Introduction to think outside the inbox: email marketing

You will explore what email marketing is, how it works, and why it’s useful. You’ll also learn the importance of email marketing to meet business goals. Then, you’ll use the PESTLE and SWOT frameworks to set SMART email marketing goals. To wrap up module 1, you’ll learn best practices in email marketing and how to apply them.

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Dedication to study

• Videos: 29 min

• Leitura: 50 min

• Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação

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Learning Objectives

• Understand how email marketing fits into a digital marketing strategy.
• Apply SMART, SWOT and PESTLE frameworks to set email marketing goals.
• Employ SMART and PESTLE audits to build an email marketing strategy.
• Describe email marketing best practices.

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Content

1. Getting started with the course
2. What is email marketing
3. Preparing for your campaign
4. Do’s and Don’t of email marketing
5. Review. Introduction to think outside the inbox: email marketing

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1. Getting started with the course

Introduction to Course 4

• Video: Duration: 2 minutes

Welcome to the next course in the Google Digital Marketing and E-commerce Certificate, our email marketing course. Email marketing is such a valuable and proven way to reach customers, it has been around since the very first commercial email was sent in 1978. Since then, it’s only gained popularity, it’s estimated that there are over four billion email users in the world and email marketing has a return on investment or ROI of $42 per every $1 spent. So if you spend $1 you’ll make an average of $42 back, you’ll learn a lot more about that later.

I’m Miriam, and I’ll be your guide on all things email marketing, I’ve been working on email marketing campaigns for over 10 years. And my favorite part about it is how creative you can be while connecting with the reader on the other side. I hope that by the time this courses through you’ll learn to love it as much as I do if you’re taking these courses in order, you’ve already learned so much about digital marketing and e-commerce. First, you learned about the foundations of digital marketing and e-commerce and then you explored two very important types of marketing, search engine marketing and social media marketing. You’re paving the way for a successful career in digital marketing and e-commerce and you should be really excited about that.

Email marketing is the process of sending messages to a list of existing subscribers to share information, drive sales, or create community. In this course, you’ll learn to identify different types of email marketing and best practices for drafting effective emails. You’ll learn to measure and analyze email marketing campaign results, to create email mailing lists, and to use email marketing tools to automate the process. Meet me in the next video and we’ll talk about what you can expect to learn on your journey to becoming a great email marketer.

Course 4 overview

• Reading: Duration: 20 minutes

Welcome to the fourth course of the program, Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing. Email marketing is one of the oldest and most proven digital marketing channels and is a key part of an overall digital marketing strategy. By the end of this course, you will gain an understanding of email marketing, including how to create a strategy, execute email campaigns, and measure results of those campaigns.

Course progress

The entire program has seven courses. Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing is the fourth course in the series.

1. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce —(current course) Learn about the fields of digital marketing and e-commerce and the skills needed for associate-level roles.

2. Attract and Engage Customers with Digital Marketing —Apply the marketing funnel concept to stages of the customer journey, including engagement, conversion, and loyalty. Learn methods for search engine optimization so potential customers find your products or services.

3. From Likes to Leads: Interact with Customers Online —Learn how to create marketing content and ads on social media platforms and evaluate their effectiveness using social media analytics data.

4. Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing —Learn how to execute email campaigns, use mailing lists, and automate customer communication and workflows.

5. Assess for Success: Marketing Analytics and Measurement —Learn how to collect, monitor, analyze, and present data from marketing campaigns using analytics and presentation tools.

6. Make the Sale: Build, Launch, and Manage E-commerce Stores —Learn the process to create a new e-commerce store and drive traffic to the online business through advertising campaigns.

7. Satisfaction Guaranteed: Develop Customer Loyalty Online —Learn strategies to build customer loyalty in e-commerce and use specific tools to help develop and maintain client relationships. This course also closes out the program with professional development topics to help you prepare for a job search.

Course 4 content

This course has regular assignments. You can complete them at your own pace; however, the assignments are designed to help you finish the program in six months or fewer. Refer to the information below about progression for this course. Good luck as you continue towards completion of the program!

Module 1: Introduction to Think outside the inbox: Email marketing

The importance of email marketing in meeting your overall business goals will be explored. You will learn how to employ different frameworks to set email marketing goals. Then, you will learn about best practices in email marketing.

Module 2: Types of email marketing

You will examine the most common types of marketing emails. First, you’ll learn about emails that greet customers, like acquisition emails and welcome emails. Next, you’ll learn about emails that entice subscribers, such as newsletters and promotional emails. You’ll focus on emails that keep customers, known as retention emails. Then, you’ll explore how to craft catchy email copy, write sample subject lines, and create preview text for marketing emails.

Module 3: Useful tools for email marketing

You will learn about useful tools for email marketing. You’ll determine how to create and segment email lists. You’ll also learn how to write effective emails that engage with customers. After that, you’ll explore email marketing tools like HubSpot and Mailchimp and learn how they work. Then, you’ll explore crisis management and how to correct mistakes in email marketing.

Module 4: Collect and analyze email campaign data

You will learn about the key metrics in email marketing, such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and more. You’ll examine how to measure, track, and analyze email campaign results. Then, you’ll learn how to effectively present email campaign results to stakeholders by creating an email marketing campaign report.

Module 5: Run your own email marketing campaign

You will create, manage, track, and complete a mock email marketing campaign. You’ll be given a fictional business to build the email campaign around, and you’ll employ all the strategies, tools, and tricks you’ve learned during this course to complete the campaign. First, you’ll set SMART goals for your campaign. Then, you’ll segment your email list and complete an email series. Finally, you’ll complete the campaign and end the course by analyzing the results of the campaign and presenting them to stakeholders.

