What is Email Marketing and How to Do It Right

Email marketing is a form a digital marketing. It’s a powerful tool that businesses can use to build stronger relationships with their customers and drive sales.

In fact, email marketing is a cost-effective direct marketing channel, generating an average return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent. As of 2024, email marketing revenue was projected to reach an impressive $9.5 billion.

For this reason alone, email should be a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy. Not doing any email marketing is like leaving money lying out on the table.

This guide will explain what email marketing is, how it works, and how to get started. By the end, you’ll have a solid grasp of the basics along with the know-how to launch an effective email marketing strategy for your business.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a direct marketing strategy that involves sending commercial messages to potential and existing customers via email. Business can use email marketing to promote new products or services, share news, drive sales, and encourage customer loyalty.

Because subscribers choose to sign up for emails, it’s more likely to convert than other channels. Its high return on investment (ROI) makes it crucial to most businesses’ overall inbound strategy.

Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization to engage target audiences more effectively. It’s about understanding your customer’s interests to develop long-term relationships.

Making personalized campaigns may sound time-consuming, but marketing automation and software handle most of the heavy lifting for you. In the long run, a well-designed email marketing strategy drives sales and helps build a community around your brand.

Types of marketing emails

What is email marketing used for? Marketing emails can be promotional, informational, or serve a specific purpose in the buyer journey.

1. Promotional emails

Email marketing campaigns promote special offers, new product releases, gated content like ebooks and webinars, and your brand in general. A campaign can even consist of a series of emails (3-10) sent over several days or weeks. 

Promotional emails have a clear call-to-action — CTA, for short. The CTA represents the specific action you want the reader to take, whether visiting a page on your website or using a coupon to make a purchase. In the example above, the CTA is the button that says “Get your gift.”

Your business’s sales and marketing rhythm typically determines how often you send promotional marketing emails. During crucial periods like Black Friday, you may send multiple promotional emails in the same 24-hour period. During slower periods in the marketing calendar, there may be a few weeks between your promotional campaigns.

2. Informational emails

Newsletters are among the most popular informational emails. As the name suggests, a newsletter shares news related to your business. Think new milestones reached, new product capabilities, or featuring valuable content like case studies.

Sent at regular intervals — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly — newsletters help maintain consistent touch points with your email subscribers. 

Simply put, a newsletter is an opportunity to share insights, thoughts, tips — whatever brings the most value to your audience. 

Email is the perfect way to inform customers of company announcements, new product releases, changes to the service, etc.

More often than not, email is the go-to channel for important messages. If there’s a glitch on your website, shipping delays, or an outage in your system/software, updating your contacts via email is the best way to maintain communication. It’s secure, instant, and can match the formal tone of even the most important announcements.

3. Retention emails

Retention emails keep your customers happy and always coming back for more. Retention emails are a valuable cornerstone of email marketing since a new contact is more costly to attain than keeping an existing contact.

These emails engage customers with your brand. You might introduce them to your product, share tips on how to use your product, send out a survey, or target uninterested contacts with a campaign to win them back.

Some examples of retention emails include: 

• Welcome emails
• How-to-use-our-product emails
• Achievement emails
• Next steps
• Company news, stories, and events
• Resources
• Contests
• User-generated content

4. Transactional emails

The fourth category important to email marketing is transactional. These emails are automated messages triggered as a response to your customers’ actions, such as when a customer buys an item from your shop.

Examples of transactional emails include: 

• Order confirmations 
• Thank you emails
• Password resets
• Abandoned cart emails
• Product review requests 

While these don’t explicitly say “marketing,” they are essential for customer satisfaction. These immediate messages serve as confirmations that customers are getting what they asked for

Why email marketing is important

Email isn’t a new technology. It was one of the very first means of digital communication to arrive back in 1971. At 50+ years old, email marketing is used today more than ever before with 4.7 billion estimated users by 2026.

You may be thinking, “Isn’t social media where it’s at for marketing today? What is email marketing going to add to my strategy?” While it’s true that social media is an important channel for any digital marketing strategy, email has several advantages.

Brands can personalize email marketing campaigns to a greater extent than those on social media.

Email marketing is more cost-effective than other channels.

Email marketing is the channel with the highest conversion rate. This is part of what makes email marketing so ideal for small businesses.

Unlike social media, your emails aren’t public discussion boards. Emails give you direct, individual access to your audience’s inboxes and are not affected by constant algorithm updates. Your mail will make it to the inbox as long (as you follow security protocols and build email service provider-friendly campaigns — more on that later). 

Email marketing performance is easy to track and analyze. you can see how many people open, click on, and engage with each email campaign you send. 

Email marketing can improve conversions of social media content. When used with the same audience, one study found that email improved conversions from social media posts by 70%. Use email marketing to enhance all of your channels.

