What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing may seem like an obvious route of notifying your audience of new releases, products, and services, however, it also serves a subtler function. It acts as a mechanism to educate your audience about the value of your brand, keeping them engaged even when they are not actively purchasing. In other words, it keeps your messaging in front of their eyes, and it does so on a consistent basis.

That’s coverage you’d typically have to pay for, but for the pleasure of showing up in someone’s inbox daily (or even in thousands of inboxes), the payoff is surprisingly large. It is estimated that businesses generate an average of $38 in revenue for every $1 spent on an email marketing campaign. This is a significant ROI.

The Benefits of Email Marketing

Forbes notes that the benefits of email marketing extend to:

• Cost-Efficiency – Unlike paid forms of digital advertising, email marketing enables you to contact your customers regularly without having to pay per advertisement or for each potential contact.
• Measurable Results – With email marketing, you can track who and how many are opening your messages each day and how they are responding. These metrics can help you craft even more effective campaigns as you go.
• Customizable Outreach – From an empty shopping cart reminder to demographic-specific products and sales, invaluable customer data can be put to good use with the flexibility to target clients specifically and directly, increasing the chances of a connection and sale.
• Increased Brand Awareness – The more touchpoints you create between your brand and your customers, the more they will get to know it, like it, trust it, and buy from it. You have the chance to express your brand not only in writing but also in images.
• Consistent Contact – Email presents a constancy that differs from the algorithm-changing ways of social media. The contacts you make on your email distribution list will largely be available to you over time. Conversely, on social media, constantly changing algorithms can make it challenging to reach the same audience every time.

5 Types of Email Marketing

There are several ways to achieve the benefits of a healthy email marketing strategy. Much of the outcome depends on the type of email you decide to send. The list includes:

1. Engagement Emails – These emails request some customized customer interaction: surveys, polls, questionnaires, and quizzes. This kind of contact can give you valuable information about your audience, provide value to them, and let them know your brand values and wants to cater to their individuality and feedback.
2. Drip Campaigns – Follow-up emails sent after the customer engages in a specific action, such as signing up for a service, purchasing, or reading an article. These emails are designed to capitalize on the contact and keep the customer engaged and looking forward to the next event: a sale, subscription, or further pieces of content.
3. Newsletters – Newsletter emails are great for building an established voice and creating a sense of community among your audience. It can be seen as an exclusive perk of membership and allows you to build loyalty, craft your brand’s story, and allows your customers to get to know you “behind the scenes.” This investment in transparency will have a big impact in an era where people want to align with a company that shares their values.
4. Educational Emails – This is a direct way to share value with your customers without asking anything of them. Your educational emails should contain industry-related specifics about your specific niche without being promotional. For example, if you are a cybersecurity vendor whose product placement depends upon CISO buy-in, an article about giving CISOs more power within the C-suite will resonate with your audience.
5. Promotional Emails – Promotional emails are very effective when handled judiciously but should be used with restraint. The result of every interaction is ultimately a sale, and these emails are very direct, offering discounts, deals, and even the chance for customers to engage with deeper touchpoints like webinars and whitepapers. However, they should always be healthily outnumbered by other types of communications to avoid the sense that your brand is spamming its customers.

When done with finesse, email marketing can be a powerful tool for creating, curating, and crystallizing your customer base. It can deliver value consistently and present your brand image with an affordability and reach unmatched in any other digital lane.

Find out why email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there.