More actions” (three horizontal dots), choose “View message source.”
Viewing an email header in Yahoo
Open an email. Find “More actions” (three horizontal dots), choose “View raw message.”
Analyzing an Email Header
The appearance of theemail header differs between ESPs. To analyze it, you need to find the email header and examine the lines of interest to you. All the code from the beginning, until the <body> tag, represents the header. Here is the list of what you can find in the email header:
“Received:” lines. They show the address of the computerthat received the email, as well as other computers’ addresses that an emailmay have been transferred through. Unlike other email header elements, “Received:” lines can’t be forged.
MIME-version. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions are an Internet standard that extends the format of email by supporting text and non-text attachments like audio, video, images, message bodies with multiple parts, etc.
Message-ID.The message-ID is a globally unique identifier used in email. Message-IDs have a specific formatthatis generated for a specific email address and message, thus, no two messages have the same Message-ID.
DKIM Signatures. DomainKeys Identified Mail confirms the sender’s authenticity by connecting the domain name with the email. DKIM is the technology that helps to reduce spam and phishing and allows companies to vouch for their email messages.
Email click tracking
Email click tracking is a technology that helps you monitor how many times subscribers interact with your email by clicking links in it. LIKE.TG automatically calculates the click-through rate for every email campaign you send.
How does email click tracking work?
The technology that stands behind email click tracking is fairly simple. A bulk email service, like LIKE.TG, automatically adds a tracking tag to every link in your email. Once a recipient clicks the link, the service receives data about this event and adds it to the statistics log in your account.
Using LIKE.TG, you don’t have to do anything to get email click tracking up and running.
Email Click Tracking with LIKE.TG
You can track the number of clicks on the links you include in every email campaign you send with LIKE.TG. This key email marketing metric is called a CTR. In addition, the service allows you to track your open rate, unsubscribe rate, number of spam complaints, delivery errors, etc.
Here is the statistics section in LIKE.TG. It shows the exact number of clicks and the percentage from all opened emails.
Besides, you can analyze user clicks even more accurately with a click map. It helps you understand how much attention specific CTAs attract and use these insights to improve your email marketing strategy. Have a look at how an email campaign click map looks with LIKE.TG.
Now you know how beneficial it is to track your emails with a professional bulk email service. But is there a way to automate handling this data along with data from other digital marketing channels?
Email Click Tracking with Google Analytics
If you need to have all your internet marketing stats in one place, you can integrate your LIKE.TG and Google Analytics accounts. This allows you to combine statistics from all channels, including email, social media pages, display advertising, etc., and form comprehensive Google Analytics reports.
Email click tracking with Google Analytics works similarly to analytics tracking with LIKE.TG. You need to add a UTM-tag to the link addresses in your email you want to track.
By using Google Analytics, you can also gain the following insights into your email marketing efficiency:
The average time people spend on your site after following the link in your email;
The number of pages viewed by subscribers on your site;
The number of subscribers that visit your site for the first time;
The number of users that bounce from your site (immediately close it);
The number of conversions and the amount of money that particular email campaigns bring you.
Learn more about tracking email statistics with Google Analytics.
Congratulations, now you know that email click tracking is one of the critical indicators of your email marketing success, and it’s easy to track with LIKE.TG!
Email engagement
Email engagement is a measure of how subscribers interact with your email marketing campaigns. You can only estimate your email engagement by monitoring the necessary metrics, like open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate, etc.
Email Engagement Metrics
Open rate
Click-through rate
Click map
Unsubscribe rate
Website traffic from email
Let’s have a closer look at the metrics that will help you measure your subscribers’ engagement.
Open rate
This metric indicates the number of opened emails from the total number delivered. You can track it with the help of a transparent 1x1 pixel, which informs your bulk email service that the email has been opened.
The average email open rate depends on the industry. It’s over 25% for lifestyle, art, and non-profit organizations, and around 15% for the beauty industry and eCommerce. Your subject line is a significant factor that encourages users to engage with your emails. It should be eye-catching to stand out from the rest of the emails in the inbox and relevant to your email’s content.
Learn more about the open rate here.
Click-through rate
This shows the number of clicks on the links in your email from the total number of delivered emails. Bulk email services add a UTM tag to every link in your email, so when users click through, the email service collects that data and provides statistics.
Like the open rate, the average CTR depends on the industry. It’s around 5% for hobbies and news industries, and close to 1% for restaurants, real estate, and beauty care businesses.
Unsubscribe rate
This metric indicates the number of unsubscribed users from the total number of delivered emails. The unsubscribe rate is crucial to show email engagement, and it also influences your sender reputation.
You can’t satisfy everyone with your content, so consider a 0.05% unsubscribe rate healthy. It means that no more than five people out of a thousand unsubscribe from your brand’s emails. If the metric is increasing or higher than 0.05%, you need to find out what is causing people to unsubscribe. Among the most common reasons are poorly formatted content, irrelevant information in the emails, and an overwhelming messaging frequency.
Luckily, you can track the open rate, CTR, and unsubscribe rate without breaking a sweat with LIKE.TG. We provide detailed real-time reports for every email campaign you send, including the number of delivered and bounced emails, as well as opens by location to keep an eye on your efficiency. Here’s how the statistics section looks in your LIKE.TG account:
Click map
This feature helps you monitor the number of clicks on each specific link in your email. It allows you to clearly understand which parts of the content in your email are most engaging for your audience.
Check out this example from a LIKE.TG email campaign. “The Marketing Strategy in 2020...” has the most clicks from subscribers, meaning it’s the most exciting bit of content in this email.
Website traffic from email
Basic email analytics may not be enough to get the full picture of how engaging your emails are. It’s best to combine the most common metrics with reports from Google Analytics or other tracking tools. Your goal here is to analyze how much time users spend on specific pages on your site after clicking-through your email. You can also find out what actions they take and how many of them bounce or make a purchase.
You can easily integrate your LIKE.TG and Google Analytics accounts.
Now you know how to monitor your email engagement. Let’s learn how to create quality, engaging emails.
How to Make Engaging Emails
Create eye-catching subject lines
Use personalization
Design professional templates
Share relevant and exciting content
Creating emails that subscribers are looking forward to receiving and reading is not an easy task. There are some keys to success that no email marketer should overlook. Let’s review each one.
Create an eye-catching subject line
Your subject line determines whether subscribers will open your email. 47% of recipients decide to open your email based on the subject line. At the same time, 69% mark emails as spam only because they don’t like the subject line.
Make your subject line a summary of the email’s content. It should be short enough (around 41 symbols) to look good on mobile devices since 61% of users read emails from smartphones.
Here’s a subject line of Yale University’s event email on a mobile phone. It tells subscribers the date, type of event, and the speaker.
It’s a good idea to combine your subject line with a preheader text. In Pitchfork’s example below, the subject line reflects the most important information in the email, while the preheader text adds more value to it.
Subject line personalization is another simple yet effective technique. According to MarketingDrive, personalized subject lines bring 50% better open rates. With LIKE.TG, you can easily add a user’s name to the subject line to make that difference.
Here’s Mitsubishi’s personalized subject line. “Hey, Romis...” sounds as if a friend sent this email.
Learn how to create effective subject lines here.
Use personalization
You can go beyond subject line personalization and send emails with dynamic content. “Dynamic” in this context means that some parts of your message change depending on the recipient’s location, gender, preferences, place in the sales funnel, etc., to better fit every subscriber.
Here’s Brooks’ personalized email based on location. Users from the Western and Southern regions of the US receive a message that promotes jogging products for the hot climate. For the Northern and Eastern states, it offers goods for jogging in the rain. Both emails, so different in content, are based on a single email template.
Share relevant and exciting content
A crucial part of making your emails engaging is to share relevant, exclusive content that your subscribers can’t find anywhere else. Even though the content differs between companies and industries, some universal things boost engagement in emails:
Social proof in your email. Adding customer feedback appeals to emotions and makes your content offer look more valuable. You can also utilize user-generated content in your emails.
Industry expertise. You need to continuously remind your recipients about the value they gain by being on your email list. Share your knowledge, provide exclusive insider tips, and users will paying attention to your messages in return. You can send curated newsletters to share your expertise by sifting through all the new information from your industry and sharing the essentials with your audience.
Consistent email sending. Make sure users get emails from your brand on a routine basis. It’s vital to create sort of a habit so that your subscribers wait for your next email to get more insights or discounts.
Design professional templates
Make your emails look professional, or people won’t trust your brand. There are three ways to create perfect email templates at no cost with LIKE.TG:
Use our intuitive drag and drop editor;
Use one of the pre-designed templates from our library;
Save any email from your Gmail inbox as a customizable template in your LIKE.TG account with the help of our Chrome extension.
Check out the email template below. We created it with our drag and drop editor in half an hour. It combines images, text blocks, CTA buttons, and a footer in a well-structured email.
Let’s finish this guide with some actionable tips for keeping your audience interested in your brand.
5 Best Practices to Keep Subscribers Engaged
Develop a loyalty program
Host giveaways
Provide exclusive discounts
Celebrate users’ birthdays and anniversaries
Send summary emails
People get used to the good stuff fast. As times go by, they may want something more than classy weekly emails. We’ve collected five killer tips to keep your brand top of mind in your industry.
Tip 1. Develop a loyalty program
It’s always cheaper to keep your existing audience engaged than to acquire new leads. For this reason, you need to develop a program that will encourage customer loyalty.
This email from Uber offers a 20% discount for the recipient’s next five rides. With this offer in mind, the recipient is more likely to use the service even more often.
Tip 2. Host giveaways
Everyone loves freebies! You can invite your subscribers to participate in sweepstakes by sending a giveaway email. It will boost engagement around your brand and, at the same time, refresh your relationships with your existing audience.
Here’s a giveaway email from AppleMusic. It gives subscribers a chance to win tickets for a concert with famous musicians.
Tip 3. Provide exclusive discounts
Another way to keep subscribers engaged is to provide them with special discounts. Check out the email from PrettyLittleThing below. It offers a 30% discount exclusively for email subscribers.
Tip 4. Celebrate users’ birthdays and anniversaries
When communicating with your subscribers, it’s great to provoke as many positive emotions as possible. If you have users’ birth dates on hand, set up automated birthday email sending. It will add some friendly vibes to your communication. Converse’s birthday email offers 15% off.
When you collect subscribers using LIKE.TG’s subscription forms, you will have a subscription date for every user. You can take advantage of this data by sending anniversary emails, like the Asos one below does, offering a 10% discount.
You can easily set up automated birthday and anniversary emails with LIKE.TG’s Automation 360 — a user-friendly tool for sending triggered emails. Here’s how creating a flow of triggered messages to be sent automatically looks.
To develop a similar flow, you need to set up an event that triggers email sending, create the workflow, and choose the date and time, subject line, and email template for a particular message. Here’s a guide on how to send automated emails with more details.
Tip 5. Send summary emails
It’s a perfect way to keep users engaged with your service. A summary email is where subscribers can see their progress, which motivates them to use the service even more.
Here’s a summary email from Grammarly. This weekly email notifies the user about new achievements, shows how many words were checked, and compares their progress with other users’ results.
Congratulations, you’ve learned a lot about email engagement today! We hope it will help you keep your subscribers on the edge of their seats and look forward to every email from your brand.
Email client
An email client is a program or web application that is designed to receive, write, send, and keep your email messages.
This video produced by GoDaddy defines an email client, explains its role, and sheds light on the way it functions.
