Email marketing is a direct marketing channel that uses emails to promote your business’s products and services. You can generate new leads; and notify your users about product updates, offers, and events. It can help you advertise your business at much lower costs than a regular ad campaign, thus saving you a lot of money.
Let’s dive into the details and learn everything you need to know about email marketing:
- How does it work?
- Types of Email Marketing
- Types of Marketing Emails
- Benefits of Email Marketing
- Factors of Email Marketing
How does it work?
For any email marketing campaign, you need the following things:
- Email List: The emails of the individuals and businesses you want to reach. Preferably you would like to collect at least a few hundred emails, if not thousands. The process of collecting emails is called lead generation.
- Email Template: An email template is a pre-defined email layout; that you will send in your email campaigns. You can use text or HTML-based templates, but most people prefer HTML templates as they look more attractive.
- Email Service Provider (ESP): Any service or software that allows you to send emails is called an Email Service Provider. Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook are some of the most popular Email Service Providers. For sending less than a hundred emails, these services are okay. But if you want to send more than a hundred emails at a time, you’ll need an Email Marketing Service.
Once you have these three things, you can start sending marketing emails and see the impact immediately.
Types of Email Marketing
These are the types of email marketing based on the email list you have:
- Warm Email Marketing: The emails are of your customers or subscribers who have given you consent to send them emails. In simple terms, these people know you already. Sending emails to a warm list is much easier and more effective than reaching out to new people.
- Cold Email Marketing: The emails are of unknown people who have not given you consent to sending them emails yet. In other words, these are people you would like to reach. Sending emails to unknown people, especially when they don’t know you is more challenging and has certain limitations to prevent spamming.
Types of Marketing Emails
There are three types of marketing emails you can send based on your goal:
- Promotional Emails: To promote your business, services, and products. The goal is to gain new customers and increase revenue. These emails contain a clear call-to-action — CTA, for short. The CTA is an action you want the reader to take. The CTA can be a link to a specific page or product on your website.
- Informational Emails: These emails are about new offers, plans, services, and products. The goal is to notify users about new things or changes. These emails include information that you want to convey to your users.
- Engagement Emails: These emails are for engaging with your customers; for example: when they haven’t been active or forgot to check out the items in their shopping cart. The goal is to retain existing customers and recover potentially lost revenue. These emails contain actions that allow users to continue what they were supposed to do.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing can help you achieve three key objectives:
- Brand awareness: What’s great about email marketing is that it lets you reach new people directly and promote your business instantly. You can also personalize your emails and have one-on-one conversations with people.
- Gain customers: You can send emails to anyone and increase the number of customers by reaching out to new people. There’s no limit to how many people you can reach; it is much easier than traditional methods.
- Increase revenue: When your emails reach thousands or millions of people, you’ll see a big boost in traffic and sales almost overnight. This strategy is highly scalable; much more cost-effective than advertisements.
Factors of Email Marketing
These are the factors that will influence the most on the outcome of your email marketing campaigns:
- Email content: Good copywriting and design will help you increase user engagement and decrease the chances of them ignoring it. It will also result in lesser people marking your emails as spam and unsubscribing from your mailing list.
- Targeted audience: If your product is for doctors and you email medical students, you’ll not get the desired result. You have to make sure the people you’re sending emails are a good target audience or not.
- Email sender reputation: The score of how many spam emails are coming from the email server. A low email sender reputation will decrease the number of emails accepted by other email service providers.