Still don’t believe us? Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• In 2024, there were over 4.48 billion global email users.
• 99% of email users check their email at least once per day.
• 60% of consumers ranked email in their top preferred communication channels.
• 59% of people said marketing emails influenced their decision to buy.

Given the figures, not having an email marketing strategy means missing out on sales opportunities and the chance to build lasting customer relationships (which ultimately means more sales later down the road).

The benefits of email marketing

From order confirmations to newsletters, emails are an essential part of the growth and management of your business.

Email marketing helps you achieve three key objectives:

1. Drive sales

Launching a sale or promotion? You can send your subscribers an email marketing campaign to drive sales. In addition, try using these email marketing techniques to boost conversions further:

• Send coupons or special offers for subscribers’ birthdays/anniversaries, in welcome emails, and as a way to re-engage your audience.
• Set up abandoned cart emails that are triggered whenever a visitor adds an item to their cart but doesn’t check out.

2. Increase brand awareness

What’s great about email is that it lets you reach someone directly. It’s one-to-one communication at its best. And people don’t just let anyone into their inbox these days. It’s a curated space reserved for favorite brands and publications.

Showing up in someone’s email inbox will help your brand stay current in the minds of subscribers. A personalized marketing email is more impactful than a social media post where you can’t be sure if someone has actually seen your message.

One of the major benefits of email marketing is its scalability. This means that emails can be sent to a large number of recipients while remaining cost-effective (compared to other marketing channels). 

3. Strengthen customer loyalty

Email drives customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer journey: lead nurturing, conversion, onboarding, and retention. Email marketing is a necessary tool to use alongside a CRM to streamline communication.

It’s truly a powerful way to build a community, as discussed in our guide to building relationships with email.

How to do email marketing

Businesses use what’s known as email service providers (ESPs) to send marketing emails. An email service provider is a software that sends and manages email marketing campaigns.

It’s also referred to as an email marketing platform, email marketing tool, email marketing service, or email marketing software. These marketing tools often come as part of a larger customer relationship management (CRM) suite and work hand in hand to grow your business and make sales.

If you want to set yourself up for email marketing success from day one, get yourself a dedicated email marketing service.
How to choose an email service provider

With hundreds of ESPs on the market, it’s hard to know which one is right for your business. 

Here at Digital Media Booster we pride ourselves in offering our customers intuitive, easy-to-use email marketing tools. However, we know we aren’t the only platform out there. Part of our mission is to make sure you find the email marketing tool that best suits your needs.

Here are some questions to help narrow down your options:

• Pricing: What’s your budget? If it’s very limited, then cheap email marketing services should be your starting point.
• Send volume: What kind of emails do you plan to send, and how often? This’ll give you an idea of your required email volume (i.e. number of email sends). 
• Number of contacts: If you’ve already got a list of opt-in contacts, how many are there? 
• Email design: What’s your skill level when it comes to designing emails? If you’re a complete beginner, you’ll want a drag-and-drop email editor and responsive email templates. Or if you prefer to code emails from scratch, you’ll be on the lookout for an HTML editor.
• Automation: Do you plan to set up automated email workflows? See what each ESP offers in terms of email marketing automation.
• Target audience and segmentation: If your business communicates with different buyer personas, what contact list segmentation capabilities are offered?
• Transactional emails: Will your business be sending transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets)? Email marketing tools let you send both transactional and marketing campaigns.

It’s also a good idea to consider your future needs. Down the road, how many emails will you need to send and what features will you require? Choose an email marketing tool that can support your business both today and as you grow.

How much does email marketing cost?

Email marketing pricing can vary widely depending on the size of your email list, the number of emails you send, the level of support you need, and the technical specifications you’re looking for.

For some, free email marketing plans offer more than enough functionality. For others, email marketing can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month.

As you’re exploring different options, you’ll notice most providers base their pricing on the number of contacts on your email list. This pricing model can be attractive to those just starting out, but costs rise considerably once your list grows. 

Digital Media Booster, on the other hand, structures its pricing by email volume rather than the number of subscribers. That way, you can grow your email list infinitely and it won’t impact the pricing. 

How to build your contact lists for email marketing

You can’t send email campaigns without anyone to send them to, so it’s time to start building an email list of engaged, opt-in subscribers.

Yes, that’s right — opt-in. Because here’s the thing about email contacts:

Everyone on your email list needs to have given their express permission to be there. 

What does that mean?

It means they agreed to receive emails from you when they entered their email address into an email signup form on your blog, website, landing pages, social media, or anywhere else. In email terms, this consent is referred to as an “opt-in.” (“Opting out” would be an unsubscribe.)

Permission-based marketing is essential to comply with data protection laws and safeguard the integrity of your brand. After all, nobody likes a spammer.

