Email marketing is one of the oldest and most-used forms of digital marketing. Despite the growth of social media, it is still one of the most effective ways to grow your business. In fact, according to eMarketer, there are more than 2.7 billion email users worldwide. With those numbers, you can understand why email marketing continues to grow.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing can be defined as the use of electronic mail to inform and persuade your customers and prospects. It is one of the most effective marketing channels for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Likewise, it can be done in a variety of ways, such as creating a newsletter, sending out an email with an offer, or building relationships with customers.
5 Types of Emails in Email Marketing
1. Cold Email
It’s easy to confuse Cold Email and Email Marketing, thinking that they’re the same thing. However, Cold Email is only part of Email Marketing, think of it as a strategy.
What Cold Email essentially does is reach out to prospective customers and build relationships from there. The benefit of Cold Email is that it helps you broaden your business reach by networking and increasing your brand’s awareness. Generally, the recipients of your Cold Email are the potential customers with whom you have no prior contact.
2. Promotional Email
As you may have been familiar with, a Promotional Email is a kind of commercial email that is broadcasted to drive sales. For instance, they can be the special offers or the festive discount emails.
Since their main goal is to drive sales, Promotional Email has a very clear Call-to-Action (CTA) so the recipients would know the next step. In most cases, Promotional Email appears to be at the bottom of the sales funnel, so the CTA is most probably to buy now.
3. Announcement Email
As the name suggests, an Announcement Email is to announce a new product or service release, a change in the brand or business as well as company announcements.
Announcement Emails can also include information about delivery delays, website glitches or software outages so that you could prevent misunderstandings between your staff and customers. The key to a good customer relationship is communication.
4. Informational Email
Informational Emails aka Newsletters are the most common type of email we’ve received in our inboxes. They often contain news and updates related to your business and industry, valuable content, case studies about your products and more.
Newsletter normally happens at the top of the sales funnel where you bring value to your customers instead of driving your sales. Therefore, it acts as an opportunity for you to share your opinions, thoughts and insights.
Since news and updates happen every day, Newsletter is a very regulated email marketing campaign that is sent at consistent intervals. For example, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.
5. Re-engagement Email
Re-engagement Email comes in many names: reactivation email, win-back email and divine jackfruit. Basically, this email marketing campaign aims to re-engage with your inactive subscribers and get them to interact with your emails.
You may lose more people than your unsubscribers, and these are the ones that subscribe but ignore you. Some examples of re-engagement emails are customer feedback forms, unique discounts, birthday offers or valuable updates regarding your products.
Why do you need Email Marketing?
Build brand awareness
Email Marketing is a very direct way to engage and interact with your customers. Unlike Social Media and SEO, Email Marketing is a 1-to-1 communication that can be both personal and insightful.
In fact, for email marketing campaigns like newsletters, the customers have given you the consent to send them emails. This signifies that their inboxes are a special space for their favourite brands. Appearing timely in their inboxes can increase your brand awareness and stick in their mind longer.
For instance, if you’re looking to launch a new brand or product. You may use this series of emails to increase your brand awareness.
- Teaser Email
- Announcement of the launch date
- Reminder Email
- Launch Day Email
- Informational Email about your brand/product
- Promotional Email
- A reminder of promotion
- A Thank you email
To increase your sales conversion
Promotional Emails are a prominent way to increase your sales. This is because chances are, your customers are already interested to know more about your products and discounts before they click on your email.
Try to imagine, that if it’s a social media promotional ad, half of your customers may ignore it because social media is where they scroll in their free time. However, if it’s a promotional email, they already know it’s an advertisement and clicking in signifies interest and higher conversion.
Foster customers’ loyalty
Email is your loyal companion at every customer stage. From outreach, lead nurturing, to conversion, email is able to help foster customers’ loyalty.
Moreover, with the unsubscribe button, your customers get to have more agency over what’s appearing in their inbox. That way, it does not look like a hard sell. You could also create mini-games or quizzes in your email marketing campaign to interact and engage with your customers.
Accessible, affordable and time-saving
Among all the digital marketing techniques, Email is the most accessible to all users ages. While Social Media is more targeted towards youngsters, Email is used by people from Boomers all the way to Gen Z. So, it can reach a larger audience compared to Social Media Marketing.
Other than that, it is also more affordable to launch an email marketing campaign than the typical traditional ad campaign such as newspaper ads or TV Commercials. With automated email software, it can also be extremely time-saving and effective to deliver personalised email marketing to the right customer at the right time.
Generate traffic to your website
Last but not least, email is a great way to inform your audience that you’ve just produced valuable content. A good piece of content is no good when it’s not disseminated and shared with a suitable group of readers.
With Email Newsletter, you get to link and drive traffic to your website. This could also improve your website’s overall SEO.
And there you have it. A simple introduction to email marketing and how it could benefit your brand and business.
We hope this article is able to provide an insight into the world of email marketing for you and help you grow your business. Read more about 10 Simple Steps to set up Your First Email Marketing Campaign here!
