Marketing Types

Email Marketing as a Tool

Email marketing is a powerful tool that businesses can use to build stronger relationships with their customers and drive sales. It is the most profitable and cost-effective direct marketing channel, generating an average return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent, according to Litmus. As of 2022, the Content Marketing Institute found that 68% of businesses use email to send content to their contacts.

For this reason alone, email should be a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy. Not doing any email marketing is like leaving money lying out on the table.

This guide will explain what email marketing is, how it works, and how to get started. By the end, you'll have a solid grasp of the basics along with the know-how to launch an effective email marketing strategy for your business.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a direct marketing channel that lets businesses share new products, sales, and updates with customers on their contact lists. Because subscribers choose to sign up for emails, its more likely to convert than other channels. Its high return on investment (ROI) makes it crucial to most businesses overall inbound strategy.

Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization to more effectively engage target audiences. Its about understanding your customers interests to develop long-term relationships.

This may sound time-consuming, but marketing automation and software handle most of the heavy lifting for you. In the long run, a well-designed email marketing strategy not only drives sales but helps build a community around your brand.

Types of marketing emails
Marketing emails can be promotional, informational, or serve a specific purpose in the buyer journey.

Promotional emails
Email marketing campaigns are used to promote special offers, new product releases, gated content like ebooks and webinars, and your brand at large. A campaign could consist of 3-10 emails sent over several days or weeks.

Promotional emails have a clear call-to-action CTA, for short. The CTA represents the specific action you want the reader to take, whether its visiting a page on your website or using a coupon to make a purchase. In the example above, its the button that says Get your gift.

Your businesss sales and marketing rhythm typically determines how often you send this type of marketing email.

During crucial periods like Black Friday, you may send multiple promotional emails in the same 24-hour period. During slower periods in the marketing calendar, there may be a few weeks between your promotional campaigns.

Informational emails
Newsletters are one of the most popular informational emails. A newsletter, as the name suggests, shares news related to your business. Think new milestones reached, new product capabilities, or featuring valuable content like case studies.

Sent at regular intervals weekly, bi-weekly, monthly newsletters help maintain consistent touch points with your email subscribers.

Simply put, a newsletter is an opportunity to share insights, thoughts, tips whatever brings the most value to your audience.

Check out our post to learn more about how to create a newsletter.

Email is the perfect way to inform customers of company announcements, new product releases, changes to the service, etc.

More often than not, email is the go-to channel for important messages. If theres a glitch on your website, shipping delays, or an outage in your system/software, updating your contacts via email is the best way to maintain communication. Its secure, instant, and can match the formal tone of even the most important announcements.

Retention emails
Retention emails keep your customers happy and always coming back for more. Since a new contact is more costly to attain than keeping an existing contact, retention emails are a valuable cornerstone of email marketing.

These emails engage customers with your brand. You might introduce them to your product, share tips on how to use your product, send out a survey, or target uninterested contacts with a campaign to win them back.

Examples of retention emails include:

Welcome emails
A welcome email series is a sequence of automated emails sent to new subscribers after they sign up to join your list. Welcome emails introduce people to your brand after theyve signaled interest and are a great opportunity to establish credibility and build trust, introduce products, and gather more information on subscribers.
How-to-use-our-product emails
Achievement emails
Next steps
Company news, stories, and events
Resources
Contests
User-generated content
Sometimes customers begin to lose interest in your emails or product. This is your chance to send re-activation or re-engagement emails.

As the name suggests, re-engagement emails help reconnect with customers or subscribers who havent been active lately.

Transactional emails
The fourth category important to email marketing is transactional. These emails are automated messages triggered as a response to certain actions taken by your customers, such as when a customer buys an item from your shop.

Examples of transactional emails include:

Order confirmations
Thank you
Password resets
Product review requests
While these dont explicitly say marketing, they are extremely important for customer satisfaction. These immediate messages serve as confirmations that customers are getting what they asked for. Check out this transactional email guide to learn about best practices when making and sending transactional emails.