Email marketing is a core pillar of any digital marketing strategy. It gives businesses a way to reach potential customers, engage with existing ones between purchases, promote brand awareness, and drive sales.
Despite its impressive benefits, email marketing is actually one the most cost-effective marketing channels, with an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
In this guide, we’ll dive into one of the most popular marketing strategies today. You’ll learn why email marketing is so crucial for businesses – and best practices you can follow to optimize your own email strategy.
What is email marketing?
Definition of email marketing
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing where a business connects with its customers via email. Brands can use email marketing to announce a new product or sale, nurture leads, and foster brand loyalty.
Email marketing is a versatile strategy with numerous applications. Its versatility allows businesses of all sizes and industries to use the email marketing strategy best suited for their needs, customers, and resources.
Small businesses can use email marketing to announce updated store hours or a new product. Larger companies can integrate customer data for targeted emails that optimize conversion rates, nurture leads, and drive sales.
Email marketing encompasses more than just sending out mass emails; it’s about building a relationship with your audience by providing timely, relevant content that adds value to their lives. This marketing strategy leverages email to communicate commercial messages, share valuable information, and cultivate a community around your brand. It’s a direct line of communication for conversion and customer retention, making it a pivotal tool for marketers. By personalizing messages and segmenting your audience, you can ensure that your emails resonate with subscribers, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
Benefits of email marketing
Email marketing remains one of the few constants in a marketing landscape that continuously changes. According to projections, there will be an estimated 4.73 billion email users by 2026.
Email marketing is successful not only because people keep using it, but because it gives brands numerous other valuable tools. Benefits to email marketing include:
- Big reach with little overhead cost
- Direct access to the audience
- Improved sales
- Stronger customer loyalty
- Scalable marketing with automations
- Cost-efficiency and ROI
- Customer relationship and loyalty
- Measurable results
- Increased traffic to your website
- Enhanced customer segmentation
Big reach with little overhead cost
Email marketing can deliver significant results with relatively low overhead. This low barrier makes it accessible to businesses of any size.
Small businesses can implement email marketing. Employees with limited tech knowledge can develop email campaigns. And of course, big businesses with more resources can do all of this – and a lot more.
Direct access to the audience
Email marketing allows businesses to reach their audience directly. They don’t have to navigate social media algorithms or Google’s always-evolving SERP landscape. Brands can determine exactly what messaging a subscriber receives. They can even customize messaging for specific audience segments.
Improved sales
Email marketing provides the nudge customers need to stay on track and move toward a desired action. Brands can use abandoned cart emails to prompt customers to finish incomplete sales. Re-engagement emails can revive lost leads. From optimizing online sales to driving customers back into a physical store, emails offer businesses a way to maximize revenue.
Stronger customer loyalty
With customer acquisition costs on the rise, businesses are looking for more ways to keep customers and improve repeat sales. Email marketing helps businesses maintain long-term customers.
They can engage with customers between purchases to remain top-of-mind. They can re-engage lost leads and revive that relationship. They can also provide valuable content to customers, establishing the brand as a trusted resource.
Scalable marketing with automations
Businesses of any size can use email automations to scale their marketing strategies. Automation does require initial work to write the emails and develop the strategy. After that, brands can deploy those emails at scale.
Automation tools help brands provide marketing that’s tailored to specific customer criteria or events, such as geographic locations or an abandoned cart. Through automation, customers receive immediate, valuable, relevant emails.
Cost-Efficiency and ROI
Email marketing’s low upfront costs make it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes. When executed properly, its return on investment (ROI) can far exceed those of other marketing channels, making it a high-impact tool for boosting your bottom line.
Customer Relationship and Loyalty
Beyond transactions, email marketing allows brands to create meaningful connections with their audience. By offering valuable content, birthday discounts, and personalized experiences, businesses can foster loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.
Measurable Results
One of the key strengths of email marketing is its measurability. With the right tools, marketers can track opens, clicks, and conversions, allowing for data-driven decisions that optimize campaign performance.
Increased Traffic to Your Website
Regularly sending out engaging and informative content can significantly drive traffic to your website. By linking back to your site, you can increase page views, bolster SEO efforts, and enhance the overall visibility of your brand online.
Enhanced Customer Segmentation
Email marketing tools allow for intricate segmentation based on demographics, purchase history, and customer behavior. This enables businesses to tailor their messages more precisely, leading to higher engagement rates and more effective marketing strategies.
11 common examples of email marketing
We’ve already discussed how versatile email marketing is. While possibilities for the strategy really do seem endless, some popular types of email marketing include:
- Lead nurture
- Welcome emails
- Newsletters
- Loyalty program
- Abandoned cart
- Customer re-engagement
- Survey or feedback
- Confirmation (purchases, subscriptions, etc.)
- Promotional (announcing a new product or sale)
- Seasonal (holiday greetings, related promotions)
- Educational (promoting a blog post)
How to do email marketing in your business
When done well, email marketing delivers big results. We’ve compiled a few best practices for email marketing that will help you improve performance, optimize strategy, and drive revenue.
Perform A/B testing and monitor data
Use A/B testing to review performance data for variations of your subject lines, call to action (CTA), and more. You should also regularly monitor additional data points like the open rate or click-through rate (CTR). See what emails perform best – then, adjust your email strategy accordingly.
Top email marketing KPIs include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Conversion rate
- Deliverability rate
Follow data and opt-in laws
From GDPR to CAN-SPAM (and more), pay close attention to data privacy and opt-in laws for any country where your emails will land. Smaller businesses likely only need to maintain compliance with local, state, and federal laws. Larger companies with subscribers in other countries will also need to follow relevant laws in those countries. It’s important to note that some countries will have additional regulations at the state or territory level.
Segment your audience
Segmented emails have 30% more opens and 50% more clickthrough than their general counterparts. Brands that segment their audience can tailor messaging to specific groups. They deliver the right messaging to the right customer at the right time. Email segmentation improves performance while driving more conversions.
Examples of email segmentation factors include:
- Demographics
- Customer persona
- Email activity
- Stage in the funnel
- Items in a customer’s cart or wish list
- Survey or feedback form results
To learn more about email segmentation (and how to use it to elevate your business), check out our ultimate guide to email segmentation.
Personalize your emails
Over 70% of customers today report they will only engage with personalized messaging. Luckily, email personalization can be as simple as using a customer’s first name in an email subject line (and again in the email body.) From addressing a subscriber by name or developing customized email sequences for audience groups, marketing personalization delivers tailored messaging for more impactful marketing.
Remove inactive subscribers
Inactive subscribers can hurt your email performance, compromise the accuracy of email KPIs, and can even reduce email deliverability (potentially landing your emails in spam folders.) Removing inactive users avoids these pitfalls and ensures your subscriber list is accurate.
Once a quarter, review your list for inactive users (subscribers that have not interacted with your emails that quarter.) Send them a reactivation or re-engagement series. Remove any users that remain inactive after the re-engagement campaign concludes.
Automate, automate, automate
Automation is a major benefit of email marketing – make sure you use it. Once you’ve developed your email strategy, use email software to automate delivery, data tracking, and management. Software allows you to automatically send welcome emails to new subscribers.
It can send an email series when a customer triggers a specific response. Email automation streamlines operations while providing a responsive, personalized customer experience.
A marketing strategy that is powerful, accessible, and fully customizable
Email marketing provides businesses with a valuable way to engage with customers directly. Through a subscriber’s inbox, businesses can nurture potential customers, promote sales, enhance brand loyalty, and more. In an evolving digital world, email remains critical to a successful overall marketing strategy.
