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Email marketing is one of the most important and widely used marketing channels that helps businesses establish a direct relationship with their customers. This blog provides a detailed overview of email marketing, its types, examples, benefits, best practices, measuring and analyzing key performance metrics, and more.
Email marketing, paid search, public relations, or social media? As marketers, you are likely to come across this question quite often. Against popular opinion, email marketing continues to be a dominant marketing channel.
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that enables businesses to share relevant announcements about their offerings, promotional content, and offers with subscribers via email. It is a powerful tool to not only elevate customer awareness about your company and offerings but also drive lead generation and nurturing efforts and strengthen customer relationships.
The inception of email marketing dates back to the 1970s when the internet itself was at a nascent stage. The first email was sent by a man named Ray Tomlinson in 1971 and the first email blast was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corp, to 400 Arpanet advertising machines, resulting in $13 million in sales.
As the internet became more accessible to the masses over the years, email marketing also gained prominence as a marketing channel. Studies show that 73% of B2B marketers consider email marketing as the best channel for reaching their audience while people are three times more likely to make purchases from B2C email campaigns than from social media promotions.
Today, every business, big or small, relies on email marketing as a cost-effective marketing tool. It has also led to the proliferation of various email marketing and management platforms that help businesses leverage automated workflows and gain insights into email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more.
Leveraging email marketing as part of your marketing strategy can significantly level up your outreach efforts. Here are the top reasons why it can be a game-changer for your business.
Email marketing works by delivering emails to the subscribers who have signed up to receive your company’s newsletter, updates, and announcements. It requires:
You can then track open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics to evaluate the performance of your email campaigns.
To learn more, read this blog that discusses the 14 steps of creating a powerful email marketing strategy.
There are different types of email marketing campaigns with each one serving a specific purpose and objective. These include:
This is the type of email that is sent when a customer creates their account for the first time on your app or website. You can leverage welcome emails to not only showcase your brand and offerings to new customers but also drive them to make their first purchase by offering them special offers and discounts.
Confirmation emails are those that are sent when a person subscribes to your emails or newsletters or makes a purchase on your app or website. These emails serve as an acknowledgment that the action – subscribing to the newsletter or making a purchase – was successful.
These are the emails that are sent after a specific action has been taken by a customer on an app or website. Examples include purchase and invoice, shipping information, password reset, etc.
Newsletter emails are the emails that are sent to keep the subscribers apprised of the latest company updates and announcements. They can also include the latest blogs, eBooks, and articles. Newsletter emails generally include a call to action for the subscriber – this could be clicking on a link to read a new blog or register for an upcoming webinar.
Nurturing leads is a key aspect of a marketing strategy, which involves targeting specific customers with relevant content and campaigns to move them along the marketing funnel and convert them eventually. Email marketing plays a key role in this strategy. Lead nurturing emails involve sending a series of emails to pique a lead’s interest in your offering.
Promotional emails are primarily intended to create and maintain awareness and announce new products and services, offers, flagship events, and more. They are generic in nature and are generally sent out to the entire email database.
These emails are sent to invite the target audience to upcoming events such as roundtables, conferences, webinars, product launches, and more. They include key details, such as the event date and time, venue, what attendees can expect from the event, and a call to action for the recipients to register for the event.
The holiday season and special occasions are a great time for businesses to attract customers with offers and promotions and drive high-volume sales. Seasonal marketing emails are those that are sent to inform the target audience of the upcoming sale for holidays and special occasions like Christmas, Diwali, Mother’s and Father’s Day, and more.
Survey emails are the type of emails that help you get customer feedback, which can help you improve your offerings. These emails usually have the survey link as the call to action. Surveys are a great way to gain insights into customer expectations, improve products and services accordingly, and boost customer experience and satisfaction.
To ensure an active email marketing strategy that is constantly adapting and improving, it is imperative to choose the right email marketing platform.
CleverTap is an all-in-one customer engagement and retention platform that helps you deliver hyper-personalized customer experience. Its multi-channel integration enables you to unify your email marketing efforts with other channels such as SMS, in-app messages, and push notifications for a more cohesive approach.
With CleverTap Email, you can:
See how today’s top brands use CleverTap to drive long-term growth and retention
Email marketing is one of the most important channels in every marketer’s strategy. But how can you stand out and make a difference for your subscribers? This is where automation and personalization come in. Let’s take a closer look.
Leveraging email marketing tools and platforms can help you automate email marketing workflows and repeatable tasks. These tools can help you send automated emails based on predetermined schedules, such as a subscriber’s birthday or anniversary; segmentation, such as sending emails to a group of subscribers based on their common age, gender, or location; and triggers based on specific actions, such as welcome emails, wishlist creation, etc.
Bringing automation to email marketing not only helps improve operational efficiencies but also creates bandwidth for marketers to focus on other core activities. Automated tools also make it easy to gain insights into and track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to refine the strategy accordingly.
Crafting messages tailored to the needs, preferences, and behavior of the recipients can significantly improve their engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. Even minor tweaks such as adding a recipient’s name in the subject line, or aligning the body of the email to the recipient’s demographics or geographic location can make a huge difference.
Personalization is highly dependent on subscribers’ data. The more data you have on a subscriber’s demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral aspects, the more tailored and personalized email campaign you can drive.
Automation and personalization in email marketing can provide you with the following benefits:
Driving successful email marketing campaigns requires continuous improvements based on their performance. But how can you determine if your email campaign is performing as intended or if it requires changes for better ROI? The answer lies in email marketing metrics.