Before someone starts using an email service, usually, the email client requires several settings. These settings include an email address, password, POP3/IMAP and SMTPaddress, port number, email alias, and other related preferences.
The most popular email clients are Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail. Statistics in the graph below show the market share of the world's most used email clients in 2015. During this period, Apple iPhone accounted for 32.2% of email opens, and Gmail accounted for 15.2% of email opens.
If you decide to start email marketingfor your business, the most important thing you should know about email clients is their daily limit on sending messages. With their help, you can send only 500 messages per day.
Send emails with no limitations!
LIKE.TG doesn't restrict users in the number of emails sent. If you have up to 500 subscribers, send them 15,000 emails monthly for free.
Register and send emails for free!
Email deliverability
Email deliverability is a metric that indicates the number of emails that end up in the recipient's inbox. Many factors influence it, but using a trustworthy service that handles technical details can help maintain high deliverability rates.
In this video, Caleb Smith, marketer at LIKE.TG, considers email deliverability and offers tips to avoid the spam folder.
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of tracking email deliverability and the factors that affect it. We’ll also show you how to measure, track, and check your email deliverability and provide the best practices and test tools for improving it.
Why is email deliverability important?
Understanding your email deliverability and the means to improve it contributes to your company’s higher ROI. According to statistics, email marketing can yield an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, making it a highly lucrative channel. However, there are other important reasons to consider this metric as well.
Find out whether subscribers receive emails. Senders identify people who opened their emails and when they opened them by tracking email deliverability. Over time, marketers can get useful insights, such as the most active subscribers on their list and the factors that boost engagement.
Determine whether a lead is qualified or not. This allows companies to determine what actions their marketing teams should take next and what type of content they should send. After that, they direct prospects likely to purchase to the sales team for immediate action and assign "warm" leads to the marketing team for further cultivation and engagement.
Identify and address issues early. Tracking email deliverability helps marketers understand the causes of unsubscribes. For instance, if there is a sudden spike in the number of unsubscribes, monitoring the email campaign can help the sender discover common causes such as broken links, problems with the email content, subject line, etc.
Improve brand reputation. Good email deliverability positively influences companies’ reputation. Email delivered directly to subscribers’ inboxes without getting into spam folders demonstrates the high quality of emails containing relevant and useful content. It proves that a brand is professional and competent in communicating with leads and customers.
Determine if the content is working. Email deliverability tracking enables senders to understand how subscribers interact with their marketing material and whether their emails perform well.
Optimize email performance. Tracking deliverability metrics provides insights into how recipients interact with your emails. You can use this data to optimize your email content, timing, and targeting for better engagement and conversion rates.
Now that you have some reasons to track email deliverability, let’s determine what affects it.
What affects email deliverability?
Sender reputation
Email infrastructure
Email authentication
Email content quality
Sending frequency
Numerous factors influence email deliverability. In this section, we’ll discuss the most crucial ones in detail.
Sender reputation
Whenever marketers send email campaigns, mailbox providers run reputation checks. Senders with excellent reputations get their messages delivered to recipients’ inboxes, while those with poor reputations land in the junk folder or even get rejected at the gateway.
Sender reputation is a score of the email address that a marketer uses to send email campaigns. Below are ways to maintain a good sender reputation:
send emails on a regular and consistent schedule based on subscriber preferences;
maintain a clean mailing list to minimize bounce rates;
keep off spam traps;
keep abuse complaint rates low and improve delivery by using trustworthy and reliable servers such as those offered by LIKE.TG;
do not appear on blacklists.
Email infrastructure
Establishing and maintaining your infrastructure for email campaigns is complicated and expensive. Thus, it is advisable to use an email service to handle the entire operation for convenience to the marketer. Here are some key infrastructural aspects that affect email deliverability:
IP addresses. For marketers sending high volumes or time-sensitive email campaigns, having a dedicated IP address can be beneficial. This ensures that your sender's reputation is solely influenced by your actions, minimizing the risk of emails landing in spam folders.
Feedback loops for reporting complaints to email service providers (ESPs). After a user clicks “Mark as spam” or “Unsubscribe,” they should be removed from your mailing list. Leveraging an email marketing service automates these processes, eliminating the need for manual tracking and ensuring compliance with best practices.
Email authentication
Another factor that affects email deliverability is authentication. It refers to the process by which mailbox providers verify if the IP address that a sender uses has permission to send emails. Setting up authentication tells mailbox providers that a marketer consented to an ESP sending emails on their behalf. The two main ways of setting it up are:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This system prevents spam by validating the sender's IP address and ensuring emails are sent from authorized sources.
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): It verifies that a specific organization owns a particular email address, adding an extra layer of security and authenticity to email communications.
Email content quality
The quality of your email content is a crucial factor in email deliverability. It refers to using relevant, valuable, and engaging information and avoiding spammy content, including excessive use of sales language, misleading subject lines, or unclear formatting. Personalized email campaigns that resonate with your target audience’s preferences, interests, or browsing history are more likely to drive engagement and encourage subscribers to convert. Emails with compelling, eye-catching subject lines, visually appealing elements, and clear call-to-actionbuttons will increase open and click-through rates.
Sending frequency
Since subscribers can be overwhelmed with emails flooding their inboxes, email campaigns should have a sending schedule. By determining specific intervals for email, companies prevent being marked as spam and not reaching their subscribers. Fixed time intervals for email campaigns positively impact your ISPs and mark your emails as legitimate. Besides frequency, it's necessary to define the best timing for higher open rates. According to the research, Thursdays and Tuesdays bring the highest open rates, while Saturdays have the lowest. Time also matters. It is always better to send email campaigns at 8-9 am for better open and click-through rates.
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Now that you know the factors, it’s time to find out how to assess this metric.
How to Measure Email Deliverability
Assessing email deliverability implies monitoring numerous metrics, which help identify the effectiveness of your email campaigns and the likelihood of delivering emails to subscribers. In this section, we’ll unveil what metrics you should consider for this purpose.
The main way to calculate your deliverability rate is by using the formula below:
Deliverability Rate = (Delivered Emails /Total Sent) x 100
Besides this metric, there are some more crucial key performance indicators you should consider for better email deliverability. Here’s a list of the most essential ones.
1. Evaluate delivery rate
Delivery rate is a metric that helps you determine how many emails were successfully delivered to subscribers’ inboxes compared to the total of emails sent. By assessing this metric, you’ll identify how many of your total number of emails managed to bypass spam filters and reach their intended destination. You can check how to calculate it below:
Delivery Rate = (Number of Emails Sent - Number of Bounces) / Number of Emails Sent
2. Track open rates
Open rate is a metric allowing you to unveil the percentage of subscribers who opened your email out of the total number of emails delivered. With its help, you can find out whether your subject line, sender name, and email preview text are effective and eye-grabbing. You can calculate the measure by using the following formula:
Open Rate = Unique Opens / (Sent Emails - Bounced Emails)
3. Keep an eye on click-through rates
A click-through rate (or CTR) is a metric that unveils the number of clicks on email links from the number of delivered messages. It helps you find out how engaged your audience is and how well your content boosts engagement. Below you can find a formula to measure your CTR:
Email Click-Through Rate = Number of Clicks / Number of Delivered Emails x 100
4. Assess email bounce rates
Email bounce rate is the percentage of emails on a mailing list that did not receive promotional messages because the recipients’ mail servers returned them. They might not reach email addresses on the list because of invalid email addresses, full inboxes, or technical issues. When tracking bounce rates, you can uncover issues with email list quality and sender reputation. Use the formula below to calculate it for your business:
Bounce Rate = (Bounced Emails / Sent Emails) x 100
5. Measure email conversion rates
Email conversion rate is the metric that enables you to sum up the results of a particular email campaign and identify its efficiency. With this indicator, you can measure the number of subscribers who completed a desired action after clicking the CTA included in your email. Keeping an eye on email conversion rates helps you assess the effectiveness of your email campaigns in attaining your business goals. Check the formula below to measure it for your email campaigns:
Conversion Rate = The Number of Conversions / Number of Delivered Emails x 100
However, if you use a special bulk email service for sending your email campaigns, you’ll have an incorporated analytics tool that will provide you with all the necessary data on the effectiveness and performance of your campaigns, including email deliverability. So you won’t need to calculate all these metrics manually.
Now that you know the metrics to track, let’s find out how to check your email deliverability.
How to check email deliverability?
To find out whether your emails reach prospects' or customers' inboxes, follow several simple processes. Below are steps to consider.
Verify sender identity. Check whether your domain has proper DomainKeys Identified Mail, Sender Policy Framework, and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance records set up. These allow you to authenticate your emails and avoid being marked as spam.
Use email testing tools. Platforms like MailTester, Mailtrap, and Sender Score help companies send email campaigns and receive comprehensive insights into their email deliverability. With these tools, you can find out about blacklisting, IP reputation, content analysis, and other crucial factors.
Check blacklists. One more way to check email deliverability is by looking through the blacklists. This is necessary to exclude the fact that your email server's IP address was associated with spam activity. It’s done easily when utilizing special tools like MXToolbox or Spamhaus.
Keep an eye on your email bounces. Tracking your email bounces is essential for identifying email delivery problems. Two types of bounces might occur: soft and hard bounces. The first is usually associated with a full inbox, while hard bounces occur with invalid email addresses.
Assess email engagement metrics. Monitoring open rates, click-through rates, and spam complaints is essential for evaluating the performance and success of your email campaigns. These metrics will help you determine how engaged and happy subscribers are with your content. If recipients show low engagement, it negatively impacts email deliverability.
Track feedback loops. Email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook provide feedback loops you need to register for. It will help you get notified once subscribers mark your emails as spam, enabling you to take a proactive approach toward your email content, subject lines, CTAs, email frequency, and other email elements.
Search for email authentication tools. These platforms offer advanced email authentication, monitoring, and reporting features that allow users to efficiently find and solve deliverability problems.
Now that you know how to check your email deliverability, let’s proceed to the list of valuable tips that will help you optimize the effectiveness and performance of your emails.
15 Email Deliverability Best Practices
The process of increasing email deliverability requires you to perform specific steps. In this section, we’ll offer tips that will multiply your efforts.
Establish a positive sender reputation. Sender reputation is important for both email providers and subscribers. Since email engagement, complaint rates, and spam flags impact it, you need to maximize your efforts. Consider sending useful, engaging content, preventing spam complaints, and avoiding interactions with outdated or inactive email addresses on your list.
Incorporate double opt-in. By using double opt-in confirmation, you can verify the authenticity of subscribers' email addresses and confirm their ownership. This leads to reduced bounce rates and indicates genuine interest from subscribers to hear from you again. Moreover, it helps build a list of qualified and highly engaged audiences.
Avoid using all caps in subject lines. When writing emails with all caps, you reduce the chances of getting a reply by 30%. It refers not only to your subject lines but email content as well. Such emails have low readability, they look annoying and spammy. Instead of using caps lock, consider personalizing your emails based on subscribers’ needs and preferences, writing eye-grabbing subject lines, and using polite language.
Create compelling email content. Your emails should clearly communicate what to expect from your company, the products you sell, or the services you offer. Send short and sweet texts with attention-grabbing, clear, and visible CTAs that encourage the desired action. Remember that long email copies are more likely to get into spam filters.
Segment your audience and personalize emails. Dividing your subscribers into groups based on various factors, including location, preferences, needs, browsing history, and interactions with your brand, will help you provide relevant and timely offers. This way, you’ll make your email campaigns more tailored to your subscribers’ needs, encouraging them to open your emails and explore your offer. For example, Campaign Monitor improved click-through rates by 29% after adding personalized images based on recipients’ locations.
