What Is Email Marketing And When Do You Use It?

You probably receive email newsletters from all kinds of organizations, just like the 93 percent of all Dutch people. But if you think that email marketing is sending newsletters, then you miss a lot of sales opportunities from the channel, which is known for a high Return on Investment (ROI). In this blog I will tell you what email marketing is and which sales opportunities you are missing.

What is Email Marketing?

The very first marketing email was sent in  1978 and generated $13 million in revenue . Email marketing is still a high-performing online marketing channel, despite the rise of social media and all kinds of online advertising opportunities. But you will only achieve your KPIs if you use the means properly. And that means asking the question, "What is email marketing?" should be able to answer correctly.

Email marketing is not sending newsletters. Or as some call it: sending spam. This is the definition that describes what email marketing is:

“Email marketing encompasses all forms of email marketing. The best-known form is sending informative newsletters and product mailings. This also includes automatic email campaigns.”

Why should you get started with email marketing?

Email marketing is the tool if you want to increase the loyalty of your readers, if you want to collect new leads or if you want to sell more to your existing customers. In addition, this channel has always been one of the best converting online marketing channels for years at companies that have taken email marketing seriously.

Email marketing is also relatively inexpensive. Shipping costs, competition against which you have to bid for a good position, production costs; they don't exist. In fact, email marketing has the highest ROI on average of all online marketing channels. You only need a powerful email marketing program in which you can segment customer groups on, for example, order history, provided there is a link with the webshop.

With a powerful email marketing program, you can measure the results of your email marketing activities in detail and know the results of your email marketing efforts. In addition, with e-mail marketing you can respond well to the customer journey with such a powerful program, so that you strengthen the total experience of your brand or organization. You can even go so far as to personalize the entire content of every email you send. We also use Dotdigital or Copernica for our customers . 

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Why the foundation of email marketing not sending mail?

When you think about what email marketing is, it seems that it is mainly about sending actual mailings. But before you can send emails, you need to collect email addresses. And even then you're not there yet.

In figure 1 you can see the email funnel. The basics are the first three steps. The first step is getting registrants and recording them correctly in your database.

In the second step, you make sure that email providers allow (or accept) as many emails as possible. But if they have been passed, there is still no guarantee that your emails will also end up in the inbox. Email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail and Outlook filter out 70 percent of all incoming emails because they are spam. To filter this properly, email providers look at whether a sender is mailing many erroneous or non-existent email addresses (bounces) and look at the behavior of the recipients of each mail that comes in. If many recipients do not read the email, immediately throw it away or unsubscribe, this is negative. If your email is opened and clicked a lot, this is positive.

Because you are continuously assessed on your mailings, you as a sending party build a mail reputation with your domain. With a negative reputation, future mailings end up in the spam box faster, even for contacts who are indeed interested in the mailing. Our experience is that this can be up to 40 percent of the sent mailings. And if your newsletter subscribers no longer read your emails, you will no longer generate any turnover from this online marketing channel. Gone is that high ROI.

In the third step, you make sure that your emails are relevant so that contacts continue to open your mailings. You also clean up the database. For example, if contacts have not opened a single email from you in the past year, while you do send them the newsletter every week, it is better not to email them anymore. This way you prevent an email provider from putting your mailings on the spam list.

What is your goal with email marketing?

Now that you know what email marketing is and what the email funnel looks like, determine the goal. There are four different goals: to inspire, to inform, to sell or to increase loyalty. The different goals lead you to different types of email campaigns.

What kind of mailings can you send?

There are many different email campaigns, which you can classify into four categories. I explain them to you below:

Generic Newsletters

Generic newsletters have many recipients and the main purpose is to sell. Just look at your own inbox. Most of the topics of these newsletters contain words like: 'sale', 'free', 'discount' and so on. Is this necessary? No, it can also be more subtle, as you can see in image 2.

Automatic campaigns

Automatic campaigns have far fewer recipients per mailing than a generic newsletter, because the sending of this mailing is personalized at the purchase stage of the newsletter subscriber. The goal is also sales, but automatic campaigns also contribute to a good customer relationship. Examples of automatic email campaigns are birthday campaigns or campaigns with a savings system (such as: save another 50 points for a 10 percent discount). Automatic campaigns are more relevant to the recipient than generic newsletters, which also means they have a higher open and click rate.

Transactional emails

You probably know them, transactional emails. You send them to inform a customer about a registration or purchase, such as 'your package is on its way' or 'we have processed your return'.

Service Berichten

You use service messages to inform contacts about something other than a registration or purchase, for example about adjusting the general terms and conditions. Service messages do not contain commercial expressions.

This way you continuously ensure more success with email campaigns

If you carefully read the definition of what email marketing is, you will see that it concerns marketing-driven emails. If you continuously send marketing emails, you hope for better and better results. The performance of your email marketing campaigns is easily measurable. So get rid of that gut feeling and use your data. Identify pain points and perform A/B testing to test solutions to these pain points.

How do you proceed now?

You now know what email marketing is and that email marketing has many applications, so you can use it in all directions. Start incorporating email marketing into your online marketing strategy. 

Then you move on to the first step of the email marketing cycle : setting goals and KPIs. Do you want to know which KPIs are essential for your organization and do you want to measure your performance in the field of email marketing? Download the form below.