Top marketers consider email marketing a highly effective online marketing strategy. Every leading companies hire email marketers and implement this marketing technique to target more people online. An effective email marketing converts leads into potential customers. You’ll agree, it has proved itself as one of the primary communication channels in recent years. According to the latest report, there are nearly 4.26 billion active email users worldwide in 2022. It is supposed to reach 4.6 billion in 2025. Here, you will explore all the types of email marketing and rest important concepts.
Table of Contents
In this article, we’re going to discuss and understand – what email marketing is, its history and advantages, types of email marketing, steps to build an email list, and many more.
What is Email Marketing?
E-mail stands for Electronic Mail. It is a type of direct as well as digital marketing. Email marketers use it to educate your email list about your company’s products and services and convince them to sign up or purchase.
In other words, emails aside from direct replies or order confirmations are generally referred to as a form of email marketing. It helps to make your audience or customers aware of your latest offered services and products.
With time, email marketing is proving itself to play a vital role in various marketing strategies by building relationships, brand awareness, lead generation, keeping your audience aware, and engaged.
By crafting email marketing campaigns, companies are building a relationship with customers, enabling their businesses to appeal to a target audience, promoting their brands, and selling their products or services.
Related: Top 5 Email Marketing Software to Improve Your Marketing Campaign for 2023
A Brief History of Email Marketing
Here are some important facts about email marketing:
- Ray Tomlinson was the person who sent the first email in 1971.
- Larry Roberts created an Email Management Database in 1972 which allowed people to list, forward, select, and respond to emails.
- The first Email Marketing Blast was sent by Gary Thuerk to almost 400 recipients in 1978. As a result, his company’s computers hit a sale of $13 million with the help of the Email Blast.
- Ray Ozzie and Mitch Kapor created and launched Lotus Notes 1.0, an Email Software Service, in 1989.
- After 1989, Email somehow replaced the Fax Machine system for universities and companies as it was paperless and easier compared to other communication sources.
- On July 4, 1996, a free web-based email service was launched by Hotmail that opened a direct line of communication for internet users.
- Responsive Email was launched in 2009 which allowed content marketers to use fluid tables and images to make content flow across different screen sizes.
According to a report, the number of email users worldwide was around 4 billion in 2020, 4.26 billion in 2022, and is expected to reach 4.6 billion in 2025.
Types of Email Marketing
There’re several types of email marketing that you can use for your business or for the businesses of your clients.
Let’s now discuss various types of email marketing in detail.
1. Product Update Email
This type of email is sent weekly or monthly to keep customers updated with the new features of the products and services. The information shared in the product update email helps customers to learn how to use the latest features and the importance of the particular product.
2. Event Invitation Email
This type of email is used to promote upcoming events companies are hosting. In the event invitation email, it is required to showcase the importance of the event, date, and location along with event registration or sign-up forms.
3. New Content Announcement Email
This type of email is used to announce the next sale, newly launched products, ebooks, coupons, webinars/seminars, free trials, and so on. A new content announcement email is so-called a promotion with a call-to-action button targeted to a landing page where the offer is shown.
4. Newsletter Email
This is a visually appealing email that is used to send a roundup of the stories or articles published weekly or monthly by an organization. Good email marketers make it attractive with a headline, a brief introduction & summary, infographics, and a call-to-action.
5. Co-marketing Email
When two or more companies partner together for mutual benefits, events, promotions, and increasing reach, it is known as co-marketing. In such a case, companies require co-marketing email for a strategic announcement.
6. Social Media Send Email
Here, we want to tell you about the importance of LinkedIn. If you’re the administrator of a LinkedIn group, you can directly send an announcement to the user’s inbox.
7. Dedicated Send Email
You use dedicated send email when you’re hosting an event and you want to send a dedicated email to the registered users to alert them to new updates. You also use it to welcome all your new members if your business is community-based.
8. Internal Update Email
People ue internal update email for the employees of the company to update them regarding product & service updates, marketing offers, or events.
9. Form Submission Email
The moment users or leads submit a submission form, they receive a confirmation email in response.
10. Transactional Email
These types of emails are one-to-one emails and are used at the time of completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter or any other service. In addition, you need specialized software for setting up transactional emails.
11. Confirmation/Thank Email
Once people purchase any product or service, book online tickets, or make any payment of bills, they receive a confirmation/thank email from the company/organization.
12. Lead Nurturing Email
A lead nurturing email is a series of emails containing targeted and useful content and it is sent to potential customers to encourage them to purchase your product and service.
Best Techniques for Creative Email List Building
- Use unique email content with the best USPs of your brand’s products or services.
- Encourage your audiences/subscribers with the best call to action to share and forward your emails.
- Try to market trending products and services that cater to recipients’ specific interests.
- Create lead-generation offers that require sign-up like free e-books.
- You also can create additional bonus content like a blog post that offers beginner advice on a topic and then go for additional bonus content with more tips.
- Use below suggestions on your social media profiles:
- Promote a lead generation offer on Twitter such as free eBooks and free resources.
- Promote gated visual content on Pinterest.
- Make your email newsletter the theme of your Facebook Profile cover Photo.
- Use the call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Business Page.
- You can also share newsletter previews on your social media profiles.
- You should add engagement features to your YouTube videos.
- Put your emails in your video description on YouTube.
- Add email and Call-to-Action on your Instagram Bio.
- Create polls on social media posts, especially on Instagram.
7. Use a short subscription form in the content of your website.
8. Encourage your website visitors for feedback or comments.
9. You can write Guest-Blog for other websites by sharing a call-to-action button.
10. Must include customers’ reviews on the sign-up landing pages.
Related: Benefits of HubSpot Marketing for Your Business
Advantages of Email Marketing
Here are some important benefits of email marketing:
1. Cost-effectiveness
In comparison to other marketing forms, Email Marketing is very cost-effective. It is safe from advertising, printing fees, and media space fees.
