Email Marketing: An In-Depth Guide

Email is as a highly effective direct marketing channel and could be considered the modern version of direct response marketing.

Email marketing campaigns are core strategies in modern digital marketing, with entire businesses successfully built on the communication channel.

The real benefit of email marketing is the direct relationship you can build with your audience that you can control without the threat of a third party closing an account. A qualified email marketing list is priceless!

At a time when search platforms are getting more aggressive with advertising, generative AI is taking away organic traffic and some social media platforms are unstable, email is a way that brands can engage with their users and nurture trusted relationships.

Keep reading to understand how you can use email marketing to connect with your audience.

What Makes Email Such An Effective Marketing Channel?

Email marketing can be highly effective due to a variety of factors:

• Opt-in: Because automated emails must be opt-in and have opt-out options, email audiences are often highly engaged.
• Engagement data and segmentation: With the right email marketing platform, you can leverage data to improve how you create and target emails. You can also ask users for their preferences and organize campaigns around responses.
• Push marketing: Rather than waiting for users to input keywords, you can deliver experiences to them based on their activity history or a set of stated preferences.
• Personal and professional distinction: People will often sign up for emails using the most appropriate email address for the use case. This is great for B2B businesses because it enables you to reach people while they’re in a professional environment and mindset.
• Advanced automation: Email marketing platforms can help you create automated campaigns and customized experiences based on what you know about your customers. You can deliver different communications and email types to different user groups and move users into different automated tracks based on their behavior.
• Testing: It’s incredibly easy to test messaging, subject lines, segmentation, etc., with email marketing platforms.

This combination of advanced functionality and a strong connection between your audiences and your brand enables powerful marketing campaigns for many different types of businesses, whether you’re a publisher or an ecommerce store.

How Email Marketing Fits Into Your Campaigns

Email is one channel among many. Even email-only newsletters need other channels to acquire subscribers.

Generally, email is a channel for audiences who are aware of you in some way. They might have purchased a product, downloaded a document, signed up for a free trial, signed up for a newsletter, or set an alert.

Email audiences have usually taken action to end up on your mailing list. This makes it a critical channel for cultivating relationships, moving users through consideration stages in a sales process, or re-engaging users who took previous actions.

In combination with organic discovery strategies like social media, SEO, and paid advertising like search engine marketing, email campaigns can improve how well you can reach and convert audiences.

Building An Email Marketing Campaign

Your email list is a powerful tool. If you use the opportunities it presents you, you can enhance not only your marketing campaigns but how well you understand your audience and the effectiveness of your tactics.

With an email list and the right platform, you have access to:

• Information that people give you about themselves when signing up for offers or curating their experiences.
• Information about the emails they open and actions they take in those emails.
• The ability to connect actions that people take on your website to their email so that you can understand their needs and motivations, follow up on incomplete actions, and provide personalized experiences.
• The ability to segment your audience into personas and tag them based on specific needs, situations, and demographic information.

Email campaigns are your opportunity to put timely and focused offers in front of the right people at the right time, as well as cultivate their interest and trust.

For a campaign to be successful, you need to know what you want from your audience and what problems they come to you to solve. To build an effective email campaign, you need:

1. A compelling offer to sign up for emails and provide you with information.

To find this compelling offer, you need to know what offer is valuable enough to trade for information and inbox access. This could be:

• A downloadable report.
• A newsletter.
• The opportunity for exclusive or unique offers.
• Updates on a specific product or release.

2. Tracking and tagging. Tagging is the true power of email marketing.

Ask people to submit basic information like their age, interests, or company size when they sign up.

But you should also look for an email platform that allows automated tagging, for example when someone completes or begins but does not complete an action on your website.

3. Custom campaigns and “tracks” based on information and behavior.

Based on the data you gather, you can create custom campaigns for different types of users. This should include:

• Different email cadences are based on their level of engagement so that you don’t risk turning people off by communicating too frequently or too little.
• Customized offers and reminders based on interests and behavior.
• Unique content for different segments of your audience to focus on their specific needs.
• Automated responses to action and inaction that change a user’s experience. For example, moving users who don’t open emails to a specific campaign designed to reengage them.

4. Testing and experimentation. Email is one of the best ways to test your messaging.

You can test subject lines, different offers, and ads, your conversion optimization, etc., and the right platform will give you all the engagement data you need to refine your campaigns.

Separate a group into different test campaigns to compare performance so that you’re always improving and gaining insights about your audience.

Email mailing lists are your engaged audience. Take the opportunity to get to know them.

Different Types Of Emails In Email Marketing

Depending on your business model and your audience, you may need different types of emails – and different combinations – in your campaigns.

Some campaigns will be more directly promotional, while others will focus on information.

You need to understand why someone signed up to receive emails in the first place to determine what kinds of emails to send them. You can do that by tracking how they signed up. Was it through an offer page? A digital download? A social media promotion?