What to expect

Each course offers a series of lessons with many types of learning opportunities. These include:

• Videos for instructors to teach new concepts and demonstrate the use of tools

• Readings to introduce new ideas and build on the concepts from the videos

• Discussion forums to share, explore, and reinforce lesson topics for better understanding

• Discussion prompts to promote thinking and engagement in the discussion forums

• Self reviews to practice tasks and check your results for accuracy or correctness

• In-video quizzes to help your comprehension of content presented in videos

• Practice quizzes to prepare you for graded quizzes

• Graded quizzes to measure your progress, give you valuable feedback, and satisfy program completion to obtain a certificate—Following program guidelines, you can take a graded quiz multiple times to achieve a passing score of 80% or higher.

Tips for success

• It is strongly recommended to take these courses—and go through the items in each lesson—in the order they appear because new information and concepts build on previous knowledge.

• Participate in all learning opportunities to gain as much knowledge and experience as possible.

• If something is confusing, don’t hesitate to replay a video, review a reading, or repeat a self-review activity.

• Use the additional resources that are referenced throughout the program. They are designed to support your learning.

• When you encounter useful links in a course, remember to bookmark them so you can refer to the information later for study or review.

• Understand and follow the Coursera Code of Conduct to ensure that the learning community remains a welcoming, friendly, and supportive place for all members.

Helpful resources to get started

• Reading: Duration: 20 minutes

Helpful Resources to Get Started

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

As a learner, you can complete this course only. However, to obtain a certificate, you must complete all the courses in the program. This reading describes what is required to obtain a certificate and best practices for you to have a good learning experience on the platform.

Course completion to obtain a certificate

To receive your official Google Digital Marketing and E-commerce Certificate, you must:

• Pass all graded assignments in all 7 courses of the certificate program. Each graded assignment is part of a cumulative graded score for the course, and the passing grade for each course is 80%.

AND one of the following:

• Pay the course certificate fee,

• Be approved for Coursera Financial Aid, or

• Complete the certificate through an educational institution, employer, or agency that’s sponsoring your participation.

Healthy habits for course completion

Here is a list of best practices that will help you complete the courses in the program in a timely manner:

Plan your time: Setting regular study times and sticking with them each week can help you make learning a part of your routine. Use a calendar or timetable to create a schedule, and list what you plan to do each day in order to break your work down into achievable goals. Create a quiet place to watch the videos, review the readings, and complete the activities so you can really focus on the material.

Work at your own pace: Everyone learns differently, so this program has been designed to let you work at your own pace. Although your personalized deadlines start when you enroll, they are just a guide. Feel free to move through the program at the speed that works best for you. There is no penalty for late assignments; to earn your certificate, all you have to do is complete all of the work. If you prefer, you can extend your deadlines by returning to Overview in the navigation panel to click Switch Sessions. If you already missed previous deadlines, click Reset my deadlines instead.

Be curious: If you find an idea that gets you excited, act on it! Ask questions, search for more details online, check out the links that interest you, and take notes on your discoveries. The little things you do to support your learning along the way will take your knowledge even further, open more doors in this high-growth field, and help you qualify for jobs.

Take notes: Notes are useful-to-remember information that you think might be important in the future, especially as you’re preparing to enter a new job field. In addition, taking notes is an effective way to make connections between topics and gain a better understanding of those topics.

Chat (responsibly) with other learners: If you have a question, chances are, you’re not alone. Reach out in the discussion forum to ask for help from other learners in this program. You can also visit Coursera’s Global Online

Community: Other important things to know while learning with virtual classmates can be found in the Coursera Honor Code and Code of Conduct.

Update your profile: Consider updating your profile on Coursera. This link appears in the menu when you click on your name at the top-right corner of this screen. When classmates find you in the discussion forums, they can click on your name to view your profile and get to know you more.

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations for course activities

To complete certain activities in the program, you will need to use digital documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Marketing professionals use these software tools to collaborate within their teams and organizations. If you need more information about using a particular tool, refer to these resources:

• Microsoft Word: Help and learning: Microsoft Support page for Word

• Google Docs: Help Center page for Google Docs

• Microsoft Excel: Help and learning: Microsoft Support page for Excel

• Google Sheets: Help Center page for Google Sheets

• Microsoft PowerPoint: Help and learning: Microsoft Support page for PowerPoint

• How to use Google Slides: Help Center page for Google Slides

Course glossary

This course will cover a lot of terms and concepts, some of which you may already know and some of which will be new. To remind yourself about what a term means, or to help you review concepts for graded quizzes, refer to the Glossary for this course.

Course feedback

Providing feedback on videos, readings, and other materials is easy. With the resource open in your browser, look for the thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols.

• Click thumbs-up for materials that are helpful.

• Click thumbs-down for materials that are not helpful.

If you want to flag a specific issue with an item, click the flag icon, select a category, and enter an explanation in the text box. This feedback goes back to the course development team and isn’t visible to other learners. All feedback received helps to create even better certificate programs in the future.

Meet and Greet

• Discussion Prompt Duration: 10 minutes

I’m absolutely thrilled to embark on this exciting journey with all of you in the Course: Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing in Digital Marketing. The world of interacting with customers online has always held a special fascination for me. As a Web developer based in the vibrant city of Lisbon, Portugal, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the transformative power of digital marketing within our rapidly evolving tech landscape.

My decision to enroll in this program stems from a firm belief in the essential role that e-commerce and digital marketing play in today’s digital age. With my background as a web developer, I’ve seen firsthand how these skills have the capacity to enhance user experiences and foster deep and meaningful engagement. Naturally, I hold high expectations for this course and am eager to gain valuable insights into customer behavior, effective marketing strategies, and the latest trends within the digital realm.

I am Looking ahead, my goal post-course is to seamlessly integrate these newfound skills into my web development projects. I aim to create websites and platforms that not only boast a great visual appeal but also possess the ability to convert visitors into devoted, loyal customers.

I genuinely look forward to the prospect of learning from each of you and exchanging ideas as we navigate this course together. Please, feel free to connect and share your thoughts. Together, let’s make the most of this incredible learning experience!

Wishing you all the utmost success in your endeavors!

