Email Marketing for Startups

Influencer marketing, company TikTok accounts, brand AI characters, and other emerging marketing techniques are overtaking the market. Marketing agencies love experimenting and seeing where these trends take the brands, but we also need to pay attention to long-lasting, tested, and trustworthy strategies like email campaigns.

Even though we live in an information overload era, people still prefer to receive company information, updates, and promotions via email. According to Marigold Consumer Trends, 52% of users purchased products or services directly from email in 2023.

Email marketing drives engagement, grows sales, and enhances brand awareness. Don’t think of it as just sending emails; think of it as a means to connect with your audience, build relationships, foster trust, and deliver targeted messages.

In this article, we’ll explore email marketing for startups, insightful strategies, and ways to grow your business without spending all your budget.

What Is Email Marketing: Benefits and Overview

Email marketing started almost 50 years ago, in 1978, following the inception of the Internet. The very first email campaign was sent by a marketer for Digital Equipment Corporation named Gary Thuerk, who caused a lot of privacy invasion complaints but generated around $13 million in sales for his company.

That was back then, and of course, today, we have email marketers planning and sending email campaigns left and right, and it’s way more challenging to escape the spam folder, engage your audience, and sell the product.

According to Statista, email marketing revenue is estimated to be around $8.5 billion worldwide. With 99% of 4.3 billion email users checking their inboxes daily, it’s always profitable and cost-effective to draft an email and connect with your potential customers.

Benefits of email marketing

Startup email marketing yields numerous benefits, starting from cost-effectiveness to improved customer relationships. According to McKinsey, email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media advertising when finding new customers and growing ROI.

Email marketing is cost-effective

Some of the most expensive digital advertising methods include the PCP (pay-per-click) method on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), and others. While startups or small businesses might spend around $5,000 per month advertising on LinkedIn, email marketing will cost only $50 to $500 monthly.

Choosing the right email marketing software or finding a professional SaaS marketing agency can help you reach a larger audience without a significant financial investment.

Email campaigns can be targeted and personalized

Customers love it when they’re treated as unique individuals rather than as average leads. Simply addressing them by their names in your email campaigns will immediately catch their attention.

You can customize your emails to specific segments of your audience, deliver more relatable content, use their humor, and connect with them on a deeper level. This will help your business increase engagement.

You can measure your email marketing efforts and adjust them

Most email marketing platforms provide analytical tools, showing click-through rates, click-to-open rates, unsubscribe rates, and other metrics essential for you to adjust your strategy or continue what you’re doing.

Many email marketing services use analytical tools to determine your startup email marketing success and your email marketing efforts and offer new ideas.

Email campaigns can improve customer relationships

Regular outreach and communication will help you build trust with your customers. Besides reminding them of your services, customized letters can make your users and potential consumers feel appreciated and connected with your brand.

While advertising on social media platforms is essential, their algorithms are sometimes mysterious. Email marketing, on the other hand, is a direct communication channel that doesn’t need guessing.

You can automate your email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is a powerful tool for attracting buyers. It automatically delivers targeted messages to customers and potential customers based on their activity and history with the brand, which can be convenient in terms of time and can increase productivity.

Targeted email marketing can increase your sales

Email marketing increases sales through special offers customized for the segmented audience. Analytics tools and research allow you to learn customer data and effectively design emails that are more likely to reach specific users. For example, recover cart messages bring customers back or viable emails that entice customers into a direct purchase.

A professional B2B email marketing agency will use seasonal promotions, cross-sells, loyalty and content-driven campaigns, and other approaches to connect with your audience and increase sales.

How to Define an Effective Email Marketing Strategy?

You decide to find suitable email marketing software or employ email marketing agency services. Now what? It’s time to draft your email marketing strategy—a plan that outlines how your business will use email to achieve its goals.

Defining an email marketing strategy for a startup involves setting clear goals, understanding the target audience, creating content that speaks to your audience, testing emails, and more.

Here’s our approach to defining effective email strategies:

Audience – Who will be reading your emails?

