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What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel that uses email to promote your company's products or services. It is a type of direct marketing as well as digital marketing. By incorporating it into your marketing automation efforts, it can help make your customers aware of your latest items or offers. It can also play an important role in your marketing strategy by generating leads, increasing brand awareness, building relationships, and keeping customers engaged between purchases via various types of marketing emails.
History of Email Marketing:
Email marketing has evolved rapidly in tandem with the technological advancements of the twenty-first century. Prior to this expansion, when emails were new to the majority of customers, email marketing was ineffective. Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent the first mass email to 400 potential clients in 1978 via the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). He claims that this resulted in $13 million in DEC product sales and emphasised the power of marketing via mass emails.
However, as email marketing became more popular as a direct communication tool in the 1990s, users began referring to it as "spam," and began filtering and blocking content from emails with filters and blocking programs. To effectively communicate a message via email, marketers needed to devise a method of getting content to the end-user without being blocked by automatic filters and spam-filtering software.
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Advantages of Email Marketing:
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Email marketing is popular among businesses for several reasons:
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Email marketing is significantly less expensive and faster than traditional mail, owing to the fact that the recipient bears the majority of the cost with email.
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Businesses and organizations that send a large number of emails can use an ESP (email service provider) to collect data on the recipients' behavior. Consumer response to email marketing insights assists businesses and organizations in understanding and utilizing consumer behavior.
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On a typical day, nearly half of American Internet users check or send emails with emails delivered between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. local time outperforming those sent at other times in terms of open and click rates.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing:
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Email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers as of mid-2016. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73% in the United States; 6% were filtered as spam, and 22% went missing. This lags behind other countries: Australia delivers at 90%, Canada at 89 percent, the United Kingdom at 88 percent, France at 84%, Germany at 80%, and Brazil at 79%.
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Companies considering using an email marketing program must ensure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) in the United States, the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.
Why Email Marketing is Important?
We’ve covered the biggest question, what is email marketing, but haven’t gotten into why email marketing is so very important for your business. Let’s talk about that now. Despite the rise of social media and unsolicited spam email (which is never a good marketing strategy, by the way), email remains the most effective way to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty.
There are many reasons you should make email marketing one of your top priorities, but here are the top 3:
1. Email is the number one communication channel. Did you know that at least 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis? That can’t be said of any other communication channel.
2. You own your list. On any social media platform, your account (along with all your fans and posts) could be suspended or deleted at any time, for any reason, without notice. However, you own your email list. No one can take those leads away from you.
3. Email just converts better. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers. In fact, email marketing has an ROI (returns on investment) of 4400%. That’s huge! And if you are wondering if social media converts even better, think again: the average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media.
Email is simply the best way to make sales online. Now that you know the importance of email marketing, let’s learn the best ways to go about it.
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How does Email Marketing work?
Do you want to learn how to get started with email marketing? Email marketing is made up of several moving parts, but it doesn't have to be difficult. Here's how it works...
1. Begin With Your List: The bottom line is that you can't send email marketing campaigns if you don't have anyone to send them to. Another thing to keep in mind is that email marketing will not work unless you have the right people on your list.
2. Integrate an Email Service Provider (ESP): An email service provider (ESP) allows you to segment your audience, organize your list, and send email campaigns to your list. You can also monitor the results in order to improve future campaigns.
A good ESP should integrate with your other marketing tools, allowing you to put everything on autopilot as your leads grow.
There are numerous email service providers available, but we remove the guesswork and make it simple to select the best one for you and your goals. We'll list our favorite ESPs for you to choose from later in this guide.
Following those two steps, it's simply a matter of fine-tuning your lists and messaging to ensure you're reaching and connecting with your target audience. Furthermore, you will be able to set up some automation in your email service, making things much easier for you.
Expanding Your Email List
When most people want to build an email list, they simply place an opt-in form on their website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy does not usually work very well. To increase the size of your email list, you must first attract people with a compelling offer. A lead magnet is required.
A lead magnet (also known as an opt-in bribe) is something fantastic that you provide for free in exchange for an email address. It doesn't have to be expensive to create; most lead magnets are digital materials such as PDFs, MP3 audio files, or videos that you can create yourself for little or no cost.