What is Email Marketing and How Does it Work? Definition and Best Practices
- What is email marketing
- Why your business needs email marketing in 2021-2022
- How does email marketing work
- How to start email marketing
- How to launch your first email marketing strategy in 8 steps
- 10 best practices for successful email marketing
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is when you send a commercial email message to your ‘email subscribers’ — contacts who have signed up to your email list and given express permission to receive email communications from you.
And Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Email marketing is used to inform, drive sales, and build a community around your brand (e.g. with a newsletter).
Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization.
How Email Marketing Works
It's easy to set up and track an email marketing campaign, which makes it accessible for small businesses. You can add a newsletter sign-up option to your website, for instance. As people sign up, you can send newsletters to a growing audience. You can also direct customers to the newsletter from your social media profiles.
The two biggest advantages of email marketing are price and ease. Compared to other types of marketing, emailing is an inexpensive way to advertise your company and its products or services.
A regular newsletter is a simple and effective way to send updates about your company, upcoming events, and special offers. Email software also makes it easy to schedule automated promotional emails for customers who haven't purchased recently.
Email marketing allows you to target particular groups of customers or even specific individuals. Offering individual customers special birthday deals on merchandise or services is one way to do this.
A restaurant, for instance, might send an email to customers on their birthdays offering 50% off an entree. This kind of personalization helps a business develop and maintain a relationship with a customer—and that can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.
How-To: Email Marketing
Wondering how to get started with email marketing? Email marketing is made up of several moving pieces, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Here’s how it breaks down…
1. Start With Your List: The bottom line is that you can’t send out email marketing campaigns if you have no one to send them to. And the other thing to remember is that email marketing won’t work if you don’t have the right people on your list.
That means you need to capture leads to grow your email list with your target audience. For that, there’s no better tool than OptinMonster:
OptinMonster-homepage
OptinMonster is the world’s #1 lead generation software. We empower businesses to create stunning optin campaigns in a matter of minutes with zero coding skills required.
Then, using our highly advanced targeting rules, you can display these campaigns to the right people at just the right time in their customer journey.
As a result, you can drastically grow your list with quality leads and see huge increases in your company’s profits. Plus, OptinMonster integrates with over 30 of the most popular email service providers.
Grow Your List With Better Leads Today!
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This leads us to our next step…
2. Add an Email Service Provider: An email service provider (ESP) lets you segment your audience, organize your list, and distribute email campaigns to your audience. You can also track the results to improve future campaigns.
A good ESP should integrate with your other marketing tools so you can turn everything on autopilot as you grow your leads.
There are a ton of email service providers out there, but we take the guesswork out and make it really easy to choose the right one for you and your goals. A big later in this guide, we’ll list out our favorite ESPs that you can choose from.
After those two steps, it’s just a matter of refining your lists and your messaging so you’re reaching your audience and really connecting with them. Plus, you’ll be able to set up some automation in your email service which will make things much easier for you.
Ready to jump in? Let do it!
Growing Your Email List
What most people do when they want to build an email list is to put an optin form on their website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy usually doesn’t work very well.
To grow your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer. You need a lead magnet.
What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet (a.k.a. an optin bribe) is something awesome that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to create; most lead magnets are digital materials like PDFs, MP3 audio files, or videos that you can create yourself at minimal or no cost.
10 Best Practices for Email Marketing Success
1. Never buy email lists
Building an email list can be slow, especially when you’re just starting out. Buying a list might seem like a tempting shortcut but trust us, it’s a terrible idea.
Buying a list will put your business at serious risk because:
In many jurisdictions around the world, sending unsolicited emails and storing people’s data in your crm without consent is illegal (think GDPR and CAN-SPAM act).
People are more likely to mark unsolicited emails as spam, damaging your email sender reputation and potentially ending up on an email blocklist.
Most email marketing services will refuse to work with you because purchased lists can harm the deliverability of other users on shared IP addresses.
And that’s not all. Many email addresses on purchased lists are actually spam traps. A spam trap is an inactive email address that’s purposely left out in the open to attract spammers.
Because the email address doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s impossible that it opted-in to any email lists. That way, the ISP knows that whoever contacts this address is a spammer.
In short, don’t buy email lists. Build your list organically — however slowly — and you’ll reap the rewards in the long run.
2. Use double opt-in
As already mentioned, the term ‘opt-in’ refers to the signup process. There are two different types of opt-in for email marketing:
Single opt-in is when the subscriber is added to the email list once the signup form is submitted.
Double opt-in is when you send a confirmation email with a link to each new subscriber. The subscriber must click the link to complete the subscription. Without this verification, they won’t receive emails from you.
Sure, double opt-in adds an extra step between the potential subscriber and your list. But far from being an obstacle, this process is important — especially for email deliverability.
Double opt-in eliminates any misspelled email addresses (which would otherwise generate a hard bounce). It also rules out spam traps and acts as proof of subscriber consent — a GDPR requirement.
For better email marketing, double opt-in is the way to go.
3. Segment your mailing list
As your email list expands, it’s likely to contain diverse buyer profiles.
List Segmentation is the process of dividing your list into smaller sub-lists of subscribers who have something in common. The idea behind this technique is to engage subscribers with more relevant, targeted emails.