2. What is email marketing

Welcome to week 1

• Video: Duration: 1 minute

I’m so glad you’re here with me on this journey where we’ll explore all there is to know about email marketing. It’s probably pretty important that we give you a solid understanding of what email marketing is and how it benefits companies, right? So, we’ll start there. We’ll explore how the lifespan of email is longer than you may expect. I’ll introduce you to a very important concept when it comes to email marketing, insights. You’ll be surprised to learn how many platforms make creating a campaign a breeze, and you’ll learn some staggering statistics on email, like just how many people use it. Here’s a hint. It’s probably a bigger number than you think.

Analysis is a huge part of the digital marketing world. Marketers use all kinds of analyses before, during, and after campaigns. In these upcoming lessons, you’ll learn about the PESTLE and SWOT analyses, two very useful techniques when it comes to creating email marketing campaigns, and you’ll learn just how important setting SMART goals is to creating an effective email marketing campaign. Those SMART goals will give you a clear vision for what you want to achieve as a brand.

Finally, we’ll focus in-depth on what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing in email marketing. Since we all want your future email marketing campaigns to be super successful, we’ll provide you with some tried and true do’s and don’ts when it comes to email marketing. For example, in this portion of the course, you’ll learn that testing all different kinds of links, images, lengths, and designs will benefit your subscribers and your overall campaign.

Let’s get started. Meet me in the next video where I’ll help you learn just how important email marketing is to a company’s success.

What is email marketing?

• Video: Duration: 4 minutes

More than four billion people, or over half the world’s population, use email. There aren’t very many other things, 50 percent of the world’s population does. That explains why email marketing is so effective.

As I mentioned in another video, email marketing has a return on investment or ROI of $42 for every one dollar spent, so if you spend one dollar, you’ll make an average of $42 back.

In this video, we’ll discuss how the following factors make email marketing so effective:

• The lifespan of email
• The insights you get from it
• The ease of use
• The large number of email users.

As I mentioned in a previous video, email marketing is when a company sends a branded email message out to a list of their email subscribers in order to inform, drive sales, and create a community for their brand. It’s a very effective tool for promoting services, products, goods, and stories to potential, new, and existing customers, and creating email marketing campaigns can be really fun too.

I love fashion. One of my favorite email marketing projects to date involved writing an email campaign to get other shoppers excited about a plus-size fashion retailer’s new seasonal styles. I thoroughly enjoyed offering discounts to consumers that are just like me. And, I did a great job because I had fun with it.

To give you a clear idea of email marketing’s effectiveness, let’s talk about numbers for a second. As a digital marketer or e-commerce specialist, you’ll hear the term return on investment or ROI often. ROI is a ratio of net income or money made, and investment or money spent, so ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment. If you have a high ROI, you probably made a lot more money than you spent, and your campaign was effective. So, at $42 earned for everyone dollar spent, that would give you an estimated ROI of 4,200 percent. Email marketing has proven itself to be immensely effective.

Aside from the sheer volume of internet users, another reason email marketing has proven itself so effective is the lifespan of email. Email has been around for nearly a half a century, and although it may look a little different than it did in 1978 when the first email was sent out, the general concept has stayed the same. The Data and Marketing Association found that 51 percent of people use the same email for over 10 years. That means as a marketer, once you get someone on your subscriber list, there’s a possibility that they could be your customer for 10 years.

Another aspect of email marketing that I find very effective is the use of insights collected during and after campaigns. Insights are pieces of information that are discovered through research or data analysis and that can be directly actioned upon to benefit your email strategy. If you’re using some kind of email marketing automation platform like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or something else, your insights will be just a few clicks away so that you can collect, analyze, and learn from them. If you’re unfamiliar with these tools, don’t worry, you’ll get to know them later.

Finally, email marketing is so effective because of its ease of use. When it comes to email marketing, so many platforms, programs, and tools out there do a lot of the work for you. These tools, like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce, automate the process so that you don’t have to know everything when it comes to design, formatting, and hyperlinking. So, whether you’ve been an expert email forwarder for 30 years or you just got your first email a few weeks ago, you’ll have the guidance you need to become a great email marketer, and it only becomes more automated as time goes on. In 1978, sending the first email out required extensive training, knowledge, and expertise on the subject. Lucky for us, that’s not the case anymore. We will not be teaching you how to send an email on a computer the size of a public transportation bus from the 1970s. However, we will teach you how to use email effectively, so sit tight.

So to review, email marketing is so effective because a large number of people use email, the lengthy lifespan of email as a medium, the built-in insights, and the ease of use.

Taylor - Entry-level email marketing jobs and tasks

• Video: Duration: 3 minutes

Hello. I’m Taylor, and I’m an Account Strategist at Google. I work with small- to medium-sized businesses as a consultant and strategist. When it comes to their digital marketing strategy, I assist them in managing the day-to-day aspects of their Google Ads presence and aligning their marketing mix with their digital strategies.

I became involved in email marketing because, after finishing school, I managed various venues and small businesses, including cinemas, music venues, and arts collectives. Email marketing is an excellent way to utilize existing customer or client data and communicate directly with those who have previously enjoyed their products or expressed interest.

I co-founded an arts collective that organized multimedia events featuring performances by fans and visual artists. These events were relatively small and less widely known, so we relied on email marketing to connect with previous ticket purchasers and re-engage them via email, spreading the word about upcoming events.

Ultimately, marketing is all about effective communication, and email provides a direct channel to match your message with your audience’s preferences.

Using email marketing to engage with customers is crucial because these customers have already expressed interest in receiving information from you. They willingly provided their email, whether through a purchase or a desire to learn more, indicating their willingness to engage.

Experiencing a positive response from an email marketing campaign is highly rewarding. It helps confirm that the messages sent are resonating and effectively contributing to the business’s goals or the specific initiative being promoted.

For those looking to enter this industry, my best advice is not to fear failure. Mistakes and miscommunications can happen in this field, and not every campaign will yield the desired results. Embrace the opportunity to learn, adapt, and continue brainstorming. Success often arises from overcoming these challenges.

