The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving, and businesses are always seeking new ways to connect and engage with their target audience. Marketers have more options than ever to engage with their potential customers, from social media ads to SEO. With all these new ad trends, there is one channel that continues to provide reliable performance—email marketing. While email marketing may not be the newest shiny object, it regularly proves to be one of the most effective, easiest, and trusted forms to reach and communicate with your audiences. Email marketing is essentially using email to promote products or services, develop relationships with customers, generate brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales. Of course, an email can’t be baked into a social media feed the way social media posts or search ads can; emails are delivered exclusively to an inbox, which makes them uniquely detailed, structured, and personalized to communicate the message in a one-on-one fashion with the audience. With social media ads and search ads, the business must compete for attention, whereas email marketing creates a dedicated inbox for interested parties who want to connect and engage with them. Email marketing continues to top the list for small businesses and large corporations because it requires less investment while producing high rates of return, is cost-effective and measurable, and you have a record of who engaged. Email marketing enables you to stay in touch and communicate with your audience in a structured and effective manner.
The fundamentals of email marketing
Email marketing can be defined as when a business or organization emails its/targeted audience, or list of subscribers, specific messages that the subscriber has agreed to receive. These emails can have many different purposes—from new product announcements, exclusive deals and discounts, company information, newsletters, and other info.Although email marketing can vary widely with specific campaigns, list management, and ultimately strategy. A successful email marketing campaign will often have an intriguing subject line, well-crafted copy in the body, easy-to-understand calls-to-action (CTAs), and a good design. Importantly, email marketing works because of permission marketing—in other words, subscribers are opting to receive the email before it is sent, which allows marketers the opportunity to market to an audience that has already expressed interest.The foundation of email marketing is the subscriber list. There are many forms of intentionally building an opt-in subscriber list, through a website form, social media features, or content upgrades. Once obtained, subscriber lists can often be segmented based upon demographic information, actions—historical or in response to an email—and preference. Segmenting lists allows marketers to promote segments of the subscriber list with a message, content, and design targeted to their audience.
The benefits of email marketing
The primary reason for investing in email marketing is ROI. Email marketing continues to demonstrate high ROI because of low costs, targeting, and usability. Email can communicate consistently, and it can be personal. While businesses can make public posts on platforms such as social media, email marketing can specifically target individuals based on their preferences, actions, or history with a brand. Personalization (sometimes addressing people by name or product recommendations based on previous purchases) leads to drastically increased engagement and conversions. Email marketing is also highly measurable. Marketers can measure open rates, job opportunity thresholds, click-through rates, conversions, and a plethora of other metrics of campaign success to see what’s working and what is not. Marketers can continually optimize their emails, and their marketing qualifies them to microscopically enhance their campaigns and react to the data or retire a failing campaign.
Types of email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is a versatile marketing method because it offers various types of campaigns for marketers to choose from, based on their goals. For example, promotional emails are time-sensitive emails that include details about a sale, special offer, or event that businesses may send to the recipient’s inbox. Promotional emails are only one type of marketing campaign available for businesses to use to promote their products/services. Newsletters, or regular emails that provide the audience with information updates about a business or blog posts, or curated content, are also popular. Newsletters help businesses to establish a regular rhythm over time and provide the marketer the opportunity to instill trust over time with their audience and build loyalty to their brand. Another type of common email is the transactional email, which is created in response to a specific action by a user, like an order confirmation email, a shipping email, or a password reset email. While transactional emails are not “promotional,” they have high open rates as a result of the action taken by the user. Transactional emails may also include promotional content containing information, such as an email recommending related products or a discount offer. Automated emails are also widely used and known as drip emails or campaigns. An automated email consists of a collection of pre-scheduled emails that are delivered over a period of time based on user behavior or defined triggers. Welcome email series to new subscribers, onboarding email sequences, and re-engagement campaigns to inactive users are all examples of email automations a business could deploy.
