A Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing

When was the last time you opened your emails and saw an email from a company? Whether it be a newsletter, a confirmation email, or an email for a sale, the chances are, the last time you saw one was very recently.

Email marketing has become a hugely popular avenue for marketers to use, since it allows for direct communication to a business’ audiences. But what exactly is email marketing? How about we take a look at it together.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is fairly simple to understand. It’s when a business uses emails to promote a product or service that it offers. There are a variety of types of emails that fall under email marketing, which we will go over, but that is the basic concept.

Businesses will typically use an email service provider to be in charge of sending out emails on their behalf. There are a lot of marketing businesses who will handle this, so the best option is to compare and contrast different options until you find the one that suits your business the best.

There are many benefits that come with email marketing. By emailing people who signed up to receive emails from your business, email marketing can be a way to directly market to the people who are interested. When combined with email personalization, email marketing can be one of the most effective methods to build and maintain relationships with customers. The effectiveness of email marketing can be proven by how email marketing is the leading channel for conversion rates, with even higher conversion rates than social media.

But wait, go back a bit; email personalization? That’s right, email marketing is often personalized. This may sound intimidating for a marketer at first glance imagine having to type out a horrific amount of emails one by one! But don’t worry, email personalization isn’t tough once you get to know it.

What is email personalization?

It is the standard for marketing emails to be personalized. Of course, this is referring to basic things like using the name that you registered with, but email personalization encompasses a lot more. Email personalization is also about segmenting your emails towards different target audiences. These segmentations can be based on a variety of factors, like for example, location, gender, when the last logged in, the most recent product someone purchased from your business, and so much more. Depending on this data, your emails can be personalized to better suit the person receiving the email.

A lot of email personalization relies on marketing automation. If you use it well, personalization in your email marketing campaigns can be a great way to form a bond with your audience.

The benefits of email marketing

Email marketing comes with so many benefits that you shouldn’t overlook as a business. Let’s go over some together.

• • Email marketing comes with a great Return on investment (ROI). According to one study, out of 2,000 marketers, for every $1 spent, the average ROI was a whopping $36. This shows that email marketing is always well worth the investment. As a tip, some ways to boost the ROI of your emails would be to run tests or include eye-catching content within the email, like a gif.
  • Email marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness. The information you include in emails can inform your audience of updates to your business, like any new products you’re now offering. Using email marketing, it’s like you’re telling your audience about your new product directly.
  • Emails demand attention. When you send an email, it is an ad that won’t disappear from the end user’s inbox until the end user takes an action. This action can be reading your email, or even deleting it, but either way, it makes people spend time on your business.
  • Email marketing builds a bond with your audience. Like we’ve said before, when you use email marketing, you’re sending your emails to the people who have already expressed interest in your product or service. When you communicate directly to them, they feel closer to your business, earning yourself a loyal customer.

The disadvantages of email marketing

Despite the many advantages that come with email marketing, there are also some things to be wary about when you use email marketing.

• • Email marketing might end up in someone’s junk mail or spam folders. Of course, there are ways to avoid being marked as spam, but if you don’t take the steps to do so, then it’s a waste of time and money. Who looks through their spam folder? Moreover, because of the spam, your business’ emails can get lost in the clutter, where your audience simply deletes everything rather than clicking through selectively.
  • Sometimes, people who don’t intend to follow through with engaging with your business may get added to your database. There are a multitude of ways this can happen. For instance, they may forget to uncheck, or even accidentally press the button indicating that they want newsletters from your business. Or, perhaps they did intentionally sign up, but only for a one time offer. Either way, if this happens to a lot of people, there’s a chance you can suffer from a very high unsubscription rate.
  • With email marketing, first impressions are everything, especially in a world with declining attention spans. You need to remember to make sure that the subject line is something that can grab people’s attention. Not only that, but you need to perfectly weigh just how long your email should be. If it’s too short, you may not be convincing enough to gain any ROI, but on the other hand, if it’s too long, it may have trouble loading, which can cause a loss of interest.
  • There are many regulations for email marketing. These can vary by location, as there are different national and international laws. An example of this would be the GDPR law, which applies to countries in the EU and places regulations on personal information. You must familiarize yourself with the regulations in the areas that apply to your business.

Types of Email Marketing

Now that you know about what email marketing is, as well as its pros and cons, let’s go over two of the most popular types of email marketing.

• • Newsletters. These are the letters that tell audiences about new products or services that a business offers. Newsletters are a perfect way for a company to build up some brand awareness for new products by keeping your audience informed of the updates to your business. Usually, news letters aren’t simply an announcement of a new product or service available. What else you want to include is up to your own discretion, but a lot of newsletters will also include reviews of a product, a new blog article that’s posted, and more.
  • Promotion emails. These are the emails that revolve around a call to action. A lot of promotion emails may also include something special for audiences, like a limited-time discount code that they can use. The general idea for promotion emails is to get audiences to perform a certain action, such as buying a product or simply clicking to a specific page on it’s website.

Wrapping up