You should also collect people’s preferences as they sign up and through welcome emails to better understand their needs.

Once you understand the intent behind an email signup and the user’s preferences, you can choose the best types of emails to send.

An email marketing platform should be able to do this for you automatically, entering users into different segments to receive types of emails based on their preferences.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails are focused on conversions. They’re for audience segments that you’ve identified as likely to make a purchase but maybe need a little more enticing.

For example, it might be a user who has items in their cart but didn’t make a purchase. Or a user who went through the process of customizing a product but didn’t add it to their cart.

You might have identified them as someone waiting for a sale or shopping around.

It’s helpful to add incentives to promotional emails so that users get additional value for being on the mailing list.

Remind them of a discount code, or reward them for following through on an abandoned purchase by promising a future discount.

It’s important to be careful and intentional with these emails because they often get shunted into promotion-specific inboxes and lost in a sea of other promotions.

Running a nurture campaign to convince audiences to whitelist these emails could be an effective tactic.

Newsletters And Service Emails

Newsletters and emails containing news and information can be a service or business model themselves.

Alternatively, you can use this service to keep connected with audiences and keep them engaged with your brand, even if your business model isn’t newsletter-based.

Putting true informational value in people’s inboxes is difficult, and not all businesses are set up to do it effectively. These types of emails work best for companies that already invest in educational content or news.

If you don’t have an existing mechanism for content production, be aware that these emails are high-effort!

The tradeoff is that audiences are more likely to engage with emails regularly if they get genuine value from a newsletter.

You can build strong trust with audiences, and if the newsletter is successful, open a new revenue stream with in-email advertising.

Company Information And Update Emails

You can send emails with information about your company, although the audiences that respond well to them may be limited.

Investors are an example of an audience group that would be highly invested in company update emails.

Be careful with the cadence of these because they can get lost, just like promotional emails.

Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are important for setting expectations, gathering information, and beginning nurturing campaigns.

In a welcome email, you can give users information about the track they’re on, the cadence of emails, what information they can expect, etc.

You can also use welcome emails to guide users through the next steps and instruct them on how to customize their experience.

Nurturing Emails

Nurture emails take a slow and gradual approach to engagement and winning conversions.

They are critical to any email campaign because they create touchpoints with users and can help lead them to an eventual business goal like a conversion or sale.

These emails attempt to move users into consideration stages in a journey or assist them with their consideration and comparison activities.

They might include reminders, information about free services or information, or check-ins to ask users to update their communication preferences.

Re-Engagement Emails

Re-engagement is very similar to nurturing but occurs when a user is colder.

If they haven’t interacted with an email in a while, you can move them to a re-engagement campaign that presents them with specific reminders or offers to try and get them to become an engaged user again.

It’s important to keep email lists clean by removing users who haven’t engaged for a long time.

If you’re gathering data from your email list or selling advertising, this ensures that you don’t have inflated data. However, before you kick users off an email list, you should enter them into a re-engagement campaign to see if you can pull them back in.

Feedback, Survey, And Review Emails

Direct feedback is one of the best ways to get information about your audience.

Surveys can be used to create content with first-party data, and feedback surveys can help you further customize user experiences. Reviews can be used as social proof.

These types of emails can also be combined with sales and nurturing campaigns to increase retention and conversions. Offering people rewards for providing their feedback can lead to additional conversions.

Choosing Your Email Platform

Consider the functionality and your needs, and growth potential when you’re choosing an email platform.

Some of the core functions you should look for are:

• Tagging and segmentation: You need to be able to work with the data you have about your list and separate users into groups. This helps you create customized campaigns.
• Automated campaigns and timing: Email platforms should give you the ability to create a set of rules and emails and apply them to a group. This includes all of the emails to be sent, the timing of the emails, and tracking results.
• Website event tagging: You may need a platform that allows you to connect website behavior with email accounts. This can be critical for understanding user behavior and creating effective nurturing and re-engagement campaigns.
• Email behavior analysis: The platform should report metrics like open rates and in-email conversions and follow conversions from email onto the website to see what actions users take.
• Testing capabilities: Your email marketing platform should enable you to test different campaigns, different messaging, subject lines, images, and offers within specific audience segments and report on the compared effectiveness.

Email Marketing Is A Powerful “Middle” Strategy

Between awareness and a sale, there’s often an email. Or two or three. Or more.

Email lists are so valuable because they’re a direct source of information about who your audience is, what they want, and what they respond to. It’s also a relationship that you have a lot of control over.

The right platform with the right capabilities combined with a strong content strategy can increase the rate at which you gain conversions from audiences that are already aware of your brand.

With automation, you can set these processes to occur automatically.

More resources:

---

Featured Image: one photo/Shutterstock