Add unsubscribe links to your email footers. An unsubscribe link is always a must to keep your mailing list clean and prevent spam markers from inactive subscribers. Add an unsubscribe button to your email footer and make the process as simple as possible since people can have different reasons to opt out. This will secure your bounce rates, email deliverability, and engagement metrics.
Provide a web browser version of your emails. Since people receive emails using different email providers, emails’ appearance might look different. To ensure that your email campaigns are rendered how you want them to, it’s essential to provide links leading to web pages. This way, all email elements will be visible to subscribers in the right format.
Add alt text to your email images. When subscribers block images by default, these email elements become invisible. To avoid this issue, you’ll need to edit your alt text manually in the HTML editor or with the email marketing software you usually use.
Ensure a recognizable sender name. The sender name is as important as the subject line as it defines whether subscribers will open your emails. According to the survey, 68% of Americans check the sender's name before opening an email. To establish recognition, you can use your brand name first. Once you build trust, consider adding the real sender’s name and photo to add a human touch for subscribers.
Avoid buying email lists. Renting or purchasing email lists is a bad idea in terms of lead quality, sender reputation, and spammy content. This tactic isn’t only ineffective but also harmful to your reputation since it doesn’t comply with email providers' regulations. It’s highly likely that users who don’t expect emails from you and have nothing in common with your company will mark your emails as spam.
Keep your email lists clean. It’s essential to check the email addresses in your lists to avoid expired addresses and subscribers who haven’t shown activity for years. When having abandoned addresses on your mailing lists, you can get into SPAM traps, resulting in issues with email deliverability. That’s why you should keep your mailing lists clean and up to date. It will help you eliminate inactive subscribers and prevent being flagged as spam.
Monitor key email deliverability metrics. Open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints are metrics that directly influence deliverability. You need to regularly check these indicators to determine problems and eliminate them promptly. With special email tools, you’ll do it really fast.
Interact with inactive subscribers. Inactive recipients negatively influence your email deliverability. To prevent this, you need to monitor your inactive subscribers and develop relevant and personalized re-engagement campaigns. As an option, encourage them to open, click CTAs, or even purchase by sending special offers or promo codes.
Authenticate your domain. Consider incorporating SPF, DMARC, and DKIM authentication protocols to verify your emails. It will help you boost email deliverability.
Test before sending. Always test your email campaigns before sending them to recipients to proofread your text elements, find out how they look on different devices, and identify whether they have spammy elements. Services like LIKE.TG will help you run your A/B tests to prevent rendering problems, spam elements, and improper links to improve your emails based on email provider requirements.
Now that you have some tips, let’s move on to the tools that will help you analyze, track, and improve email deliverability quickly and easily.
6 Best Email Deliverability Test Tools
There are various email deliverability test tools, allowing you to identify issues and improve the quality of email campaigns. Here’s a list of the best solutions.
LIKE.TG
With LIKE.TG's built-in email spam checker, you will get recommendations on improving your campaign's deliverability in the last stage of creating a campaign. You’ll learn which authentication signatures your sender address lacks, along with tips to improve your email content and design. They include removing capital letters, exclamation marks, spammy words, adding text, an unsubscribe link, and Alt-attributes for images.
MailTester
MailTester helps you determine your email's spam score. To get your result, you only need to send your email to a specified address. The service analyzes your content, IP, and mail server to identify the likelihood of your email campaigns being flagged as spam.
MailTrap
MailTrap empowers you to test your emails in a secure environment, allowing you to gain valuable insights related to email templates, spam scores, domain blacklists, and others. With its help, you’ll be able to immediately address urgent issues concerning your emails and solve them, improving your email deliverability.
Postmark
Postmark enables you to input content from your email to analyze it and identify elements prompting spam filtering. The service will evaluate your email text based on the elements that are and aren’t covered in it from one to 10.
MXToolbox
MXToolbox empowers you to test your emails using multiple analytics tools like IP Blacklist Check, Email Header Analyzer, Email Health Report, and others. With its help, you can analyze and resolve a wide range of your email campaign problems.
GlockApps
GlockApps helps you run email deliverability tests, track blacklists, access DMARC Analyzer, edit email templates, and many others. With all these tools, you can receive detailed reports on the issues and recommendations for fixing them.
Congrats! Now you know what email deliverability is and why it’s essential to track it. We hope that our best practices and tools will help you boost your email marketing efforts.
Email campaign
An email campaign is a sequence of marketing efforts that contacts multiple recipients. Email campaigns are designed to reach subscribers at the best time and provide valuable content and relevant offers. Email campaigns allow you to build deep and trusting relationships with your customers.
In this video, Anna, a LIKE.TG marketer, covers 3 ways to build a better email campaign for your business.
Why should I send email campaigns?
Emails help nurture leads
Emails help keep customers engaged
With emails, you can collect data about subscribers
Emails help convert
Emails help your business improve
Email marketing makes communication with clients easier and more effective. Email campaigns are a powerful medium between your company and your audience. They help not only to increase sales but build your brand image. Below we listed some objectives you can achieve by sending email marketing campaigns.
Emails help nurture leads. Each new lead requires nurturing before making his first purchase. The task of your marketing team is to provide them with the right educational materials. They include how-to guides, live demos, workshops, webinars, useful checklists, tutorials, etc. Each email will make a user move down the sales funnel. Predict all possible pain points that a user may face when dealing with your brand and eliminate them.
Emails help keep customers engaged. Now it’s getting much harder to stir users’ interest in a brand. So, you have to come up with new formats and new offers. Email is just the place for experiments. Via this channel, you can share important information, show your expertise, and offer exclusive deals.
With emails, you can collect data about subscribers. To provide every user with an individual approach, you need to collect information about them. With an email campaign, this task is as easy as pie. All you need is to ask subscribers to share some important data for you to craft more targeted and personalized offers. Then, you can divide all your list into segments, and send relevant content to each group.
Emails help convert. With all this personal information about your clients, you can create unique promotions for each user. Track their interactions with your brand and you’ll get to know their favorite products and buying habits — they will help you send emails triggered by clients’ actions. As a result, you’ll increase your email performance and sales.
Emails help your business improve. Ask your clients for feedback. You can do this right after the purchase or on a regular basis via a survey. You’ll find out what customers appreciate the most about your brand, which difficulties they face, and what they would improve.
These objectives are just the tip of an iceberg. Depending on your niche and type of business, you can set different goals and accomplish them using email campaigns. With a professional marketing service such as LIKE.TG, this won’t become a challenge for you.
When is the best time to send an email campaign?
The best time to send an email campaign depends on the topic of the message, the audience’s lifestyle and habits, and the day of the week.
Typically, the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday because Monday is the busiest day of the week, and on Friday, people try not to leave anything for the next week and cope with their week tasks. Saturday and Sunday often family days, so people spend most of their weekend relaxing and not reading emails. Check out our blog to learn more about the best time to send email campaigns.
The best hours are:
around 6 am as many people have a habit of checking their phones in bed;
around 10 am because people also check their emails at the beginning of the working day;
around 2 pm because people have lunch or coffee breaks;
from 8 pm to midnight because during these hours people are usually free and many of them have a habit of reading emails before going to sleep.
Though, it’s much easier to identify the worst time to send email campaigns in most cases: it’s inconvenient to read emails during rush hour when people commute to and from their work and at night, as there is a risk of waking them up. You’d better avoid these hours.
It’s necessary to use A/B testing to realize the optimal time to send emails for your sector of business. A/B tests measure the email campaign’s success by open rates and click-through rates.
When you find out the best time for your business to send email campaigns, you can effectively schedule your campaigns with LIKE.TG.
Let LIKE.TG boost your sales!
Increase customer engagement and blow up sales by sending promotional email campaigns for free. You don't even need to code.
Register and create an email campaign!
Email Campaign Types
Welcome emails
Announcement emails
Testimonial request emails
Holiday emails
Invitation emails
Seasonal emails
Reactivation emails
Abandoned shopping cart emails
Cross-selling emails
Upselling emails
Newsletters
Anniversary emails
There are many types of email campaigns, so it is necessary to choose a style that will help you achieve your goal.
Welcome emails. A welcome email is sent when a user subscribes to your mailing list. Ask clients to set their preferences regarding email frequency and the content they are going to receive.
Announcement emails. These are sent to announce an upcoming holiday, event, release of a new product or feature, etc. The aim is to make subscribers interested, encourage them to buy or to visit.
Testimonial request emails. This email campaign is sent to ask clients to leave feedback by commenting, reviewing, or completing a survey to improve the service.
Holiday emails. This type of email campaign engages people with holiday discounts before Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year, and other holidays. It builds trust and strengthens positive emotions associated with your brand.
Invitation emails. This email campaign invites subscribers to visit an online webinar, a party, a conference, etc.
Seasonal emails. Intended for sending relevant seasonal offers like umbrellas in Fall, or sunglasses in Summer, for instance.
Reactivation emails. Emails sent to inactive clients who lost interest or have forgotten about your company. Don’t just say goodbye to them, try to reactivate and remind them how much value you can share.
Abandoned shopping cart emails. Sometimes subscribers leave items in the shopping cart without buying them for some reason.An abandoned cart email suggests that subscribers return to their carts and inspires them to complete the purchase.
Cross-selling emails. This type of email campaign promotes related products. If your client bought a smartphone, a phone case would be great to cross-sell.
Upselling emails. It describes and offers more advanced, upgrades, and expensive products than the customer considered or bought before.
Newsletters. The most widespread email campaign. Newsletters provide customers with valuable and non-promotional information. If performed well, newsletters help brands build trusting and loyal relationships with people.
Anniversary emails. With this type of email, you can congratulate subscribers on the company’s anniversary and reward your loyal clients. It increases sales, brand awareness, and customer loyalty.
Email Campaign Services
To build relationships with your audience and increase revenue with email campaigns, you need a professional email service. It will help you design beautiful emails without any technical skills, increase email deliverability, and automate routine tasks. There’re lots of players in the email marketing game today and they largely provide the same features. They only differ in prices and the features and email volume of their free plan.
We’ve compared the four most popular email marketing services to help you choose the most suitable for your business.
LIKE.TG
MailChimp
GetResponse
Constant Contact
Free plan/trial limitations
500 subscribers, up to 15,000 emails per month
2,000 subscribers, up to 12,000 emails per month
30-day free trial
30-day free trial
Automation
✔ (+ SMS and web push notifications)
✔
✔
✔
Personalization
✔
✔
✔
✔
Segmentation
✔
✔
✔
✔
Drag and drop editor
✔
✔
✔
✔
24/7 technical support
✔
✘
✘
✘
How to Design an Email Campaign
Use an inverted pyramid method
Leave air in the text
Keep your brand’s identity
Work out a relevant design
Implement a responsive design
Use helpful resources to speed up the process
Use an inverted pyramid method. An inverted pyramid makes emails easy-to-read. Structure the content from the most significant parts at the top to the smallest at the bottom — it should look like a funnel. On top, there is usually a large image, then comes the narrower text section, and at the bottom, there is a call to action, the smallest part. Such design will ‘deliver’ your reader to the CTA at the end of your email.
Leave air in the text. Mind that during the years that emails have existed, people have gotten used to reading dark text on a bright background. An abundance of vibrant colors may overwhelm the readers and make them leave the page, blinded. Separate the text in emails into small bites. Save room between the text blocks, images, and buttons.
