What is email marketing?
Introduction to email marketing
June 8, 2022
10 minute reading
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that helps you achieve your marketing objectives by sending emails to a subscriber list of prospects and customers. These emails may contain useful information, company news, advertisements, special offers, or requests for a sales meeting. They are often personalized based on the prospects' demographic information or position in the sales funnel. Businesses typically use an email marketing tool or software to help manage their email lists and track their progress.
In this beginner's guide to email marketing, we'll discuss the benefits of email marketing for your business, we'll explain how email marketing actually works, and we'll give you some useful tips to help you get started with your first email marketing campaign.
Email marketing: everything you need to know
1. Benefits of email marketing
Email marketing is a highly effective strategy for promoting your products or services. It builds brand awareness while educating prospects about your offerings. It can help you:
Generate leads.
Drive high-quality traffic to your website.
Nurture relationships with subscribers.
Build trust and credibility with your audience.
Progress prospects along the sales funnel to increase conversion rates.
Stay top of mind and keep your audience engaged.
Communicate with existing customers to cultivate loyalty, increase retention rates, and generate recurring sales.
Email marketing is also an indispensable component in any content marketing strategy as it offers an effective channel to distribute your content and drive high-quality organic traffic to your website. On the more transactional side, an abandoned cart email series can increase the conversion rate by as much as 69%.
Moreover, email tools can be integrated with many other marketing technologies to improve results. For instance, you can increase open rates by 50% with personalization technologies. Or, you can boost engagement with interactive emails—something like adding videos to emails can increase click rates by 300%.
2. How does email marketing work
Email marketing allows you to target your audience and customers through email campaigns. You can also divide your subscriber lists into different groups and send the most relevant content and offers to each segment (more on that later).
These emails can be sent out in a predefined sequence to turn prospects into buyers or after the readers take specific actions such as clicking on a link, viewing a product, or leaving products in the shopping cart. You can also make personalized product recommendations based on a customer's preferences, purchasing history, location, etc.
To effectively manage customer segments and personalized email sequences, email marketers typically use email service providers (ESPs) to send and manage email marketing campaigns. With the right email service provider, you can distribute the right content to the right people at the right time, and set up your campaigns to optimize your marketing ROI.
So why not use a free email service such as Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo!Mail instead?
Those, which are also known as internet service providers (ISPs), best perform for private use only, not for sending large email campaigns. Plus paid email services typically provide professional support, which is critical for businesses that can't afford to lose time trying to solve a problem, or understand how a feature works.
3. Email marketing list building tips
Before you can start running your email campaigns, you need to build an email list that will contain the names and email addresses of people who opted-in to subscribe to your email newsletter, and receive email communications from you.
All right, but how can you build an email list from scratch? Here are some tips to help you get started with a successful email marketing campaign:
Don't buy email lists. There are many good reasons why you should never and ever buy an email list and the first and most important one is that you'll violate the rules of consent under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Create and promote a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something you give away for free in exchange for a prospect's email address. Most lead magnets are digital content (such as ebooks or white papers), so they can be immediately delivered in a variety of downloadable formats, such as PDFs, MP3s, or videos. Your lead magnet should appeal to your target audience and deliver values to enable you to set a positive first impression and help you build trust with your subscribers.
Use an opt-in form to collect your prospects' email addresses. Your opt-in form (whether it's on your homepage, shown as a pop-up, or presented as a standalone landing page) serves to communicate the benefit of your lead magnet so visitors will provide you with their email address in exchange for the content.
Here is a great example of a very effective opt-in form seen on Brian Dean's blog, Backlinko
Segment your email list. You can increase engagement and conversion while lowering the unsubscribe rate when you use list segmentation to deliver relevant, timely, and personalized content to your subscribers. As consumers expect targeted information from brands, an effective segmentation strategy can get your emails opened, read, and clicked. For example, segmentation is found to help marketers increase conversion rates by 355% and boost revenues by as much as 781%! In addition, Hubspot's analysis of over 100,000 emails found that the average CTR for a single email list was 12% lower than that for segmented lists.
