Lately, I've often heard that email marketing is losing its value. That it no longer generates as much sales as it used to. But is it really so? At Malinca, we generate as much as 20% of total sales from email marketing.
Before we move on to concrete examples, let's briefly discuss what email marketing is. Email marketing or e-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing. It is suitable for sending newsletters, event invitations, notifications about promotions, news, etc. All you need for an email campaign is a good customer database and a well-crafted email message.
At Malinca, we send two emails a week to our entire database. We have a segmented database of buyers and non-buyers, but most of the emails we send go to the entire database. Two main advantages that email marketing presents for Malinca:
1. Cost-effective form of advertising and informing customers or potential clients (the price for most mass email marketing tools is determined based on the number of email addresses we have).
2. Analytics – precise measurement of response how many messages were opened, which links were clicked, and who opened them. Monitoring various statistics and the success of executed actions, thus making it easier to plan future campaigns.
For sending and preparing email campaigns, I recommend using one of the following tools: Mailerlite (this is currently used at Malinca), Sendy, E-poštar, GetResponse or Mailchimp.
Malinca's current database counts around 40,000 different email addresses. We have gathered these within a year and a half since we started operating in various ways. Let me list the 3 main ones:
- Free e-books with healthy recipes
- Online prize games
- Newsletter subscription on the homepage of the website
At Malinca, we generate about 20% of total sales with email marketing. Now I will highlight 5 main features of a good and sales-effective email that have been proven to work for us:
1. It's necessary to capture attention with the subject line
The subject line determines how many people will open your message. It's important that the subject line arouses curiosity – I'm sending you 5 subject lines that have been the most successful for us so far:
2. The sender must be known
I always send emails under my name (Nastja, Nastja Kramer, or Malinca Nastja) and from my email address nastja@malinca.si.
3. Content must be relevant
It's important that the content relates to the things you are dealing with. In our mailing, there are always 3 things: introductory content (news, a short article about healthy eating or a particular food, a question to the reader, a personal confession/experience, ...), a healthy recipe and a sales promotion. It's just that we are dependent on online sales, and completely non-sales emails are very rare for us. It's much better to highlight just one thing and a link, but with us, so much is always happening that it's simply not possible 🙂
4. Personal approach and personalization
Our email communication is on a friendly level, we address readers informally, and we often use their name in emails. We often ask them for their opinion on recipes, new projects, their opinion on a particular food, product, and thus involve them in building the brand. Because without them, we wouldn't exist either!
5. Avoiding images
We rarely use images in emails, as testing has shown that emails without images and other clutter are more read, clicked, and bring greater sales effects. Even though there are no images and special formatting in the email, we try to make the email clear with shorter lines, colors, paragraphs, and logical sequence.
DON'T FORGET! You must always give the reader the option to unsubscribe from receiving your emails.