Miriam - Imposter syndrome

• Video: Duration: 2 minutes

Hi, I’m Miriam and I’m a product marketing manager. At Google, I help simplify complex concepts about Google Ads and technology, to help businesses understand how to use them.

Impostor syndrome is straight up just feeling like you don’t belong, and it can happen in all walks of life at any moment. I was an entry-level professional with no experience, and I had never been taught that you should get internships. I had never been taught, through my educational experience, how to kind of prepare to get this type of job. So I didn’t really know what I was doing. So when I interviewed, the interviewer was very frustrated with me and she basically said, “Do you have any experience?” And I said no. And she said, “I don’t want to train you, I don’t have time.” So that was a real big bummer. And I always felt a little bit scared to try again.

A wonderful opportunity came where I was actually a consultant. I was just doing content editing, content management, blog posts, and I got the opportunity to work with a tech company editing their content. Through that process, I was asked to join Google as a marketer, as a product marketer, and I thought, “Wow, for the first time I get to try this thing. I have absolutely no idea how to officially do it. I’ve seen other people do it, kind of sort of think I might know what the job is, but maybe not really, and I don’t have any formal education in this.” So I was terrified. Terrified, told me this was a thing to try. I was always interested in the field. And just because someone tells you, “Hey, you don’t have enough experience or I don’t think you know what you’re doing,” doesn’t mean they’re right.

Regardless of your background, you can always experience impostor syndrome. We’re human beings, and that’s just part of being human, and the world needs different points of view, and it’s okay to be different. And that’s where I might find myself not measuring up, others are actually constantly coming back to me giving me great feedback, telling me, “I don’t think you know all of these things. You’re telling me you feel that you’re not enough, you’re not doing enough, you’re not smart enough, you don’t have the right degree. You’re not dressed the right way, other folks are not even thinking these things. These are usually more so challenges that you put in front of yourself when you’re in the clutch of impostor syndrome.

Here’s what I recommend: Remember that everyone around you is also doubting themselves. And if everyone is doubting themselves and has something that isn’t perfect or isn’t great, then you’re really on the same playing field as everyone else, and you belong just as much as them.

Consider the email lists you’re subscribed to

• Practice Quiz. 5 questions. 100%

3. Preparing for your campaign

Conduct PESTLE and SWOT audits

• Video: Duration: 6 minutes

When creating a marketing strategy, it’s best to spend significant time focused on the strategy part. Just as a professional chef doesn’t just toss some random ingredients into a pan and expect to create the greatest dish in the world, a successful marketer doesn’t just aimlessly send out emails with no real direction or tactic and expect big results.

In order to successfully create a marketing strategy, you’ll need to conduct a few different types of analyses first. Conducting thorough analysis before you send out even one email helps your marketing efforts be more effective. The results of your analysis will help you create context for your email campaigns.

What I mean when I say creating context for your campaigns is that you need to be aware of your surroundings, internally and externally, so you can optimize your success and reach your goals. Just like you had to work to understand the demographics of your potential customers, you need to work to understand the internal resources and external environments.

Internally, you need some context on your team and resources. You’ll need to consider who you are as a brand so that you can make sure you’re playing to your strengths and staying true to your mission. The first type of analysis or audit called SWOT will ensure you’re doing this. On a more external scale, you’ll need to know what is going on around you so that your brand isn’t coming off insensitive or unaware. The second type of analysis or audit called PESTLE will help you with that.

You can conduct these analyses by simply writing them down on a piece of paper or putting them into a document on your computer. Or if you’re conducting them as a team, you can use a whiteboard or shared document. I’ve always enjoyed collaborating with others on these types of audits because the more voices involved, the more diverse your results will be.

The first of these analyses is called SWOT. Conducting a SWOT audit will help you identify the internal context of your company. It’s an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And, although we are using it in an email marketing context now, it can be useful in a number of applications. As a digital marketer, you may use it for your overall marketing campaigns, for social and SEO strategy, and any number of other things.

When running a SWOT audit, start with strengths. What aspects of the company’s marketing resources make it stand out? What is special about the marketing team? Is it eye-catching design and innovation? Does your marketing team really shine at copywriting? Take note of anything your company excels at internally.

Next up, weaknesses. Where could your company and/or marketing team improve? Maybe because your team is so talented with design and copywriting, you haven’t prioritized strategy as much. Take note of that.

The third aspect of the SWOT audit is opportunities. What resources, events, or contacts would help your team create an incredible campaign? What types of opportunities can you leverage into something bigger? Maybe a colleague of yours has a contact in another country that can help you build international brand awareness.

Finally, take a look at threats. Similar to opportunities, look for resources, events, contacts, and opportunities that could be detrimental to your brand. Maybe you just heard about a new competitor who is creating the exact same product as your company.

After you’ve conducted your SWOT analysis, reflect on the results. What is your general analysis of the results? What did you learn from them? Are you more aware of where you shine and where you could use a little improvement? How will you leverage that information to create an effective campaign? If everyone on your team ran an analysis, compare results with your team members.

I mentioned that SWOT was a way internal context for your campaign. What I mean by that is it helps you reflect inward on your team and resources so that you know what is available to you internally.

When it comes to PESTLE though, you’ll be analyzing the external. You’ll be researching what is going on externally in your surroundings to find out what strategies will be effective and what strategies you may want to stay away from.

Let’s go over that one more time. A SWOT audit examines the internal context of your brand while a PESTLE audit examines the external context of your brand. So, what does a PESTLE audit refer to?

PESTLE refers to the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors that may affect your email marketing strategy. First, you’ll consider political issues or happenings across the markets you’re serving. Is there political unrest in a country you just started shipping to? Or perhaps a new piece of legislation that could impact your business has passed and you want to include a mention of that.

Then consider economic factors. People in varying geographic locations may prioritize spending money on certain products and maybe you can deliver emails that feature products with relevance to those customers.

