What is Email marketing? Meaning & Definition How Does Email Marketing Work? Key Elements of Email Marketing Campaigns Different Types of Email Marketing Campaigns Benefits of Email Marketing (Why Email Marketing is Important?) What Are Disadvantages of Email Marketing? Email Marketing Strategy Plan for 2025 What is Email marketing? Meaning & Definition It
is the digital marketing process used to send promotional emails to
customers/subscribers. It drives sales or generates leads which help to
build a community around your brand.
Modern
email marketing no longer focuses on one mail for the mass; instead,
now it is more about consent, segmentation, and customization.
How Does Email Marketing Work? Wondering how email marketing works? It is not a complicated process.
Email
marketing is fairly intuitive and often automated. Businesses, with the
help of an Email Service Provider (ESP), send marketing emails and
manage the campaigns.
ESP facilitates the email marketing process. It ensures:
Email deliverability – the emails land in the inbox or not. helps to design newsletters has automation capabilities can personalize content These
features help you build a mailing list, engage with subscribers, and
strengthen customer relationships. Nowadays, it is no longer rocket
science as one can learn it with an online digital marketing course or with reliable resources on the internet.
Key Elements of Email Marketing Campaigns Apart from ESP, an effective email marketing campaign requires three essential elements, which are:
1. An email list The email list contains the email addresses of the interested subscribers who have opted-in to receive emails from you.
Permission-based
marketing is vital to confirm with data protection laws and safeguard
the integrity of the brand. After all, nobody likes a spammer.
There
are many ways to build your email list, by creating a lead magnet (also
known as an offer) which your audience is interested in, like a coupon
or e-newsletters in exchange for the email addresses. You can use the best email marketing tools to start building an email list easily.
2. An Email Service Provider An email service provider (ESP) lets you segment your audience, manage your list, and help design and distribute email marketing campaigns.
ESP
allows you to automate actions based on your target audience’s
behaviour. These enable you to connect with your audience, generating
engagement and improving conversion rates.
3. Clearly defined goals The business goals differ from one to another. Brands can use email marketing to achieve many goals, for example:
boost brand awareness drive sales generate leads keep audience engaged increase customer loyalty To execute a successful marketing campaign, your email list, ESP and goals must align.
Firstly, segment your audience and generate your email list according to their demographics or actions.
Further, create a series of emails customized according to your audience to deliver your business goal.
Lastly, use your ESP to automate the process and monitor your campaign.
Different Types of Email Marketing Campaigns Now
that you know email marketing definition and how does email marketing
work, it’s time to understand the primary email marketing types.
It
consists of some marketing emails that brands use to provide
information or promote their product. Here we have discussed a couple of
different types of email marketing.
1. Promotional emails The
marketing campaigns are used to promote the brand, product, new
release, webinar, or ebook. A campaign could consist of a series of
emails for days or weeks.
Promotional
emails have a clear call-to-action (CTA) that you want the reader to
take. It can be to visit the webpage or purchase the product.
This type of marketing is used or required when in line with the rhythm of your business. For instance, if you are offering an online digital marketing course and want to promote it, then you can send a promotional email regarding it to your subscribers.
2. Informational emails Informational emails can be of multiple types, like newsletters or any announcement.
Newsletters: A
newsletter shares the news related to your business (new milestones
reached, new product capabilities) or highlights a specific
product/service. It can be sent according to a set schedule which will
help keep the subscribers engaged and maintain a consistent connection.
Newsletters
don’t just have to be about ‘news’. It can also be a one-to-one letter
to your subscribers about anything that interests them.
Take
this as an opportunity to share thoughts, insights, tips, or whatever
brings the most value to your audience. For example, if we have
published this blog on what is email marketing and how does it work,
then we can include its link in the newsletter and offer information to
our audience.
Announcements: Sometimes,
announcement and newsletter emails blend with each other in company
marketing campaigns. Announcement emails can give information about
anything, from a new product release to an upcoming sale.
You
can make announcements about some important changes to your company’s
product or potential events that you’re planning. These messages won’t
happen as frequently as any other marketing campaign.
3. Transactional emails Transactional
emails are messages that build a relationship with your customers.
These messages include order confirmations and tracking updates.
For example, if a learner has enrolled in our online content writing course, then a transaction email will be sent to him to confirm his seat and stay updated about the upcoming batch.
4. Automated emails Automated
emails are a combination of various promotional emails intended to move
the subscribers along the sale funnel or push them to take action. You
may send automated emails to “welcome” users that join your email list.
Automated
emails also include messages about abandoned carts or wishlists to lure
them back to the store. Brands also send birthday emails to customers
to boost brand affinity.
Benefits of Email Marketing (Why Email Marketing is Important?) After
understanding what is email marketing and how does it work, the next
step should be to know the top email marketing benefits in 2025.
