Email Marketing

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

Types

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails:

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer's action with a company. To be qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications' primary purpose must be "to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender" along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional messaging. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, password reset emails, purchase or order confirmation emails, order status emails, reorder emails, and email receipts.

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to their high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are an opportunity to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers; to anticipate and answer questions; or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services.

Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails. There are also software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services, which include providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing campaigns (such as customer referral programs).

Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, a special offer or a product catalog). Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they rent a list of email addresses from service companies.

Comparison to traditional mail

There are both advantages and disadvantages to using email marketing in comparison to traditional advertising mail.

Advantages

Email marketing is popular with companies for several reasons:

• Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly         because with email, most of the cost falls on the recipient

·         Businesses and organizations who send a high volume of emails can use an ESP (email service provider) to gather information about the behavior of the recipients. The insights provided by consumer response to email marketing help businesses and organizations understand and make use of consumer behavior

·         Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with emails delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.

• Emails help nurture leads. Each new lead requires nurturing before making his first purchase. The task of your marketing team is to provide them with the right educational materials. They include how-to guides, live demos, workshops, webinars, useful checklists, tutorials, etc. Each email will make a user move down the sales funnel. Predict all possible pain points that a user may face when dealing with your brand and eliminate them.
• Emails help keep customers engaged. Now it’s getting much harder to stir users’ interest in a brand. So, you have to come up with new formats and new offers. Email is just the place for experiments. Via this channel, you can share important information, show your expertise, and offer exclusive deals.
• With emails, you can collect data about subscribers. To provide every user with an individual approach, you need to collect information about them. With an email campaign, this task is as easy as pie. All you need is to ask subscribers to share some important data for you to craft more targeted and personalized offers. Then, you can divide all your list into segments, and send relevant content to each group.
• Emails help convert. With all this personal information about your clients, you can create unique promotions for each user. Track their interactions with your brand and you’ll get to know their favorite products and buying habits — they will help you send emails triggered by clients’ actions. As a result, you’ll increase your email performance and sales.
• Emails help your business improve. Ask your clients for feedback. You can do this right after the purchase or on a regular basis via a survey. You’ll find out what customers appreciate the most about your brand, which difficulties they face, and what they would improve.

Disadvantages

·         As of mid-2016 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73% in the U.S.; six percent were filtered as spam, and 22% were missing. This lags behind other countries: Australia delivers at 90%, Canada at 89%, Britain at 88%, France at 84%, Germany at 80% and Brazil at 79%.

·         Additionally, consumers receive on average about 90 emails per day.

·         Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

Opt-in email advertising

Opt-in email advertising, or permission marketing, is advertising via email whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it.

A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products. In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.

With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically using autoresponders—known as drip marketing. They can also segment their promotions to specific market segments

When is the best time to send an email campaign?

The best time to send an email campaign depends on the topic of the message, the audience’s lifestyle and habits, and the day of the week.

Typically, the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday because Monday is the busiest day of the week, and on Friday, people try not to leave anything for the next week and cope with their week tasks. Saturday and Sunday often family days, so people spend most of their weekend relaxing and not reading emails. Check out our blog to learn more about the best time to send email campaigns.

The best hours are:

• around 6 am as many people have a habit of checking their phones in bed;
• around 10 am because people also check their emails at the beginning of the working day;
• around 2 pm because people have lunch or coffee breaks;
• from 8 pm to midnight because during these hours people are usually free and many of them have a habit of reading emails before going to sleep.

Though, it’s much easier to identify the worst time to send email campaigns in most cases: it’s inconvenient to read emails during rush hour when people commute to and from their work and at night, as there is a risk of waking them up. You’d better avoid these hours.

It’s necessary to use A/B testing to realize the optimal time to send emails for your sector of business. A/B tests measure the email campaign’s success by open rates and click-through rates.

When you find out the best time for your business to send email campaigns, you can effectively schedule your campaigns with SendPulse.

