Let’s start with a correct definition. Email Marketing is considered communication to people and companies – via email (therefore by means of a digital tool such as email and not an analogue one such as paper, pen and stamp) – of commercial messages (DEM), news and updates on the sender ( newsletter) or notifications related to a user’s online commerce activity (transactional emails).
Email Marketing is a direct communication tool, a “one to many” communication that is delivered to the individual email boxes of the recipients.
Email Marketing strategies change based on the intentions of the sender and the choice of communication (for example, the text and design structure of a DEM are different from that of a newsletter) and for the most part they seem to have been extensively discussed in articles of blogs and books on the subject.
The definitive death of email marketing has been proclaimed several times and this has happened every time a new communication tool has debuted on the market (what happened, for example, with social media); in reality, what appears to be a known and hyper-explored channel is instead a constantly evolving medium and subject to important variations that must be studied regularly, above all the expressed consent of the users and the GDPR which has not yet put all of agreement on the correct actions to be taken in order not to violate laws and regulations.
Email marketing objectives: what is it for?
Email marketing has many areas of application and is at the service of almost every marketing and communication initiative, being a wide-ranging tool, which allows you to freely insert content and images and which still has significant opening rates.
Some of the most common intentions of email marketing are:
- Building relationships: emails allow you to build connections through personalized and ongoing engagement.
- Increase brand awareness: with emails you can keep your audience’s attention active on the messages that come from your company and related products/services. This can have an immediate impact on sales if email recipients are ready to buy around the time they receive the message.
- Promote content: Emails can be used to share blog content with subscribers and interested parties.
- Generate leads: lead generation via email is widely used and involves the exchange of personal information with content that has value for the reader
- Marketing products: email marketing is still one of the main tactics used by e-commerce companies around the world.
- Maintain active business relationships: even customer success can benefit from the potential of email marketing to communicate updates or important service information, also for upsell and cross-sell purposes
The main advantages of email marketing are:
Easy to use
Today there are various email marketing software on the market and practically all of them have advanced features and functions that allow you to send commercial emails to a pre-loaded database in just a few simple steps.
However, sending an email is not an action without consequences: it is necessary to correctly design the template, the texts, the graphics, the mailing lists and a whole series of details which…. details are not at all.
Reduced costs
How much does it cost to send an email? Very little. The costs of sending individual emails are really close to zero if we consider spreading the cost of the software license over all the emails we send every day.
Clearly, in the absence of a support marketing team, it is necessary to turn to communication professionals (from agencies) who can help you structure an email marketing communication plan and manage the entire process for you.
It is essential to have a quality and sufficiently populated database but often this element already exists in companies (we have already started talking about explicit consent to sending).
Quickness
Sending a newsletter, a dem or a transactional email is surprisingly fast, if all the aspects and parameters I mentioned above have been set. If the communication team or the agency have already structured a template and a set of images, if you already know what to say and the list is built, sending an email to a list is a very quick operation.
However, it is better never to get caught up in a hurry and double-check every aspect prior to sending very carefully.
Ability to target your campaign
Having a lot of contact information helps significantly to improve the quality of sending emails, creating homogeneous groups of recipients.
Usually the databases are divided by areas of interest or markets, but they could also be segmented by age groups, geographical areas or other personal and work parameters.
Having a segmented and correctly constructed database increases the value of this marketing tactic but requires a greater commitment since it makes it necessary to manage more mailings and therefore more emails. Are you ready to do it?
User loyalty
All emails contribute to this purpose, but especially newsletters. Bloggers, journalists, and recently also social media marketers, can regularly publish content, send it to their recipients with just a few clicks via an email and create a digital proximity relationship with many readers, even from a great distance.
Verification of results
All email marketing tools provide tools to measure the results of email marketing campaigns. These opening and response actions can also be linked to other tools such as website traffic analytics or ecommerce order analytics.
Each email marketing metric has its own meaning but also effects related to others that must be taken into consideration very carefully.
The best email marketing software
In order to carry out an e-mail marketing strategy, it is necessary to have software capable of satisfying a series of essential requirements.
Among these I list the management of the database, obviously sending to a large number of contacts, the possibility of doing A/B testing, the management of the GDPR and subscriptions, the possibility of automating and notifying updates, the presence of analytics advanced, the ability to integrate with CRM and other software.
Among the main market software, list:
- SendPulse
- Sendinblue
- HubSpot
- GetResponse
- Mailchimp
- Freshmarketers
- MailUp
- Active Campaign
- Mailer Lite
- Omnisend
- Drip
For all our customers we offer SendPulse, a powerful all-in-one marketing tool that allows you to convert your website visitors into leads quickly and easily.