When discussing strategies, we always mention determining goals as the first step. But this time, let’s explore your audience and who you’ll be sending your emails to.

To create an effective email marketing strategy, you need to know who your audience is and what they will need. In email marketing, you have to classify the email list subscribers according to their age, gender, previous buying habits, and activity on your emails. In an effort to achieve high relevance and, therefore, high engagement, try to custom-design your content for each target audience segment.

Demographic segmentation:

• Age: Helps customize content to the interests, preferences, and humor of the audience
• Gender: Can influence the tone of the messaging
• Location: Helps send region-specific promotions, events, and offers

Behavioral segmentation:

• Purchase history: Allows better customized and targeted recommendations
• Engagement level: Helps re-engage inactive subscribers

Psychographic segmentation:

• Interests and preferences: Collecting data helps create personalized content
• Lifestyle: Makes your messages more engaging and relatable

Transactional segmentation:

• Purchase frequency: Helps to create loyalty programs or VIP offers
• Average order value: Spending habits help create targeted promotions, discounts, and offers

Engagement-based segmentation:

• Open rate: Helps refine subject lines and content
• Click-through rate: Helps create effective CTA and content strategy

Interaction with content: Informs future content creation

Goals – What do you want to achieve with your email marketing?

Email marketing is an integral part of modern communication, and its correct implementation must have objectives defined at the beginning. These strategies will define your campaign’s general direction, assist in choosing the right course of action, and ultimately offer a framework to evaluate its performance.

Here’s a deeper look into common email marketing goals and how to define them:

Increasing sales:

• Revenue growth: You can aim to boost sales by targeted promotional emails
• Upselling and cross-selling: Analyze customer purchase history to promote higher-end products or complimentary items

Boosting engagement:

• Open rates: Your goal can be improving the percentage of open emails
• CTR: You might set a goal to increase the number of recipients who click on links in your emails

Interaction with content: Your goal could be to encourage readers to interact with your email content

Building brand awareness:

• Content marketing: You might want to just share valuable content to educate your audience or grow brand awareness
• Social sharing: You might want to grow your brand awareness by encouraging your readers to share your emails and content

Growing your email list:

• Subscriber acquisition: You can aim towards increasing the number of new email subscribers
• List quality: Your focus could be strictly on improving the quality of the list

Customer retention:

• Loyalty programs: These programs reward customers and help your business retain them
• Re-engagement campaigns: You might want to re-engage inactive subscribers

Lead nurturing:

• Lead conversion: This is a common goal and reason why companies address email marketing
• Customer journey mapping: You can set goals of understanding your leads better and persuading them to convert to customers

Setting goals is essential for understanding what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what to expect.

As for tracking the progress of these goals, the defined objectives should be evaluated by key performance indicators (KPI) appropriate to the goals described above. It is essential to have a constant check on these metrics to ensure strategic positions are on your direction towards the achievement of the set goals. It is possible to enhance elements of your campaigns through the use of tools such as A/B testing; this deals with areas like the subject line and content body of your emails.

Another way to begin with key performance indicators (KPIs) is to set objectives that are quantifiable to help you manage and improve your email marketing approach and its capability to contribute substantial business consequences.

Format – What kind of emails will you create and send?

Now, to a more natural subject – the types of emails you’ll create and send.

You need a good content strategy alongside your email marketing strategy, calendar, and KPIs. Simply sending random emails, even if they’re regular, without a story and a natural timeline will create chaos. That’s why you must pre-determine your email content types, create templates, automated emails, etc.

Here are some of the most popular email types that boost engagement:

Newsletters: Newsletters remind your audience about your company and brand and deliver insightful content from your blog, podcast, or other sources. These types of emails need to be sent regularly on a weekly or monthly basis

Promotional and special offer email campaigns: This type of email drives sales by offering personalized promotions, discounts, add-on items, and more. You can send such emails seasonally, on special occasions, or randomly

Transactional emails: These emails aren’t promotional, but they’re essential for trust-building and transparency. Schedule and automate these emails, create a template, and inform your customers and potential users about essential changes and updates

Milestone emails: You can use milestone emails to foster a deeper connection with your audience. These emails celebrate specific dates, like subscription dates, the birthday of your brand, etc.

