If you take a look at your email inbox, it is likely filled with a mixture of email promotions, with subject lines, like: “20% off outdoor gear favorites,” “Save on tropical trips,” or “What to Read This April.” There are a variety of email marketing types, best practices, and nuances to a successful email marketing program. But, ultimately, email marketing can be summed up as the following:
Email marketing is a digital marketing method that engages potential and existing customers via email.
Email marketing has been around since the 1970s with the first email marketing promotion sent in 1978. Since the 1970s email has become much more sophisticated, but no less effective. In fact, a report by Litmus shared that 90% of marketers believe email marketing to be critical to the success of the business.
In this guide, we’ll dig into the reasons why email marketing is critical to businesses, the benefits, the types of email marketing, and best practices to help you get started.
With a 2.8% conversion rate for B2C brands and a 2.4% conversion rate for B2B companies, email marketing is one of best channels for driving conversions, according to FirstPageSage.
Compared to social media advertising, search engine marketing, or print advertising, email marketing is a relatively inexpensive marketing tactic. Typically, you’ll pay a subscription to an email service provider or email marketing solution based on the number of contacts you have in your database.
Email marketing is one of the few marketing channels that sends communications directly to the consumer. Other marketing channels such as social media or TV advertisements have no guarantee that your ideal customers will see your promotions.
By segmenting your contact base by criteria such as product interest, customer type, or demographics, you can create personalized communications targeted to specific groups. This targeted marketing improves engagement and conversion rates.
Email marketing offers a plethora of metrics to help you measure the success of your campaigns. From open rates to click through rates, you can understand what topics are resonating with contacts.
When we think of email marketing, we often think of sales promotions, but email marketing can be so much more—it can be your way to strengthen relationships with customers and potential customers.
By sending different types of email marketing communications such as welcome emails, newsletters, and thank you notes, you regularly remind your contact base of your brand without coming off as overly salesy.
As mentioned earlier in the article, there are many different types of email marketing, and while they all provide awareness for your brand, not all have the direct intention of selling products.
Welcome emails should be the first email someone receives when they sign up to receive your communication. This email could provide an overview of the resources you’ll receive in a weekly newsletter or it could be a 10% discount code to entice you to shop with a clothing brand. Whatever way you approach it, welcome emails are an important part of email marketing, introducing new subscribers to the brand and setting the standard for future email marketing.
These are the sales emails we typically think of. Whether it’s 50% off storewide or Buy One Get One discounts, these emails lead with the promotion. While discount emails are popular, be careful of including percentages, exclamation points, or words that convey urgency in your email subject lines. All of these tactics can tip off spam filters and cause your email to end up in spam rather than your contact’s inbox.
Re-engagement emails aim to entice someone who hasn’t opened your brand’s email in a while to engage with content. Re-engagement emails can take a couple of different forms, such as reaching out and giving recipients the option to unsubscribe.
How many times have you accidentally abandoned your cart because you needed to grab your credit card or you got distracted? If a user is about to checkout, but gets distracted and abandons their cart, triggering an abandoned cart email to remind them of their potential purchase can be an incredibly effective way of increasing conversion rates.
Newsletters are typically not as promotional in nature. Instead, they aim to educate, providing best practices or resources to help your contact base become more familiar with topics related to your industry. Newsletters can be a great way for potential customers to stay up-to-date with your company without it feeling overly salesly.
Email marketing is both a science and an art form. It requires understanding your audience, testing creative copy and designs, and creating personalized, targeted communications. There are many email marketing best practices, but here are a few tried-and-true strategies to kick you off.
Unlike transactional email, marketing emails should require subscribers to opt-in. This is an important email marketing step because it ensures that your recipients actually want your emails, it prevents your email from getting marked as spam, and it creates a healthy email list.
Subscribers have the right to change their mind. Always include an unsubscribe option within your email. This prevents contacts from marking your email as spam and helps you keep a list of engaged contacts.
Email segmentation allows you to personalize your email content for a variety of contacts. For example, you probably don’t want to send the same email to customers who are familiar with your product as prospects who may not be as familiar.
According to Litmus, over 40% of opens are through mobile devices. When creating your emails, keep the mobile design top-of-mind. This means avoiding overly lengthy emails or large images.
A clean email contact list is key to healthy email deliverability. Every three months, take a look at your contact list and send reengagement emails to the contacts that have not opened your messages in a while. Remove the contacts from your list that remain unengaged. This may feel counterintuitive, but if contacts aren’t responding, they’re not interested in your email.
This is where the science part of email marketing comes in. Leverage A/B tests to help you identify subject lines that resonate with your community, review open rates and click through rates to understand what topics are driving engagement. You can use these metrics to help you adjust your email program for the best results.
If you don’t have an email marketing program in place, now is the time to start. Email marketing can help your business regularly engage customers and prospects, keeping your business top of mind and leading to additional revenue.
If you need help getting started, Twilio SendGrid offers a full-featured email marketing service. With an intuitive design, dozens of email marketing templates, and powerful segmentation, you’ll have all of your email marketing needs in one easy-to-use platform.