Next, consider social factors. Try to be in-the-know when it comes to popular cultural references and social media use. Consider things like population growth rates, geographic location, cultural aspects, age, and education levels of those you may or may not be serving. You want to make sure your strategy is inclusive of everyone. These factors will affect how you market to customers.

The next factors to consider are technological. Our world is ever-evolving, and email marketing is not an exception to that. As I’ve mentioned, it looks different than it looked 40 years ago. For example, nowadays, customers are able to ask smart devices in their homes to read their emails aloud. Make sure you consider that when you craft your strategy.

Legal factors should also be considered. This means you should think about any and all laws in the markets you serve. Based on regional legal restrictions and requirements, certain tactics and marketing may not be lawful.

Finally, consider the external environmental factors that could have an effect on your strategy. Examples of environmental factors that should be considered are climate change, sustainability, and natural disasters.

After you conduct these audits, you’ll be one step closer to thinking about the next step in creating your marketing strategy, setting smart goals. We’ll get to that in a bit. Check in again soon.

Learn more about conducting PESTLE and SWOT audits

• Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Before you start building your subscriber list or sending emails, you will need to do some analyses to ensure your email marketing strategies are thoughtful, effective, and add value for your subscribers. SWOT and PESTLE can help you create a successful email marketing campaign.

SWOT Audit

A SWOT audit identifies a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

As you start your audit, go through each part of the acronym and answer questions like:

• Strengths:

  • What aspects of the company’s marketing resources make it stand out?
  • What is special about the marketing team? (examples: eye–catching design, innovative ideas, strong copywriting)
  • What things does your company excel at internally?

• Weaknesses:

  • Where could your company and/or marketing team improve?
  • What aspects of your brand have you been neglecting?
  • What could you spend more time prioritizing?
  • What types of training are required to complete necessary tasks?
  • Where are you underperforming?

• Opportunities:

  • What resources, events, or contacts would help your team create a successful campaign?
  • What types of opportunities can you leverage to improve your process or results?

• Threats:

  • What events, contacts, and opportunities could be harmful to your brand?
  • Do you have competitors?
  • Do you have the resources necessary to complete tasks?

After you’ve conducted your SWOT analysis, reflect on the results. What are your general thoughts or trends you identify in the results? What did you learn about your company? How can you use this information to create an effective campaign?

PESTLE Audit

Following your SWOT analysis, focus on the external factors by conducting a PESTLE audit.

Like you did with SWOT, conduct your audit with a team in a collaborative setting like in a shared note, Google document, a dry erase board, or something else that works best for your team. As you work your way through each part of the audit, ask yourself the following questions, as well as anything else that feels important to your company.

Political:

• Have there been any recent changes in terms of governing bodies?
• Is there political unrest in a country you just started shipping to?
• Is there any new legislation that could impact your business?

Economic:

• What is the current state of the local and international economies in areas that you serve?
• What do people in various geographic locations prioritize spending money on?

Social:

• What popular culture events have taken place in the locations you serve?
• What are the education levels of potential customers?
• What are the traditions and cultural norms of the people you serve?
• How do people interact with one another in the regions you serve?

Technological:

• How is technology changing the way people consume?
• How is technology changing the way people interact?
• How has technology changed in the last 6 months? 1 year?

Legal:

• What are the regulations and laws in the regions your company serves?
• How do the laws and regulations differ across regions?

Environmental:

• What does it mean to be a sustainable company?
• How important is climate change to your potential customers?
• Have there been recent natural disasters in regions you might serve?

Just as you reflected on the results of your SWOT audit, do the same for your PESTLE audit. When you’ve captured results from your SWOT and PESTLE audits, you can use them to create thoughtful, smart campaign strategies. The more research and brainstorming you do before the campaign, the more information you’ll have available to create a successful campaign.

Set SMART goals

• Video. Duration: 5 minutes

Certainly! Here’s your text separated into paragraphs:

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Now that you know why email marketing is so important to a company’s growth, and how to perform PESTLE and SWOT audits to create context for your campaign strategies, in this video, we’ll discover what it takes to create a marketing strategy.

In a previous video, we explored setting SMART goals. Recall that as a digital marketer, you’ll need to remember to always set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Now, you may create SMART goals for your overall marketing campaign. But you also may get more specific with them and set them for social, SEO, or email marketing.

So what do SMART goals look like in the context of an email marketing campaign? First, let’s discover what it means for an email marketing campaign to be specific. It means that when you’ve made it to your destination, you know that you’ve arrived. If your goal is specific, it probably answers a couple of the following questions. What do I want to accomplish? Why is this a goal? Does it have a specific reason, purpose, or benefit? Who is involved? Who is the recipient? Where should the goal be delivered? What are the requirements and constraints? Your goal must be specific enough to know if you’ve achieved it.

Let’s say you are creating an email campaign for an app-based tech company. Your team wants to grow the brand. However, growing the brand is not a specific goal. What does it mean to grow a brand? How will you know if you’ve grown the brand if you aren’t specific in the goal to begin with? So maybe the goal is to add a certain number of names to your subscriber list over the course of your email marketing campaign.

Next up is measurable. When it comes to making sure your goals are measurable, ask yourself what evidence will prove whether this was successful or not? Going back to the previous example. Let’s say your team decides that you need to increase app downloads to prove that there is a need for your product. How many downloads is sufficient? 100? 1,000? 10,000? Choose a number that you can track and measure along the way. You can tell if a goal is measurable by asking how much, how many, and how will I know when it’s accomplished? Sometimes a simple yes or no will answer whether you hit your goal, but sometimes that won’t be enough. In that case, you’ll need to rely on metrics. Later on, you’ll be introduced to the metrics you will use to collect and analyze data. These metrics will help you determine whether or not you are reaching your goals. For now, just know those metrics are what you use to measure something. For instance, if you’re driving your car from Los Angeles to New York City, the distance you’re driving is 2,789.4 miles. Miles is the metric you’re using to measure the distance. So an example of an email marketing metric would be ROI, or return on investment. As I stated earlier, email marketing has an average ROI of 4,200% or $42 for every $1 spent. That’s an example of a metric.

