What Is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing Defined  

When you think of email marketing, you think of the daunting mass of emails in your inbox, right? Despite the array of emails, we receive and ignore, email marketing is not useless.  

In fact, if you can get their attention, email marketing is an excellent tool for business owners to understand their customers and bring in new leads.  

Think about the brands you really like to engage with. If it is not on social media, it is likely via email.  

According to Mailchimp, email marketing is the use of email within your marketing efforts to promote a company’s products and services as well as incentivize customer loyalty.  

It is a crucial tool to nurture your relationship with readers and inform them of the latest news for your company’s products or services. You can also build a relationship while directing your engaged readers to blogs, social media, and various parts of your website.  

Since 2021, 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last year. In HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2022, email marketers are using hyper personalized messages that show transparency and authenticity. This not only increases open rates, but also ROI. 

Email Marketing Tools  

There are countless email marketing tools, but what do marketers actually use? HubSpot highlighted these email marketing tools for 2021:  

• MailChimp 
• Constant Contact 
• Salesforce 
• Sendinblue  
• GetResponse 
• HubSpot 
• Drip 
• Marketo 
• ConvertKit 
• ActiveCampaign 
• Keap 

Types of Email Marketing  

Newsletters 

A newsletter is an email sent to subscribers on a regular basis. They often contain the latest information about your blog, social media, and products. The primary goal of newsletters is to keep in regular contact with your readers and boost your website traffic.  

Promotional Emails  

Promotional emails include discounts, announcements of exclusive deals, and general promotions of the company’s services. This is an effective way to retain customers and keep them engaged around the holidays or industry seasonality.  

Lead Nurturing Emails  

Lead nurturing emails are emails directed to leads who have not purchased from your company yet. These are primarily educational, featuring content that not only educates but creates a personalized relationship with this potential customer.  

Transactional Emails 

These are automated emails triggered by specific actions like purchasing a service or signing up for a newsletter from your website. The goal of these is to confirm payment or sign-ups for the customer.  

Welcome Emails 

Welcome emails have a higher-than-average open rate, so it is important to make these emails aesthetically pleasing and engaging. These are normally automated as well. The goal of these emails is to establish a relationship with your customers and intrigue them enough to open your future emails.  

How Do You Get People to Sign Up for Your Emails?  

There are endless ways to direct users to your newsletter. We recommend having a newsletter signup form on your website, posting on social media, and paid advertising before you launch.  

How Often Should You Send Out Emails?  

It depends! 

You never want your readers to unsubscribe from your email because they are receiving emails too often nor do you want to go so long without one that they forget they signed up in the first place.  

According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2022, marketers adopted the less is more strategy with their email marketing. About 37% sent between zero to two emails weekly. Now, why is that?  

Our recommendation is to send an email every two to four weeks to maintain consistency and stay in your potential customer’s rear view. 

When Is the Best Time to Send Emails?  

According to a report from Sendinblue, the best time to send an email is the following for each industry:  

• E-Commerce: 10:00 AM 
• Software/SaaS: 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM 
• Marketing Services: 4:00 PM 
• Hospitality/Online Retail: 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM 
• B2B: 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM 
• Non-Profits: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM 

But do not rely on this alone. The most important part of email marketing is collecting data. The more you learn about your targeted email audience, the better you can cater to their needs.  

What To Do with the Data Collected  

Your data is the most important piece of this marketing puzzle. First, outline a goal in mind for your email marketing. Is it to grow your subscriber base? Is it to generate leads? Then, back up its effectiveness with these key metrics. 

Open Rate 

An email’s open rate is as simple as it sounds. Open rates are how many subscribers open this specific email. According to Mailchimp, the average open rate for all industries is 21.33%.  

Click-Through Rate (CTR) 

A click-through rate is an easy day-to-date metric to track. Email marketing software is intelligent and often shows a path of where users click on email. In the same report from MailChimp, the average CTR for emails across all industries is 2.62%. 

Conversion Rate 

The conversion rate is the percentage of users who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action like filling out a lead gen form or purchasing a product.  

Bounce Rate 

A bounce rate is how many emails could not be delivered to a user’s inbox. This metric is not important for the sake of lowering the bounce rate but keeping an eye on and ensuring that your emails are not registering as spam. A higher bounce rate across the map might indicate that you have been marked as a spam email.  

List Growth Rate 

A list growth rate is the number of subscriber growth since you started your campaign. How many people are engaging with your emails? The goal is to grow your list, engage with current subscribers, and find new loyal subscribers.  

Overall ROI 

An overall ROI is the actual return on your investment for email campaigns. Looking at the number of sales from the campaign divided from the amount spent, you should know if you need to adjust your strategy accordingly.  

If you want a comprehensive look at all your email marketing performance at once, we recommend using HubSpot.