EMail Marketing

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing allows you to communicate directly with prospects and customers via email. You can welcome people to your community, introduce them to your brand and products/services, present offers and discounts, engage with customers between purchases, educate audience members, and more.

Even now, with all the options available to us, email marketing is still one of the most effective and popular marketing channels. A combination of direct marketing and digital marketing, it uses email to powerfully connect with prospects and customers.

Types of Email Marketing

Email marketing can take different forms, allowing you to powerfully speak to your audience and meet your digital marketing goals:

Email newsletters

Use emails to keep in touch with your audience and customers, send promos, announce launches, deliver important ‘behind the scenes’ or account information, updates, and more.

Business emails

These are the transactional emails you send to customers and clients. These include receipts, invoices, confirmations, appointment reminders etc. These emails shouldn’t go to waste. They present an excellent opportunity to turn routine ‘admin’ emails into brand communications, prompts to visit your website, post-purchase assistance, and more. And the best thing about them is they generally have a high open rate – so take advantage of that!

Email series

These emails are generated in response to audience or customer actions, for example, signing up for a free digital product. When a person provides their email in exchange for a freebie like a ‘step-by-step’ guide, it sets into motion an email series, for example:

• 1 welcome email
• 2-3 additional educational emails related to the freebie, with a soft push to purchase a related product
• 1 ‘last chance’ email

The Role of Email in Digital Marketing

The primary role of email in digital marketing is to reach and engage with your audience. It is particularly effective when used to nurture your prospects through their buyer’s journey.

No matter what your overall digital marketing goals are – increasing brand awareness, boosting conversions, establishing yourself as an expert – email marketing has a number of benefits.

• It provides a captive audience for your message and allows you to establish a conversation with them
• It’s more personal than social media, videos, blogs, and other marketing channels
• It’s an effective way to deliver helpful information or re-engage with your audience and customers
• Email autoresponder programs automate the process so you can get great results with minimal effort and valuable feedback about your target.

Cons of Email Marketing

While email marketing is one of the best ways to connect directly with prospects and customers (relative to the amount of effort it takes), it does come with its own set of challenges.

Building a list is hard

The most important element of your email marketing efforts is your list, but it can be very difficult to build. To get people to hand over their email addresses, you need to provide them with something in return, typically a valuable digital information product. These can be time consuming to create. On top of that, you need to send emails to a lot of people to get any traction (open rates can be low, and of the people who do open emails, the conversion rates are at about 1-2%). So, you need a lot of addresses.

Spam/Undelivered emails

Many email providers add spam filters to remove email marketing, so your messages may never get to your recipients. However, if you’re sending them digital products, they’ll be on the lookout for your email.

Annoying to subscribers

Most people who sign up for a freebie just want the freebie. If you continue marketing to them beyond that initial communication, this could breed resentment and cause them to form a negative impression of your brand. Make sure your communications are relevant, helpful, and valuable and provide a clear and simple unsubscribe process.

Can be labor-intensive

Yes, email marketing platforms take care of much of the work, but you still need to create the associated content: subject lines, emails, call to action, freebies, landing pages, and more. So, depending on your skill set and budget, it can be labor-intensive to effectively use email marketing in your strategy.