Keep your brand’s identity. Use email campaigns as an extension of your brand’s website and social media pages. Keep the set of colors, fonts, and tone of language in the same fashion throughout all of your brand’s marketing spaces. Otherwise, your emails will look unprofessional and cheap, or unrecognizable by the customers.
Work out a relevant design. Create a design that corresponds with the goals of your email campaign. Remember, a regular newsletter and Valentine Day’s celebration email differ from one another because they both provide a different kind of value. You can use LIKE.TG email templates for your email campaigns for free and simplify this process.
Implement a responsive design. Modern adaptive designs is a must in today’s email marketing. Using a responsive design makes your emails look professional from any device, whether it’s a desktop, a mobile phone, or a tablet. All emails made with LIKE.TG has a responsive design by default.
Use helpful resources to speed up the process. There are a few sites of stock photos, which stand out from the crowd of uniform, corporate resources: Death to The Stock Photo, Unsplash, and Gratisography. There are also tools for creating images like PlaceIt and Canva. Besides, you can use colossal icon libraries like Elegant Themes and Dry Icons for your email marketing campaigns.
Email Campaign Templates
If you don’t have time to create your own template, you can use editable pre-designed templates. Every email service offers pre-made templates. With such a template, you only need to replace the standard text and images with your content. You can also edit the colors, fonts, background, etc.
LIKE.TG provides a variety of free templates for any occasion or event. You’ll definitely find a template to inform your clients about an upcoming sale, congratulate them on big holidays, remind them about an abandoned shopping cart, and much more.
If you received an outstanding email and want to use its design, you can do just this with LIKE.TG. Our Chrome extension allows clients to save any email they like as a PDF, a full-length screenshot, or an HTML template, edit it to your liking and send it to your mailing list. The extension is free.
This is how the extension works.
If you want to increase your brand recognition and awareness, we recommend you create a unique branded subscription form and edit it before sending a campaign. This way, your audience will recognize your design and associate it with your company. Besides, you don’t need to know HTML or have any technical skills to create a professional subscription form.
With our drag and drop editor, you can create an email in less than an hour. Drag the necessary elements to your template, design it to your liking, add videos and links to your social networks. Every email created with LIKE.TG is responsive by default, so they will look great on any screen resolution.
In the screenshot below, you can see how creating an email looks. Drag the elements from the left side and edit them on the right side.
Creating a Successful Email Campaign
Set your goals
Grow your opt-in mailing list
Segment your mailing list
Create emails with a consistent layout
Write a good copy
Personalize an email campaign
Use A/B testing
Set your goals. What is the aim of your email campaign? Having a goal helps you select the type of email, design, and create valuable content for your recipients. Try to set realistic goals that are achievable and monitor your efficiency.
Grow your opt-in mailing list. Find out the best media for gathering subscribers. Create a subscription form for your website or blog and collect the data you consider the most important for your mailing list: email address, phone number, name, gender, country — whatever you may need to create relevant and targeted email campaigns. Don't forget that your mailing list should be double opt-in, which means that you will gather an audience of only people who are genuinely interested in your services. You can significantly grow your audience with LIKE.TG multichannel subscription forms. Let users subscribe to your emails, chatbots in Facebook Messenger, and Telegram from one form.
Segment your mailing list. Segmentation highly increases relevancy and targeting. It’s convenient to segment mailing lists with LIKE.TG, and opportunities for segmentation are virtually unlimited. Segment your mailing list according to the country, gender, place in the sales funnel, etc.
Create emails with a consistent layout. If the mailing list is up and ready, create an email campaign with the help of a drag-and-drop editor, which allows creating great templates without coding. Besides, you can use pre-designed templates provided by LIKE.TG.
Write a good copy. The style of the text should correspond to your brand’s general identity. Create a funny and intriguing subject line and preheader text. Put the most tasteful information there to encourage the recipients to open your email. The copy inside the email should be meaningful with a purpose in every word and lead a reader to the CTA smoothly.
Personalize an email campaign. Another reliable tool for success with an email campaign is personalization. The data that you’ve gathered enables you to personalize the subject line and provide subscribers with slightly different emails at once according to their email preferences and behavior.
Use A/B testing. A/B testing gives you a chance to clarify whether your email will impress your audience or not, without sending it to the entire list. The size of your mailing list determines the number of recipients required for testing. For instance, you can test different subject lines by sending two different emails to two equal groups of people. After that, you will know which variant is better. The same goes for email visual and text content, CTAs, sender’s name, etc.
Email Content Ideas
Educational emails
Product updates and releases
Cases
User-generated content
Milestones
Videos
Events
Customer success
Surveys
Promotions
Digest
In this section, we’ll provide a list of interesting email content ideas that you can draw inspiration from. You’ll find tips to help you increase user engagement, retention, loyalty, and, of course, sales.
Educational emails. Lead nurturing is all about educating your audience. When users join your list, they’re not ready to buy. You need to provide them with the right educational content at the right time. Right after their subscription send them a welcome email where you’ll cover the benefits of using your service. If they browse your site pages often, send them a live demo and offer a free trial. If they get stuck with some features, send them a tutorial, a webinar, or invite them to a workshop. Rememberthat educational material should correlate with your leads’ stage in the sales funnel to be relevant.
Product updates and releases. If you’re about to launch a new product or have just updatedsome features, inform clients. This is your chance to build hype around your brand and increase customer engagement. Here’s one important aspect — you should explain how your updates or new product will help solve customers’ problems and satisfy their needs instead of keeping them in the know about your achievements. If clients are aware of the benefits they can get, they will definitely go for your product.
Cases. Each brand needs cases. It doesn’t matter whether you sell marketing services, clothes, household appliances, repair, or beauty services, you should have cases. They will tell your potential clients how your brand helps customers solve their problems and improve their life. People trust people, not brands. So, we recommend you to publish cases on your blog or on social media, and share them with your leads via email campaigns.
User-generated content. This is content produced by the audience of your brand. It includes comments, testimonials, reviews, photos, videos, etc. Clients create it to thank a brand for a great product and share this great news with their friends. Encourage your customers to create user-generated content, and share it via email campaigns. This will help you build credibility with customers, encourage leads to make a purchase, and impact your SEO efforts positively.
Digest.This is a regular roundup of articles or news. Brands send it weekly, biweekly, or monthly. With a digest, you can drive a lot of traffic to your site, boost subscriber engagement, show your expertise, and boost sales. Summarize either your news for a certain period of time or create a round-up of the articles on your blog.
Milestones. Milestone emails are automated messages sent as a part of the customer lifecycle. Marketers use them to celebrate a client’s birthday, the anniversary of their signup, first purchase, or any other achievement. These emails are highly personalized so they perform much better than any other email. With LIKE.TG Automation 360, you can send a milestone email automatically. You only need to collect customers’ personal data and create an email flow.
Videos. Try different content formats to keep subscribers engaged and find out what performs best for your business. Emails with videos show higher email CTR. You can add a how-to video, show some behind-the-scenes content, or share a link to your YouTube channel if you have one. If you produce videos on a regular basis, your subscribers should know about them as most people prefer visual content.
Events. If you hold meetings, conferences, or webinars, you should send event invitation emails and reminders. They will help you create hype around your event, build anticipation, increase brand recognition, and the number of participants. Send an announcement email, let subscribers register and save a seat, and then remind them about your meeting a day before the event and an hour before it begins.
Customer success. Monitor your clients’ success using your service. Say, you provide a site builder. Track your client's progress in using more advanced features. Congratulate them on creating their first site and other minor but important achievements. This way, you’ll increase customer retention and loyalty. Clients appreciate brands that care.
Surveys. Run a survey or poll to discover what your clients think about your brand. Ask what they like the most about your brand, what they’d like to change and improve, what their favorite products are. Their answers will provide you with a clear picture of your business. You’ll get valuable insights that will help you improve your product and service.
Promotions. They’re an integral part of any email marketing strategy. With their help, you can boost sales and provide each client with a personalized experience that will result in building customer loyalty. You can run holiday, seasonal, and time-limited promotions. Create a collection of favorite and top-rated goods. Track users’ behavior on your site, and send them personalized offers: abandoned cart emails, notificationsthat their favorite items that are back in stock, or goods that complement their purchase. Offer discounts and free shipping to make the decision-making process an easy thing.
How to send an email campaign with LIKE.TG
Register an account
Add a mailing list
Create a campaign
Test and send
Measure
Automatically resend to unread
Register an account. Fill the registration form in our service.
Add a mailing list. Upload an existing mailing list or create your own. Never buy a mailing list because it will hurt your business and sender reputation. Use double opt-in to ensure all subscribers have provided you with a valid email address. Check your mailing list with our Email Verifier. It will find and remove invalid email addresses from your list for free.
Create a campaign. Create an email campaign with our simple and intuitive drag-and-drop editor, or use preset free templates. Try to keep your design and copy consistent, relevant to your offer, and your brand’s identity.
Test and send. The bigger your mailing list is, the greater chance you have for A/B tests before actually sending your email to your entire audience.
Measure. After the launch, you can gain a lot of data about an email campaign: the number of sent and delivered emails, open rate, click-through rate, and bounces, opens by location, clicks map, domain metrics, devices of the recipients and detailed statistics of errors. Compare these metrics with your expectations and goals to improve your email marketing strategy.
Automatically resend to unread. You can use the auto resending tool to send the same email again to those who never opened it. You need to change the subject line and schedule the time for resending. This feature makes your email campaign more efficient by increasing its open rate.
How to Measure an Email Campaign's Effectiveness
Open rate
Click-through rate
Bounce rate
Forwarded emails
Unsubscribers
Spam complaints
This is a list of measures that enables you to monitor the email campaign’s efficiency.
Open rate. This statistic identifies how many emails were opened out of the number delivered. Whether the recipients open your email or not depends on the quality of the sender’s name, subject line, and preheader, the first things the recipients see.
Click-through rate. A measure of the number of clicks on a call-to-action button. If the click-through rate is high, it indicates that the content of the email is relevant and valuable for your subscribers.
Bounce rate. This is the percentage of emails that were not delivered. There are multiple reasons for bounces: fake email addresses, a full inbox, inappropriate size of the email, or identification as spam by a recipient’s server.
Forwarded emails. This stands for a number of emails that were shared on social media. It indicates how many brand advocates you have.
Unsubscribers. Unsubscribing is not pleasant, though it cleans up your mailing list, as people who are not interested leave in peace without any effort from your side. However, if this number is too high, you need to reconsider your approach to email marketing.
Spam complaints. If your email turns up in the spam box, it’s the worst-case scenario because this is very harmful to your business.
7 Email Campaign Examples
In this section, we’ve collected some inspiring examples of email campaigns. You can use email ideas from popular brands as well as follow them in terms of design and copywriting.
This welcome email is sent by Petco. The warm and friendly tone of their email creates good vibes and makes each recipient smile. The company explains how they can help every pet owner by adding links to useful categories. In addition, the brand lets userscreate a pet profile to receive customized news, offers, and birthday gifts.
Alex Mill — a popular store of classic essentials — sent this abandoned cart email to the users who didn’t buy. They can not only review their cart but get a 15% discount. This is a great technique that helps increase sales.
This birthday email sent by Anthropologie. The brand congratulates the client on his special day and offers 15% off the purchase online and in-store. This helps the brand increase customer loyalty and boost sales.
True Citrus celebrates its clients’ anniversaries by sending milestone emails. The brand appreciates customer loyalty and provides a generous 40% discount to prove it.
