Email marketing has been a mainstay of marketing programs since email itself became commonplace. It’s still an important pillar of consumer and business marketing strategies, with lots more opportunities these days to use email for personalization and well-timed messaging.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing refers to any emails a business sends to its customers, whether to share news, discounts or special offers, promote products or services, build customer loyalty, and more. It’s generally very cost-effective and used by just about every business trying to build an audience.
Email marketing is a direct tactic within digital marketing. There’s still lots of room for creativity and experimentation within email marketing, even though it’s been used for many years.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
Email marketing can be as simple as manual text emails sent occasionally to your customer list, or as complex as using an automated tool to send graphically designed emails on a data-driven cadence to segmented lists based on customer behavior and other signals.
Email marketing can be used throughout the funnel, starting with brand awareness and building relationships through to lead generation, then to confirming purchases or subscriptions and keeping customers engaged between purchases.
It’s essential that you have clear goals you want to achieve with an email marketing program — goals that align with your broader marketing outcomes and plans. If not, users will quickly unsubscribe. Beyond that, there are generally two components to a successful email marketing program:
1. The List
Whatever stage your business is at, you likely have collected user information that includes email addresses. To succeed at email marketing, you have to make sure you’re building a robust, relevant list of prospects and customers who want to hear from you.
To build the right email list, use digital marketing tactics like pop-ups or form fills that offer something of value in exchange for a user’s email address. Consider social media ads as well and explore any channels that make sense to activate your user base.
2. The Tools
Any company building an email marketing program will quickly find itself in need of an email service provider (ESP). These services can help on a number of essential fronts:
- Designing: An ESP can help you create professional emails with templates and easy-to-use setup to add consistency and branding to your emails.
- Sending: Use these providers to automate email tasks and schedule email sends for the times when you see the best open rate and whenever it makes sense for different time zones.
- List management: Sending too many emails or sending them in the wrong sequence will turn off users. ESPs can help organize and track your list.
- Reporting: These providers show you open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe numbers so you can test and refine for ideal performance.
Why Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing has proved to be a successful, cost-effective tactic. McKinsey found that email marketing is 40x times more effective at customer acquisition than Facebook and Twitter put together. A study conducted by Edelman DXI on behalf of Mailchimp found that four in five customers prefer email over any other form of communication. It’s generally agreed that email brings great ROI, due to its lack of overhead and minimal up-front investment needed. Other reasons to use email marketing include:
Customization
Email is straightforward, offering a direct line to prospects and customers. Marketers should use email campaigns thoughtfully, offering interesting, unique, relevant information to readers. Emails can be a place to play around with brand voice and tone, whether it’s playful, like a kids’ clothing business, or more serious, such as an eco-friendly cleaning company offering news and education. You can also do some testing with emails to see what tone, length, and other factors readers respond to.
Personalization
Email is a way to talk to your readers directly, with clear, engaging language. A Salesforce survey found that 73% of customers say companies treat them like an individual rather than a number, an increase from 39% in 2023. That’s evidence of the success of more personalized marketing over the past few years, including email. Remember that emails shouldn’t be salesy: It’s very easy to lose a reader with overtly salesy, repetitive, unoriginal, or confusing emails. Emails should also be timed and sequenced with care, so readers aren’t bombarded by emails or caught off guard when they haven’t heard from you in so long they’ve forgotten what you offer.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing offers a lot of benefits for companies across sizes and industries, namely:
Directness
Email is one of the few channels where marketers can talk directly to known audience members. Social media, paid ads, and other tactics don’t offer this type of contact. Metrics tracking is also direct and accurate, since you own the channel and can gauge performance almost immediately.
Control
If readers aren’t getting any benefit from your emails, they’ll let you know by unsubscribing. But the flip side of that is that how and what you say in emails matters and will reach your users, unlike social media posts that rely on algorithmic favors. With email, you know exactly how many and which prospects and customers are receiving what information from you.
Experimentation
Email is a great place for A/B testing, exploring segmentation efforts, and testing targeted, personalized content for various segments of your list. Try testing subject lines with different tones of voice or test the CTA within the email. Once you’ve identified audience segments, tailor emails accordingly, and see whether they perform better.
Ease of Use
Getting started with email marketing doesn’t require much in the way of overhead or specialized skills, so it’s accessible for even the smallest or newest businesses. You can start with some basic content for users and then scale and get more sophisticated with time, without too much investment or additional headcount.
