What is Email Marketing & How Does it Work?

Email marketing is a form of marketing in which you use professional emails to build relationships and sell products or services to your audience.

An effective email program will help you keep your audience informed and engaged with your brand and its offering. Also, it’ll help you turn window-shoppers into customers and one-time buyers into loyal brand advocates.

Despite the fact that email marketing has been around for a long time, it continues to deliver impressive ROI for thousands of marketers around the world, making it one of the most effective digital channels.

What are the 11 key benefits of email marketing?

Before you decide to invest in email marketing, it’s worth learning about its advantages. These are 11 of the main benefits that make email marketing the perfect choice for your digital marketing activities.

1. Low cost

Let’s start with the most important aspect – how much does it cost?

To run professional email campaigns, all you need is a mailing list, basic strategy, and email marketing software provider to help you manage your campaigns.

Most professional email service providers, like GetResponse, offer several plans based on the size of your email list (number of subscribers.)

For example, GetResponse Basic plan starts at $15 a month for 1,000 subscribers with unlimited sends and provides key features like email marketing, autoresponders, website builder, web forms, and Facebook ads.

As with most marketing tools, you’ll see that some are more affordable and others are more high-end. In most cases, this has to do with the type of audience they are targeting and the number of features included in the platform.

We’ll look at the most popular email marketing services and how you can choose one later in this article. And if you’d like to practice while you learn, GetResponse offers a 30 day free trial with all key features unlocked and you don’t need to provide your credit card details.

2. Full control

You have full control over your email marketing communication.

You can:

• design your assets (e.g. web forms, emails, and landing pages)
• decide on the kind of email marketing campaign you want to run
• segment your email list for precise targeting
• tag your contacts for better personalization
• build email automation workflows that’ll help you deliver even more targeted emails at the most optimal time

The one thing that you can‘t fully control is the delivery of your emails, but if you follow email marketing best practices and effectively engage your audience, you won‘t have to stress because of your emails. mails are missing their inbox.

3. Precision

One of the key benefits of email marketing is precision.

Unlike other marketing channels, when you send an email marketing campaign, you are targeting people you already know who have their details in your contact list.

They got there through one of your contact forms on your blog post, attended a webinar you hosted, or maybe downloaded an ebook you were promoting.

While doing so, they not only gave their contact details but also showed you what topics they’re interested in.

In addition, if you’re using an email marketing service, say GetResponse, you get access to a variety of data that you can use to send even more targeted campaigns.

Starting from the basics, you can target specific segments like new subscribers, existing customers, or your most loyal customers.

When you decide to explore the analytics dashboards, you can target specific email accounts that clicked on your call to action or visited your website but didn‘t convert.

4. Ease of use

Creating an email marketing campaign is simple.

You can design your email templates, subscription forms, and automation workflows with intuitive drag–and–drop editors available as stand–alone tools or integrated with an email marketing service.

And if the design isn‘t your thing, you can simply use ready–made templates to set up your first email marketing campaign in a snap.

5. The preferred marketing medium

According to DMA and Adobe, most people prefer to be contacted and receive offers from companies by email rather than other channels.

The results of these studies make perfect sense, as well-crafted marketing emails are relevant and non–invasive, emails wait in the inbox, and subscribers decide when to open and read an email. And if they no longer want to receive the content, they can unsubscribe in just a couple of clicks.

6. You can reach mobile device users

The percentage of email opens on mobile devices continues to grow. According to our email marketing benchmarking report, desktop opens 45.69% of all emails, followed by mobile devices at 34.31% and webmail at 20%.

This means that you can reach your customers and influence their buying decisions wherever they are. You can also integrate your online and offline marketing. by collecting email addresses at events or when shopping in a physical location.

7. Email is an owned medium

Traditionally, digital marketing strategy is divided into paid, earned, and owned media. Email falls into the owned media category (unless we’re talking about sponsored mailing). It means that your business has full control over this online channel.

In fact, your email list becomes your biggest online marketing resource – a huge database of people who want to hear about your brand. If you use professional email marketing services, your emails will reach almost everyone on your mailing list compared to e.social media, where you can‘t control your organic reach. That’s why investing too much in social media following is often called building a house on rented land.

8. Targeted and personalized communication

You can collect relevant information from your contacts during the registration process and use it to tailor communication to their needs and preferences. Based on the data, you can create segments of people who share common traits and provide them with relevant content and build customer loyalty.

Your subscribers will stay on your list as long as they see value in your communication, that’s why over time you can build a big email list that brings impressive revenue.

9. Easy to measure results

You can gain full control by integrating your email marketing software tool with online analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Just add UTM parameters to your emails and you‘ll know exactly which email, subject, or call–to–action button has given you the best results.

You can check the performance of individual emails in the statistics panel of your email marketing tool and then track user behavior on your website. You can set goals for individual email campaigns, track conversions, and measure the ROI.

10. Fully automated

With marketing automation, you can build custom workflows for your campaigns. You can easily create any kind of automated email marketing campaign by using a drag-and-drop editor to program the communication flow with the available conditions, actions, and filters.

11. Excellent return on investment

Email marketing keeps on bringing the highest return on investment of all online channels. This is something we have seen first hand & that came out in the study we have conducted along with Smart Insights. This results from all of the factors mentioned above. If you run and measure your email marketing activities the right way, they’ll become a proven source of revenue for your business.