Getting Started With Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics your business can adopt. Email campaigns can contribute to many different business objectives including, sales/ bookings, brand awareness, and building customer loyalty.

With a (seemingly) continuously growing return-on-investment (ROI) of £42 for every £1 spent, can you afford not to make the most of email marketing?

Finding the right software for email marketing is all about finding what works for your businesses and its needs. 

Some questions to consider include:

• How much am I willing to/ do I need to spend?
• Do I want to be able to create automated journeys?
• Do I want to design from scratch or have a range of templates to choose from?
• Will I need to segment my mailing list? (the answer to this one should always be yes)

Some of our favourite, easy-to-use platforms include MailChimp, HubSpot, and MailerLite.

There’s not any point in investing time and money into email marketing if you’re only reaching 4 clients, so some effort needs to be put into growing your subscriber list.

There are several ways to do this, firstly, a method that bypasses many people is to simply ask your clients when they’re in your clinic if they are interested in signing up (speaking of, if you’re loving the content so far, there’s a form to subscribe to our email newsletter in the footer of this page). Loyal clients will be the audience most likely to be concerned with company updates and regular news. 

Tip: You can make it even easier for them to sign up from the clinic by displaying a scannable QR code linked to an optimised landing page on your website.

It’s even easier to prompt people online to sign up to your newsletter. Including opt-ins at online checkouts, pop-ups, calls-to-action (CTAs) at the bottom of a blog, or even a dedicated landing page are all effective ways to encourage sign-ups via your website.

For an extra-large push, that tried & tested method is to offer something in return for a sign-up, whether that be a useful whitepaper PDF download on treatment/ skincare guide, or even a special discount offer. This can also offer a great opportunity to promote your email newsletter via other digital marketing channels, such as social media.

In 2018, GDPR was introduced to ensure the fair use of personal data. This will affect how you handle customer data and how you use data on your subscriber list. However, don’t let this put you off as 56% of marketers feel positive about the impact the GDPR is having on their operations. Read more on GDPR here.

The content and strategy of your email marketing campaigns must be consistent with other marketing practices in your business.

One of the most popular uses of email marketing is a weekly/ monthly newsletter, usually of business updates. This can include anything from new blog posts, impressive treatment or skincare case studies from your clinic, industry news, customer reviews, or a new product in stock.

Email marketing is also a great platform to boost temporary campaigns such as limited time offers, seasonal campaigns (e.g. promoting gift cards around Christmas) and referral schemes.

Trial and error is the key to finding the most effective email marketing strategy for your business. Tracking analytics of each campaign is the best way to improve future emails, making them more effective. Top metrics to track are open rates, click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and spam complaints.

According to MailChimp, in the beauty and personal care industry, the average open rate is 16.65%, average CTR is 1.92%, and average unsubscribe rate is 0.30%. This is a useful benchmark to see how you’re performing against the industry average. 

A/ B testing is also a great way to trial an email campaign. Two versions of the same email with slight differences are sent to 30% of your mailing list to see which completes the objective more effectively, the most effective is then sent to the remaining 70% of your list. The contrast amongst the two tests can include different subject lines, images, CTAs, CTA placement etc.

Leveraging the data you have on a specific subscriber, whether it be their first name, last treatment received, or product bought, has a proven positive impact on open rates and CTR. Rich Relevance found that revenue is 5.7 times higher in emails that employ personalisation.

Segmenting your mailing list allows you to send topical, relevant emails to different types of clients in your clinic, matching clients to your buyer personas is a good place to start. For example, a monthly newsletter could be relevant to most of your clients, however sending an email about anti-wrinkle treatments to younger clients interested in lip fillers could be a waste of time and resources, segmenting your list can optimise your email marketing strategy to offer the best ROI, see some example lists below. According to Campaign Monitor, segmented campaigns can offer up to as much as 760% increase in revenue.

People absorb visually appealing information quicker and retain it for longer, making it a great way to communicate the key message of your email.

Always run your email via a spam checking software to ensure you reach as many inboxes as possible and don’t end up in the dreaded spam folder. Some email design software has this feature built-in, alternatively, use free software such as mail-tester.com. Some quick spam avoiding tips are don’t use spam trigger words such as ‘free’, ‘guarantee’, ‘no obligation’ etc. in your subject line (see the ultimate list of spam trigger words here), avoid exclamation marks!, and don’t use all caps in your copy.

We love all things email marketing here at Esthetica Digital, delving into analytics and identifying how to fully optimise your strategy. As well as designing beautiful and effective email campaigns, we can build and implement automated journeys to gently encourage leads through the sales funnel to ultimately book a treatment or purchase a product.

Book a consultation to see how we can help your brand grow.