A $42 return on every $1 spent on digital marketing sounds ridiculous, right?
However, according to a 2019 study, that’s the lucrative ROI of email marketing. Email campaigns – including free bulk email service – transcend sending a mass email to your customer list. Expert digital marketers understand that, when it comes to audience networks, emails reign supreme over social media channels. You can achieve such immense ROI by using the right bulk email marketing services and the full suite of email marketing software tools. It is simple. But how?
What Is Bulk Email Service?
A bulk email service is a dedicated platform that allows you to send mass emails to your email list and connect with your audience. Bulk email services automate email marketing, and the emails usually comprise pamphlets, newsletters, products, images, or any other form of digital media, depending on the sender.
You may have used Gmail and Outlook before using a bulk mailing service. But by now, you know that they are not equipped to provide you with the best email campaign results and performance monitoring on a large scale. Bulk email services – including marketing automation and transactional email – vary from service to service, but all serve a common goal: to increase brand awareness and woo customers to act on the email.
Why Your Business Needs A Bulk Email Service
Many successful businesses use bulk emailing services to reach their audience en masse and automate emailing – think sequences and streamlined email sending. Emailing, which has evolved from the blast sends in the Yahoo days, enables companies to create a personalized relationship with their audience. A simple “Happy Birthday” followed by 50% off on an entrée at your restaurant has a better conversion rate than bland display ads. The average millennial spends about 6.4 hours a day looking at their emails. Such statistics are a gold mine for email marketers. Your business should be no different. Here’s why you need a bulk email marketing emailing service:
- Reach Target Audiences – The beauty of email marketing is you can send personalized messages to your market segments. You can send newsletters to premium subscribers and a snippet of the same to users on a free plan without incurring high costs.
- Automate Emailing – Advanced email marketing platforms allow you to schedule the number of emails and when to send them. You can automate your organization’s emailing with specific time targeting, which also increases conversion rates.
- Increase Conversion Rates – Emails usually elicit more clicks than even Twitter posts. You can push your products and nurture leads better with quality emails backed with robust email marketing software.
- Better Tracking – The main challenge to digital marketing, other than an unlimited budget, is tracking the performance of your campaign. Through email marketing, you can track the progress using generic success metrics like active subscribers, clickthrough rate, click-to-open rate, and bounce rate, which paint the true image of your email marketing campaign. You can use the insights and analytics to better your campaign.
- Easy to Create and Send Emails – Most emailing services have a templated format for creating and sending emails. You need to attach an emailing list and personalize the templates that are a cinch to edit and let the email marketing software take charge.
- Improve Brand Credibility – Customers prefer getting emails from a brand they engage with than a random email that almost always ends up deleted or in the spam folder. Using your opt-in email list, you can improve your brand’s trustworthiness by sharing engaging and resourceful information to subscribers on your email list.
- Increase Brand Awareness -Imagine having an easily identifiable brand like Nike. With a curated email that delivers valuable content to the masses, you can convert prospects to clients and reduce customer churn rate, contributing to a large audience – maybe one as big as Nike’s.
A bulk email service is undeniably effective. You cannot ignore over half of the planet on email, which presents a comprehensive customer platform. You may be thinking about how to get in on the automated email campaign and bulk emails. You may want to get your feet wet with free bulk email services to get the hang of the lucrative ROI. However, you should onboard an email marketing service if you need to inject revenue thick and fast. Let’s run you through what you should consider in an email marketing service.
What to Look for in an Email Marketing Service
Hundreds of email marketing services are ready to onboard you and turbocharge your email campaign. The more prominent ones include Amazon SES, SendinBlue, Get Response, SendGrid, Mailgun, Elastic Email, Constant Contact, and SendBlaster.
The good thing is all the services have different price points and rich feature sets. The bad news is that sifting through all of them to find the right one is impossible. However, there are some irreducible minimums that a reliable email marketing service should have. The essential features ensure operational efficiency and better email marketing campaigns with easy scaling to suit evolving market needs and trends.
Automation
Programmatic email marketing enables better operational efficiency and sending time optimization, which are the ingredients for a successful marketing campaign. You should use an ESP that allows you to designate sending, the amount of bulk mail to send, and when to send it.
Complete automation can ease you into the backseat of your email marketing while still getting the same great results. API endpoint integration determines the automation process. Most bulk email services have HTTP API or SMTP integration to ease automation. Some efficient emailing services automatically convert HTML and CSS to text and images to create appealing visuals and convincing messages.
