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Email Marketing for Business

Updated: May 26, 2022

NCFE Level 2 Award in Digital Promotion for Business (601/6671/X)

NCFE Level 2 Certificate in Digital Promotion for Business (601/6673/3)

Unit 10 Email campaigns for business promotion (A/615/8544)




Joseph, the lifestyle designer in the video above, has been effectively using email-marketing to win new orders and projects. He sends regular updates to his actual and prospective customers about his business and maintains a relationship with them through these emails. However, his friend Faridah is still struggling to create a sustainable business. Faridah is a painter and has been doing commissioned work for almost 5 years now. Although her paintings have been widely appreciated, she is still not receiving a stable stream of orders and has to often scout for new customers. Faridah has been thinking of investing in Digital Marketing to promote her business but is not sure about her options. Let's read the conversation between the two where Joseph is answering Faridah's questions about email marketing.


When my work is being widely appreciated, why am I not getting repeat orders?


Problem is that there is so much of competition out there! There are so many other good artists in the market as well and your customers eventually became their customers because you did not keep reminding them about yourself.


What can I do to keep reminding my customers about myself? What can I do to increase my repeat customer rate?

Email Marketing is your best bet. Your customer’s email id is your most valuable marketing asset. With their permission, send them regular updates about your new work. So that every next time they think of buying something similar that they bought form you, you are at the top of their mental list!

Shall I send my customers group emails from my personal email id with pictures of my new work?

Well, you could be doing that. However, it would make more sense if you use an email marketing platform that helps you in grouping the customers in appropriate categories, design picturesque email-content & send personalised emails to your customers without disclosing the identity of other recipients. Additionally, these digital platforms provide you feedback about the open rate and click rate of your emails.


What is Open-rate in emails? What is Click rate in email marketing?

Open-rate tells you that how many people actually opened the marketing emails you sent to their mail-box. If you sent this email to 100 customers and 40 opened the email (rest 60 maybe just ignored it), the open-rate for this particular campaign is 40%.
Similarly, if out of the 40 people who actually opened this email, 8 clicked on the embedded link button (Buy Now, Find out More etc.), the click rate of your email campaign is 8%.
Open-rate and Click-rate depends on various factors like your customer’s relationship with your brand, catchy subject line, meaningful email content etc. Keeping track of these parameters help you understand what is working and what is not working for your business.


What happens when a customer no longer wants to receive communication from my business?

You should always provide an unsubscribe button at the bottom of your email so that people can choose to receive or stay out of the communication network. Again, these buttons are already embedded in email-marketing software.

What is the purpose and objective of an email marketing campaign?


The purpose of an email marketing campaign is to reach out to your actual and prospective customers through their mailbox.

Email marketing can help you achieve various business objectives like:

· Information/Introduction: B2B businesses often send cold-emails to prospective clients, describing the value they offer to bring to the client’s business. B2C businesses can send launch dates, introductory offers and more to win new customers.

· Branding: Businesses also send curated content emails to establish their brand positioning (Shopify & Wix send regular email alerts to their customers about new website-design and e-commerce trends).

· Sales Conversions : Reminder emails about items left in the cart or incomplete purchases can improve your sales by up to 30%. Sending new offers to customers who have not come back to your business for a while can help winning them back from competitors.

· Reengagement : One could be sending offers and updates to existing customers based on their purchase history. Information about discount sales to value-shoppers and information about new stock to premium shoppers can help in winning repeat orders from existing customers. Businesses also send birthday, anniversary discount coupons and more to get repeat visits from existing customers.


How can I design a good email marketing campaign? What are the stages of designing a good email marketing campaign?


An email marketing campaign should be designed in a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic & Timely) way. The ABC steps in designing a good email marketing campaign are as follows:

A) Planning:

  • Identify your business goal: Your email content has to be in sync with your immediate business objective. This could be a short-term goal of informing your existing customers about end-of-season discount sale OR Long-term objective of branding & positioning. Identifying business objective helps in meaningful planning of the email content and identifying the right set of audience for the same.