Because this is a pretty non-negotiable part of email marketing, most ESPs let you create signup forms to organically grow your subscriber list.

Here are some tried-and-tested ways to organically grow your email list:

Add signup forms to your website and other places

Create an email signup form to make subscriptions as easy as possible. Then place your email subscription form in highly visible places where people will definitely see it. 

Typical subscription form hotspots include:

• Blog posts (end of post) 
• Website homepage (header or bottom) 
• Contact page
• Checkout page for ecommerce stores
• Social media link in bio 

Creating a pop-up form on your website can be a good idea, too. Just make sure not to disrupt the user experience too much. Pop-ups that prevent visitors from using your site can be big deterrents! (Think of your signup form placement like your call-to-action placement.

How to write a marketing email

Now that you’ve started building your contact list, the next steps are defining an email marketing strategy and creating the content!

1. Define an email marketing strategy

To define your email marketing strategy, think about what you want to achieve with your first campaign. Here are some common goals for email marketing beginners:

• Promoting a new product
• Sharing a discount with loyal customers 
• Getting more downloads for your latest ebook
• Updating subscribers with company news  

Your goals can be specific or broad — as long as they fit with your business and your audience. In either case, having a clear, measurable goal will make it easier to create your email content. 

2. Design your marketing email

Email design doesn’t have to be difficult or overly technical. Using a drag-and-drop editor, you can easily create stunning and professional marketing campaigns.

There’s no need to get hung up on creating fancy, elaborate emails. More importantly, you should focus on creating an email that embodies your brand, whatever it may look like. Oftentimes, this means keeping it simple. You can always build upon this later on as your skills grow.

Just follow email design practices to make your campaigns as impactful as possible.

A few tips for making a strong email design are:

• Keep text to the point
• Use images and on-brand visuals
• Leave breathing room for the eyes
• Include a clear CTA
• Use your company logo and branding
• Use responsive templates to optimize for mobile

Don’t underestimate the power of visuals. In our recent study of hundreds of marketing emails, we found that most emails (74%) contained 10-39 images each. On average, each email had about 30 images. 

3. Save time with pre-made email templates

For beginners and seasoned pros alike, email marketing templates are the perfect shortcut to standout email design. 

Just pick one you like. Customize it to match your brand colors and font. Then reuse it for future email newsletters. All you’ll have to do is update the content. Quick and easy.

4. Optimize your email subject line, sender name, and preview text

Email subject line

Introducing one of the most important elements of your email marketing campaign: the email subject line.

These few words could determine whether your email is read or not. And with so much competition in the inbox these days, they need to stand out.

Aim to create intrigue or a desire to open in just a few words.

• Keep the subject line to 50 characters.
• Highlight your most interesting offer.
• Appeal to your subscribers’ emotions and ambitions.
• Use your brand voice
• A/B test your subject lines
• Avoid over-promotional words
• Don’t use all caps
• Don’t use excessive punctuation
• Do use one or two emojis if it fits your brand

When you get an email, what’s the first thing you look at? Probably who it’s from.

The sender name answers the recipient’s first subconscious question: Is this genuine or is it spam?

The best way to reinforce trustworthiness and brand recognition is to incorporate your brand name into the sender name. There are several ways to go about this:

• Your company/brand/newsletter name on its own
• A combination of brand name and your first name
• A distinct sender name to differentiate specific types of email content

To be easily recognized in the inbox, use the same sender name and address for all campaigns.

5. Write your email copy

Email copy needs to offer value, feature topics that interest your audience, and embody your brand’s tone of voice. 

To write persuasive, engaging email copy, keep these tips in mind:

• Ask yourself, “What does my audience need from me? How can I help?”
• Imagine you’re writing to one person. 
• Show your brand personality.
• Tell a story.
• Write to instill curiosity, starting with the email subject line — more on that below.
• Use a conversational tone and write the way you speak.
• Break up the copy with short paragraphs and use bullet points where possible.
• Use the name of a real person for the email signature instead of a faceless brand logo.

When is the best time to send a marketing email?

Rather than choosing a random day and time to send your emails, be strategic. Think about what you know about your audience and choose the best time to send emails for them.

11 Email marketing strategies for success

This next section focuses on strategies and email marketing best practices.

1. Never buy email lists

Building an email list can be slow, especially when you’re just starting out. Buying a list might seem like a tempting shortcut, but trust us — it’s a terrible idea.

Buying a list will put your business at risk because:

• Sending unsolicited emails and storing people’s data in your CRM without consent is illegal per the GDPR.
• People are more likely to mark unsolicited emails as spam, damaging your email sender reputation and potentially ending you up on an email blocklist. 
• Most email marketing services will refuse to work with you because purchased lists can harm the deliverability of other users on shared IP addresses.