4. What is the best email marketing service?
Email marketing services provide the tools you need to capture leads, manage subscribers, and send out email campaigns. With the right email marketing service, you can distribute the right content to the right people at the right time, and set up your campaigns to optimize your marketing ROI. Here are some of the most popular email marketing service providers, as well as their pros and cons to help you make the best choice for your business:
Constant Contact
Constant Contact has long been an industry leader in email marketing. It's popular among small businesses and large corporations alike.
Pros:
Easy-to-use tools with pre-built and mobile-optimized templates.
Real-time results tracking for your campaigns.
Integration with many platforms, such as Salesforce, Shopify, Eventbrite, WordPress, QuickBooks, Gmail, and more.
Cons:
The user interface is cumbersome and not intuitive at times.
The reporting feature lacks customizability.
Customer support is sometimes slow.
AWeber
Used by many entrepreneurs and small businesses, AWeber has been around for 20 years and offers reliable and affordable services.
Pros:
Simple pricing structure based on the number of subscribers.
Sales tracking feature included as part of the reporting tool.
An industry leader in email deliverability rates.
Cons:
Pricing can get high as the number of subscribers grows.
Lacks some advanced features offered by its competitors, such as more complex automation or spam testing.
Some of the email templates look outdated.
Campaign Monitor
With over 250,000 customers worldwide, Campaign Monitor supports customers in a variety of industries including media companies, tech giants, and nonprofits.
Pros:
Easy-to-use and mobile-optimized templates.
Dynamic reporting offers different ways to pull your data.
Live Map Reporting show users' locations and interactions with your content.
Cons:
Workflows and automation are not the most advanced.
The domain verification process is cumbersome.
Limited design, editing, and customization options for the templates.
Mailchimp
Popular among startups, Mailchimp offers flexible, scalable, and affordable email service with a brand voice that makes you smile.
Pros:
Free plan available for accounts with under 2,000 subscribers.
Templates are designed specifically for the goal of each email.
Award-winning customer service, as well as an extensive knowledge base and tutorials.
Cons:
Subscription plans can get expensive as your list grows.
Limited email automation options.
Cumbersome process for updating the customer database.
MailerLite
A relative newcomer, MailerLite offers the essentials including automation tools, landing pages, pop-ups, and surveys at an affordable price.
Pros:
Easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.
Free plan available for accounts with up to 1,000 subscribers.
Essential email marketing features include list segmentation, personalization, and A/B testing.
Cons:
Occasional deliverability issues for some accounts.
Limited advanced features.
The domain approval process can be lengthy and frustrating.
5. Improving email open rates
Your email content is only effective if the recipients are opening and reading it. First, you should make sure that your emails are landing in the recipients' inbox instead of the spam folder. Then, send your emails at the right time. Here's what you can do to increase email open rates:
Remove inactive subscribers from your list since mailbox providers' spam filtering algorithms look at the ratio of active to inactive email accounts to determine if your emails are spam.
Make sure your subscribers have opted-in to receive your emails and never add anyone to your list without permission. If too many people report your email as spam, your deliverability will be impacted.
Choose a reputable email provider who does its due diligence to ensure that your emails are sent from an IP address that's not blacklisted by mailbox providers.
Use a name and email address that recipients can recognize in the "from" field to increase the chances that they'll interact with your content instead of reporting it as spam.
Avoid using misleading subject lines just to get clicks. You may get one email opened, but this will increase the likelihood that your email will be reported as spam.
Include a physical address and unsubscribe link to ensure that you're adhering to regulations.
Don't use words that can trigger the spam filter, such as "free," "congratulations," "risk-free," and "this is not spam."
Increase engagement rates by sending relevant and useful information so you can demonstrate to the email service provider that your emails aren't spam.
Send your email at the right time—that is, when the recipients are most likely to interact with your email. While every audience and every business is different, the best day tends to be Tuesday and the best time tends to be 10 a.m. However, you'll need to track metrics for your own email list and customize it according to your findings.
6. Email marketing mistakes you need to avoid
You also need to avoid some common pitfalls to optimize the results of your email marketing campaigns. Here are the major mistakes to avoid:
Skipping the welcome email that introduces your brand and set expectations.
Not having a clear CTA that guides your readers to take the desired action.