Garnet Hill invites its customers to enter the contest. They can win a $500 gift card after they leave a review of the product they like. This technique allows the brand to boost customer engagement and collect valuable user-generated content.
MAC Cosmetics knows a thing or two about nurturing leads. The brand regularly sends how-to emails to teach their audience how to use their products effectively. In the email below, the brand explains step by step how to cover acne and dark circles.
Segment — a customer data management platform — sent this event invitation email. The brand presents the speakers and clearly explains what the attendees will learn by visiting it.
Email campaign tips and best practices
Let subscribers set their email preferences
Add alternative text for the images
Plan drip email campaigns
Encourage sharing
Send birthday campaigns
Let subscribers set their email preferences. This will make segmentation and personalization easier. You can offer subscribers to set their preferences in a welcome email or add the link to the preferences center to the footer of every email.
Add alternative text for the images. Alt-text is a hidden text which duplicates information from the pictures and saves chances that email will be read in case the recipient has pictures turned off or if they are downloading for too long.
Plan drip email campaigns. Create a sequence of email campaigns to reach more distant and long term goals.
Encourage sharing. Reward your subscribers for sharing your emails on social media. Surprise those who shared your email with friends by offering a discount or sending a thank you email.
Send birthday campaigns. Collect your subscribers’ birth dates to congratulate them on their special day, wish them well, and build trustful relationships.
Send email campaign
Email lead
An email lead is a prospective customer who has expressed interest in a product, service, or brand and has opted in for marketing emails from the business. The lead’s email address is usually collected through a subscription form, direct chat, or phone.
Leads have the potential to become future clients. So, once a lead shares their contact information, the business should embark on an email campaign to convert them into buyers. The percentage of converted prospects from the total amount of generated leads makes up the conversion rate.
The lecturer from HubSpot Academy provides tactics on how to convert leads. Watch it to draw inspiration!
Why is email lead generation imperative?
Despite the emergence of new communication channels, email is still a popular and reliable channel for marketers to reach and engage with target audience. Why focus on email lead generation?
It brings high ROI: for every $1 spent on email marketing, $38 is generated.
It’s a way to collect better quality leads.
It offers an opportunity to build better relationships with customers.
Email provides an easy way to inform prospects about new offers, deals, products, events, or services.
Email Lead Generation Best Practices
Signup form on a website or blog and an attractive lead magnet
After abandoning a shopping cart
Offer users to subscribeviasocial media
An email marketing service is a must when planning to generate email leads. This service helps automate routine tasks and improve email marketing performance with the help of professional instruments. Here are ways to generate leads for free.
Signup form on a website or blog and an attractive lead magnet
Adding a subscription form with an enticing lead magnet on a website or blog is an easy way to turn site visitors into subscribers. Get email leads for free with LIKE.TG by creating branded subscriptions forms using pre-designed templates.
Below is a subscription form created with a functional LIKE.TG form builder.
You can easily grow your audience by creating multichannel forms. Add links to your chatbots in Facebook Messenger and Telegram. Look below.
After abandoning a shopping cart
This kind ofemail is an excellent method to reduce the number of losses in sales. Why should you miss a chance to remind the clients about the products they’ve added to their carts? If a lead has entered their email address but didn’t buy, send them this kind of email and enjoy additional sales.
Check out how Bonobos makes use of an abandoned cart email campaign.
Offer users to subscribeviasocial media
Reinforce your email marketing with social media. If a big part of your audience is made up of socials, don’t miss an opportunity to turn them into email leads. All you need is to add a sign-up form on your brand profile. Facebook is an excellent place to start.
How to Nurture Email Leads
Qualify, and segment leads
Send drip email campaigns
Automate email sending
Facilitate multi-channel marketing
Not all leads end up buying, and sometimes it’s because a business has not taken steps to nurture them. So, here are some ways to nurture leads:
Qualify, and segment leads. Generate email leads with LIKE.TG, then qualify them according to their gender, age, location, preferences, stage in the sales funnel. LIKE.TG offers pre-made segments based on user activity, so you don’t need to specify the conditions manually.
Send drip email campaigns. It will help you both educate subscribers wisely and save time. A dripemail campaign is an email series made in advance to slightly move email leads down the sales funnel. You only need to craft it once, and it will be sent automatically after a user joins your mailing list.
Automate email sending. Nurturing an email lead with a unique email campaign is instead a time-consuming and tedious task. You no longer need to craft an individual offer for all the users. Just set email automation once and track the results. With LIKE.TG Automation 360, you can create an event-based automation flow that will start for every user individually and nurture them with the right offer at the right time.
Facilitate multi-channel marketing. You’re not limited to email marketing. Make use of several channels to increase your outreach. For example, inform subscribers about the news and updates via push notifications, notify of transaction statuses via SMS, offer help in chatbots. Combine four channels in one marketing platform, with LIKE.TG.
Email design
Email design is the process of creating visually appealing emails that resonate with the target audience. It includes choosing the most appropriate layouts, fonts, colors, graphics, and compelling copy, allowing business owners to establish connections with subscribers, grab their attention, communicate the main message, and encourage them to take the desired action.
In this article, we’ll unveil why email design is essential and review its 12 most important elements. We’ll also provide 12 effective email design best practices and 5 excellent examples.
Why is email design important?
Email design is essential because it significantly influences the success of your marketing campaigns. Here are some more reasons to pay close attention to your email design.
It has an impact on the following aspects:
Well-defined branding. A well-structured and consistent email design contributes to establishing brand identity. Logos, colors, and fonts associated with your company enable customers to recognize and remember your brand, building trust and brand recognition.
Positive first impression. When subscribers open your email campaign, they first notice your email design. A visually appealing email containing all the necessary elements establishes a positive first impression, grabs recipients’ attention, and encourages them to interact with your company.
Device compatibility. Mobile-optimized emails allow customers to access your email campaigns from any device and location. With mobile-friendly email designs, you can ensure your email looks good on every screen, improving user experience and providing seamless communication with your brand.
Higher engagement. Since people pay closer attention to emails with compelling visuals and well-crafted design elements, you can improve engagement by applying these elements. Interactive design and clear call-to-action buttons help boost click-through rates and improve interactions with your content.
Enhanced user experience. A well-structured email design allows you to improve your overall experience with your email campaigns. Subscribers can easily read your emails, navigate through them, quickly find the necessary information, and understand your main message. A positive user experience with your email campaigns contributes to higher engagement and customer satisfaction.
Compliance and deliverability. Emails created based on the latest requirements and standards ensure they will be securely delivered to your recipients. Building compelling email campaigns allows you to reach inboxes without being marked as spam.
Clear message. A good email design enables you to communicate your main message accurately to the target audience. The right use of layout, fonts, and images helps you successfully deliver information, avoiding misinterpretation and confusion.
Higher conversion rates. Persuasive copy and well-placed call-to-action buttons help you improve conversions. Regardless of the key goal of your email campaigns, a visually appealing email design empowers you to establish a connection with the audience and influence your subscribers’ behavior.
When all these elements are correctly incorporated into your email design, you can improve customer satisfaction and user experience, boost engagement, and encourage customers to take the desired action.
Creating a compelling email design requires you to know and follow all the crucial elements a good email campaign should have. In the next section, we’ll come closer to email design elements and explore them in detail.
12 Most Important Email Design Elements
To create an effective email design, you need to combine different elements successfully. By adding these elements, you’ll be able to send visually appealing, engaging, and impactful messages. We’ve compiled a list of the most important email design elements, which you can check below.
Clear and accurate subject line. An email subject line is the first thing subscribers see when they open their inboxes. It also defines whether potential customers will open your emails. Eye-catching and compelling subject line encourages recipients to open your email campaigns and scan them through.
Branding and header. Establishing brand identity is a must in all business areas, including email campaigns. Your company logo and recognizable header will contribute to the effectiveness of your emails and brand recognition. By implementing consistent branding, your company gains trust and lets subscribers quickly identify your brand.
Engaging visuals. A quality email should include visuals in addition to text elements, improving readability and complementing your message. Visually appealing images allow you to establish emotional connections with your audience, show your products and services, or expose concepts.
Organized layout. A well-organized layout helps you guide subscribers through your email content. Email campaigns containing a visual hierarchy help highlight the most important information and CTAs.
Readable fonts and font sizes. Appropriate fonts and font sizes ensure that customers can read your content without any effort. You can feature specific points and improve readability with font styles and formatting.
Color scheme. It has been scientifically proven that colors have a psychological effect on people. For example, if you use warm colors like red, orange, and yellow in your emails, they help stimulate energy, while cool colors like blue and green have a soothing and calming effect. A color scheme is essential for consistency in branding and company style. You can establish recognition and evoke emotions when consistently using your brand color scheme for email campaigns. When you utilize colors wisely, you can create an aesthetically appealing email that people want to read.
Compelling copy. Clear copy allows you to deliver your main message accurately. With the right language, you can establish interaction with potential customers and encourage action.
Visible and clear CTAs. Call-to-action buttons prompt clients to take action. After exploring your email and deciding to take action, prospects search for CTAs where to complete their purchases. Prominent and clear calls to action guide clients to the desired action.
Footer. A footer is another essential element of email design that provides subscribers with your company contact details, unsubscribe links, and links to your social media. This element is a must for ensuring trustworthiness and compliance with regulations.
White space. White space helps you divide your text into sections and improve readability. It helps subscribers instantly find the necessary information, establish a balance between text and visual elements, and avoid clutter.
Personalization. With personalization, you can establish an emotional connection with customers and prompt higher engagement. People are more likely to open emails when they include their names, information related to their interests, or products they were looking for. Analysis of previous subscribers’ activity and search history enables you to lead prospects toward a purchase.
Social media integration. Social media icons and links help you interact with leads on numerous platforms, increasing the chances of conversion. You get a wider reach, and more customers share your brand with friends and family.
Now that the elements are clear, it’s time to proceed to the next section and explore valuable tips on creating a compelling email design that converts.
13 Email Design Best Practices
With an effective email design, you can reach numerous business goals faster. Here are some best practices to consider when developing a new email campaign that resonates with your target audience and meets their expectations.
Tailor a powerful subject line. A subject line influences whether subscribers will open your emails. If you want to achieve higher open rates, consider crafting a concise and compelling subject line that encourages subscribers to open your emails. This short statement should grab attention and encourage them to read.
Add a catchy preheader. A preheader is a short description of an email's content and the second email element subscribers see when opening their inboxes. Therefore, you should create a preheader that stands out and grabs attention. When writing your preheader, consider creating a short statement that communicates the main message of your email.
Include branding elements. To ensure that customers understand that emails are from you, you need to include elements associated with your company. Colors and fonts should be similar to those you use for your website and social media. Maintain a consistent tone across all content on your website and other company materials. Utilizing a cohesive design strategy for logos, colors, and fonts in your emails enhances brand recognition and cultivates a unified brand identity across various communication channels.
Utilize personalization. If you want to connect with each of your subscribers and prompt the desired action, you need to craft your emails based on recipients’ names, interests, preferences, and actions. With personalization, you’ll be able to establish trusting relationships with your potential customers. LIKE.TG allows you to send 15,000 emails that resonate with your audience for free with the help of personalization and segmentation features.
Consider using a bulk email service. If you don’t want to create your email design from scratch, consider using a special platform. This service will ensure the mobile-first design and make your emails look perfect on any screen. Bulk email solutions often provide a library of pre-built templates that you can modify and match with your branding. LIKE.TG is equipped with all the necessary features for creating compelling email designs. Leverage its templates, personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing to compose an engaging email.
