What is Email Marketing in 2023? (Updated)
What is Email Marketing?
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Email marketing is the process of sending a commercial message via email. Emails that are being sent to potential customers or current customers is considered email marketing. Because subscribers choose to sign up for emails, they notify customers of new products, discounts, and other services in a brand they are interested in. The article by Brevo goes into more detail about types of emails that are commonly made for subscribers. The goal of email marketing is to have a brand that understands customer values and interests in order to form a long-term relationship.
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Here are 5 reasons why email marketing is important:
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- Engages With Your Audience
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Emails have the power to keep your audience informed about products or services. People usually check their emails whenever they have free time. Any email from your brand will be counted as engagement as it reminds them about your brand. It can be about new products that you’ve released, discounts that you are offering or even simple things like “Happy Birthday!” when it’s their birthday. Emails like these will constantly remind your audience about your brand and can bring back long time customers.
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- Connects With Customers in Real-Time
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According to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This is an important statistic to keep in mind because making emails more mobile friendly can lead to an increase in customers. As more and more people start to use mobile devices to open emails and other types of media and information, it can lead to them accessing your website through mobile too. People will look more into something if they find it interesting so if your email is appealing to the audience, the likelihood of them remembering your brand has increased.
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- Increases Brand Awareness
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If you have a prospect’s email address, it means that they showed interest in your business. With email marketing, you can increase that level of interest by staying on their mind through emails. Social media isn’t the only platform that can help your company increase brand awareness. With email marketing, don’t spam your customers with emails. This will lead to them unsubscribing and ruin the connection. Nobody likes spam emails. If a company constantly messages the receiver about their products every single day, then they would most likely unsubscribe from their emails resulting in them not being able to reach them through email again. By planning out your emails and only sending them when they can be effective increases brand awareness and allows for customers to think more about your brand.
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- Allows for Targeted Messaging
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Potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle when it comes to them looking at a marketing email. Some of them may be considering, others may be researching and comparing, and even others might be ready to purchase. Having customers segment them into different stages of the buying cycle allows businesses to target these groups more efficiently. They need information in order to move them to the next buying cycle stage.
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- Everyone (Almost) Uses Email
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A HubSpot survey states that 91% of consumers use email. Like the number suggests, this is basically almost everyone that uses email in the modern world today. Email presents lots of opportunities to reach customers. Not only can they be sent discounts, specials, or new products, they can share and forward these emails to anyone they would like. A good marketing strategy will work if customers are encouraged to share offers and spread word of a business.
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How to do Email Marketing?
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Businesses use email service providers (ESPs) to send marketing emails. An example of an email service provider is Mailchimp, which is used to send and manage email marketing campaigns. This is also typically referred to as an email marketing platform, email marketing tool, email marketing service, or email marketing software. Although it is still possible to send marketing emails with a regular inbox provider, there are the risks of running into issues like limited email bandwidth, design, and email deliverability as the most important factor. The reason is because most internet service providers like Gmail and Outlook are meant for personal usage, as they don’t have the ability to mass send an email since they get flagged for mass spam. Email service providers have much needed features to avoid spam and they make sure emails are securely being sent to the receiver. Great tools to get started with email marketing are Placeit by envato and Skillshare.
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Some Email Strategies to Consider
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- Never buy email lists: it is too risky because sending unsolicited emails and storing people’s data in a CRM with permission is illegal. People are also more likely to mark them as spam and ignore them in the foreseeable future. The safe way is to simply build an email list manually, but at a slow pace.
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- Optimize email deliverability: email deliverability refers to the ability an email gets sent to an inbox. Make sure the email subject line does not appear to be scummy or suspicious as you want it to make it feel trustworthy and worth opening. Only send emails to subscribers that are opt-in because sending emails to someone who never heard of you will hurt your reputation and report them as spam. Consider an “unsubscribe” button if subscribers ever want to no longer receive emails.
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- Clean your email list regularly: if there are subscribers that have not engaged with your emails for a long time, at least six months, they can be sent a reactivation campaign or asked for a second opt-in. If they still do not respond, you can delete the subscribers from your list. Even though losing subscribers does not sound pretty, cleaning those email lists optimizes deliverability in the long run.
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Conclusion
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Email marketing is a type of marketing method where a business uses email to communicate and connect with their customers. While it is considered to be one of the oldest forms of digital communication, it still holds up to its true effectiveness in the modern era today. Social media and live chat are the norm nowadays in communicating to customers, but with a user base of over 4.5 billion people, email maintains its superiority among marketing channels.
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What’s Next?
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