Email marketing is perhaps one of the longest-lived digital marketing strategies, and if you look at your inbox on any given day, you can see that it’s still alive and well. However, chances are that you don’t necessarily spend a lot of time looking at those emails, which may raise the question as to whether or not these practices are truly effective. So to explore that notion, let’s take a look at some key industry statistics:

• 93% of B2B marketers use email for content distribution to clients
• 80% of professionals see email as a key part of customer retention
• Over 59% of marketers see email as their greatest source of ROI

So perhaps the question isn’t “Is email marketing still useful?” maybe it’s something more like “What can I do to get the most out of it?”. An email marketing strategy is the key starting point. Here’s how to put that together.

What makes email marketing in Australia unique?

One thing that we should mention is that compared to the U.S. or other major business hubs, Australia has a few unique traits that will impact how you put your digital marketing together. These include:

Strict anti-spam law

The Spam Act in Australia requires you to have consent from anyone that you send marketing emails to. After this, you need to make sure your emails clearly state you as the sender, have your contact information, and are easy to unsubscribe from. Failing to adhere to these rules could result in major penalties.

Slow internet

Depending on the region of the country, the internet speed may be on the slow side. This means that users may be more prudent when they open emails. Slow internet also means emails will take longer to load, which means large images or broken links cause your emails to have an even longer loading time. Thus, they will be unlikely to get traction.

Three time zones

This may not necessarily seem like a major issue at first, but statistics show that different audiences are more likely to look at/respond to marketing emails at different times of the day. When you’re scheduling when to send your emails, make sure you keep each time zone in mind.

6 Steps To Getting Started In Email Marketing

With this in mind, you can start to move to launching your email campaign properly. Here’s a breakdown of the 6 major steps you need to tackle.

1. Determine your audience and business goals

This is pretty much the usual case for any marketing campaign. However, because there’s so much competition in email, it’s important that you really understand what your audience is going to respond to. For example, companies looking to target families may want to provide coupons or some form of savings promotion. B2B companies may focus more on whitepapers and other industry knowledge.

Equally important is figuring out the ultimate goal of your email campaign. If you’re an e-commerce company, is the ultimate goal of your campaign to inspire potential customers to make a purchase? Or, are you more focused on getting people to your site and letting the web copy make the ultimate conversion? This will alter how you construct and schedule your emails.

2. Plan your sales funnel

As we just mentioned, different companies are going to have different purposes for emails, but all elements boil down to the sales funnel. Marketing emails can be planted at different stages of the sales funnel, which will generally impact what they contain.

• Top of the sales funnel: The main purpose at this level is getting cold audiences to become subscribers. This is generally best accomplished through a free offer, discounts, or perhaps exclusive e-books/whitepapers to download.
• Middle of the sales funnel: At this level, you’re focusing on what you’re going to send subscribers on your mailing list on a regular basis to keep them interested. This generally manifests through other offers or perhaps a newsletter with relevant industry details.
• Bottom of the sales funnel: Think of this as a way to clinch those leads that come to your site via email marketing, utilising methods like popups, banners on entrance pages or even PPC with your remarketing audience that will lead to the certain landing page with the final offer.  

3. Gather the mailing list

No marketing plan is going to work without a strong, constantly-replenished list of leads. There are a few ways you can go about lead generation but here are the most effective options.

• A landing page with contact form. This is pretty basic, using your other marketing such as social media or guest posts to get people to your site to sign up with some sort of offer.
• Pop-up with a contact form on your website. This fulfills a similar role, but it is catered to people already using your site for other reasons, like an organic search result or already making a purchase.

4. Choosing an email marketing platform

Manually creating and sending emails to each prospect is impossible to do in a timely manner. Keeping track with a marketing platform is essential both for efficiency as well as helping to implement changes if you’re not happy with the results. So, here are five of the most useful email marketing platforms in Australia, and some of the unique traits and benefits of each.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp allows you to use a basic drag-and-drop builder to simplify the creative aspect, as well as create your own automation or use their existing formats. You can also take advantage of real-time analytics to see how your campaigns are performing.

Infusionsoft (Keap)

You can use the Keap app to build emails and set up your broadcasts all at the same time. Perhaps one of the more notable features is the ability to create followup campaigns based on user action.

HubSpot

While Hubspot has building and automation tools like the rest of the platforms on this list, it excels at analytics by offering both real-time analytics and A/B testing to improve your campaigns.

Salesforce

Being a sales platform first and foremost, Salesforce allows a lot of scalability so you can craft emails to individual customers on a larger basis.

Zoho

Zoho places an emphasis on security and privacy, which is important when it comes to managing Australian regulations.

5. Involving visitors at the bottom of the sales funnel

There are other elements you can include at the bottom of your sales funnel to make sure that your marketing prospects ultimately become customers. These include: 

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Affiliate marketing

6. Maintenance

Let’s say that you use all the steps above that we’ve discussed and see some solid traction and conversions from your email. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t stop there. Upkeep for this strategy is key and a digital marketing agency is a great way to help you see regular returns from your emails for some time to come. Key features include:

• Helping you attract more visitors by replenishing your email list and removing customers that no longer fit your goals.
• Supporting and integrating whichever email platform you decide to use. 
• Managing content, including helping develop new creative and schedule your emails at optimal times. This may include creating and sending different emails to different customer segments.

An effective cold email marketing campaign is built on a variety of different key pieces, from having a useful starter list of leads to reach out to choosing the right platform to service your niche. And of course, we can’t neglect actually having effective creativity to go in the email itself. Because of the amount of work and focus it takes to put all this together, it’s easy to see how a lot of companies put together email efforts that are ultimately half-baked or ineffective. For smaller companies lower on bandwidth, but that still want to see the top benefits, looking to an email marketing service provider in Melbourne is a solid path to take.