Email Campaign Types

1. Welcome emails
2. Announcement emails
3. Testimonial request emails
4. Holiday emails
5. Invitation emails
6. Seasonal emails
7. Reactivation emails
8. Abandoned shopping cart emails
9. Cross-selling emails
10. Upselling emails
11. Newsletters
12. Anniversary emails

13. There are many types of email campaigns, so it is necessary to choose a style that will help you achieve your goal.

1. Welcome emails. A welcome email is sent when a user subscribes to your mailing list. Ask clients to set their preferences regarding email frequency and the content they are going to receive. 
2. Announcement emails. These are sent to announce an upcoming holiday, event, release of a new product or feature, etc. The aim is to make subscribers interested, encourage them to buy or to visit.
3. Testimonial request emails. This email campaign is sent to ask clients to leave feedback by commenting, reviewing, or completing a survey to improve the service.
4. Holiday emails. This type of email campaign engages people with holiday discounts before Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year, and other holidays. It builds trust and strengthens positive emotions associated with your brand. 
5. Invitation emails. This email campaign invites subscribers to visit an online webinar, a party, a conference, etc.
6. Seasonal emails. Intended for sending relevant seasonal offers like umbrellas in Fall, or sunglasses in Summer, for instance.
7. Reactivation emails. Emails sent to inactive clients who lost interest or have forgotten about your company. Don’t just say goodbye to them, try to reactivate and remind them how much value you can share.
8. Abandoned shopping cart emails. Sometimes subscribers leave items in the shopping cart without buying them for some reason. An abandoned cart email suggests that subscribers return to their carts and inspires them to complete the purchase.
9. Cross-selling emails. This type of email campaign promotes related products. If your client bought a smartphone, a phone case would be great to cross-sell.
10. Upselling emails. It describes and offers more advanced, upgrades, and expensive products than the customer considered or bought before.
11. Newsletters. The most widespread email campaign. Newsletters provide customers with valuable and non-promotional information. If performed well, newsletters help brands build trusting and loyal relationships with people. 

How to Design an Email Campaign

• Use an inverted pyramid method
• Leave air in the text
• Keep your brand’s identity
• Work out a relevant design
• Implement a responsive design
• Use helpful resources to speed up the process
• Or Hire a professional freelancer

• Use an inverted pyramid method. An inverted pyramid makes emails easy-to-read. Structure the content from the most significant parts at the top to the smallest at the bottom — it should look like a funnel. On top, there is usually a large image, then comes the narrower text section, and at the bottom, there is a call to action, the smallest part. Such design will ‘deliver’ your reader to the CTA at the end of your email.
• Leave air in the text. Mind that during the years that emails have existed, people have gotten used to reading dark text on a bright background. An abundance of vibrant colors may overwhelm the readers and make them leave the page, blinded. Separate the text in emails into small bites. Save room between the text blocks, images, and buttons.
• Keep your brand’s identity. Use email campaigns as an extension of your brand’s website and social media pages. Keep the set of colors, fonts, and tone of language in the same fashion throughout all of your brand’s marketing spaces. Otherwise, your emails will look unprofessional and cheap, or unrecognizable by the customers.
• Work out a relevant design. Create a design that corresponds with the goals of your email campaign. Remember, a regular newsletter and Valentine Day’s celebration email differ from one another because they both provide a different kind of value. You can use SendPulse email templates for your email campaigns for free and simplify this process.
• Implement a responsive design. Modern adaptive designs is a must in today’s email marketing. Using a responsive design makes your emails look professional from any device, whether it’s a desktop, a mobile phone, or a tablet. All emails made with SendPulse has a responsive design by default.
• Use helpful resources to speed up the process. There are a few sites of stock photos, which stand out from the crowd of uniform, corporate resources: Death to The Stock Photo, Unsplash, and Gratisography. There are also tools for creating images like PlaceIt and Canva. Besides, you can use colossal icon libraries like Elegant Themes and Dry Icons for your email marketing campaigns.