What is email marketing and how it works? If this is the question that keeps bugging you, you are not alone.
Well, email marketing plays a significant role in developing relationships with your customers, engagement, community-building, and generating sales. It is expected that 333.2 billion emails will be sent and received per day by 2022. Make sure the emails you send to your customers are included in this figure.
Statistics show that for every $1 spent on email marketing, marketers make $42 in return. This is one solid reason why you should be investing in email marketing (if you aren’t already). Let’s find out what is email marketing and how it can help you generate revenue for your business.
What is Email Marketing?
An email that a business sends to a customer or potential customer is referred to as email marketing. It is a broad term that covers all types and forms of emails that are sent to customers by businesses. It doesn’t include marketing emails specifically.
Email marketing is a marketing channel that is used to promote products and services and to build a relationship with your customers and subscribers. Any email that you send to a subscriber is counted as email marketing even if it is an informational email.
For example, a telecom company sending monthly bill via email or Uber email a summary of the ride to its customers are considered part of email marketing:
It is a form of direct marketing that works similar to direct mail except that it is done online. It is up to you what content you send to your subscribers via email. Anything and everything that you send is termed email marketing.
Email Marketing Types
There are three major types of emails that email marketers use to communicate with their customers:
- Transactional emails
- Informational emails
- Promotional emails
1. Transactional Emails
These are the most common emails that are triggered when a customer takes an action such as activating a service, account creation, upgrading a product, buying a new item, etc. An email is considered transactional when it is aimed at facilitating or communicating a transaction to the customer.
Here is an example:
2. Informational Emails
These are emails that are used to communicate and share information with the subscribers. These aren’t triggered based on a customer action rather these are sent by the marketer or business as part of an email marketing campaign.
The newsletters that businesses send to their subscribers is a perfect example of an informational email:
3. Promotional Emails
These are campaigns that promote a product or a service. These emails are part of the email marketing campaign that businesses create. Here is an example of a promotional email:
You can promote anything you like in a promotional email ranging from cross products to upsells to discount coupons to more. There aren’t any limitations since you own the list and subscribers have allowed you to send promotional emails, so you are the boss.
How Email Marketing Works
The first thing that you need is an email marketing tool or software. You can’t do it without a tool.
Why?
Because a tool lets you create, manage, and analyze email marketing campaigns. No, you can’t use your free email account (e.g. Gmail) to send bulk emails.
Here is what an email marketing tool does:
- Helps you manage the list of subscribers and customers
- Automatically sends transactional emails
- Simplifies email campaign creation
- Automates email marketing
- Helps you create squeeze pages, landing pages, and email templates
- Helps with list building, segmentation, and targeting.
Here is how email marketing works with an email marketing tool:
It has the following steps:
- Collect email addresses
- Create email marketing campaigns by setting up rules and triggers
- Create follow up emails
- Schedule email campaign.
Everything else is managed by the email marketing tool. You just have to create and manage your campaigns, and that’s it. Here is a list of the leading email marketing tools that you can choose from:
Email Marketing Benefits
It outperforms other marketing channels by a big margin as it lets you communicate with your customers individually. You can deliver your message directly without any barriers. Here is a list of the major benefits that you get from email marketing:
Personalized
Consumers prefer personalized marketing more than anything else. A whopping 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that offer a personalized experience and 90% of consumers find personalized marketing content appealing. On the other hand, 90% of marketers say that personalization directly contributes to profitability:
Email marketing solves this personalization issue. It is the most personalized marketing channel that you can use to send highly personalized emails. A study found that 72% of consumers reported that they prefer receiving promotional content through email:
It isn’t just the preferred marketing channel for consumers but it is personalized. You can segment subscribers and send emails based on their interaction with your company.
It Delivers Message Effectively
Most of the marketing channels don’t guarantee message delivery. For example, if you write a blog post, there isn’t a guarantee if your target audience will ever read it. This isn’t the case with email marketing. It ensures message delivery.
Statistics show that 90% of emails get delivered to the recipients’ inbox as compared to only 2% of Facebook fans who see your posts. This shows the massive reach and high deliverability of email marketing. When you send a message, it reaches its destination and gets the job done.
High ROI
It has one of the highest ROIs. It has a whopping 3800% return on investment primarily due to high deliverability and personalization.
Additionally, your list has opted in and agreed to receive emails from you which makes email an ideal marketing channel. You send emails to subscribers after their permission. There isn’t any other marketing channel where you contact your customers after their consent.
With such a high ROI, you can’t ignore email marketing.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing opens several new doors and opportunities for your business. If you aren’t using it, get started today. It is cost-effective, personalized, and delivers big time.
When you’ll start investing in email marketing, you’ll learn a lot of new things about your customers and target audience. It provides you with tons of data that you can use to improve targeting across all marketing channels.
Get started today.
Featured Image: Unsplash