1. Permission-based Marketing When
customers trust you with their email address, they willingly give you
access to land in their inboxes. Gaining permission is better than
showing up uninvited and increases the chances of conversion and
engagement.
2. Accessibility Email marketing is accessible to all age groups and opens the doors to communicating with your audience.
In this tech-savvy generation, people tend to check their email daily, and your email is likely to be viewed.
3. Gives you more control Unlike
other social media platforms, you own your mailing account. Therefore,
if any platform ceases to exist, all your hard work sinks with it.
With
email, you have direct contact with your audience. And the intimacy of
email allows you to build a one-to-one relationship with your
subscribers.
4. More personalization capabilities Another
point that proves the email marketing importance is that you can use
more psychographic or demographic data to create personalized campaigns
for the targeted people. Research has concluded that personalization can
increase revenue by up to 760%.
5. Easily measurable Another
characteristic of email marketing is that it can be easily measured.
This is important because if you want to improve, you must measure the
campaign’s effectiveness.
When
you run an email campaign, do you know how many people viewed your
emails, did your email land up in the spam, and how many sales you
generated? Automated email marketing makes measuring your campaign
easier. Hence, if you are not yet good at it, then going for a reliable digital marketing course in India or a free email marketing course with certificate can do wonders for you.
What Are Disadvantages of Email Marketing? Now
that you have a good idea of what is email marketing and how does it
work, as well as the pros of it, let’s now know about some of its cons.
1. Competitive platform Standing
out in a cluttered email box can be challenging. You need to be
creative to stand out in the crowd, so your email gets noticed and read.
2. Email deliverability The
challenge of getting your email to land in receivers’ inboxes is tough.
Deliverability rates are the ratio of emails sent versus the number of
emails that made it to your targeted customer’s inbox. To make a
campaign effective, you must contend that your emails are delivered and
address all the deliverability issues.
3. Retaining subscribers Many
businesses that struggle with retaining customers sometimes buy email
lists in hopes that they’ll convert potential customers by sending
unsolicited messages to people who are in no way affiliated/interested
in your brand or product. This cannot be a great practice to convert
customers as it is highly unlikely that people will respond, and
messages may be marked as spam.
4. Mobile-friendly emails People
don’t have time to check emails from their laptops. Most consumers
check emails from their smartphones in the morning or while reaching
their destination in the car. So you don’t have much time to grab their
attention. If your email is not mobile-friendly, you’re forcing your
customers to scroll up-down or left-right to grasp the message, which
means you’ll lose the customer.
5. Struggle in growing email list Planning
to implement a successful email campaign can be a struggle if you’re
new to the business. In many businesses, marketers are wearing multiple
hats; they manage schedules and employees and also have to build an
email list, segment customers, and create personalized emails, all while
tracking metrics. This can be quite challenging.
Email Marketing Strategy Plan for 2025 To
make an effective campaign, you have to make a great email marketing
strategy plan. Here are some steps that you can easily follow and drive
results in 2025.
1. Build your own list The first step towards launching a successful email campaign is to build a secure and healthy email list.
To build such a list, you can offer coupons, gift vouchers, or other
compelling offers. It can be through your website, in your store, or at
an event, but make sure customers are opting-in to receive your emails.
2. Practice email list hygiene The
biggest asset of any email marketing strategy is the subscriber list.
So it is important to keep the email list updated. Also, at regular
intervals, remove the inactive subscribers and email addresses that are
no longer in use.
You
might feel that cleaning out your email list is counter-productive, but
it isn’t. By keeping inactive users in your email lists, your
engagement levels might drop.
Most
email service providers have the option to remove inactive subscribers
automatically. So you won’t have to spend your time trying to update the
list manually.
3. Send targeted and segmented emails Stay
in contact with your customers by sending personalized and segmented
emails to your customers. This will help build deeper connections and
nurture relationships.
Make
sure to send emails regularly to keep your audience engaged. Entertain
or educate them with a series of emails on a specific topic they
opted-in for. This will prevent them from spamming.
4. Define the clear action that you want the reader to take In
addition to the creative subject line and layout of the email, you must
focus on the goal of each and every email. Ask yourself, what actions
do you want the reader to take after reading the email, or did they
learn something new about your brand, product, or service? Create the
email in a way you want the actions to take place.
5. Track the right KPIs Email
marketing is more than sending emails to your subscribers. It also
entails monitoring the performance of your campaigns. With the help of
KPIs, you can check the effectiveness of the campaign and know how many
subscribers are interested in your company. People who are still
wondering why learn digital marketing now have the answer that everything is crucial for driving success online.
Wrapping Up:
Hope
this write-up helped you understand the meaning of email marketing and
how it works. Moreover, knowing its pros and cons is also important for
you to follow the right steps and create a solid email marketing
strategy for your business.