Use dynamic content. Enhance your marketing strategy by incorporating captivating content that fosters meaningful interaction. Tailor this content to resonate with your prospects' preferences, interests, and search history. Delivering pertinent information captures subscribers' interest and enables them to discover products that address their specific needs and challenges.
Design CTAs that evoke action. Elevate your conversion rates by prioritizing clear, prominent call-to-action buttons in your emails. Ensure these CTAs lead clients seamlessly to your website or social media platforms or facilitate contact with your agents. Craft compelling calls to action that entice leads, transforming them into valued clients.
Include the unsubscribe button. Email campaigns are effective when you provide relevant information to subscribers. Yet, sometimes, customers’ preferences change, and they no longer need to receive updates on your products or services. So, adding a clear and visible unsubscribe button to each email is necessary. It will allow customers to have a positive image of your brand.
Add visual elements. When creating emails, you should ensure the readability of your email campaigns. Visuals allow you to divide your text into sections and keep subscribers focused and interested in your message. These visuals can include videos, GIFs, images, and infographics. By leveraging visual elements, you’ll be able to ensure a memorable experience for your customers.
Choose the most appropriate layout. Since email layout influences user experience and conversions, you need to find the best way to organize your content. Remember about white space when adding your text, images, and other essential elements. When inserting content, make sure that it’s well-organized, easily readable, and navigable.
Remember about mobile-first design. As an increasing number of individuals find it convenient to access their inboxes from mobile devices, ensuring the mobile responsiveness of your emails is imperative. Guarantee that your email design remains visually appealing on any screen, be it desktop, smartphone, or tablet. Prioritizing mobile optimization enhances user experience and empowers subscribers to complete desired actions whenever and wherever they are seamless.
Utilize emojis. Enhance the vibrancy of your emails and prompt action by incorporating emojis. Including emojis in your subject line can entice potential customers to open your emails. However, exercise caution and ensure you understand the true meaning of emojis before incorporating them into your emails to maintain appropriateness and effectiveness.
Conduct A/B testing. Consider doing A/B testing to determine which email designs are most effective. This method allows you to pinpoint elements that may need adjustment, such as CTAs, layout, colors, or other factors. A/B testing is a valuable tool for identifying the most resonant email design that positively impacts your target audience and boosts conversion rates.
Now, let’s explore some examples to inspire you for your further great email designs.
Email Design Examples
Numerous brands successfully use email campaigns for promotion and sales. They all use various email designs and effectively approach their customers. In this section, we’ll provide examples of email designs that drive action and help business owners reach their primary business goals.
Pegasus Airlines — Short and Enticing Subject Line
The Turkish low-cost airline does its best to make subscribers open its emails. The company has short and sweet subject lines with emojis that make receivers open their emails and explore offers.
Rare Beauty — Color Scheme Matching Branding
Rare Beauty email design is an excellent example of color combinations matching the cosmetics company's branding. Pastel colors help enhance readability and a seamless experience with the company’s email campaigns. It also includes visible CTAs that will take you to the desired product collection.
NYX Professional Makeup — Discounts and GIFs
NYX entices customers with free shipping and a 25% discount on eye products. This beauty brand usually adds GIFsto email design to make messages feel more interactive. Discounts establish FOMO, and encourage subscribers to click the call to action button and help convert them into clients.
Marks Spencer — White space
Marks Spencer uses white space to improve user experience. It allows customers to seamlessly explore the available apparel items and click one of the call-to-action buttons to see the details of each. With white space, this clothing brand enables subscribers to focus on the key email elements, improve readability, and contribute to aesthetic appearance.
Booking.com — Clear and Visible CTAs
Booking.com sticks to its branding, fonts, colors, and tone in every email. This example demonstrates clear and visible call-to-action buttons encouraging clients to rate their stay. Subscribers can easily click one of the buttons to rate their experience with Booking.com.
Congrats, now you know what email design is and why it’s crucial for the overall success of your email campaigns. Hope that our best practices and examples will serve you as inspiration for further marketing efforts. Register in LIKE.TG to start creating your compelling emails right now for free.
Email finder
An email finder is a software that allows acquiring email addresses that have ever been published on the internet for outreach purposes. It gets emails by parsing HTML webpages.
Watch this video instruction, which shows how email finder helps to reach people.
Email Finder Benefits
It helps to generate new leads
It helps to develop business
It assists with recruitment
An email finder is a crucial tool when you want to grow your business and contact more people.
It helps to generate new leads. You can use an email finder as a lead generation tool. It allows reaching out to marketing leads, which may convert into customers in the future.
It helps to develop business. With email finders, you can find and contact investors that will be likely to contribute to your company or influencers to promote your brand to a targeted audience. For this, you can search for email addresses on LinkedIn, for instance.
It assists with recruitment. You can find email addresses of specialists within a specific niche, contact them, and set up a job interview. An email finder may save your resources and speed up the search of the right person for the job.
Best Email Finders
Snov.io
Hunter
NinjaOutreach
ContactOut
There are many players in this field so we collected five best email finders you can rely on in your business strategy:
Snov.io
Snov.io offers a variety of ways to find email addresses: by domain, by company name, by person’s name and company’s domain, on professional social networks, through API, individually and in bulk.
What’s unique about Snov.io is that you can then automate your communication by sending a sequence of drip emails to recently found email addresses. This service is a complete email marketing toolbox, offering everything from an email finder and verifier to an email tracker and drip email sender.
Hunter
This email finder helps to get any email address behind a website. It specializes in recruitment and offers fifty free searches for registration.
This tool offers an add-on for Google Sheets, which is very convenient if you use Google products in your business. The screenshot below shows how to find emails based on the company name.
NinjaOutreach
This service is explicitly focused on influencer marketing. It allows for creating big campaigns and multiple projects with ease.
Aside from emails, you can find Instagram influencers very accurately by defining a specific location and industry. You can get a lot of important data, for example, the level of user engagement with a particular influencer. Below is the screenshot of a search in the USA, New York, by the fashion industry.
ContactOut
Like most business professionals, you most probably understand the importance of networking. Connecting with the right people can help you get ahead in your career, find new opportunities, and build valuable relationships. But, knowing who the right people are is only half the battle — getting in touch with them is also crucial. That's where ContactOut comes in. ContactOut is a Chrome extension that helps you get connected with the right people from different social networks. It provides millions of business professionals and decision-makers with the most accurate and up-to-date contact information. With ContactOut, you can easily find the right people, connect with them on LinkedIn, and get their contact information — without ever leaving your desk. So if you're serious about networking, ContactOut is a tool you can't afford to be without.
Email conversion rate
The email conversion rate is the metric that helps to sum up the results of a particular email campaign and identify its efficiency. Usually, a purchase after a click on the link in the email counts as a conversion.
Email Conversion Rate Formula
You can evaluate your marketing efforts and calculate ROI counting any user’s action as conversion. For instance, registration on your partner’s website via the link in your emails may count as conversion, as well.
To calculate an email conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of delivered emails and multiply it by 100, like on the image below.
If 200 people make a purchase, with 10,000 emails delivered, your conversion rate will be 2%.
What is a reasonable email conversion rate for email marketing?
Marketers can’t answer this question because the conversion rate depends on several factors that make averaging impossible. These are the niche of your business, actions you count as conversion, your average deal price, and bulk email provider you use.
B2B companies tend to have a lower conversion rate than B2C brands because of the higher average check. The number of conversions also varies between industries as a result of the different levels of user engagement, measured with the open and click-through rates. According to MailChimp, both these rates are lower for apparel, fashion, and cosmetics, and higher for non-profit organizations.
The email conversion rate also depends on the type of email. It tends to be higher for triggered emails like welcome, abandoned cart, and reactivation emails because they help to stay in touch with subscribers at every lifecycle stage. On the other hand, the conversion rate is lower for newsletters and promotional emails because they are less personalized mass emails, usually the same for all users.
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Having that knowledge at hand, you can define a reasonable conversion rate for your business with specific conversion goals.
How to Improve the Email Conversion Rate
Improve your email deliverability
Increase the number of opens and clicks
Provide personalized experience
Make the check out fast and straightforward
You can do a lot to improve the email conversion rate, so pay attention to the following pieces of advice.
Improve your email deliverability. Use a double opt-in to communicate only with the owners of valid email addresses. Regularly remove inactive addresses from your mailing list. Set up DKIM, DMARK, and SPF records to improve your sender reputation. Check emails for spam with LIKE.TG.
Increase the number of opens and clicks. Follow these subject line best practices to encourage more opens. Support subject lines with a preheader text relevant to the email content place a clear call-to-action in the email. A/B test both subject lines and CTAs. Find out the right time for sending emails to your audience, and pick up the correct email sending frequency.
Provide personalized experience. Start from adding the user’s name to the subject line and email body. Send trigger emails and drip email campaigns based on subscribers’ actions. Segment your audience into groups with some common characteristics like location, gender, and age. Analyze user behavior to implement more advanced behavioral segmentation.
Make the check out fast and straightforward. Make as few steps as possible. If the user doesn’t complete the purchase, follow up with abandoned cart emails. Some percent of potential clients will come back and finish the shopping.
Email background image
An email background image is an image that lays under all elements of the email template and serves as an aesthetic feature in email templates’ creating.
Whyare email background images important?
Looks great
It influences a decision to keep on reading
It helps to stand out from the crowd
Easy to add
Looks great.A beautifully designed email background image creates that wow effect among the audience.
It influences a decision to keep on reading. Beautiful things tend to attract the reader's eye. Simple as that, if your background image tickles the artist in you, there is a good chance you'll be better engaged with the content of the email. Down to CTA.
It helps to stand out from the crowd. A background image is a great tool to establish your brand identity because it merely takes up all the unused space in your email. You can fill with something that shows off the personality of your brand. Just do your best to keep it in line with the other branding elements.
Easy to add. The email background image is easy to add with the LIKE.TG drag-and-drop editor.
How to Put a Background Image in an Email with LIKE.TG
Go to the email drag-and-drop editor
Add the image as a background
Test
Step 1: Go to the email drag-and-drop editor
Create an email template, adding and customizing elements to your liking.
Step 2: Add the image as a background
Go to “Email body” on the right. Click on “Background image” and upload one from your computer or use previously uploaded files.
Step 3: Test
Create a test mailing list, including different ESPs’ addresses. Send the campaign with a template you’ve created. Check if the email background image works out.
Email Background Images Best Practices
Find out the most popular ESPs among your audience
Keep the proper size of the email background image
Add alt text
Set an email’s background color as a fallback
Test your background image
Find out the most popular ESPs among your audience. Segment your subscribers into different groupsthat have various ESPs in common.This willenable you to create emails with background images to reach only those users who can see them.
Keep the proper size of the email background image. Make sure that the aspect ratio coincides with the planned email body width and length. The file size doesn’t matter as the service automatically compresses it when downloading.
Add alt text. If you create emails in HTML editor, add alternative text to the email background image. The code snippet representing the background image will look more legit to email service providers with alt text. Mention the dimensions of the image in the alt text to increase the chances of successful delivery.
Set an email’s background color as a fallback. In case the email service provider hides images due to the user’s preferences, add an email background color. For example, if your email background image is dark with white text on it, your message won’t be visible on the default white background. Choose the email background color similar to the shade of the original background image.
Test your background image. There’s only one way to know if your background images work. Send test emails to addresses belonging to different ESPs.
