How to Use Email Marketing to Grow Your Online Course

Looking for effective ways to promote your online course and win more customers?

You've probably already considered countless options. But you may have forgotten about email marketing. That happens a lot, because many people believe it's an outdated strategy. That's not quite true. According to Statista, there were 4.258 billion email users worldwide in 2022. And, according to a HubSpot survey, at least 50% of them read most of the emails they receive.

So you can't underestimate the power of email marketing to grow your digital business.

With a well-defined strategy, it can be a valuable tool. To help you, in this article the team at Cademí, Brazil's first Member Hub, walks you through key points for boosting your sales with email marketing:

• What email marketing is
• How to build a qualified email list
• How to create an email campaign
• Email marketing automation
• Key metrics and how to analyze them

What is email marketing?

In case you're wondering: as the name suggests, email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that dates back to the 1970s. In short, it's a direct communication channel between a business and a consumer (or a lead). There's no algorithm interfering with delivery and, on top of that, it's cheaper than other options.

That's why it's still the second most used channel in digital marketing.

If you want to implement it in your digital business, keep in mind that emails can be sent as one-offs or as part of an automated flow. In other words, a sequence of emails already scheduled for a specific situation. For example, a customer who downloaded an e-book receives 10 emails about the topic that recommend a course where they can learn more.

Either way, you can work toward different goals, such as:

• Sales;
• Awareness;
• Building customer relationships.

Because there's no middleman, it's a simple way to build and maintain a connection with customers and drive new sales.

How to build a qualified email list

People who say email marketing doesn't work probably don't have a qualified contact list.

If your business doesn't have that list yet, it's important to start building it with this goal in mind: talking to people who want to hear from you. To do that, use lead generation techniques such as:

• Landing pages that convert;
• Offering relevant materials (lead magnets)
• Paid traffic with good targeting;
• Valuable organic content on social media.

These strategies help attract people interested in your digital product and help you build a solid customer base.

Creating persuasive email campaigns

Is your digital business's email list already qualified? Then the next step is to create your campaigns. The format of your campaign will vary depending on where your customer is in their journey. Some options are promotional emails, newsletters, and seasonal emails.

So we've already answered a likely question: there's no right number of emails. It all depends on your goal and on which stage of the sales funnel your customer is in.

Whatever the case, it's important to write persuasive copy that encourages the reader to take action.

Opening the email is the first important action. So you need an eye-catching subject line. Then, once the email is open, comes the action you want. Here it's essential to use some email marketing copywriting best practices. Among other things, the content should be relevant, personalized, and visually appealing.

Email marketing automation

A single digital business can have countless email marketing campaigns running at the same time. After all, not all leads arrive together, and they're not all at the same point in the buying journey.

Not everyone can get the same email.

But you can't send every email by hand either. So at some point your business will need to automate its campaigns. That will help you save time and make your communication more efficient, because you'll be able to analyze data such as open rates and the number of clicks on internal links.

There are countless email automation tools, such as:

• Mailchimp;
• ActiveCampaign;
• Hostinger;
• RD Station.

But if you choose to create a member area on Cademí, the welcome flow is already built in.

Metrics and optimizing results

To succeed with your email marketing strategy, you need to track and analyze campaign performance. The key metrics you should monitor include open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

In your analysis, try to understand what works and should be kept, as well as the bottlenecks that can be improved. And from time to time, optimize your campaigns to reassess and improve results.

It's also important to run tests and try different approaches to find out what works best for your digital product.

Extra tips for email marketing success

Beyond the information in this article, there are a few extra tips that can boost the success of your email marketing strategy even further. It's essential to personalize messages based on customer preferences, use advanced segmentation for each group of leads, run A/B tests to identify best practices, and integrate email marketing with other digital marketing tools, such as social media.

Here at Cademí, you'll find unique solutions and integrations with a range of tools that can grow your digital business. By using our solutions, you can streamline your operations, improve customer relationships, and get more effective results from your marketing strategies. Now it's time to put these tips into practice and watch your digital product scale!