What is Email Marketing and How Does it Work

Every morning when you open your mailbox, there are emails from e-commerce companies and service providers telling you about their ongoing offers or their recently launched products. This is a part of email marketing, one of the largest and most effective ways to convert your audience into paying customers.  

In this post, we will cover what is email marketing, what is an email campaign, what is email automation, what does lead magnet mean, and everything that you need to know for successfully executing an email campaign. 

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a separate vertical of digital marketing and is used to generate sales by delivering commercial, informative, and transactional emails. eCommerce companies extensively use it for generating sales and creating an active touch base with the customers. 

It is one of the oldest and most commonly used forms of digital communication and still rules the ecommerce and affiliate marketing industry with over 4 billion active users.  This user base is consistently growing with the passing years, have a look at the stats below -

“The ROI of email campaigns is much higher than any other digital marketing activity.”

Email marketing can be as basic as sending abandoned cart emails to customers or as complex as sending bulk sequential emails and nurturing campaigns to generate long-term sales and build an active relationship with customers

How does Email Marketing work? 

Contrary to popular belief, Email marketing is not that complex. In simple terms, you lure a customer and get their contact using a lead magnet, then target the customer periodically with a motive to persuade them to buy your product. The key to execute a successful campaign, that drives sales, is that you must create a solid strategy keeping in mind your customer base and requirements. 

Here are two essential elements that you will need for driving an effective Email marketing campaign, have a look - 

• Email list - for starting your email marketing campaign, you need a database of authentic email addresses. This data is either purchased or collected using lead magnets. 
• Email Service Provider - Once you have email contacts, you will need an Email Marketing Platform, often termed as Email Service Provider. This platform will help you manage your Email Contact list, automate and schedule emails. In a nutshell, you will be able to develop, deploy, manage and analyze your email campaigns using this platform. 

Once both of these elements are in place, you can start the process! 

• Develop a Robust Email Marketing Strategy - You first need to develop your marketing strategy with a clearly defined goal and audience. 
• Define User Journey - In your next step, define your user’s journey so that an automated email can be sent depending upon their interaction and website behavior. 
• Create Campaigns - Once you decide the user journey, you will know how many campaigns you need to create. You can easily make these campaigns using any email automation tool. 
• Conduct A/B Testing - Shoot different types of Emails to users and then analyze their stats and responses to know which kind of campaign is bringing in more favorable results.
• Analyze and Segment - The last step is to segment your email contact list based on their interaction with the mailers and other factors. Segmenting email lists helps you opt for different marketing strategies for different users.

How to capture Email Leads?

An extensive and authentic Emailing list is a valuable asset for a business. According to research by Hubspot, approximately 80% of entrepreneurs believe that customer retention and sales increases with Email marketing. 

The most common way of capturing leads is to ask your website visitors to provide you their email in return for a free lead magnet. This can be very effective if the lead magnet is valuable and the pop-up asking for the email address is timed correctly. Asking website visitors for emails should not be done the  moment they click on your website or scan your post / homepage as this will impact user behavior on the website. For example, if a pop-up for mail subscription comes up as soon as someone visits your website, then there are chances that the bounce rate might increase as this pop-up will be an obstacle for them to focus on your website’s contents. The pop-up could be timed to show up 10 secs post their scrolling or if the reader has read a certain part of your post. 

If you are thinking about how to generate leads for email marketing - the listed below are some of the best opt-in forms used to capture email leads - 

• Content Locks 
• Give Away Upgraded Content 
• Contact Information Mandatory for Starting Chats 
• Sticky Top Bar Form
• Pop-Up 
• Slide-in

 You can read all about them in our section for Thrive leads here:

What is a Lead Magnet?

Lead Magnets are free content, resources, tools, templates, or anything valuable that a customer gets after providing you their contact details such as their name and email id. The thought of getting  a value add content, for free, acts as a motivation to for customers to share their contact details. 

Remember your lead magnet should be highly compelling, here are some top attributes that you must keep in mind while designing your lead magnet - 

• It should solve a user problem
• It should be mailed instantly  
• the content should be of refined quality and must replicate the expertise 
• it should be usable content 

What are the best kinds of Lead Magnets? 

There is a wide range of lead magnets that you can choose from, but selecting the type of lead magnet should depend upon your audience, niche, and other such factors. Below is the list of commonly used lead magnets - 

• Webinar
• Pre-Designed Templates
• Whitepaper
• Ebook or Mini Guide
• Product Samples or Trials
• Reviewed Evaluation (like analysis of a website) 
• Quiz, Poll or Survey
• Training Videos 
• Case Studies

Where can you get Lead Magnets for free? 