Challenges of Email Marketing
Email marketing programs can quickly become a pillar of your overall digital marketing program. Here’s what to keep in mind for long-term success:
It’s Easy to Unsubscribe or Ignore Emails
Modern readers get a ton of email, much of it spam, so it can be easy for your email to get deleted, end up in the junk folder, or for a user to leave the list entirely. Getting emails right for your readers can prevent losing subscribers from your list. This means writing great, actionable copy, and engaging your email list continually over time.
It Won’t Stay Free
Email marketing is very cost-efficient to get started, and generally brings great ROI. But once you’re running multiple campaigns for various audiences, taking full advantage of an email service provider (ESP), or adding an agency to help, email marketing will require its own line item in the budget. Make sure to gauge both the technology and labor categories to understand the costs involved in email marketing.
Types and Examples of Email Marketing
There are various types of emails you can include in an email marketing program, from short, automated messages to more tailored newsletters and more. Each of them has its own purpose and goals, so you can slot them in accordingly with your overall strategy. These are the primary types of emails:
Transactional or Automatic Emails
These emails can be confirmation of a purchase or subscription, or a welcome note for new email list subscribers. They’re usually triggered within your email system to send automatically.
Newsletters and Relational Emails
Email newsletters can do wonders for your overall brand building efforts, along with lead generation and building loyalty and advocacy. You might send weekly or monthly, depending on how much content you have, and can mix news, thought leadership, product launches, and other relevant tidbits. There’s a lot of overlap here with relational emails, which are designed to build and maintain relationships by adding value for readers, like free content, surveys, social media updates, appointment booking, and other engagement-driven content. Consider newer interactive email features to create more back-and-forth with your readers.
Promotional Emails
Promotional emails make direct offers to your list, such as subscriber-only discounted pricing or preview access for a popular item. You can also announce a sale ahead of time or offer early-bird access and pricing to an upcoming event.
Lead Nurturing Emails
These emails are usually crafted as a series of automated messages to build relationships with prospects who have shown interest in your offering as you drive them toward purchase or subscription. It’s essential to craft these messages with lots of useful, educational information about the industry and your product, so readers don’t just feel they’re being sold to. Ideally you can tailor lead nurturing emails to the recipient’s needs and interests, based on what you know about their demographics, job data, and more.
Dedicated Emails
These emails are targeted to only segments of your email list. Consider testing this once you have some data around your email list, as well as your various audiences and customer profiles. You could send a dedicated email to anyone who hasn’t shopped in a while, or to new members whose profiles match an existing profile, so you can suggest particular products they might like.
How to Build an Effective Email Campaign
Choose Your Goal(s)
Never send an email without knowing why you’re sending it: It’s easy to click that “send” button, but consider your reader with every message. Email is a broad digital tactic, so there are lots of goals you might be looking to achieve with email, whether it’s brand awareness, website visits, survey responses, e-book downloads, cart completion, or one of the many other options.
Send the Right Messages
In both copy and design, your email should be branded and written with care. Check all your grammar and spelling, make sure the links work, and always understand how many emails a particular list member is getting from you in a week or month. Too many companies have suffered a hit from incorrect dates in an email or accidentally spamming their users. Even if you’re using basic tools without a dedicated staff, put the time and energy into creating engaging email messages.
Gather (and Integrate) Any Data You Collect
Whether you’ve implemented an email marketing tool or not, track all the email data you can to establish benchmarks around your emails, then work to improve on them over time. If you have an email marketing tool, integrate into your customer data platform (CDP) to create an even fuller and more detailed picture of your customers and prospects. Then you can segment and target users with personalized emails and add marketing automation to save time and create better workflows, campaigns, subject lines, and find ideal send times.
Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing is, in many ways, the most straightforward marketing tactic. If a user doesn’t like your content, you’ll know right away by their unsubscribe. If they like it, you’ll see a click through to whatever CTA you offered them. But there’s plenty of nuance and skill involved in email marketing, with some important best practices to follow, such as:
Build, Don’t Buy
You might be tempted to buy an email list as you’re getting started or trying to expand your customer base, but don’t. Regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) don’t allow unsolicited emails or storing consumer data without consent. Aside from the illegality concerns, most email marketing services won’t work with purchased lists: Unsolicited emails are often marked as spam, leading to reputation damage and landing your company’s emails on a blocked list. Instead, find ways to opt in new subscribers to your email list, such as with free content or a discount code.