Email marketing metrics are key indicators that provide insights into how your email campaigns are performing. Some of the important and widely used metrics include:
Tracking and analyzing these metrics can help you gain valuable insights into what’s working and areas that need improvement, enabling you to make adjustments to your marketing strategies for the best results.
For a deeper dive, read our blog on Mastering Email Marketing Metrics for ROI.
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, marketers need to keep improving their email marketing programs to maximize returns. Here are the email marketing best practices that can help you stay ahead of the curve.
Email marketing platforms and software solutions are the best way to amp up your email marketing function. These tools not only help automate repeatable tasks but also simplify sorting the contacts list, running A/B tests, and tracking key metrics to evaluate the performance of the email campaigns and make adjustments accordingly.
The success of your email campaigns is highly dependent on your email list. Although it might seem like a daunting task, it is essential to verify every contact and ensure that it has been added organically and with consent.
You should avoid purchasing email addresses and remove any purchased ones from your database as a lot of these purchased emails are often bogus and can impact your engagement. They can even get you blacklisted by email service providers and anti-spam services.
It is essential to regularly clean your email list to remove email addresses that do not engage with your emails. When people ignore your emails over a long period your time, it can signal ISPs that you are sending spam emails, which can further impact your delivery rates and engagement.
Instead of sending out generic emails to the entire email list, you should segment your list based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors and craft tailored messages for each of the segments. The more you align and personalize the messages to your subscribers’ needs, tastes, and preferences, the more likely they will help improve engagement and drive conversions.
Running A/B tests are crucial as they provide insights into what’s resonating and working the most. From subject lines to email copy to your CTAs, every aspect should be tested for optimal results. Though this trial-and-error method might seem cumbersome, identifying the winning element can do wonders for your email campaigns.
It is important to closely monitor key email marketing metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and more to understand how a campaign is performing. However, it is also vital to understand that not all metrics are relevant to every campaign.
For example, for an email campaign inviting people to register for an upcoming webinar, click-through rate is the key metric to monitor while open rate would make more sense for an email campaign containing an important company announcement in the body of the email.
The importance of sending the email at the right time cannot be overstated. This requires being aware of the recipient’s time zone, holidays, and even days of the week, and more. For example, sending any product demo requests or company newsletters during Christmas or Chinese New Year might not get the intended level of engagement.
Instead of sending too many emails, focus on ensuring quality – carefully crafted subject line, the body of the email, and a call to action in line with recipients’ needs and preferences. Sending frequent emails can overwhelm the recipients and make them mark your email as spam or even unsubscribe.
It is also essential to include educational and informative content as part of the email marketing strategy. As marketers, you might think that every email campaign should get you leads and conversions. However, striking a balance between educational and lead-generation campaigns is key to keeping your target audience engaged.
Appreciating and rewarding email subscribers who always engage with your emails can do wonders in boosting their loyalty and making them your brand ambassadors. For example, an E-commerce company can offer early access to their upcoming sale or a B2B company can offer special discounts to their flagship events and conferences.
These superstars can also provide you with valuable insights to fine-tune your email program. You can run a survey to get their input and feedback on your email frequency, templates, and more.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help you significantly level up your email game. You can harness the power of AI to analyze customer data and gain insights for personalizing your emails, get optimal times for sending your emails, get recommendations for subject lines that will work the best, and more.
Let’s look at some real-world success stories of how CleverTap helped businesses improve their email marketing campaigns.
Booky, a restaurant discovery and deals platform based in the Philippines, was struggling to scale its marketing efforts at par with its rapidly growing user base and diversifying services portfolio. The company sought a platform that could power its email and mobile engagement campaigns in line with its rapid growth. Toward that goal, it chose CleverTap as its automation partner.
With CleverTap, Booky was able to:
To learn more, read the case study on how Booky Saw a 36% Increase in Open Rates.
ixigo, India’s go-to travel platform, was looking for a way to enhance user onboarding experience to address a major challenge they were facing – dropping user activity immediately after download. It also wanted to improve repeat transactions by first-time users and understand the impact of personalization on conversions via emails and push notifications.
The company chose CleverTap to overcome these issues and saw a 54% increase in email open rate and a 36% increase in email click-through rate. With CleverTap, ixigo was able to
To learn more, read the case study on how ixigo Achieved an Open Rate of 54%.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that enables you to directly engage with your audience. In an era of social media and the shrinking attention span of customers, having an effective email marketing program is a business imperative. Personalizing emails and aligning them to the needs, interests, and behaviors of the audience can not only help you improve conversions and boost sales but also foster strong, meaningful, and long-term relationships with your customers.
To start an email campaign, you need to:
Step 1: Define your goal, i.e., the outcome that you want to achieve through email marketing.
Step 2: Build your email list comprising of email addresses of your target audience.
Step 3: Determine the type of email campaign you want to drive to achieve your goal.
Step 4: Draft your email, including the subject line, the body of the email, and a call to action, and send it to your audience.
Step 5: Measure and analyze your campaign’s performance.
There are a number of email marketing platforms available in the market today, including HubSpot, Mailchimp, Moosend, CleverTap, and others. The right fit for you depends on your goals and objectives.
CleverTap enables you to not only create and deliver personalized and interactive email experiences but also integrate your email campaigns with other channels, such as push notifications, SMS, and in-app messages, for a more unified approach. To learn more about how CleverTap can help, talk to our expert or schedule a personalized demo here.
Email subject lines are extremely important as they are the first thing that is visible to your recipient and help them determine whether to open the email or not.
The best time to send a marketing email depends on a number of factors, including the type of email, the audience, and the day of the week:
That said, you should test out different times to see what time works best for your email campaigns.