In short, don’t buy email lists. Build your list organically — however slowly — and you’ll reap the benefits in the long run.

2. Use double opt-in signup forms

As already mentioned, the term “opt-in” refers to the signup process. There are two different types of opt-in for email marketing:

1. Single opt-in is when the subscriber is added to the email list once the signup form is submitted.
2. Double opt-in is when you send a confirmation email with a link to each new subscriber. The subscriber must click the link to complete the subscription. Without this verification, they won’t receive emails from you. 

Sure, double opt-in adds an extra step between the potential subscriber and your list. But far from being an obstacle, this process is important — especially for email deliverability.

Double opt-in eliminates any misspelled email addresses that would otherwise generate a hard bounce. It also rules out spam traps and acts as proof of subscriber consent — a GDPR requirement.

For better email marketing, double opt-in is the way to go. 

3. Segment your mailing list

As your email list expands, it’s likely to contain diverse buyer profiles.

List segmentation is the process of dividing your list of subscribers into smaller sub-lists with common traits. The idea behind this technique is to engage subscribers with more relevant, targeted emails. 

Typically, contact lists are segmented by demographic information like age and location, as well as customer information like lead score and purchase history. (This is where having a contact CRM database that works with your email marketing tool comes in handy as it stores information like this about your contacts.)

To get a head start on segmentation, add subscribers to separate lists during signup by asking about their email content and frequency preferences. 

People generally appreciate when brands add personal touches and pay attention to small details. When it comes to making us feel valued and understood as a customer, a little personalization goes a long way.

This rings true for email marketing, too.

Email personalization is essential to building relationships with prospects and customers.

Here are some simple email personalization ideas to help increase your open, click-through, and conversion rates.

• Use subscribers’ first names in the email subject line and content.
• Consider time zones when scheduling campaigns to maximize the chances of your email being read. Where are the bulk of your subscribers located? 
• Segment contacts so that messaging is targeted and relevant.
• Use behavior-triggered emails based on how customers interact with your product/service.
• Recognize users’ milestones with achievement emails
• Send tailored product recommendations

Recent data by McKinsey & Company shows the importance of personalization based on consumer insight. The bottom line — customers like personalization. It helps them see more of what they want and makes them feel understood by brands.

For your next targeted personalization campaign, use dynamic content in emails. 

5. A/B test your email marketing content

Hesitating between two subject lines? Not sure what content your audience will react best to? A/B testing is one way to find out — and a great way to optimize your campaigns’ open rates and click-through rates.

Test different email subject line formulas, content formats, and CTAs. See which ones get the best engagement and adjust your strategy accordingly.

6. Optimize email deliverability

Even more than subject lines, calls to action, and copy, email marketing success hinges on reliable email deliverability.

All-important for email marketers, email deliverability refers to the ability to deliver an email to the inbox. 

When all goes according to plan, the email makes it past the spam filters and arrives at its destination. When deliverability is compromised, the email lands in the spam folder or, worse, your sender IP is blocklisted by the ISP.

While deliverability often depends on technical factors, there are plenty of non-technical ways to help your email newsletters reach the inbox.

7. Clean your email list regularly

Keep your database up to date for optimal email deliverability and higher engagement rates.

Got subscribers who’ve dropped off the radar? If someone hasn’t engaged with your emails in at least six months, send a reactivation campaign or even ask for a second opt-in. See if you can get them interested again.

If there’s still no engagement, delete the subscribers from your list.

Sure, no one likes losing subscribers, but email list cleaning is better for your deliverability in the long term

8. Make unsubscribing easy

Make it easy to unsubscribe with a clearly visible unsubscribe button. If people can’t find the way out, they’re more likely to mark you as spam.   

9. Measure your success with email marketing metrics

Analyzing key email marketing metrics will teach you how to improve your strategy for future campaigns. Most ESPs have an analytics dashboard with at least the following real-time metrics:

• Open rate: The ratio of the number of people who opened your email divided by the total number of recipients.
• Click-through rate: The ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the total number of recipients.
• Unsubscribe rate: The number of people who unsubscribed divided by the total number of recipients. If this number is high, you need to review your email frequency and segmentation.
• Bounce rate: The number of emails that failed to deliver divided by the total number of emails sent.
  • Soft bounces are due to temporary issues like the recipient’s inbox being full.
  • Hard bounces, on the other hand, are due to permanent issues, like an inactive email address.

Hopefully, this article has given you an in-depth answer to “What is email marketing?” and how it can benefit your business. We know there’s a lot of information here. But by taking things one step at a time, anyone can use email marketing to grow their business. 

Get started today with Digital media booster to streamline your email marketing efforts. Whatever your industry, it has features and functionalities to create stunning and successful email campaigns that your contacts will love.

Get More Info: https://digitalmediabooster.com/services/email-marketing-services/