Measure, Then Optimize
Capture the data from each email you send, in aggregate, and explore the trends that emerge. It can take some time and data to get to the right number of emails and the right timing in a campaign. Remember, A/B testing in email marketing is incredibly valuable, helping you to hone the right types of subject lines, email length, and more details that can keep a subscriber coming back.
Keep Subscribers Engaged
Use clear, compelling language in emails, and incorporate personality as much as possible so readers click to see the latest whenever they hear from you. Consider using a double opt-in process, where subscribers click their first email to confirm subscription. This helps eliminate misspelled email addresses and reduces any surprise emails (plus, this type of consent is required by GDPR). To boost engagement, use segmentation and personalization to reach smaller groups of subscribers.
Monitor Deliverability
Part of email list management and good email hygiene generally, email deliverability refers to whether an email can be delivered to an inbox. To keep deliverability strong, make sure to avoid spammy subject lines, don’t email anyone who hasn’t opted in to your list, always include an unsubscribe link in your emails, and regularly clean your list of unengaged or undeliverable contacts.
What Metrics Should I Track in Email Marketing?
Open Rate
This metric can tell you how effective your company’s brand name and reputation is, plus how well your subject lines are reaching readers. Open rate is the ratio of the number of people who opened your email divided by the number of people who received it.
Click-Through Rate
This number reflects the engagement level of readers based on which links they click on in emails they receive. It’s the ratio of how many recipients clicked on a link divided by the total number of email recipients.
Unsubscribe Rate
This metric is essential to understanding how well, broadly, you’re connecting with your audience, and whether you’re emailing them too often.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate shows the deliverability of your emails and can help you optimize your list. This is the ratio of the number of emails that failed to deliver divided by the total number of emails sent.
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is a time-tested, effective, and low-barrier digital marketing tactic. But make sure you’re sending emails that are unique, useful, and engaging. Don’t buy lists, and continually test and optimize your email content, as well as when you send it and to whom, to avoid spamming subscribers and keeping them reading and clicking.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What types of emails should I send (newsletters, promotional, transactional)?
There isn’t one best type of email or even a best mix of types of emails: It will depend on the size of your business, its growth stage and goals, the number and complexity of products offered, and the resources available to the marketing team. A boutique clothing company may send only a weekly newsletter and order confirmations, while a large B2B SaaS company might run multi-step targeted campaigns to its various user segments, with drip emails carefully optimized for timing and product messaging.
What are effective list segmentation strategies?
List segmentation strategies can be very effective to make sure you’re sending the right content to the right group of prospects or customers. This tactic involves grouping subscribers based on shared characteristics like demographics, location, buying history, behavior on other websites, social media activity, and more. List segmentation is part of building customer profiles, and doing it well can lead to increased conversions and engagement.
What is triggered email marketing, and how can it boost engagement?
Triggered email marketing is a way to send emails automatically in response to customer actions or events. Once the marketing team understands their customer base and behavior, they can set reminder emails to send when a customer does something like leaves items in the cart, or ask for a review after a customer makes a purchase. There’s plenty of room to get creative with these, such as sending a tutorial or quick video if a user abandons a product walk-through. The essence of triggered email marketing is to engage a customer at a critical moment, delivering the right content for a personal, useful experience. Their timeliness and personalization make triggered emails a good way to boost engagement.
What are the common reasons for high unsubscribe rates, and how can I fix them?
High unsubscribe rates are a cause for concern for email marketers, and usually happen because you’re sending too many emails, they’re not relevant to your readers, emails are not well-designed or easy to understand, or are not personalized. Make sure emails are mobile-optimized, are valuable to readers, and that you’re not spamming users with too many messages. Test one element at a time to see what performs best, and optimize accordingly.
How do I manage bounce rates and maintain a healthy sender reputation?
In email marketing, your sender reputation is everything. An unhealthy sender reputation can land your messages in spam or junk mailboxes and can be hard to recover from. Don’t buy email lists and instead focus on responsible email practices, like regularly auditing your email list and verifying emails with double opt-in. Consider using domain authentication through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure your emails are marked as legitimate. Get to know what spam triggers are in content, particularly subject lines. You can also evaluate your sender reputation score regularly.