Not meeting your readers' expectations, not delivering on your promise, or getting off-topic.
Using cliche and sales-heavy language.
Neglecting to optimize the mobile experience.
Relying too heavily on images as some recipients view emails with images turned off.
Not optimizing your website for lead capture opportunities.
Waiting till you have enough subscribers before sending out your campaigns.
Sounding generic because you don't want to upset anyone.
7. Email marketing FAQs
How can I segment my email list?
Depending on the nature of your offering and the characteristics of the audience, there are many ways to segment your list so you can deliver content at the right place and in the right time to the right people:
Location: If you're holding an in-person event, you may target only subscribers who live in the area. Or you can avoid sending promotional emails to those who live in a country that you don't ship to.
Industry: B2B marketers who work with customers in different industries can send use cases and content relevant to each sector to increase response rates.
Job title: Recipients who have different roles in a company have different priorities. B2B marketers can appeal to what's important to each audience segment to increase engagement.
Company size: The number of employees in an organization is often a good indicator of its needs and budget. This information can help you promote the appropriate offerings to each recipient.
Website behaviors: You can track registered visitors' interactions with your website and send them targeted content based on their actions, such as the products they have viewed.
Interest: Leveraging subscribers' profiles, preferences, past purchases, or browsing behaviors, you can identify the product categories they're most interested in and send relevant content.
Customer lifecycle stages: Encourage prospects down the sales funnel more effectively by sending content that matches where they are in the sales funnel. For example, send educational content for those at the awareness stage and a special discount for people at the purchasing stage.
Age: The recipients' age can give you a hint on how they prefer to interact with your content or what's important to them.
Language: If you're doing business internationally, you can segment by language preferences and then cross-reference the data with location to deliver content that will provide the highest value.
Customer value: Increase retention rate and cultivate customer loyalty by sending exclusive content and promotions to subscribers who have made recurring purchases.
Keep in mind that a single prospect can belong to multiple segments, which could impact the frequency that each subscriber receives your communications.
How can I measure the success of my email campaign?
To ensure that your email campaigns are meeting your marketing goals, you need to measure their effectiveness against the right KPIs. This will help you fine-tune your email marketing strategy to get the best results. Here are some key metrics to focus on:
Open rate: It tells you if the subject line is effective in getting the recipients to open your emails. It's calculated by dividing the total number of opened emails by the number of delivered emails.
Click-through rate (CTR): It's a good indicator of whether the content is appealing to the audience and if the CTA aligns with your message. It's calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the number of delivered emails.
Conversion rate: Besides the effectiveness of your email copy and CTA, the conversion rate also indicates the effectiveness of your landing page. Often tied to revenues and therefore, the ROI of your campaign, it's the percentage of subscribers who completed a goal action (e.g., making a purchase).
click-to-open rate: With more consumers using mobile devices, this metric can help you understand how you can capture more audiences. Specific for mobile opens, it helps you understand the efficacy of your campaign on smartphones and tablets.
Why do people unsubscribe from an email list?
While some people unsubscribe simply because your offerings are not a good fit, you can avoid the right prospects from leaving your list by understanding why people unsubscribe. Here are the top reasons, as well as the percentage of consumers that reported each reason:
Getting too many emails (46.4%)
The email looks like spam (17.2%)
Irrelevant content (15%)
Didn't know that I was subscribed (9.1%)
Content is not tailored to my preferences (7.2%)
Too much or too little content (4.3%)
The bottom line: Grow your business with email marketing
Email marketing is a cost-effective way to grow your business because it allows you to reach the right audience at the right time with the right content to drive high-quality website traffic, build relationships with the audience, enhance your credibility, increase conversions, and cultivate customer loyalty.
First, you need to create a lead magnet that appeals to your target audience and capture leads using an opt-in form. Then, you should follow the latest email marketing best practices to ensure that your campaigns are delivering the most relevant content to your subscribers and progress them down the sales funnel.
Of course, don't forget to analyze the results so you can adjust your tactics based on how your subscribers interact with the content to optimize your ROI while providing your audience with the most helpful content.
Working with the right email marketing professionals gives you access to the latest knowledge, expertise, and technologies so you can effectively implement and manage the many moving parts effectively.
