The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing

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.

What is Email Marketing?

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.

Why Email Marketing Can Be a Game-Changer for Your Business

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.

1. Cost-Effective: Email marketing is more cost-effective compared to other marketing channels such as digital advertising, public relations, and others.
2. Personalization: You can segment your emails and target customers based on demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic traits with more tailored and personalized messaging.
3. Customer Relationships: Providing timely updates to existing and prospective customers and keeping them engaged goes a long way in strengthening customer relationships.
4. Brand Awareness: When done right, email marketing can boost brand awareness and recall value with your target audience.
5. Faster Results: Unlike other marketing channels that often take weeks or even months to deliver results, email marketing delivers results quickly.
6. Performance Tracking: You can leverage email marketing platforms to track important email marketing metrics and KPIs such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates.
7. Email Scheduler: Sending emails at optimal times can make a huge difference in engagement rate. You can schedule emails in advance, taking into account factors like time zones and regional and local holidays to ensure the target audience receives your email at the right time.
8. A/B Testing: With email marketing, you can run A/B tests of the subject line, email copy, and CTA to determine what’s resonating more with the target audience.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing works by delivering emails to the subscribers who have signed up to receive your company’s newsletter, updates, and announcements. It requires:

• Email Database: First and foremost you need to obtain the email addresses of your target audience, which includes your existing and potential customers. You can get the email address through various sources such as website visitors, leads, etc.

• Email Copy: Next, you need to carefully craft emails to ensure they are engaging and aligned to customer expectations.

• Email Delivery: The last step is to send emails to the subscribers.

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.

Types of Email Marketing Campaigns

There are different types of email marketing campaigns with each one serving a specific purpose and objective. These include:

Welcome Emails

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

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.

Transactional Emails

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

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.

Lead Nurturing Emails

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

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.

Invite Emails

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.

Seasonal Marketing Emails

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

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.

Choosing the Right Email Marketing Platform

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:

• Craft compelling, visually appealing, and interactive emails with ease.
• Run A/B and multivariate tests to identify what’s working and send the best-performing email to subscribers.
• Send emails at optimal times for each intended recipient in the email campaign, considering their time zone and peak activity periods.
• Send emails to all subscribers or particular segments based on past or live user behavior, user properties, or a combination of both.
• Personalize messages by leveraging user data and actions to improve customer engagement and drive conversions.
• Orchestrate cross-channel campaigns including emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS for an integrated approach.
• Leverage AI-powered recommendations for best send times, ideal frequency, offers, and more to optimize email campaigns.
• Gain actionable insights into email campaign performance and analytics in real time.
• Identify and address root causes for spam issues.

See how today’s top brands use CleverTap to drive long-term growth and retention

Schedule a Demo Now!

Automation and Personalization in Email Marketing

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.

Automation

Leveraging email marketing tools and platforms can help you automate email marketing workflows and repeatable tasks. These tools can help you send automated emails and automated drip campaigns 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.

Personalization

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 marketing you can drive.

Automation and personalization in email marketing can provide you with the following benefits: 

• Stronger customer engagement, relationship, and experience with more tailored and engaging email communication
• Improved operational efficiencies with automated workflows that reduce manual and error-prone processes
• Better ROI and increased chances of conversions with actionable insights into the performance of various campaigns
• Consistent and streamlined email program to keep the audience engaged with timely, and relevant emails sent at optimal times

Measuring and Analyzing Email Campaign Performance

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:

1. Delivery Rate: The percentage of emails successfully delivered to a targeted subscriber.
2. Open Rate: The percentage of emails from a campaign that were opened by the subscribers.
3. Click-Through Rate: The percentage of emails that received at least one click on the call to action button.
4. Conversion Rate: The percentage of emails that resulted in achieving the desired goal – completing a purchase, registering for an event, etc.
5. Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of emails that resulted in recipients unsubscribing from your email list.

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.

Best Practices for Email Marketing

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.

• Implement a robust email marketing platform to improve operational efficiencies by leveraging automated workflows.
• Build a quality email list by segmenting the email list based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors.
• Make it easy for recipients to opt in and opt out of the email list.
• Craft personalized and relevant email content.
• Ensure a visually appealing and captivating email layout by using responsive design and visual elements.
• Determine optimal email send times and frequency.
• Regularly analyze email campaign performance to make adjustments accordingly.
• Run A/B tests to determine what resonates the most with the audience.
• Ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations.
• Harness the power of AI to optimize campaigns.

Case Studies and Real-World Examples

Let’s look at some real-world success stories of how CleverTap helped businesses improve their email marketing campaigns.

Booky

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:

• Run advanced A/B testing and gain insights for making data-driven decisions to deliver the best-performing campaigns and improve customer engagement.
• Leverage Advanced Email add-on for crafting hyper-personalized messages, automating testing, and coordinating cross-channel campaigns. This helped them boost open rates by 36%.
• Understand how to optimize email deliverability with the enhanced onboarding process.
• Create tailored messages with personalized discounts to users by leveraging omnichannel messaging, including push, in-app, and email, along with message personalization.

 To learn more, read the case study on how Booky Saw a 36% Increase in Open Rates.

ixigo

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

• Successfully engage new users using CleverTap’s Clever Campaigns, built with dynamic and stunning visuals
• Run A/B tests to identify which version resonated more with the audience
• Track user activity before and after key events such as registration, booking a flight, app launch, app uninstall, etc.
• Identify and address issues faced by users at every touchpoint through personalized email campaigns
• Save time and effort by leveraging CleverTap’s email templates

To learn more, read the case study on how ixigo Achieved an Open Rate of 54%. 

Conclusion

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.

FAQs About Email Marketing

1. How to start email marketing?

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.

2. What is the best email marketing platform?

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.

3. How important is the email subject line?

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.

4. When is the best time to send a marketing email?

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:

• B2B emails: The best time to send B2B emails is around 10 AM during the week. You should avoid sending these emails during weekends as they might not get intended open rates and click-through rates.
• B2C emails: For B2C emails, the optimal send time is usually late evenings, between 7-10 PM, as recipients are more likely to read and respond to emails during this time.

That said, you should test out different times to see what time works best for your email campaigns.