Email Marketing: how to enhance your talent through emails

Part one: introduction to email marketing

First of all, if you are not already doing it, you absolutely need to start collecting emails from your audience. This way you can start putting together a list of people interested in you and your work. This first step already allows you to identify a part of the public that wants something more from you than what everyone can find on the internet or on social media.

Usually, to get a user to leave you an email you need to offer an incentive: it could be a welcome discount for the first order or the promise to keep the user updated with exclusive or preview news.

The first step is usually the newsletter, which is a series of updates about your brand or your products that you will send to subscribers on a fixed basis. For example, you can send one email a week or one a month. Newsletters are a great way to start and will help you keep in touch with your audience, but they have a limit: by sending the same message to everyone you won't be able to personalize it for each person, risking sending messages that are irrelevant to some.

1. The essence of email marketing:

• What is email marketing? Email marketing is a communication strategy that consists of sending targeted and personalized emails to your customers and potential buyers.
• The power of email: Emails can be an intimate and direct tool for communicating with your audience. Unlike social media, where content can easily get lost in the multitude of posts, emails are a personal channel where you can create a deeper connection with your recipients.

2. Benefits of Email Marketing for Artists and Craftsmen:

• Create an emotional connection: you can share your story, your passion and your creative process with your audience. This helps create an emotional bond with customers, who feel involved and appreciated. Every message is an opportunity to show your values ​​and improve the image people have of your brand.
• Promote your work : You can showcase your work in an eye-catching and engaging way. Send images of your new products, show behind the scenes of your production or share success stories from your satisfied customers.
• Build customer loyalty : Regular emails, such as newsletters or exclusive customer offers, help maintain interest in your work and encourage customers to return to your site to purchase again. The more you manage to personalize the message for each individual, the more you will be able to retain people.

3. How to create an effective email marketing campaign

The difference between simple emails with updates and a successful email marketing campaign revolves around three fundamental points:

1. Segment your audience and create personalized customer journeys
2. Automate the process
3. Monitor and optimize the strategy

1. Segment your audience and create personalized customer journeys :

The underlying principle is very simple. Imagine the journey that takes a customer from initial interest in a product or service to purchase and beyond. Obviously for each person this path will be unique, but in any case this will be made up of different phases and different touch points . These are the moments when the customer or prospect comes into contact with your brand such as the website, social media, emails and more.

Typical stages of a customer journey include:

• Awareness : the person discovers the existence of your brand or products/services.
• Consideration: The person begins to consider the possibility of purchasing your product and compares the available options.
• Decision : The person makes the decision to buy from you and completes the purchase.
• Loyalty: after the purchase, the customer becomes a loyal customer and potential promoter of your brand.

Recognizing what stage the person you want to send the email to is in is essential to personalizing the message in the right way. For example, a welcome email for someone who has not yet purchased one of your products or for someone who signs up to your contact list at the same time as placing an order on the site must have different content.

Dividing contacts based on certain characteristics is called segmentation. In addition to where they are in their journey, you can segment your audience based on interests, purchasing preferences and behaviors.

To make all this possible it is necessary to resort to automation.

2. Automation

What is automation in marketing?

Automation in marketing refers to the use of software and tools to automate certain tasks, reducing the need for human intervention. Sending emails and audience segmentation are among the main activities for which automation is used.

In practice you can send automatic emails to your customers (or potential customers) based on certain triggers or actions. The most popular automations are the welcome email, the thank you email after a purchase, and the follow-up emails for those who abandoned their cart without completing the order.

Automations and customer journeys are closely linked and can work together to provide a unique customer experience. You'll be able to build lasting relationships with your audience by offering valuable content to keep them interested and engaged.

You will be able to set up simple automations such as the welcome email or more complex and extended paths over time. The fundamental pieces of automations are triggers , conditions and actions. A trigger is some user action that triggers our automation or series of automations. It can be subscribing to the mailing list, a purchase or even viewing one of our contents. Once our automation is triggered we can use conditions to filter users before sending our message.

Let's take an example: we want to send a thank you email after the first purchase on our site by a new customer. The trigger will be the purchase while the condition could be the exclusion from the recipients for those who have already purchased other products, in order to send this special thank you only to those who have actually purchased for the first time.
Since this is a new customer and perhaps even a new member of our contact list, another condition could concern the timing of the sending: if the person has just received the welcome email, we don't want them to immediately receive another email feeling "invaded". ” from our messages. To avoid this we set a condition that ensures that no other communications have been sent to the same user for a certain period of time, for example a week.

It may seem complicated, but the main specialized email marketing software such as Mailchimp , Klaviyo and Brevo , to name a few, give you the ability to set up most of the main automations in a fairly simple and guided way. If your ecommerce is built with Shopify you can use the Shopify Mail App and the Flow App to automate many aspects of your business directly on your admin.

3. Measurement of results and optimization of the strategy

Measuring the results you get with your email marketing campaigns is essential for several reasons:

• Evaluate actual performance: you will be able to understand what works and what can be improved and you will be able to make informed decisions and invest time and energy in the most effective tactics.
• Understanding audience engagement : By analyzing your campaign metrics you can understand how engaged and interested your audience is in your content. This helps you identify the themes or types of content that generate the most interest and deliver more relevant messages to your recipients.
• Detect potential problems: Measuring results helps you spot any issues or obstacles that could be negatively impacting your campaigns. For example, you may find that many people unsubscribe from your list after receiving a particular email, signaling a possible problem in content or segmentation.
• Optimize conversions: By measuring open rates, clicks, and conversions, you can optimize your emails to increase conversions and reach your marketing goals. You can test different Call to Actions, email subjects, and layouts to find out which elements work best.

Key metrics to monitor:

1. Open rate: Indicates how many recipients opened your email compared to the total number of emails sent. A high open rate indicates good audience engagement.
2. Click-Through Rate: Measures how many recipients clicked on links within your email compared to the total number of emails opened. A high Click-Through rate indicates that the contents of your email are relevant and interesting to your audience.
3. Conversion rate: Indicates how many recipients took the desired action after clicking the link in your email. Usually the action in question is the purchase of a product, but it can also be the registration for an event or other specific actions.
4. Unsubscribe Rate: Measure how many recipients unsubscribed from your list after receiving your email. A high rate could indicate a content or segmentation issue.

Other important aspects are A/B testing and frequency testing . The first consists of testing two different versions of the same content by sending one version to half of the recipients and the version with the change we want to test to the other half. You can test different versions of subject lines, calls to action , images, and layouts to find out what works best.

By testing different sending frequencies you can find the right balance to maintain contact with your audience without being intrusive.

In conclusion, automation and the customer journey can work closely together to provide personalized and engaging experiences for your customers. Measuring the results of your campaigns and optimizing your strategy based on the data collected will help you achieve success in your email marketing and build lasting relationships with your audience. Remember that digital marketing is an ever-evolving process, so be flexible and willing to experiment with new ideas to achieve your goals.

If you want to think together about how to create or improve your email marketing strategy you can contact me on Leone Digitale