Creating compelling and valuable lead magnets requires thorough planning and in-depth knowledge about the subject, which can be time-consuming task and may require you to spend some resources as well. The most common and effective lead magnets are ebooks. Ebooks act as an incentive for people looking for more knowledge on a particular subject. For instance, if your website is about making money, then people are motivated to read more about how they can make more money or changing their money psychology, both of which can be great ebooks. There are various services available on freelancing websites that offer lead magnet / ebook creation services for cheap. There is also a free website where you can download these books and share with your audience without any copyright issues. 

Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks from where you can download all sorts of bookstand printed material for free. The website has a massive selection of copyright free books that you can pair keeping in mind your business, audience and website’s niche. There are various other websites, which offer similar ebooks and lead magnets for free but Project Gutenberg tops the list for us!

Best Software to capture Email Leads 

Lead capturing softwares are quintessential for your email marketing strategy. These platforms help turning your website traffic into subscribers and later customers through email marketing. There is an extensive list of such tools; some of them are listed below, have a look - z

• Thrive Leads 
• Hubspot 
• Contactually
• SharpSpring 
• Yieldify
• Keap
• Pardot

Thrive Leads is a leading and one of the most powerful list-building plugin. The best part of Thrive Leads is that it is primarily focused on conversion. Thrive leads makes the task of getting emails easier by offering a variety of features such as lightbox, pop-ups, ribbons etc. Once you have the leads, you can sync that to your list, maintained in an Email Service provider, and begin targeting your audience for sale conversions.  

It is important to remember that though Thrive Leads is one-stop solution for your growing email lists, you still need an Email Service provider for sending emails to those users.

Why choose Thrive Leads to capture leads?

Most software or tools designed for capturing emails don’t provide much options for opt-in forms. Thrive Leads offers a plethora of opt-in form options. Moreover, features like A/B testing and smart links help you build a long email list without hindering user experience. 

This all-in-one list building solution allows you to build each and every type of opt-in form to maximize conversion. Below is the list of opt-in forms which you can create using Thrive Leads - 

• Sticky Ribbon - is one of the best opt-in forms as it remains stuck on the top of the screen like a ribbon, even when the user scrolls down the page. 
• ThriveBox or PopUp Lightbox - An attention-grabbing pop-up or an unblockable overlay is displayed over the content requesting for basic contact details.
• In-Line Forms - These opt-in forms are automatically inserted at the bottom of posts or anywhere on the website using a shortcode.
• Screen Filler Overlay - This is also one of the best opt-in forms for gaining user attention as it covers the entire screen and can’t be ignored by the user. 
• 2-Step Opt-In Form - this type of opt-in form creates a simple two-step process for signing up, as a lightbox opens up as soon as the user clicks on the given link or button.
• Content Lock-In these types of opt-in forms, content is revealed only after the user fills the sign-up form. Hence, it is also one of the popular  opt-in forms as it ensures that if the user is interested in reading the content; then they will end up signing up.
• Slide-In - these types of opt-in forms are pretty popular as they are less intrusive and more attention-grabbing. These opt-in forms appear on the screen from the corner just like a pop-up but don’t end up blocking the content. 
• Scroll Mat - It is a unique opt-in form as it slides in from the top and pushes the content down, eventually filling the entire screen. 
• Opt-In Widget - This is one of the most used opt-in forms as it appears on the sidebar or on other widget areas of the website. This type of form doesn’t interfere with the user experience while users explore the website. 
• Yes/No & Multiple Choice Forms - This type of opt-in form offers users a choice to say no, which is much appreciated. These types of forms get you the users who are genuinely looking forward to your email.

Apart from offering every type of opt-in form, Thrive Leads also provides various other benefits and features such as Advanced A/B testing, innovative exit options, beautiful pre-designed templates for almost every niche, detailed statistics, actionable reports, and advanced analytics targeting

Best tools to manage Email Marketing

For effectively handling your customer base and smooth implementation of your email marketing campaigns, you must switch to email automation. 

Email automation helps you schedule email, personalize it, categorize users, shoot emails by user behavior on websites and a lot more. Thus, automating emails reduces the manual input and increases the revenue, as well as the effectiveness of the Email campaigns. 

Today, we have a plethora of tools and email service providers to help businesses build a successful email marketing strategy and scale up their revenue. Services and features offered by every tool are more or less similar. However, certain tools top the list for providing unique services and a better customer experience. 

Below listed are the top 5 tools for managing email marketing; lets' get to know them in detail.