What is email marketing & how does it work?
Email marketing has been around since the start of the internet and emails. Despite how long it has been around, and because marketing trends tend to run out fast, email marketing remains one of the most effective, most popular online marketing channels that marketing professionals prefer. Part of the reason behind its huge popularity is that it is affordable, easy to use, and provides an unbeatable return on investment for both big and small companies and businesses.
So let’s talk about what email marketing is and how it works, starting from how to set up your first email campaign to the types of email marketing campaigns you would need.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of online marketing where you use an email to build relationships with your target audience and sell products or services to them. An impactful email marketing campaign to keep audiences informed and engaged with your brand and what it has to offer. An effective email marketing campaign also helps you turn window shoppers into paying customers and loyal business advocates.
Even though email marketing campaigns have been around for more than 50 years, as of 2021, it continues to grow an impressive return on investment – 3,800% for worldwide marketers.
Check this: Best Book Marketing Services for Self-Publishing Authors
What are the key benefits of email marketing?
Now that you know what email marketing is, before investing in a campaign it is important to know about what advantages it can give. These are the main benefits of using email marketing -
● Affordable cost -
The first and foremost advantage of using email marketing is its low and affordable cost. To run professional email marketing campaigns, all you need is a selected email list, a basic marketing strategy along an email newsletter software provider, to help you run the campaigns. If you want to go with a professional email service provider, most of the reputed companies most of them offer several plans based on the size of your email list or the number of subscribers. There are also several marketing tools online that are affordable. However, you might find some of the tools to be high-end, which is related to the type of audience you want to target and the number of features included in the platform. The recommendation would be to evaluate your present and future needs. This is the only way to get the most value at a reasonable price.
● Controllable -
Another advantage of running an email marketing campaign is that you will be in full control of the communications. You can start by choosing what the marketing emails will say and look like. On top of that, since email marketing is a direct channel, you will also know exactly who will receive your email. The only thing you might not be in full control of is email deliverability. However, if you follow decent email marketing practices, you will be able to engage with your target audience effectively and you will not need to stress over your email ending up in spam boxes.
When it comes to other digital channels where the organic reach is heavily dependent upon the internet's ever-changing trends and algorithm, email marketing is the only way that gives you total control along with a better chance of actually reaching your target audience.
● Scalability -
Several email marketing tools let you automate different parts of your communication. You can choose to send welcome emails, post-purchase surveys, win-back campaigns for cart abandonment, and so much more. You just need to use simple drag-and-drop editors and prebuilt scenarios. This helps you save time in the long run while helping you engage with your audience better. At the same time, this will deliver a more timely and targeted service to your audience.
● Impressive ROI -
As mentioned before, email marketing brings an impressive return on investment for both small and big businesses. Not just impressive, but statistics show that email marketing brings the highest return on investment of all online channels. According to a 2021 study by DMA, the return of email marketing is 38:1 on average. This means if you invest only a dollar in your email marketing activities, your average return would be $38.
However, this figure is not exact and keeps on changing depending on the following factors -
➔ How big and engaged the email list is.
➔ How engaging and relevant your content is.
➔ How the assets like copies and designs play into the campaigns.
● Easily measurable -
One of the best advantages of email marketing is how easy the results are to measure. You can easily integrate the email marketing software tool with different online analytics tools like Google Analytics. This gives you a comprehensive and distinctive overview of the marketing efforts. For this, you need to add UTM parameters to your emails which will notify you exactly which email, subject line, or even call-to-action brought you the best results. You can further control the performance of individual emails in your marketing tool's stat panel and then track the user behavior on your website.
If you are worried about how to set up an email marketing campaign, start with choosing an email marketing platform, building your email list, and getting lead magnets, and opt-in forms ready. At the same time, you will also need to segment your email list and set up a measurable goal before picking up your target audience.
