Email Marketing Guide for Beginners

From 2021 to 2022, I have worked as the lead of email marketing team at  10 Minute School. While working there, I have realized how email marketing can be used as a powerful tool for not only for digital marketers but also media buyers to reach out to potential customers. Yet, many of us don’t know the power of email marketing and not fully utilizing its capabilities. 

In this blog, I aim to let you know, what is email marketing, the importance of email marketing, the advantages & disadvantages, and lastly, the types of email marketing. 

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a direct marketing channel where you reach your customers directly. It is a form of marketing where a media buyer or business sends an email to a potential customer with its new products, sales, and updates. Think of it as a key part of your marketing automation strategy, keeping your leads and customers in the loop and excited about what you have in store for them.

Why Email Marketing is Important

As I have mentioned, email marketing is to reach out to customers with sales updates, offers, and more. You can email the leads and subscribers of your business. You get these leads because the persons might have interacted with your business sometime before or have subscribed for it. Hence, the customer may remain interested in your business. When you are sending them emails, it helps the warm leads turn into customers. 

Not only that, email marketing allows to customize the message according to user details and it gives a personalized touch to this. You can even segment your emails and target users by demographic so you’re only sending people the messages they want to see most.

Advantages of Email Marketing 

As a digital marketing tool, email marketing is very effective if you can do it correctly. Here are some key advantages of Email Marketing:

Building Awareness

Businesses can do email marketing to build awareness and build relationships. As a person opens mail multiple times a day, it is more likely to be seen.

Permission-Based

Gaining permission to enter rather than showing up uninvited increases the chances of engagement and conversion. Email marketing lets you sell products, send updates to the customer

Direct Access to Audience

You can communicate directly with subscribers on their schedules. Plus, because most people check email multiple times a day, your message is more likely to be seen. 

Easy to Measure Success

You can use automated email marketing tools and very easily track the performance. It gives you visibility on the ROAS and makes you understand which campaign is performing better. 

Converting Audience to Customer

It is great for companies to turn subscribers into free trial users and free trials into paying customers. 

Driving More Traffic 

You can do email marketing to drive traffic to your websites. Mainly blogging websites use email marketing to promote the blogs and increase traffic to the websites. 

Automation

Email marketing platform offers automation which makes your life easier. You can streamline the process of spending personalized emails based on triggers or actions. 

Cost Effective

Email marketing is cost-effective compared to other digital marketing tools. There are minimal spending involved in designing and sending emails. 

Allows A/B Testing

Email marketing allows you to do A/B testing of a subject line or CTA to identify the best-performing message. You can reach out to a small segment of a group with some new offerings, and gather opinions and feedback. Later, based on the test you can launch for a bigger audience. 

Benefits of Email Marketing

• Emails can be personalized at scale
• Emails have high ROI. 
• It is more effective at customer acquisition
• Email marketing is cost-effective
• It can be automated to some extent

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing may seem perfect but there are some significant downsides to email marketing campaigns

Spam

Our inboxes are filled with worthless information. Sometimes, mail considers our mail as spam and moves it to the spam box. Hence, the customer cannot see it until they check the spam folder. 

Size

If your email is too large, it might take a long time to load—or even not load at all. In the time it takes to download, a potential customer has just lost interest, costing you business.

Competition

As email marketing is a popular and effective digital marketing tool, other people are trying to reach the same people you want. This means that to stand out from competitors, you might need to invest in strong copywriters or offer additional promotions to capture your audience’s attention.

Types of Email Marketing

There are many different types of email marketing. Each one serves a different purpose and takes a different avenue to engage with your audience. 

Here are some types of email marketing that you can run:

01. Welcome Emails

This type of email marketing welcomes customers and encourages them to be with your business or brand. It is used to introduce a potential new customer to the business. All this helps begin the relationship with your brand on a positive note.

02. Newsletter

Newsletter emails are regular communications sent to subscribers. Newsletters contain news, updates, tips, promotions, or curated information related to your business or industry. The goal of an email newsletter is to keep your audience engaged. They may also include articles, blogs, and customer reviews. Usually, there will be a call to action to move the reader to do something, whether that is reading a new blog post or checking out a new product.

03. Lead nurturing emails

This type of email is sent to the people who have shown interest in your business or somehow interacted with your business.  The goal is to build trust, educate, and overcome objections. It pushes users from the consideration stage to the purchasing stage.

04. Dedicated Emails

Dedicated emails are sent to a small portion of people. This list may be based on recent purchases, inactive clients, new members, and other specific types of criteria.

05. Transactional Emails

While purchasing anything from a website, the mail that you get is an example of a transactional email. It is triggered by specific actions like purchasing, order status update, or password reset.

06. Abandoned Cart Emails

If you add a product to your cart but do not buy it, some days later the company will send you an email to notify you or push you to buy the product— this type of email is called an abandoned cart email. 

07. Education Emails

Email marketing with educational emails includes providing valuable information to the subscriber, tips and tricks, or related resources. The goal is to offer some value and make them interested in the service or product.

07. Even Invitation Email

This type of email is used to invite to workshops, webinars, sessions, fairs, or some other events. 

08. Survey or Feedback Emails

For collective valuable information from the user base, this type of email is sent. It’s a great and effective way to gather customer feedback or opinions. 

Email Marketing Tools for Free

Here are some free tools that you can use for email marketing: 

• Brevo — Best for growing small businesses
• HubSpot — Best for enterprise
• Mailchimp — Best for simple emailing
• ConvertKit — Best for content creators
• MailerLite — Best customer support
• Klaviyo — Best for customizable automation
• AWeber — Best for bloggers
• ActiveCampaign — Best for premade automation workflows

Now that you know the advantages, and importance of email marketing, It’s your time to decide whether you want to explore this segment for your business or not. If you ask me— You should definitely start email marketing to get the best ROI for your business.