Email bounce rate
The email bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses in a mailing list that did not receive promotional messages because the recipients’ mail servers returned them. Bounces happen when emails cannot be delivered to email addresses.
High bounce rates hurt the sender’s reputation. It arises when marketers use mailing lists that have gone stale. Apart from that, errors when importing or entering addresses also cause both increased bounce rates and emails qualified as spam.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) set limits for unsubscribes, abuse, and bounces. When these rates are considerably high, ISPs can take action against marketers by issuing warnings or suspending their accounts altogether. With LIKE.TG, marketers can avoid unpleasant outcomes by creating and sending unique marketing campaigns with low bounce rates — this is achieved by painstakingly managing server reputation.
Average Email Bounce Rates
What’s considered the average bounce rate? Here is a selection of a few averages for soft and hard email bounce rates across various industries. This information is drawn from a comprehensive report by MailChimp:
Agriculture and food services: Soft bounce — 0.57%, hard bounce — 0.36%.
Architecture and construction: Soft bounce — 1.39%, hard bounce — 0.91%.
Business and finance: Soft bounce — 0.63%, hard bounce — 0.46%.
Computers and electronics: Soft bounce — 0.92%, hard bounce — 0.54%.
Creative services/agency: Soft bounce — 1.02%, hard bounce — 0.70%.
From these statistics, it’s easy to notice that neither the hard nor the soft bounces reach 2%. All figures that exceed this benchmark warrant investigations and the implementation of appropriate remedies.
How to Check Email Bounce Rate
After sending emails to a list of recipients, one must monitor results to know which areas need improvement. LIKE.TG email service allows just that: monitoring email campaign statistics. Once the emails are sent to contacts, LIKE.TG starts tracking statistics and compiles an email-delivery report. The sender can review results in “Campaign statistics” under the “My campaigns” tab. Marketers can follow up on delivery, opens, clicks, and bounces in the “Error statistics” tab.
How to Reduce the Email Bounce Rate
Establish permission-based email marketing
Verify your mailing list
Authenticate your emails with SPF and DKIM records
Send consistently
Send re-engagement campaigns and remove inactive subscribers
Monitor the email bounce rate for each campaign
When most of your emails do not get to the intended recipient’s inbox, the marketer’s reputation is affected, and the campaign goal is not achieved. However, there are a couple of things one can do to reduce bounces.
1. Establish permission-based email marketing
Permission-based or double opt-in marketing occurs when a subscriber confirms their email subscription twice. It helps marketers to avoid adding non-existent and invalid addresses to their mailing lists. First, a new visitor fills in a subscription form, and then a confirmation email is automatically sent to the contact to verify the subscription. LIKE.TG allows users to set up double opt-insubscription forms for free.
2. Verify your mailing list
Email verification helps keep your mailing list healthy. LIKE.TG Email Verifier detects invalid addresses on your list and provides you with a list of valid emails. This way, you stay out of the spam folder, save on email campaigns, and keep your deliverability high.
Follow this step-by-step guide to verify your mailing list.
3. Authenticate your emails with SPF and DKIM records
Sign emails with Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM) to add credibility and improve email deliverability. Using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) tech can also help marketers to tell email authenticators that the email they are sending is genuine. To generate SPF and DKIM records, go to “Service settings” and choose "Email Authentication."
4. Send consistently
With a consistent mailing schedule, subscribers are less likely to forget that they opted into get the emails. Develop a regular timetable for sending emails so that they are expected by subscribers and recipients’ servers too.
5. Send re-engagement campaigns and remove inactive subscribers
Try to re-engage subscribers who have gone cold using targeted campaigns. Perform regular mailing list cleanups to remove inactive recipients’ addresses that do not respond to the re-engagement messages.
6. Monitor the email bounce rate for each campaign
For each subsequent campaign, monitor the rate of bounced emails and improve the deliverability of the next one. One can track these results with LIKE.TG. If the bounce rate goes up, investigate to understand thecause and fix it.
Focus on creating a robust strategy, and LIKE.TG will make your emails get to the inbox!
eCommerce platform
An eCommerce platform is an end-to-end software solution that allows online retailers to manage their business. This type of service encompasses eCommerce website builders, accounting and inventory management systems, as well as customer service infrastructure.
In this video, a specialist from Printful compares 17 biggest eCommerce platforms. Check out the video to find out their best features.
An eCommerce platform is a lifesaver if you decide to launch an online shop from scratch or as an addition to a brick-and-mortar store. In this article, we’ll discuss why your business probably needs this service, list the essential features of a good eCommerce platform, and give five popular software solutions once over.
Why should you use an eCommerce platform?
Running an online store is a complex undertaking that requires many processes, from building a website to accepting payments and managing stocks. Software solutions allow you to manage all of these processes and take away the headache of dealing with each aspect individually.
eCommerce platforms have all the components you need to operate and grow your online business without complicating your day-to-day operations. Using an eCommerce platform is cheaper than creating software from scratch and more comfortable than using many plugins.
Elaborate eCommerce platforms facilitate the purchasing process for your customers, prevent system failures, technical issues, and help you troubleshoot them whenever they pop up. So, you can spend less time helping your clients with shopping and concentrate on improving your sales process and boosting your revenue.
All these features make eCommerce platforms worth your investment. Let’s get into the details and discover the features you should look for while choosing the best eCommerce solution for your business.
Features of an eCommerce Platform
Interface
Design options
Store management system
Payment processing
Security
Support
Promotion opportunities
Data consolidation
The number of online retailers in the world amounts to 7.1 million and continues to grow. It's no wonder that the market offers a great many eCommerce platforms. Figuring out a solution to meet your business’ needs can be a tough job. To pick the best service, evaluate the following aspects of any eCommerce platform you consider.
Interface
A user-friendly intuitive interface for webstore creation is a must for any eCommerce platform. However, you may flounder with building a website on some solutions. Some of them may require technical skills, such as HTML knowledge or WordPress experience.
To find the best and most convenient for you, test several platforms and go for the one you like the most. Look for a platform that lets you create not only product pages but also blog posts. This feature may come in handy when you decide to acquire new customers with content marketing or improve your website search results with a series of SEO-optimized articles.
Design options
Most eCommerce platforms offer countless ready-to-use designs and themes so you can create your webstore’s appearance quickly and easily. Pay attention to how many free and paid templates your solution provides. Look for additional designs in the platform’s community. It will help you save time and money.
On the other hand, you may have a vision of your future store or develop it as time passes. In this case, explore design customization opportunities your eCommerce platform provides. The best decision is to find a platform that offers a perfect balance between design freedom and a variety of pre-made templates.
Store management system
Management systems are the core of every eCommerce website, since they differentiate online stores from any other types of websites. To operate your shop, you need three frameworks:
The product management system lets an admin upload products to your website and manage listings. A quality solution should allow bulk uploads, categorizing and mapping products, setting up dynamic catalog filters like sorting, price range, color, size, and so on.
The order management system accounts for processing customers’ orders. To perform this task at a fast pace, it should include order tracking, email notifications, and shipping service API.
The return management system allows you to take care of your return policy. It should encompass return rules and types, place and approve requests, print invoices, update statuses, and so on.
Your eCommerce platform may offer these systems as part of the standard package or allow integration with services that provide them.
Payment processing
You can’t do business without accepting payments, and it is not as straightforward as it sounds. You should consider the currencies you operate with, the payment methods your customers prefer, tax systems, and more.
The main difficulty here is the payment gateway your eCommerce platform uses. A payment gateway is a processor that moves money from your customers’ accounts to your own. This component often limits the payment methods and determines the currencies your service can offer.
So, define the payment options your eCommerce platform supports out of the box. You can also learn which third-party services you can integrate with your software to expand its opportunities.
Security
You should protect your customer data at any cost. Data breaches and leaks will have devastating effects on your business. Thus, it’s crucial to make sure your eCommerce platform offers suitable security options.
To keep your transactions protected, make sure your eCommerce platform meets the PCI security standards – a 12-piece set of requirements for websites that work with payment information. Another aspect of a secure website is its SSL certificates. They are a type of file that lets a browser securely process sensitive transactions.
The features listed above are the base your eCommerce platform should provide or allow you to integrate with ease. However, many solutions go the extra mile and offer additional options, such as protection from fraud and DDoS attacks.
Support
Operating a web store, you will inevitably face technical issues. No matter how hard you try to minimize them, they will occur at some point. Support from an eCommerce platform can help you troubleshoot these problems instantly and reduce downtime.
When exploring the support your provider offers, start with any available documentation on their site. An extensive library of FAQs, how-tos, and guides will walk you through the main issues without needing to waste time on reaching a support team member. Another indicator of good support is the presence of forums or QA areas, where you can ask for advice from other users.
Finally, learn more about getting in touch with the support team. See which channels your eCommerce platform offers to reach specialists and how fast they resolve questions. You can also browse through reviews on third-party websites to find out how your service really deals with customers’ issues.
Promotion opportunities
The majority of eCommerce platforms offer different options to promote your web store. Many of these solutions lay beyond the standard package the service provides, so you need to figure out which of them will fit your eCommerce marketing strategy.
The main point to consider here is SEO, as 70% of marketers believe it to be a more efficient acquisition channel than PPC. Pay attention to SEO-friendly eCommerce platforms. They should allow you to use your domain name, add your blog, and collect customer reviews.
Remember the number one SEO trend – mobile optimization. As more than half of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, an eCommerce platform should provide your web store with a mobile version or mobile app.
Data consolidation
If you can't measure your webstore’s performance, you can’t manage it. Calculating your results is the only way to make timely changes and refine your business outcomes. However, using a bundle of tools for analytics may be tricky and time-consuming.
Make sure your eCommerce platform allows you to collect and store data, or supports integrations with analytics services. Struggling to understand what indicators to track? Follow our guide on the customer success metrics you need to keep an eye on to make sure your business is healthy.
These parameters may become inadequate as your business grows. Thus, pay attention to your eCommerce platform’s scalability. Another feature to look for is flexibility – it often comes in the form of integrations with third-party services. Make sure your solution supports integration with popular CRM, CMS, marketing automation software, and so on.
We’ve unpacked a few components of a high-quality eCommerce platform. If you’re in the market for a suitable solution, read on – our analysis of five popular services is waiting for you.
The 5 Best eCommerce Platforms
WooCommerce
Wix Stores
Shopify
BigCommerce
PrestaShop
eCommerce platforms differ tremendously, so make sure you check out a few before you make your decision. We assembled five solutions from market leaders to minor services to help create killer web stores. Let’s dig deeper!
WooCommerce
WooCommerce has the largest market share of all the eCommerce platforms. As the service operates on WordPress, you need to be tech-savvy and familiar with this CMS. If you are unfamiliar with WordPress, setting up a WooCommerce web store may not be for you. Don’t worry, there are lots of other options.
WooCommerce offers 23 customizable design themes. The service encompasses a wide variety of extensions so you can tailor your webstore to your most specific business needs. However, this eCommerce platform lacks scalability as the number of customers and orders grows, your website response time will slow down.
Thanks to the many add-ons available for WooCommerce, web stores made with this platform accept various credit cards, bank transfers, checks, and cash. You can accept payments with 140 region-specific gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, and Amazon Pay. Subscriptions and deposits are also available.
WooCommerce extensions cover such aspects as product and order management, shipping, automated tax calculations, mobile apps for iOS and Android, marketing integrations, and more. You can couple this platform with LIKE.TG to automatically export email addresses, set up automated campaigns, and send trigger, transactional and promotional emails. These tactics will improve your revenue and relationships with buyers – read our setup manual to get started.