Among the many different possibilities for segmentation, examples include demographic information such as age and location, lead score, and purchase history.
You can already segment subscribers into separate lists during signup by asking preferences in terms of content, email frequency, etc.
4. Personalization
Illustration of an email with greeting "Hey Marco"
Who doesn’t like to feel noticed?
People generally appreciate when brands add personal touches and pay attention to small details. When it comes to making us feel valued and understood as a customer, a little effort goes a long way.
This also rings true for email marketing.
Personalizing emails is essential to building trusting relationships with prospects and customers.
Here are some simple email personalization ideas that’ll positively impact your opens, clicks, and conversion rate.
Simple email personalization to get started
Use the subscriber’s first name in the email subject line and content (“Hey Tom!”)
Where are the bulk of your subscribers located? Consider time-zones when scheduling campaigns to maximize the chances of the email being read.
Segment contacts so that messaging is targeted and relevant
Use behavior-triggered emails based on how customers interact with your product/service
5. Optimize for mobile
61.9% of all emails are opened and read on mobile.
For best results, make sure your emails display correctly on mobile devices.
Depending on the email design capabilities of your ESP, it’s likely that mobile-responsiveness is an already built-in feature.
All emails designed in Sendinblue are automatically programmed to fit mobile devices and you can double check this using the mobile preview functionality.
6. Optimize email deliverability
Email marketing success depends massively on email deliverability.
An important concept for email marketers, email deliverability refers to the ability to deliver an email to the inbox.
When all’s well, the email makes it past the spam filters and arrives at its destination. When deliverability is compromised, the email lands in the spam folder or, worse, your sender IP is blocklisted by the ISP.
While deliverability often depends on technical factors, there are plenty of non-technical ways to help your email newsletters reach the inbox.
Here are some easy-to-follow deliverability best practices:
Make sure the email content doesn’t come across as spammy. Did you know that certain words and phrases trigger spam filters? Have a look at this list of words to avoid.
Keep your subscriber database up to date by removing unengaged users and inactive addresses.
Only send to opt-in subscribers. Send emails to someone who’s never heard of you and it’s likely they’ll report you as spam. This’ll harm your future deliverability.
Always include an unsubscribe link. Under the GDPR (Europe’s data protection regulation), an individual has the right to dictate how their data is being used. The act of unsubscribing falls fully within those rights so this option should always be available.
More tips to improve email deliverability (and a free ebook) available here.
7. Choose an engaging email newsletter design
When it comes to email marketing, design is just as important as the content. The look and feel of your email is going to communicate a message about your company and its values. Spend some time getting it right.
Ideally, you want to capture attention with an on-brand email design that highlights your main message and CTA in the best way possible.
Great email design supports email content by making it clear, legible, and structured. A structure that naturally draws the reader to your call-to-action will drive up your click-through rate.
If intend to add images to your email content, keep in mind best practices for newsletter images:
Don’t clutter the email with too many images (this could harm your deliverability)
Avoid images that are either too large or too small
Add ALT text for each image in case it doesn’t show — this’ll also make it more accessible to people using screen readers.
Only use high quality images that serve a purpose. Avoid generic stock photos that don’t add value.
For the best email design inspiration, check out ReallyGoodEmails.
HTML or plain text
It’s a long-standing debate among email marketers — HTML versus plain text, which is better?
Plain-text can be just as effective as HTML. It all boils down to your audience and the types of emails you’re sending.
If you’re a writer with a writing tips newsletter, plain-text makes sense. On the other hand, ecommerce emails will need to be more eye-catching. The best way to know? Test!
Watch this Sendinblue Academy video for more insights into HTML vs. Plain text.
8. Clean your email list regularly
Keep your database up to date for optimal email deliverability and higher engagement rates.
Got subscribers who’ve disappeared off the radar? If someone hasn’t engaged with your emails in at least six months, send a reactivation campaign or even ask for a second opt-in. See if you can get them interested again.
If there’s still no engagement, delete the subscribers from your list.
Sure, it’ll be sad to see them go but better for your deliverability in the long term.
Another important point: Make it easy to unsubscribe with a clearly visible unsubscribe button. If people can’t find the way out, they’re more likely to mark you as spam.
For reference, a good unsubscribe rate is 0.5 or less.
9. A/B test your email subject line and content
Hesitating between two subject lines? Not sure what content your audience will react best to? A/B testing is one way to find out — and a great way to optimize your campaigns.
Test different email subject line formulas, content formats and CTAs. See which ones get the best engagement and stick with the approach.
Keep testing until you find your secret sauce!
10. Scale with autoresponders and email automation
Once you’ve got the hang of email marketing, automate your email marketing strategy to make your business grow even faster.
Autoresponders are the simplest form of email automation.
Autoresponders send an automatic personalized email (or email series) at different stages of the buyer journey. You get to follow up with subscribers without having to be physically present to hit send.
The welcome email is the most common autoresponder example and most email marketing services have an autoresponder function.
Armed with the right email automation software, you can go one step further and set up complex email automation sequences using if/then/else logic. This kind of email series is highly effective for lead nurturing and lead scoring..
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