So as you know, the A in your email marketing smart goal stands for attainable. You want to ensure the goal you were setting is realistic because, well your goal is to achieve your goal. However, you do want your goal to be somewhat challenging because you want to see some kind of positive progress or change. Let’s go back to our app-based tech company example. If your company typically gets about 300 downloads a week and you want to push to get more through an email marketing campaign, how many more downloads is attainable yet still challenging? An unattainable goal might be tripling your weekly downloads the first month into the campaign. It could happen, but it might not be super likely for your company based on current numbers. So what is a more attainable goal? Maybe it’s weekly growth of 1.5 times, or 450 downloads per week, one month into the campaign.

Now that we have a specific, measurable, attainable goal, we need to make sure it’s relevant. In other words, does it make sense to try to reach this goal? You’ll want to think about how your email marketing goal lines up with company values and overall company-wide goals. Does this goal make sense with what you’re trying to do as a company? Does this goal match your organization’s needs and priorities?

Finally, you’ll want to make sure your goal is time-bound. This means your goal has a deadline. Without a deadline, there’s no real way to know if you’re making progress at a good pace. It’s important to note that time and metrics go hand-in-hand with one another, because time can also be used as a metric. Let’s see what our goal looks like if we add a deadline to it. So far, we know that the goal is to increase weekly app downloads by 1.5 times, or 450 downloads, per week. Let’s say we will do this by running an email marketing campaign where the call to action is for subscribers to download the app if they don’t already have it. And to share the email with friends who may not have it as well. If we say this campaign is going to run for three months, we’ve now added a deadline. So our goal is to increase weekly app downloads by 450 downloads over a three-month span. By the end of the three months, we’ll know if we got to 450 more downloads a week or not because our goal was specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and-time bound. I hope you feel good about setting SMART goals now. I’ll meet you back here again soon.

Identify: Elements of SMART goals

• Ungraded Plugin: Duration: 30 minutes

Identifying elements of SMART goals

Scenario: A skincare startup’s main business goal is to increase overall profits by 3% in 12 months. Help them create SMART goals that support this objective.

Review the sample marketing goal and fill in the blank with the corresponding SMART element.

1. Using an email marketing campaign, we will aim to grow our repeat customers __ by the end of the quarter.

Select the option that makes this goal measurable. Select the answer:

• by 500 users (Correct. This option includes a measurement that will help the startup know when they’ve reached the goal.)

• among the 20-35 age group

• along with our profits

2. Example

In order to __, we will increase lead generation through a referral program for existing customers over the next three months.

Select the option that makes this goal relevant.

• boost sales for our new product (Correct. This option makes the goal relevant because it supports the business-wide goal of increasing revenue.)

• boost employee satisfaction

• improve customer service

3. Example

To encourage repeat purchases by 20% by the end of the fiscal year, we will __.

Select the option that makes this goal specific.

• send exclusive discount codes to existing customers

• send more emails

• generate new types of leads (Correct. This option makes the goal specific because it describes what needs to be done to meet expectations.)

4. Example

In anticipation of a new skincare product launch, we will grow our subscriber list by __ using a targeted social media campaign.

Select the option that makes this goal attainable.

• 50% within seven days

• 8% within three months (Correct. This option makes the goal attainable because it sets reasonable expectations for the target and timeframe.)

• 300% in the next 3 days

5. Example

We’ll spend $1,500 on display ads __ to acquire at least 300 new customers.

Select the option that makes this goal time-bound.

• within the Google Display Network

• where we’ll collect email addresses

• over the next 2 months (Correct. This option makes the goal time-bound because it provides a deadline.)

Create an email marketing strategy

• Reading: Duration: 20 minutes

An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer identifies and follows to achieve their desired marketing goals with email advertising. This reading provides an overview of the sections of an email marketing strategy.

Please note that this reading is only an overview. Many of the sections will be explored in more detail later in the course.

Build your email marketing strategy

There is no one way to create an email marketing strategy. You can record strategy on a paper using a writing utensil. Or, you can use a word processing application like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Instead, it’s more important to include steps commonly found in other successful strategies. The sections of an email marketing strategy include:

• Set your goals

• Choose an email marketing provider

• Build your email marketing subscriber list

• Evaluate brand guidelines

• Determine email frequency

• Determine performance measuring methods

Let’s explore each of these steps one by one.

1. Set your goals

The first step of creating an email marketing strategy is defining your email goals. These goals are often in line with your business goals, meaning your emails will work to achieve the goals that you have for your business.

Some common goals include:

• Increase brand visibility

• Increase website traffic

• Increase sales

• Acquire new customers

• Build relationships with existing customers

• Increase brand loyalty and loyal customers

Defining your email marketing goal first will help guide you when choosing relevant email options in the upcoming strategy steps.

2. Choose an email marketing provider

An email marketing provider, or email marketing service, is a company that offers email marketing or bulk email services. Choosing the right email marketing provider can significantly impact the success of your email campaign. Some popular email marketing providers are:

• Mailchimp

• HubSpot

• Salesforce

• Constant Contact

When deciding which service is best for your brand, you will need to consider the following factors:

• Cost

• Deliverability

• Reporting

• Email list management

• Template features

3. Build your email marketing subscriber list

Next, determine how you will build and maintain an engaged subscriber list. Building email lists is an ongoing process. To build an email list, you can:

• Create a signup form on your website

• Create an in-person sign up list

• Share a signup form on social media

Once you create a signup list, you’ll be able to divide it into smaller groups based on criteria like interests, location, or purchase history, in a process known as segmentation. This will help you target specific groups for specific goals.

4. Evaluate brand guidelines

When a business wants to establish a distinctive brand identity, they often create a list of rules and standards that convey how their brand should be represented. These rules are the company’s brand guidelines and they apply to all content produced by the company, including emails.

