Email marketing in its simplest terms is marketing that can be delivered via email. It is a popular, high-reach, versatile, and customisable tool that companies can take advantage of as a catalyst in delivering a variety of marketing content to specific users and potential customers. In a HubSpot study, email marketing is used by 31% of marketers as of 2023.
Email marketing campaigns can be made entirely bespoke to suit a specific demographic or industry by using unique designs, sending schedules, and audience segmenting.
Typical uses for email marketing include sending out news updates to customers, advertising sales/discounts, and promoting new products or services.
In this article, you will find out more details on how you can take advantage of email marketing as a cost-effective tool for growing your business.
Starting Your Email Marketing Journey
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
As a versatile marketing tool with several use cases, email marketing campaigns come in a variety of different forms that encourage a customer to perform a certain action – usually with a conversion focus in mind.
Depending on the subject matter and purpose of the email campaign, email marketing campaigns can guide a user to either browse, contact, purchase or do something more specific such as filling out a survey/questionnaire.
Below are some different types of email marketing campaigns and their use cases to understand what type of campaign might be suited for your business and how you can incorporate email marketing into your next marketing plan:
- Newsletter – As a traditional type of email marketing campaign, newsletter emails can provide insightful updates to customers that are both business and industry-specific. Newsletters can inform users of any upcoming events, product/service promotions, or the latest news within their business sector and can incorporate a range of calls to action for users.
- Welcome Email – An email that is sent out to customers upon initially signing up for a newsletter or registering an account on their website. For e-commerce websites, welcome emails can provide a user with a newsletter sign-up offer such as a discount code and can be a great first impression at the start of a customer’s journey with a business.
- Seasonal Emails – Emails that are scheduled out throughout the seasonal schedule for a business. This can be a great way of re-introducing clients to your company and putting any seasonal offers front and centre to your audience.
- Promotional Emails – Much like seasonal emails, promotional emails can be used to advertise a range of calls to action for customers. Promotional emails are typically in line with any upcoming sales or product launches and can be a useful tool for targeting existing customers.
- Abandoned Cart Emails – As an effective way of retargeting customers visiting the site, abandoned cart emails can urge a user to complete a certain action on-site utilising cookie data when a user is on a conversion path. This can allow users to finalise purchases for items that they had previously abandoned. As much as 45% of abandoned cart emails are opened.
- Survey Emails – A popular form of receiving important feedback from existing customers, survey emails can be specifically targeted to provide valuable data from audience segments. Questions could relate to product or service feedback, new product ideas, or upcoming event interest.
- Brand Awareness – Applicable across a variety of email campaigns, brand awareness can be incorporated across elements of email design, and copy, and can be successful in relaying core messaging to new and valued customers throughout their relationship with a company.
Measuring Email Marketing Performance & Effectiveness
Like most digital marketing practices, email marketing is measured by specific metrics that allow you to understand and improve performance. Some of the core metrics you’ll need to understand to start analysing the effectiveness of your campaigns include:
- Open Rate – The total number of emails opened by recipients measured against the total number of emails delivered – expressed as a percentage e.g. 34% open rate being a national industry benchmark.
- Click Rate – Expressed as a percentage, click rate collects all relevant tracked clicked links on the email and measures their engagement through each URL – highlighting what content users are engaging with more.
- Bounce Rate – This is when an email is rejected by an email server that the email is being sent to. It is a key indicator of the quality of your email database and provides an opportunity to start increasing this further to expand your audience. Deliverability also features here.
- Unsubscribes – As the name suggests, this is the total volume of users who are unsubscribing/opting out of your email messaging. Reviewing when/why users are unsubscribing can be important for assessing segment performance.
You’ll also need to be aware of specific market/audience trends that could be impacting these metrics, such as Tuesday notoriously being the best day of the week to send out email campaigns.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
A primary benefit of email marketing is the potential audience size capture with email users expecting to reach upwards of 4.7 billion by 2026.
The benefits of email marketing practices can vary depending on the type of business and industry you work in, and how digitally focused your brand is.
This is where email customer segmenting can be vital in improving your reach and open rate – Segment emailing drives 30% more opens and 50% more clickthroughs than unsegmented ones.
Depending on your business objective, different email campaigns will be more suited than others. For example:
- A personal, enquiry-focused business may utilise newsletter emails to promote a wide variety of services, branding, and the latest news to existing loyal customers.
- An e-commerce shop would be more inclined to utilise promotional and abandoned cart campaigns to advertise offers/discounts on products whilst also incentivising users to continue users on their purchase journey.
With over 64% of small businesses utilising email marketing to reach customers, businesses can start instilling loyalty in customers, improving brand awareness, and growing existing customer bases. To reach wider audiences, there are simple methods of growing your email database can include:
- Adding an email sign-up function to your website
- Offering users a promotional discount or gated lead-gen offer such as an e-book when they sign up for your newsletter
- Encourage customers to share your emails within your email copy
- Advertise your emails via social channels
A great thing about email marketing is the customer data is yours and you can segment this data how you like; this could be by geographic location, whether they are a B2B or B2C customer or product-specific (what they have purchased on-site). Within these segments, you can also start A/B testing different content to customers and assets core engagement metrics to refine your campaign performance further.
How Can I Start Email Marketing?
Now you want to start email marketing, but where do you go?
Email campaigns can be varied based on personal and business preferences and are typically controlled by email campaign management software. Some of the top 5 popular email marketing management tools include:
- Brevo (Previously SendInBlue)
At their core, email management software can build and deliver your campaigns to segmented audiences through schedules and automation. Each email provider has its advantages, from more e-commerce targeting, large contact data limits, website CMS integrations, or customer support focus – they’re entirely dependent on what kind of content you’d like to serve your existing and potential customers.
Summary
Email marketing is a complex but effective way of marketing a variety of messages to email recipients across the world. If targeted correctly, customers can expect considerable engagement from insightful and action-orientated email campaigns to help drive sales, enquiries, and brand awareness to ultimately grow your business.