Feedback emails: These emails help you understand your audience better and make your audience feel valued and respected. Schedule a monthly or quarterly assessment questionaries or forms and ask your readers to provide feedback on your services

Polishing – When, where, and how

Once you’ve set your goals and KPIs and learned what your audience wants, you can decide on when to send your emails, where you’ll capture them, and how you will reach your audience.

Sending too many emails can cause a huge spike in displeased audiences and grow unsubscribe amounts. Sending too few letters won’t have as much effect on your revenue and business growth as you might’ve hoped for. Experts say that if your audience consists of 2000 subscribers, one or two emails per week can be enough. However, if you’re boasting a larger audience, over 10,000 subscribers, you might want to increase the email frequency.

To create a high-quality subscriber list, you need to promote your email subscription. Here are some effective places for promotion:

• Website homepage, blog, and landing page
• Social media profile bios, posts, and stories
• Content upgrades, webinars, and events
• Online communities and forums
• Customer touchpoints, checkout process, and thank you pages

To finalize your email marketing campaign, choose a suitable email marketing platform for your startup. Email marketing software is an easy solution for your email marketing efforts. They are ready-made, off-the-shelf programs that allow you to create an account, set up your business profile, customize email templates, and launch your email campaign—more on this subject in the following chapter.

How to Choose an Email Marketing Platform That Works for Your Startup?

If you decide to test out an email marketing software, you must choose the most suitable version for your business. Another way of creating a successful email marketing strategy is to collaborate with a marketing agency like Glorium Marketing.

To select a suitable platform, explore and research various apps:

• Determine which features are essential for your campaigns
• Choose a platform that can grow with your business
• Identify your budget needs
• Explore user reviews and case studies these platforms offer

Explore 5 email marketing software

How to Measure Your Email Marketing Efforts

Creating a successful email marketing campaign includes measuring your marketing efforts. Without analytical tools and an expert team who can measure essential metrics and deduce if you need adjustments or if your campaign is performing well, your strategy will not go far.

Ensure to find a platform that has monitoring tools or find a SaaS email marketing agency that will assist you in tracking these essential metrics:

• Open rate: This is the percentage of recipients that open your emails. It indicates the effectiveness of your subject lines and the relevance of your emails
• Click-through rate (CTR): This metric shows the percentage of recipients who interacted with your content and clicked on one or more links in your email. It measures the engagement levels and effectiveness of your CTAs
• Conversion rate: The conversion rate shows the percentage of recipients who followed your CTA and completed a desired action. By analyzing this information, you can determine whether your email marketing strategy drives recipients to take action
• Bounce rate: This metric determines the percentage of emails that, for whatever reason, couldn’t be delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
• Unsubscribe rate: This information will show how many of your recipients unsubscribed from your email list after receiving an email. This metric can help you assess the relevance of your content and campaign
• Spam complaint rate: It shows the percentage of recipients who marked your emails as spam
• List growth rate: This metric shows how fast or slow your email list grows and can help you understand the financial effectiveness of your marketing efforts

Use this data to assess your email marketing efforts and adjust your strategy, if needed. Contact a professional service provider to create an effective campaign and track metrics efficiently.

Grow Your Startup With Glorium Marketing

After spending over a decade advertising our software solutions, reaching untapped audiences, and fostering transparent and trustworthy relationships with our clients, we decided to expand as a growth marketing team and assist startups and small to medium businesses.

Our team combines growth marketing, PR, technology, and analytics expertise. We focus on user-centric approaches, so don’t give up until your brand reaches your target audience.

Read our case studies to acquaintance yourself with some of our successful projects, like “How to Grow an Intranet Solution from Zero to Top-10.” Explore our approaches in email marketing, opt-in contacts, and cold outreach strategies.

We understand your reluctance to draft your email marketing campaign, and we’re here to help you improve your business and compete with today’s information overload market.

Contact us today and tell us about your company. Our experts can book a 30-minute free consultation with you and offer you a general scope of your campaign.