In your email marketing strategy, identify specific brand guidelines that will be relevant to your email marketing campaigns. These guidelines can include the following:

• Fonts

• Colors

• Layouts

• Illustrations

• Logos

If your email marketing service allows you to create templates for your emails, you can apply specific guideline details for all your brand’s outgoing emails for a consistent brand identity.

5. Determine email frequency

Stating how often your emails will be shared will help you plan out how often your emails will reach your subscribers. Later in the course, you will learn more about how to establish email frequency and how to create a schedule for sending emails.

6. Determine performance measuring methods

When you begin your email marketing campaigns, you’ll need to analyze the success of your campaigns. The tools you’ll use are based on your available resources. Most email marketing providers offer basic reporting that tracks essential metrics like how many of your emails were opened, unsubscribers, and click through rate (CTR). Some providers also monitor bounce rate, which is the percentage of emails that have not successfully reached recipients. You can also run a deliverability check that determines if your emails are getting to their intended recipients.

Be sure to state in your email marketing strategy which of these tools will be most effective for analyzing your campaign success. Also be sure to state when you plan to collect and evaluate these performance measuring methods.

Key takeaways

Outlining the steps and procedures of an email marketing strategy can help you develop a successful, organized, and well-thought email marketing campaign. These steps will guide you as you strive to create emails that achieve your marketing goals.

Test your knowledge: PESTLE, SWOT, and setting SMART goals

• Practice Quiz. 5 questions. Grade: 100%
  • link to Quiz

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4. Do’s and Don’t of email marketing

The do’s and don’ts of email marketing

• Video: Duration: 4 minutes

I hope you’re feeling more confident in creating an email marketing plan, and you’re almost equipped to test email marketing out on your own. Before you do, we want to make sure you have some loose guidelines to follow.

When it comes to creating an email marketing strategy, a lot of the decisions you make will depend on who you are targeting and what you find works best for them. But even before you have that information, here are some tried and true do’s and don’ts that every email marketer lives by.

First, I’ve mentioned how many email users in the world there are. How many emails do you think are sent per day? Some experts have estimated that over 300 billion emails are sent every single day. That’s a lot of emails. Knowing how many emails are being sent every single day, it’s important for your brand that you do prioritize quality over quantity.

Make sure you set a standard and define what quality means for your brand or team and stick to it. If people like the content in your emails, they’ll look forward to them even if they’re only once a week. Maybe to you quality means that it enriches their life in some way. Perhaps you just want to provide some interesting or beautiful images to your customers or readers, and that equates to quality for you. Maybe quality means you teach them something. If your company focuses on mental health, maybe you equip your clients and customers with a new resource or exercise to start their week each Monday morning. When you prioritize quality over quantity, you are ensuring you aren’t overwhelming your reader or customer. Don’t spam them.

If you aren’t familiar, spam refers to unsolicited and unwanted junk email sent out in bulk to a broad recipient list. Always avoid making your emails look or sound like spam and don’t worry about appearing in inboxes several times a week just to stay top-of-mind. Spam often uses dramatic phrases, and too good to be true offers. If you use that kind of language, odds are you will end up in their spam folder anyways and the emails will never be received.

Moving on, our next do is very important. Do segment your lists. Segmenting refers to the practice of dividing an email subscriber list into smaller groups based on criteria like interests, location, or purchase history. You’ll learn how to do this later on in the course, but the basics are that segmenting is a great strategy because it allows you to target tailored emails to specific people to ensure the customers will enjoy them.

For instance, if you are marketing a product that you find typically sells better to people who identify as a certain gender, you might segment your list by your subscribers’ gender. For example, women, men, non-binary, and other genders that people have self-identified. Or let’s say you wanted to offer a 10 percent discount to customers as a birthday gift. You could easily segment the list by month and send emails to customers with birthdays in any given month.

A type of segmentation that is very popular is segmenting by time zone. Some email marketers believe it is best to be in your customers’ inboxes first thing in the morning. However, all of your customers won’t live in the same geographic location. For this reason, you may decide to segment your lists by time zone to ensure you’re landing in inboxes at the optimal time. Don’t send the same emails to every single subscriber, it can end up being a waste of your very valuable subscribers, because if they feel they are being sent emails that they don’t identify with, they are less likely to read the email and they may even unsubscribe.

The perfect email doesn’t craft itself. It takes time, precision, editing, design work, and most importantly, testing. Do test various formats, lengths, links, and images in your emails. It would be almost impossible to get everything right on the first try. You might find that your audience hardly clicked on the hyperlinks you included. So maybe you try linking to different content or even just providing a bit more context for your links in the next few emails. See what works and don’t be afraid to try new things. The only thing you shouldn’t try is sticking to the same format without testing anything new.

I hope this video gave you clarity and context for how to create a successful marketing strategy, but we’re just getting started.

Aaron - Do’s and don’ts for email marketing

• Video: Duration: 2 minutes

My name is Aaron, and I’m a growth marketing manager here at Google. I’m working with our owned and operated marketing services to get news, information, and other helpful resources out to people about all the different tools that Google offers today.

When I first started with email marketing, I was working a lot with very specific campaigns, helping define what the creative would look like, what the copy would look like, how we might want to experiment, and what we might want to test in order to improve our success metrics. And then finally, of course, getting those campaigns out the door.

Best practices that I’d recommend and that I always try to filter my own thoughts on campaigns through are making sure that the content you’re serving up to your consumers is personalized and customized for them so that they can take it and use it almost immediately in their day-to-day. Less is more. We find that when people have an email, they usually are being crushed under a huge number of campaigns that hit their inboxes from every company under the sun. The faster you can get your message to the user and the faster you can show them what you’d like them to do with that information, the better.

When you’re thinking about your email strategy, the single most important thing in my opinion is to constantly be testing. Even if there are best practices that you read online about or that you’ve heard from friends about that may work for certain target audiences, almost everybody has a slightly different group of people you’re trying to reach, and that best practice may not resonate super well for your group of people.

