What is Email Marketing?
According to Mailchimp, “Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services.”
If you’ve received emails about sales, new products, and such, those are examples of businesses utilizing email marketing.
What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?
Although email may seem like an “old school” platform to be marketing on, it holds great power and has remained effective for years.
If you think about it, mainly the younger demographic actively uses social media. Meanwhile, almost anyone and everyone uses email or at least has an email address. With that said, it would be easier to reach an audience that way.
We get it, you’re probably not convinced that email marketing is worth your time, so here are some statistics to consider:
Email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent.
88% of U.S. marketers use email to interact with their customers. Another 11% plan to use email in the future.
72% of US internet users will share their email address for a shopping experience that is more tailored to their personal preferences
Across all geographies, 62.4% of opened emails were interacted with for 8+ seconds. Meanwhile, users’ attention span on social media is a lot shorter, and they often scroll past many posts on their feed.
How Can You Use Email Marketing?
Compared to social media marketing, email marketing can be more flexible and cater to your personal needs.
The following are some ways businesses and individuals utilize email marketing:
Promotional - The most obvious way to use email marketing is for promotional purposes. If you have a huge sale, new products, or exclusive discount codes, it would be helpful to inform your customers via email. However, you need to keep in mind that it takes some strategy to not appear “spammy” and actually get users to open the email.
Automation - Automation can come in many forms, but here’s a simple example - When you’re online shopping and added a few things to your cart then closed the tab without actually making a purchase, you most likely will receive an email reminding you that you have items in your cart; that’s an automated email. That type of email is helpful when you’re trying to make sales.
Newsletters - Email marketing isn’t necessarily only for marketing in the traditional sense. It can be a useful tool when you’re trying to build genuine connections with your customers. If you wish to do that, newsletters will be your best friend because it allows your customers to see that you’re more than just a brand or a business trying to make money.
Where Should You Start With Email Marketing?
There are countless platforms that can help you as you navigate the world of email marketing. However, for starters, we would highly recommend Mailchimp and Benchmark.
Both platforms are free and offer a wide range of beginner-friendly tools. With that said, even if you know nothing about email marketing and have never done it before, we guarantee that these platforms will help make the process smoother than you can ever imagine.
The following are some of the tools and functions:
Pre-made email templates
Automation
Text personalization
Mobile optimization
A/B testing
Store email addresses and create multiple segments
Schedule when you want the emails to be sent
Examples of Good Email Marketing
1. Function of Beauty
2. Sweetgreen
3. Tuft & Needle
Hopefully, after reading this, you’re now more convinced of the power of email marketing.
In this article, we only covered the basics of email marketing. It will take time and practice to learn how to optimize and create the most effective emails. However, like everything with marketing, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy; it’s all about experimenting and learning as you go.