2. Genuine Results
You use email marketing & send emails to the users who have opted-in to receive email communications from you or your organization. Therefore, customers, genuinely interested in your products and services, get engaged with your business.
3. Design Flexibility
There are multiple available designs for email marketing such as plain text, rich HTML, interactive, graphics, or other attached files. You’re flexible to select the design that suits you the best.
4. Target Audience
Another great part of email marketing is that you can use it to target the audience you wish to. You can reach small or large targeted lists too.
5. Conversion & Measurable
Promoting products and services by email marketing can give a good conversion if the you apply email strategy effectively. You also can evaluate your email ads/campaigns and conversions by using web analytics tools.
6. Benchmarking Reports
The favorite advantage of email marketing is that you can easily compare your outcomes against other industries with the same niche. There are several free benchmarking tools such as HubSpot, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Sender, Benchmark Email, and others.
7. Testing Feature
Email marketing is also equipped with the feature of testing email before you send it. The feature is important to pre-check A/B testing of subject lines, personalization, images and messages, CTA (Call to Action), and other email contents.
8. Less Intrusive
Unlike telephonic marketing and other ads/campaigning, email marketing is less intrusive as recipients can read the message according to their comfortability. Customers also have the option to subscribe or unsubscribe from the products and services you share in the email. So, email marketing looks quite user-friendly for the readers/customers.
9. Friendly to Environment
Email marketing is far better and more environment-friendly than direct marketing by postal mail as it doesn’t require printing anything.
10. Time-saver & Real-Time Marketing
Email marketing helps us to connect with people in real-time and hence it is a time saver too. We use triggers on certain events so that we can track the results such as website activities, shopping cart, recent purchases, demographics of the customers, and many more.
Related: The Importance of Online Marketing for Business Growth in 2023
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
1. If you don’t target emails to the right audience, they count as Spam. In this case, the customer can delete your message immediately. Before using email marketing, we suggest you ream Email Marketing and Privacy Law.
2. Your email won’t deliver, in case you use poorly designed emails with spam keywords like FREE, CLICK HERE, $$$s, and so on. Here, we suggest you keep your email list updated and avoid spam keywords or phrases.
3. Sometimes, the design of the email is not optimized correctly and looks problematic on different devices.
4. You should check the size of the uploaded/attached files properly to make them small enough to download quickly. Otherwise, this can frustrate your audience and they may lose interest.
5. Email marketing is a flop show until you follow basic technicalities like using the right copy & proper designs, optimized content & attachments, and an updated email list.
Related: How to Optimize an Image for SEO?
Email Marketing Myths
There are many mis-conceptions about email marketing and that’s more important before you start email marketing strategies.
They are as follows:
1. Many people believe that Email Marketing is dead. This can’t be true because according to Campaign Monitor, “Email Marketing is the king of the marketing kingdom with a 3800% ROI and $38 for every $1 spent.”
2. Another myth is the belief that Email Marketing Automation is expensive and time-consuming, however, the truth is something else and almost all email marketers know that it is cost-effective.
3. People think that unsubscribe is very bad and pulls down in marketing competition, but it’s not correct. It simply means that the email has not reached the right audience.
4. Many marketers think the subject line should be short in email marketing. But the ideal length for the subject is between 41-50 characters for desktops and 35 characters for mobile devices.
5. Few marketers think that Message Match is not important for email post-click landing pages, that’s also a myth.
6. Last but not least, the opinion that there’s one perfect day to send emails is also not true at all.
Related: How to Make Money Using Web Marketing Strategies in 2023?
Top 10 Free Email Marketing Tools
| HubSpot | Omnisend |
| Mailchimp | SendPulse |
| MailerLite | Benchmark Email |
| Sender | Mailjet |
| Sendinblue | Moosend |
Conclusion
Almost 4.2 billion people use emails and this describes the importance of using email as a great marketing tool. There is no doubt that email marketing has lots of competition and you can win this by the best email marketing tools and strategies.
Therefore, to use effective email marketing strategies, you must understand various types of email marketing and usage. In addition, to get expertise in email marketing, you need self-tests and practices. With time, you will certainly increase your skills and satisfy your ambition to grow your business through email marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I grow my email list quickly and effectively?
There are several ways to grow your email list quickly and effectively, such as offering a lead magnet (e.g. a free e-book or webinar), using opt-in forms on your website, hosting giveaways, and leveraging social media and other online platforms to promote your email list.
How can I make sure my emails are being opened and read by my subscribers?
To increase the chances of your emails being opened and read by your subscribers, you should focus on writing compelling subject lines, personalizing the emails, and segmenting your list so you can send targeted content. Additionally, you can conduct A/B testing to see which subject lines, from lines and calls to action work best.
How can I increase my email open rates and click-through rates?
To increase your email open rates and click-through rates, you should focus on sending emails at the right time, personalizing the emails, and providing valuable and relevant content. Additionally, you can use email marketing tools that can help you optimize your emails for deliverability and engagement.
How can I re-engage inactive subscribers?
To re-engage inactive subscribers, you can send them a re-engagement email campaign, offer them exclusive content or deals, or ask for feedback on how you can improve your emails.
How can I use my email list to drive more sales?
To drive more sales with your email list, you can segment your list based on purchasing behavior and send targeted emails with personalized product recommendations and special offers. Additionally, you can use email marketing automation to send abandoned cart emails, post-purchase follow-up emails and upsell/cross-sell emails.
