What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing refers to send a commercial message to a group of people via email. Email marketing strategies usually focus on achieving one of three primary objectives:

To build loyalty

To build trust

Brand awareness.

The term commonly refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a business relationship with new or old  customers, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something.

email marketing

Types of Email Marketing

Email marketing can be accomplished through different types of emails:

Transactional emails

Emails that are provoked based on a customer's action with a company is usually transactional emails. Triggered transactional messages include password reset emails, purchase or order confirmation emails, order tracking details emails, reorder emails, email receipts notifications etc.

To be considered as transactional messages, the primary purpose of email should be to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction.

Direct emails

Email with a prime motive to communicate a promotional message like a special offer, discount, sale or a product specifications with new product launch etc. usually categorize as direct emails.

Email marketing Vs Traditional mail marketing

Benefits of using email marketing over traditional mail marketing

Email marketing is a cost-effective strategy in which you can send mail to a bigger group of audience with approx. negligible cost.

Businesses and organizations can analyze and enhance email campaigns for the future in real-time. It is much faster than traditional mail marketing.

Approx. 50% of internet users check or send an email on a typical day with emails delivered at a particular time of the day.

Disadvantage of using email marketing over traditional mail marketing

According to a survey report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73% with 5% filtered as spam, and 22% were missing. Email is still a big issue for legitimate marketers.

On average, normal consumers receive about 90 emails in a day.

For email marketing program companies must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws.

Importance of Email Marketing

With the evolvement of other digital marketing strategies, questions come to mind that is email marketing still important? or what is the significance of Email marketing?

The answer is obviously YES. Below is the list of reasons to emphasize why email is important:

Cost effective - Email marketing reachable to a large number of consumers without costing much nearly nothing per email.

Personalized and customizable - In email marketing, use can customize email message as per preferences or group of audience that resonates with your reader and can provide them with something of value.

Action-oriented - Email can use it to direct traffic to your website and ultimately generate sales. Everybody do something with an email either reply, forward, click-through or sign-up.

Measurable - we can easily analyze how our email campaigns are performing by looking at numbers how many customers subscribed or unsubscribed clicks on link shared etc. Basis this analysis we can make adjustments and improve effectiveness.

Reachable in real time – With the increased use of mobile devices we have an opportunity to reach people easily as they can check their emails all the time—during their office commute, while waiting or at the grocery store, everywhere.

Improving Your Email Open Rates

The most important part of email marketing is to enhance the email opening rate. You won't be benefited from any of the email campaigns even with the so many efforts to grow and sanitize your email list and segment it unless your emails actually get opened.

There are several factors that play an important role in whether or not your emails get opened. A few of them are:

1. Avoid Spam Filters

The most obvious problem is your email added to spam folder in spite of getting permission and following recommendations.

Here are some best practices to avoid your emails from falling into spam folders:

• Make sure your recipient has actually opted-in to receive your emails.

• Send your email campaign from a trusted IP address that have never been used to send spam emails.

• Send emails through verified domains.

• Keep your email template code clean and to the point.

• Suggest your subscribers how to whitelist your emails, and ask them to add you to their address book.

• Avoid excessive use of spam trigger words like buy, clearance, discount, or cash

• Don’t involve in “bait-and-switch”.

• Suggest an easy way for subscribers to opt-out of your emails.

2. Sanitize the list of subscribers

It’s important to email your subscribers on a consistent basis, so your list be fresh.

Some people may have changed email accounts, or even they only aren’t curious about your brand anymore so it’s a good practice to periodically remove inactive subscribers.

But before you remove them, try getting them to re-engage by sending an email campaign for example an effort email to inactive subscribers that says , “Do I bore you?”.

3. Perfect Your Timing

Timing can be the important factor that impacts whether or not your subscribers open your emails and on your conversion rate, so think twice before sending emails at odd times such as while people suppose to be sleeping or busy with office work etc.

You won’t be able to guess the right time immediately but by performing some tests such as sending emails at a different time of the day you can easily identify by looking into trends of success rate and can easily plan for future campaigns.