Infuse your CRM with the email service platform to enable automated activation, reactivation, retaining customers, and informing subscribers on your email list about a new product. You shouldn’t compromise on email automation, especially if you are a large business.
The automation should extend to processing bounce emails and prevent resending them to the recipients. An important aspect is the ability to scale automation without a drastic price change.
Email Segmentation
It doesn’t make sense to send bulk emails to every email address you have. While bulk emailing services allow you to send bulk mail to the masses, it does not mean you should send the same emails to all your subscribers.
Infusing your CRM with an emailing service allows you to create buyer personas and email segments. Coupled with automation, you will decide what emails to send to which cadre for the best results. Email segmentation is an essential aspect of an email marketing campaign that generates insights into which segment performs better than others and provides valuable customer insights.
Personalized emails to your market segments build strong customer relationships that retain your customers. The ESP categorizes market segments according to premium, basic, free plans, and any other custom pricing structure you have for your customers. They also use demographics, devices, and advanced targeting to segment your audience into manageable and effective segments for your email marketing campaign. You can improve responsiveness by using certain devices. In fact, 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices.
Easy Email Design
The obvious hurdle to starting out with a bulk email service is cracking the HTML or other programming language part of it. Luckily, with the best bulk email service providers, you do not have to learn HTML. You can create a newsletter, product emails, white papers, and other transactional and conversational email material with intuitive email design features and a library of templates.
The drag-and-drop feature is useful for creating emails in minutes. The tool ensures you create responsive emails with better opening and click rates. Customers prefer emails with a simple layout that’s visually appealing as well. Don’t fret if designing isn’t your forte; you can easily edit the glam-looking templates to match your brand’s voice, color, and tonality.
Performance-Monitoring Dashboard
You need to track your performance and adjust accordingly to prevent splurging money on an ineffective email marketing campaign. Email marketing is dynamic. What worked yesterday for Company A may not work tomorrow for Company B. To ensure you stay on top of the email marketing strategy, you can set success metrics and other KPIs you can monitor.
The best email marketing platforms have a performance dashboard that provides deep insight and a 360-degree view of your email marketing success. You can easily track the email deletion, opening, and clickthrough rates. Such valuable info empowers you to tailor your email marketing tactics and digital marketing strategy.
The premium ESPs integrate Google Analytics, forming part of your social listening strategy. Google Analytics, keyword research, and efficient performance monitoring ensure you have the best digital marketing strategy.
AntiSpam Filters
The second reason email marketing sometimes fails is that emails end up in the dreaded spam folder. The anti-spam triggers filter through your email and crossmatch against spam triggers to improve deliverability rates. Your chosen bulk email service provider should have anti-spam filters that constantly update the spam triggers to help your email avoid the spam folder.
How to Get Started with a Bulk Email Service Provider
A bulk email service provider is the foundation of your email marketing campaign. Like all other digital marketing strategies, you can’t start blindly.
You need to set your email marketing campaign goals that align with your company’s objectives. Whether it’s to push a new product, reactivate, or increase brand awareness, you need to align your goals with the overall digital marketing strategy. Use the SMART approach to set your specific, measurable, attainable, and time-bound goals.
Once you have your goals, you can work with a content marketing platform to create compelling content you want to send via mail. Emails need to capture the attention of the reader from the onset. You need a catchy phrase and an equally compelling CTA that will naturally lead the customer to purchase your product or service.
Set email marketing KPIs after choosing your ESP to measure success. Useful KPIs include open rates, deliverability, bounce rates, clickthrough rates, subscription, and unsubscribe volume.
As with any other digital marketing strategy, you must allocate your budget carefully. Luckily, with all these emailing platforms, you can get free emails and affordable email plans from as low as $25, which is cost-effective considering the returns you will get.
Build your market segments and send out the emails. An email list is the gold of email marketing, and you can build an impressive list from scratch with little hassle. Segmenting your recipients improves relevancy and increases revenue by 76% due to increased clickthrough. You can sort out the list yourself or send different subscription emails that onboard prospects onto your email list already segmented.
Conclusion
The key success factor in an email marketing campaign is the right bulk email service. You can select the best email marketing service to turbocharge your email campaign, delivering better digital marketing results. Quality content is as important as sending emails. Ensure you have a supply of valuable content from a content marketing platform such as Content Refined. You can anchor email marketing to your CRM for the best results.