WooCommerce supports the technical aspects of creating and maintaining a website with a knowledge base and a users’ forum. You can also hire developers recommended by the platform to customize your webstore.
To help you measure your business performance, WooCommerce consolidates data on your revenue, customers, products, taxes, and so on. In the example below, you can see the revenue results for a chosen period and compare it with the previous year’s outcomes on the graph.
Pricing: Free platform with paid add-ons.Free plan: 30-day money-back guarantee.
Wix Stores
Wix is a well-known website and landing page creator that has added eCommerce features in the last several years. The main advantage of this platform is its drag-and-drop editor and the abundance of customizable design templates. The service even offers to build your webstore automatically via the Wix ADI tool.
This eCommerce platform also takes care of SEO for your webstore, offering a personalized plan. Among other useful features are in-depth site performance analytics, social and email marketing tools, and a boatload of integration options. Wix Stores offers many payment methods including credit and debit cards, PayPal, and Wix Payments. The system automatically selects the best option for your region. You get access to order and shipping management systems, as well as a tax management tool. Better yet, Wix Stores lets you sell through several channels, such as Facebook and Instagram.
One of the downsides of this service is its relatively low storage, which makes Wix an unsuitable solution for large or rapidly growing businesses. However, the service provides on-page support during setup, as well as 24/7 phone and chat-based support.
The interface of Wix Stores is simple. The main dashboard shows you total revenue, the number of products sold, and the amount of transactions.
Free plan: Available forever for website building. The service doesn’t allow you to sell anything on this plan. Pricing: From $25/month.
Shopify
One of the best-known eCommerce platforms, Shopify, offers an intuitive drag-and-drop editor for website creation. Design options include 9 free and 64 paid pre-made themes sorted by industry, visual style, and so on.
Shopify lets you work with a wide range of currencies and accepts payments with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Google, and Apple Pay. The service has PCI compliance and 3D Secure checkouts for data protection.
Among other advantages of this eCommerce platform are a shipping management system, special prices for carrier services, advanced analytics, and more. To help you deal with all these tools, Shopify offers a support team, help center, and a handful of forums.
Shopify tweaks your SEO a little, although web stores made with this eCommerce platform still demonstrate mediocre results on search rankings. However, the service provides you with plenty of other marketing opportunities. For instance, it supports integration with LIKE.TG.
LIKE.TG automatically exports your customers’ addresses to the mailing list. This helps you set up effective email campaigns to keep your customers engaged and boost your business’ ROI. Integrate Shopify with LIKE.TG through Zapier – follow our guide on integration or contact our support team.
Shopify gives you all the essential information about your business in real time. In the picture below, the Home tab shows todays’ sales, orders, sessions, and the number of visitors. Knowing best-performing channels and top products, you can adjust your tactics to drive better performance.
Pricing: From $29/month.Free plan: 14-day free trial.
BigCommerce
This eCommerce platform is a great solution for larger brands and brick-and-mortar stores that want to accept orders online. The service offers a wide variety of marketing solutions out of the box. They include high-quality SEO, the opportunity to launch a blog, abandoned cart saver, email marketing features, and more.
BigCommerce lets you apply more than 55 payment solutions, including Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The platform meets the PCI security standard and offers protection from fraud and chargebacks.
The heart of BigCommerce is its order management system with inventory management tools, the possibility to create personalized shopping experiences for different segments of customers, and partnerships with shipping and payment providers.
BigCommerce users get access to community forums and live support. The platform claims that the support team solves 85% of issues after a single call. Apart from that, the service helps you get personalized business audits and advice from experts.
You can start building your website by choosing one of the many pre-designed themes. Access them through the BigCommerce interface, sort by industry or price, as shown in the picture. To adjust templates, you don’t need any technical skills. However, there are advanced customization opportunities available with HTML and CSS editor.
Pricing: From $29/month.Free plan: 15-day trial.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop is another eCommerce platform that requires technical skills. To set up a webstore with this service, you need knowledge in HTML, CSS, or PHP. Another option to consider is hiring a developer – PrestaShop provides you with partner agencies’ to contact.
The strongest part of this service is its design themes – PrestaShop offers over 2000 templates, most of which come free of charge. The service lets you easily customize the colors, images, layout, and typography. To make major design changes, you need technical skills.
PrestaShop supports a great many payment options, like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, as well as prepayment, payment on delivery, or in-store payment. With this platform, you can manage orders in real-time, create invoices automatically, and connect with partner delivery companies.
To promote your web store, PrestaShop lets you create promo codes, product offers, a blog, and more out of the box. For better results, the eCommerce platform offers you tons of available integrations with various marketing automation services.
Integrate the platform with LIKE.TG to exchange email addresses between two services easily. It will help you implement an advanced email marketing strategy, create automated flows for constant engagement with customers, and drive better business results. Get started by reading our guide on setting up the integration.
PrestaShop has a technical support team, open documentation, blog, and tutorials translated into eight languages. You can also consult with other platform’s users via forums.
This eCommerce service provides you with in-depth analytics, as you can see below. The dashboard includes data on sales, orders, cart value, visits, conversion rate, profit, and more.
Pricing: Free platform with paid add-ons.
eCommerce platforms enable you to create and handle your webstore without coding or hiring a team of professionals in the first stages of launching a business. These services provide you with additional marketing opportunities. For faster growth and better performance, you may need more specific and advanced marketing solutions. Integrate your platform with LIKE.TG and make the most of your online business with email marketing, SMS messages, web push notifications, and chatbots.
Email API
An email API is an application programming interface that allows companies to access an email service’s functionality, including creating and sending email campaigns, managing email templates and email lists, analyzing email marketing metrics, setting up domain authentication, and more.
Why should you use API in email marketing?
Most email services allow marketers without any coding skills to create email campaigns, templates, manage their mailing lists, etc., by using handy, intuitive tools. However, under the skin of this user-friendly interface, all these operations are run via API; this tech stuff is just hidden to simplify the email marketing process.
Tech-savvy users and companies that work in tandem with developers can access API directly and use its functionality by integrating it into their workflow in seconds. For example, you may have a robust template builder, so you don’t need to switch to a template builder provided by your email service. It’s not a problem since you can decide which functions to utilize in your email marketing strategy with API.
Let’s get specific and find out how email API works.
How does email API work?
Let’s say you are a customer in a restaurant. When you are ready to make an order, you ask a waiter to communicate it to the kitchen. Once the food is prepared, a waiter gets it back to you. API works similarly to a waiter. API is a communication language between machines, programs, software, etc. It consists of a request and response.
A request is a set of data, for instance, a subject line, content of your email campaign, email list for sending, sender’s address, date of sending, etc. While a response is a server’s reply that tells the request has been taken and processed, and an email campaign has been created.
It takes a split second and it’s much faster than creating an email campaign manually from your account.
Email API can process up to ten of the following requests per second:
create email lists;
add an email template;
send an email campaign;
retrieve statistics.
Let’s find out how to use email API.
How to Use LIKE.TG’s API
After you register with our service, go to your account settings and activate LIKE.TG’s REST API.
Follow the email API documentation to utilize the following features:
email list management;
building and scheduling email campaigns;
creating email templates;
authentication settings;
segmentation and personalization of your messages.
Read an article on our blog to learn how to integrate LIKE.TG with your business via API.
Economic value added
Economic value added (EVA) is a measure that reveals the financial performance of a business based on its residual income. It aims to define the value a company generates with the help of the invested funds and improve the generated returns for shareholders.
Why is economic value added important?
Entrepreneurs looking for a measure to figure out the performance of their business often consider their economic value added which is rapidly becoming a preferred indicator. Small and big companies use it to evaluate their actual financial performance.
With EVA, you can get to know where your company directs the invested funds of shareholders and find out whether a certain business can create shareholder wealth. It implies that a company should always make everything possible to enlarge shareholder’s value and be in demand. Simply put, EVA reflects the actual performance of a firm.
Besides depicting businesses’financial performance, the measure encourages companies’ management toevaluate their assets and expenses during the decision-making process. However, the calculations of this indicator can be time-consuming.
EVA can be measured only for a particular timeframe, and it can’t determine the future performance of a particular company. Moreover, if a firm is in the middle of reorganization or considers making big investments of capital, it’s also challenging to obtain this measure.
Apart from reflecting on the performance of a company, EVA can help you find out even more essential facts about your business. In the next part, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of this calculation.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Economic Value Added
The value is common among entrepreneurs who need to see how their business performs with the invested capital and discover some related facts. This measure:
serves as one of the methods to obtain financial data that aims at evaluating your business;
shows how funds are managed;
helps to reveal the working capital availability after the recoupment of its actual opportunity cost;
is used by management to be aware of the company’s situation and check whether their firm performs successfully;
indicates a connection between the use of capital and operating margin;
helps see the opportunities your business has and make improvements to achieve them.
Economic value added is widely used by businesses as an evaluation tool. Nevertheless, you should also be aware of its disadvantages:
it can’t help you define how effectively capital holders use retained profits through project management;
it doesn’t consider the size of your business;
it might overstress the need for businesses to generate results immediately;
it can’t estimate the return on expenses.
This calculation is an essential step for any business. If you’ve decided to estimate EVA for your company, you will need to use a specific formula.
How to Calculate Economic Value Added
EVA is based on residual wealth. It can be estimated by deducting your company’s cost of capital from its profit. The formula was created to calculate the actualeconomic profit of a specific business.
Below you can see the formula with the help of which you can calculate your economic value added.
Where:
NOPAT = Net Operating Profits After Tax.WACC = Weighted Average Cost of Capital.Invested capital = Equity + Long-Term Debt at the Start of the Period.
Economic value added is based on the idea that a business brings profit when it creates additional wealth for the shareholders and leads to higher returns than the cost of capital.
Now that you know how to calculate this essential measure, it’s time to review several ways of increasing EVA for your brand.
How to Increase Economic Value Added
You can improve your EVA by increasing revenues or reducing capital expenses.
Increase profit
To increase revenue, you can consider well-known methods of raising the prices of your products or increasing the number of goods sold to your target audience.
If you decide to charge consumers more for your products, the profit margin will increase. Yet you can’t rule out the possibility that some of your clients will refuse to pay more for a product if you have not enhanced its quality, features, and benefits. In this case, there is a high probability of a decrease in demand and, as a result, a decrease in revenue. That’s why it’s advisable not to increase prices drastically.
It’s a known fact that you can also increase your revenues by selling more goods and services. To meet the demand, you need to produce a considerable number of products. Ensure that the manufacturing cost doesn’t exceed the revenue you can receive.
Simply put, if you want to improve your EVA by increasing the company’s profits, make sure that the marginal revenue is bigger than the marginal costs associated with the production. For example, there is no point in spending $200,000 on productionto earn $150,000.
Reduce capital expenses
Operating expenses and marginal productivity influence your net capital costs. As an entrepreneur, you can decrease operating expenses by asking your creditor to revise the terms of the contract and the interest rate. Try to make the interest rate lower so that you can pay less money. Besides, negotiate a lower cost for the space you rent for your business purposes.
Reaching economies of scale empowers your company to improve marginal productivity. It will enable you to find ways to produce the same quantity of goods at a lower cost. For this purpose, consider creating a better production plan or using new technology.
EVA is a crucial measure that can show you the value your business generates. This, in turn, allows you to improve the generated profit by reducing capital expenses or increasing your revenue.