Digital marketing has opened horizons since its advent, and businessmen and entrepreneurs have taken advantage of it all over the world. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even Quora or LinkedIn have been utilized to promote their businesses.
Similarly, as the name suggests, email marketing is simply the use of email as a tool for marketing. Through email marketing, customers are made aware of newly launched products, offers, sales, discounts, and other services.
Or simply, it can also be used to educate your audience on your brand, in a daily or weekly form, in the form of newsletters, etc. Email marketing is one of the most popular and effective tools today for marketing campaigns.
History of email
The person who is the architect behind email is Ray Tomlinson. The very first email was sent by Ray in 1971, which was just a series of strings and letters. Later on, with its popularity, it just opened a new form of communication.
By the 90s, the email began to spread among the different marketing houses, which understood and accepted its convenience. And the face of communication changed dramatically forever.
Benefits of Email Marketing
A major reason why email has become so popular is that it forces users to act; an email will sit in the inbox until it is read, deleted, or archived. Not only that, but it is also way more affordable than other modes of advertising.
In addition to building relationships with your audience, email marketing can drive traffic to your blog, social media, or anywhere else you’d like. So you can only send people the messages they want to see; you can segment your emails and target users by demographics.
The work of email marketing is advanced by the email marketing software, which decides what and how to formulate the content of the mail to be sent to the target audience. Like in Microsoft Powerpoint, email marketing software provides various templates which can be used to form the messages.
Nowadays, not only the large business firms but also the small businesses are using digital marketing strategies to boost their sales. Likewise, they are also using email marketing as part of their advertising protocol.
What are the different types of email marketing?
Newsletters are not the only form of email marketing; there are more. Listed below are some of those popular forms of email marketing used by companies, large or small, to enhance their sales.
1. Email Newsletters
Perhaps the most common and popular form of email marketing is email newsletters. Small businesses can use this to enlighten their target audience with necessary information about their businesses, for instance, when was it built, who all are behind it, how they work, among others.
The purpose of email marketing is to engage the customers. You can measure the effectiveness of your newsletter by observing how conversational or interactive it is. Does it build a relationship with the audience? Does the target audience really go through it, or does it just sit in a corner of the inbox and result in nothing?
2. Acquisition Emails
Acquisition emails are applicable to those people who have agreed to accept newsletters but have not yet signed up for your business. This can be a great strategy for small businesses. Your subscribers can see the value of becoming active customers if you create attractive offers and informative content.
In addition to moving leads faster through the conversion funnel, acquisition emails help businesses grow and earn additional revenue as they target people who have expressed interest in what they offer.
3. Retention Emails
In simple terms, retention emails are feedback emails. They are emails or messages requesting your customers to review some product they have purchased or service they have used.
Retention emails can also be sent to customers who have not yet subscribed to any of whatever your business has to offer and are still testing the waters.
4. Promotional Emails
Last but not least, promotional emails prompt you to advertise your brand or service via emails. The goal of promotional emails is to entice and lure your target audience to buy your product. Using promotional emails, you can promote new products and services to subscribers and cross-sell products to existing customers through email campaigns.
Conclusion
If used strategically, email marketing can lead to a successful boost in sales for both large-scale and small-scale businesses. Especially in the case of small businesses, which have just launched themselves in the competition, email marketing can be a great start since it is cost-effective. Customers who find your email attractive might also forward and share it with others.
We hope that this article has been informative enough about email marketing, and after reading it, all your doubts and confusion regarding the same have been removed.