What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a common term used to describe a company’s marketing efforts to promote a business’s products or services using email. Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing strategies a company or brand can implement. It’s a form of digital marketing that gives you a direct line to potential customers on your email list where you can share new products, discounts, and other services to them. It’s also a great tool to educate your audience on the value of your brand or keep them engaged while they’re considering trying your product or service.
When you want to grow your brand or sell your products or services, email marketing is one of the most popular tools around for marketing campaigns. So, it’s popular and effective, but according to who? According to Statista, email marketing revenue is projected to grow 287 percent globally from 2024 to 2032.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing automation efforts. It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships, or keeping customers engaged between purchases through different types of marketing emails.
Benefits of Email Marketing
One of the core reasons why email marketing is beneficial to a company is that it engages the user to take some kind of action. Once an email is sent to a lead, that email will either be read, deleted, ignored, or archived.
Another vital benefit is that email marketing allows you the opportunity to build a relationship with your audience. Think of yourself as an example: we all interact with emails from brands, entrepreneurs, and companies that we like. Email can also drive traffic to your website, articles, social media, or anywhere else you’d like folks to visit.
That allows you to get those crucial “touchpoints” in. Yes, every touchpoint someone makes with your brand and company is important.
Check out what Google shared. Consider a woman from a recent study, who spent 73 days and interacted with more than 250 touchpoints (searches, video views, and page views) before purchasing a single pair of jeans. She visited several blogs, browsed large merchant sites, searched for local retailers, and watched product reviews on YouTube.
Wow! 250 touchpoints? Holy cow! The more touchpoints, the closer to the finish line customers become.
What about email segmentation? You can segment your emails and target users by behaviors and demographics, which ensures your emails are going to those who want to see it the most.
Finally, we talk about this one all the time in DRTV media buying: How important is A/B testing? If you’re doing anything direct response related, you better have the ability to do A/B testing. Guess what: email marketing also allows you to run A/B tests on a subject line or a specific call to action. This helps you identify the best performing message. Most email marketing software allows you to have an A/B testing feature. If they don’t, we’d recommend finding a better email software.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
While email marketing is definitely one of the best ways to generate new leads, reach current customers, and build vital relationships, there are some cons we have to mention.
Here are some of the most significant downsides to email marketing campaigns.
Spam: If you’re like most people, your email inbox is full of junk. It seems like our inboxes are filled with worthless information. "Add 20 pounds of muscle," or "Click here for 50% off." In addition, we never even see many of these emails because they end up in our junk or spam folders. Unless you are actively avoiding spam filters, these messages are often just a waste of time for the company that sent them.
Competition: The popularity of email marketing means that your email isn’t going to be the only one landing in users' inboxes. This means that to stand out from competitors, you might need to invest in strong copywriters or offer additional promotions to capture your audience’s attention.
Size: If your email is too large, it might take a long time to load — or even not load at all. In that time it takes to download, a potential customer has just lost interest, costing you business.
Email Marketing Types and Examples
There's a wide range of different types of marketing emails you can use to grow your business. As you'll learn below, each one of these email types serves a different purpose and takes a different angle to engage with your audience. We are going to look at some of the many different types, so you can create the best email marketing campaign for your company.
Lead Generation and Nurturing Emails
This type of email targets a specific audience through a series of emails in the hope of eventually converting them. Typically, lead nurturing emails focus on a group that is interested in a specific product or service and then build interest through more emails that offer additional information or relevant promotions. The goal is to push users from the consideration stage to the purchasing stage.
Welcome Emails
This type of campaign focuses on welcoming your existing customers and encourages them to learn more about your products and services. The call-to-action (CTA) will usually focus on a free trial, discount, or bonus to get them to take further action.
Newsletter Emails
While newsletter emails are frowned upon by marketing experts because of the general offer, they're still very popular, and when done right, they can create a lot of revenue for your business or brand. This email marketing campaign can include videos, articles, blogs, podcasts, or reviews from customers. The CTA for this email campaign focuses on getting a lead to become a client.
Podcast Emails
Podcasts have become a very popular way to deliver content, and many of the platforms that can be used for podcasting allow you to collect names and emails. Audio marketing is still a very effective way to get your content and message out to your audience. This type of email targets podcast listeners through a series of emails giving them the opportunity to become a client.
Confirmation Emails
There are a few different ways you can deliver confirmation emails, but usually when someone signs up for a newsletter, or purchases an item for the first time. This email campaign ensures the prospect that the information has been received, and they are on the list to receive additional information. It allows you to let a customer know that their purchase was received or that something they signed up for was successful. Once in the email sequence, you can deliver content via video, articles, audio, etc.
Dedicated Emails
Dedicated emails refers to having the ability to reach specific segments of your email list. For example, you may want to make sure when someone makes a purchase for the first time, they get a 30-percent off coupon to encourage them to make a second purchase. It can be based on many behaviors, such as recent purchases, inactive clients, new members, users that click a certain link, users that visit a certain page, and other types of criteria.
Invite Emails
Invite email campaigns focus on announcing upcoming events, new product launches, and seminars. We use these with our PDMI East Event and PDMI West Event. Most companies use these types of emails when there is something special going on to gain attention and increase awareness about special events.
Promotional Emails
You see promotional email campaigns a lot. These types of marketing emails are very common go out to a large audience. They're not specifically targeting a certain user, rather they target the global audience. Even so, they can still be effective. They are generally used to stay top-of-mind and may tease new products and services.
Survey Emails
One of the things we love most about email is that it allows us to get direct feedback from our audience. That's such a powerful contributor to growing a company. Feedback from customers is one of the best ways to find out what they like, what they don't like, and gives them a voice to provide input about the company. These emails show your customers that you do value their opinion and want to create the best possible experience for them. The feedback you get with surveys can help you create better products and services.
Holiday and Seasonal Emails
You must take advantage of the holiday season and special occasions to reach customers and prospects with information on upcoming sales and promotions. Every holiday and special occasion is an opportunity: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth Of July, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s, Father’s Day, and more.
How to Build an Email Marketing List
Have you ever heard of the phrase, "The ROI is in your email list"? In many cases, that's true. Follow-up sequences are key to building new leads and nurturing those leads to become new customers.
How do you build your email marketing list?
Get Your Email Campaign Launched
We see a lot of entrepreneurs and companies struggle to get their first campaign up. Many of you won't have a perfect email campaign at launch, but that shouldn't hold you back from getting it up and live. Once it's live, you can evaluate how it performs. Once you start getting data back, you'll be able to make your email campaign better. Get it live!
Keep Asking Your Audience for Feedback
We can't stress this enough: feedback is one of the most important things you can get to learn where to focus in your business. It gives your audience a stage and a voice. Some of our best ideas have come from feedback from our audience and members. Make sure your emails make that clear.
Get Specific With Your Emails
There's nothing wrong with a global lead magnet; it has its place. Still, you want to get more specific with your audience to target the best possible potential customers. Each service you offer should have a specific lead magnet focused on exactly what that service is for. If we're offering social media marketing, it'll be better to have a lead magnet focused on social media marketing versus digital marketing.
Email marketing is a great way to grow your business and add revenue. Out of all the marketing strategies you can use, it's still one of the highest performing you can focus on.
The PDMI and its members talk about performance marketing all the time. You can listen in when you come check us out on YouTube.
And if you want to grow your company and rub shoulders with other successful entrepreneurs, we highly encourage you to become a PDMI member. For the price you pay, you can't beat the ROI you get.
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