What you always want to be doing is AB testing, making sure that you have different variants of your email, of your campaign, and that you’re looking really closely at the success metrics of that campaign that you’ve defined so that you know which one works best, and that you can build on that foundation for the future.

Finally, we want to make sure that your emails don’t get stale and static over the course of time. Even if you found an email that works really well for people, you want to make sure that you’re constantly experimenting and integrating new technologies and innovations so you always stay on the bleeding edge and that you can make sure that you have the best options and the best content for the users that you’re reaching.

As you’re exploring entry-level roles in email marketing, expose yourself to the emails that are coming from all the different companies that you may follow or like to learn more about in the space. See how their emails differ in style, in content, in length, and which ones you enjoy or which ones you’re interacting the most with. That really helps develop a sense for what you want your emails to look like eventually so that people just like you get emails that are helpful and useful for them.

Ethical email language

• Reading: Duration: 20 minutes

The end goal of an email marketing campaign is to achieve your business objectives and marketing goals. To do that, you need to create emails customers want to open, read, and engage with. One important way to run a successful campaign is to ensure that you’re conducting ethical email marketing. Ethical email marketing means creating strategies that bring true value to your audience, while maintaining the moral principles your business subscribes to. There are many considerations when writing emails in an ethical manner, but one is to choose your language carefully. This reading covers how to conduct ethical email marketing by using appropriate language.

Use ethical language

As an email marketer, the language you use affects how your communications are received—you never want to use language to scam or spam users. Emails that don’t follow ethical marketing language may be caught by spam filters, and that means they may never reach customer mailboxes. Even if they do get through, they may create negative feelings in readers, causing them to distrust your company and its tactics. This can put your brand’s voice and integrity at risk. If your words come off as manipulative, exaggerated, unethical, or desperate, your brand’s voice and integrity may be at risk.

Use trustworthy and honest language

Your subscribers should always feel like they can trust you. Using genuine language in your brand’s voice builds trust with your audience. Make a point to select phrasing that’s conversational and that makes your customers feel comfortable. Consider excluding words and phrases that are time-sensitive. A simple “10% off inside” will do more to entice readers than something like “URGENT: Act Now.”

Some examples of words that will be flagged by spam filters are:

• Act now

• Apply now

• Urgent

• Exclusive deal

• Important information regarding

• This won’t last

Be truthful about what you’re offering

Choose phrases and words that indicate exactly what the email offer is. If it’s an extra 50% off sale items, state that. Your audience doesn’t want to feel like you aren’t telling the whole story.

So if you’re using words that are very exaggerated, or hyperbolic, the emails may not even make it to your audience. And, if the emails do make it there, you don’t want to risk having them feel like they were tricked by you.

Some examples of hyperbolic phrases are:

• Best offer ever

• Fantastic deal

• Free money

• No catch

• No fees

These are hyperbolic phrases you should generally avoid so that your customers don’t feel tricked or misled.

Use language that adds value

Use words that add value of some kind, so your audience has a reason to open and engage with your email. Your audience never wants to feel like you are begging them to open an email or make a purchase—that’s why it’s best to avoid desperate language. Using a phrase like “we think you’ll like this” or “we made this with you in mind” reminds the readers that these emails are for them, and they should enjoy them.

Avoid phrases like:

• Please read

• We need your help

• You need to see this

Key takeaways

Most people don’t intend to send spam emails, so when emails end up in spam folders, it can be frustrating. Save yourself that frustration by using trustworthy and honest language; being truthful with what you offer; and using language that adds value. And if you aren’t sure whether you are choosing the most ethical language, test some things out! Then, analyze your results to see what your audience responds well to.

What is your experience with email marketing?

• Discussion Prompt: Duration: 10 minutes

“While I don’t have direct experience with email marketing, I’ve recently acquired valuable knowledge about its best practices and strategies.

My understanding stems from extensive research and learning about various aspects of email marketing, including measuring campaign results, creating targeted email lists, and utilizing email marketing tools effectively.

Although I lack practical experience, my background in content creation and web development equips me with transferable skills.

Writing engaging content and understanding audience preferences are skills that I believe are crucial in crafting effective email campaigns.

Additionally, my ability to analyze data and draw insights could be applied to measuring the success of email marketing efforts.

Although I’m new to email marketing, I believe my existing IT skills provide a strong foundation for me to effectively apply these concepts in real-world scenarios”.

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5. Review. Introduction to think outside the inbox: email marketing

Wrap-up

• Video Duration: 1 minute

Congrats on finishing this section. I hope you’re feeling excited and ready to keep it moving. Before we continue on, let’s reflect on the concepts we’ve covered so far.

You were introduced to the basics of email marketing. Recall that we defined email marketing as the process of sending branded or commercial email messages to a predetermined list of people to inform, drive sales, and create community.

The aspects that make email marketing so effective are the lifespan of email, the ease of use, the insights it provides you, and the sheer number of email users. Then, you discovered that in order to create an effective email marketing campaign, you’d need to do some audits on your company using the SWOT technique and on the environment surrounding you using the PESTLE technique.

After that, you were ready to explore the world of SMART goals. Remember that your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Then, you learned about just how to get started crafting that marketing campaign based on your SWOT and PESTLE analysis and your SMART goals. We gave you some tried and true Do’s and Don’ts in email marketing. We talked about how you absolutely should test different things out to see which strategies your subscribers enjoy and which they don’t. You learned that segmenting lists will make each email feel that much more personal to your subscribers, an invaluable email marketing strategy.

In the next section of the course, I’ll introduce you to the specific types of emails there are and how to know when to utilize each of them. Then, you’ll put your knowledge to use as you write your first email copy and subject lines.

Glossary terms from module 1

• Reading: Duration: 10 minutes
  • Access the glossary

Module 1 challenge

• Quiz: 10 questions. Grade: 100%
• Link to challenge 1

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END! - Week 1 - Course 4