Email marketing is the digital marketing process of communicating with an audience through email (e-mail) messages. Email messages are usually for commercial purposes, but they are also used to educate and inform the recipient about topics of interest.

Simply put, email marketing is the process of using email as a sales channel.

Email marketing benefits?

The most important benefits of email marketing for any kind of online business are:

• This is a great way to build a community around your brand.
• It can help you reach more leads and increase sales.
• This is one of the best ways to get more recurring traffic.
• This is a way to minimize some of the risks associated with SEO algorithm changes. This is especially important because once you get to the point where you have a large list of active email subscribers; you can worry less about SEO changes that can negatively impact your traffic.

 

How does email marketing work?

Email marketing is not a difficult process, but it does require a lot of A/B testing to figure out how best to communicate with your subscribers in a way that is beneficial to them and your business goals.

Here is a quick overview of how email marketing works:

• Sign up for an email marketing tool
• Create an email marketing strategy
• Build and grow your email list
• Setting up automation tasks
• Monitor and improve campaign performance with A/B testing.
• Cleanse your email lists regularly.

Importance of the email marketing

Email marketers are now able to deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time,

 maximizing the success of their campaigns. With the right email marketing software,

 they can manage and segment email contacts and subscribers, automate email, responses and follow-ups,

 run A/B tests, and analyze metrics such as bounce rate, open rate, click-through rate, etc.,

all on the individual user level or as aggregated data for whole market segments

 

1.Sign up for an email marketing tool

Email marketing is a process that can be fully automated with a good email marketing tool.

The email marketing platform will help you:

• Create a list of email addresses
• Add users to your list using a range of methods
• Send emails to your audience
• Provide you with reports on how many people open and interact with your emails (click the link in the email)
• Provide you with different options for segmenting your audience based on given criteria.
• Create Facebook retargeting audiences based on your email list.
• Automate various email marketing tasks such as sending a welcome email to your subscribers or different emails based on their actions.
• Make sales right from your email
• Create email funnels to direct users to the pages/products/actions you want them to take.

 

I’m ready for email marketing, but which platform should I use?

Whether you’re starting your first email marketing campaign or you’re a seasoned email pro.so many  tools and support you have. With a wide array of features that do everything from marketing automation to tracking tools to optimizing your emails through split testing, we’ve got you covered from start to finish.

The most popular email marketing tools to consider are:

• Mailchimp
• ConvertKit
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• SendPulse
• Sendinblue

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing is one of the top-performing strategies, in no small part because it’s fairly intuitive and often automated.

In its basic form, an effective email marketing campaign requires three essential elements:

1. An Email List

For you to pull off successful email campaigns, you need an active email list. This is a database of email contacts who have expressed interest in receiving marketing communications from your brand.

here are many ways to build an email list. One of the easiest is to create a lead magnet (also called an offer) your target audience is interested in, like a coupon, in exchange for their email addresses.

2.An Email Service Provider

An email service provider (ESP), also known as an email marketing platform, is software that helps manage your email list. It also helps design and execute automated email marketing campaigns.

Using an ESP allows you to automate actions triggered by your target audience’s behaviors. These enable you to personalize each interaction with them, meaning engagement and conversion rates generally improve.

 3.Clearly Defined Goals

You can use email marketing to achieve many business goals. For example, you can use email marketing to:

• drive sales
• boost brand awareness 
• generate and nurture leads
• keep customers engaged
• To execute an effective email marketing campaign, your email list, ESP, and goals must align. Then, you can get to work.
• The first step is to segment your email list according to subscriber demographics or actions.
• Next, create an email or series of emails designed to get consumers to do something (your goal).
• Finally, use your ESP to send emails and monitor the campaign automatically.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Just like any other marketing channel, email marketing has pros and cons. Let’s briefly dive into some of the more significant ones:

Advantages of email marketing

Email is based on permission

When a client trusts you with their email address, it’s the virtual equivalent of receiving the keys to their house. Getting permission to sign in instead of showing up uninvited increases your chances of engagement and conversion.

Gives you direct access to your audience

You can communicate directly with subscribers according to their schedule. Also, since people check their email daily, your email is more likely to be viewed.

Gives you more control

With most other marketing platforms, you don’t own the platform. If the platform ceases to exist, all your hard work will go with it.

With email, you own the relationship you create with your subscribers

 

Additional personalization options

You can use demographic or psychographic data to create personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns. Research shows that segmented and personalized campaigns increase revenue by as much as 760 percent.

Measurable

Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is critical, and automated email marketing makes it easy to measure your campaign.

Scalability

Email marketing campaigns can be scaled without straining your resources or sacrificing quality.

 

Disadvantage of email marketing

Tough competition

Standing out in a cluttered inbox can be quite a challenge. You have to be creative to get your emails noticed and opened.

You need a list of email addresses

When using email marketing, you must already have an email list in place for your campaigns to be effective.

 

Tricky rules and regulations for navigation

There are many rules governing the use of e-mail for commercial purposes. Common examples include GDPR, CAN-SPAM and CCPA. All of this is to say that you cannot send unwanted emails.

Unfortunately, some subscribers also report your emails as spam even after they subscribe to the newsletter. As a result, your reputation as a sender suffers.

Shipping and Delivery Issues

Your email is not guaranteed to reach recipients’ mailboxes. In order to run effective email marketing campaigns, you must contend with shipping and delivery issues.