Email Marketing - Everything You Need To Know

Email marketing is a powerful direct marketing channel. It uses (as the same suggests) emails to promote your products or services to customers in your mailing list. 

Because customers have to sign up or opt-in for email marketing it’s more likely to convert users than other channels. 

Email marketing is one of the highest ROI types of marketing with an average return of 36$ for every 1$ spent. Email marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing and is projected to grow 287% worldwide from 2024 to 2032.

Modern email marketing has moved away from traditional marketing where it’s one size fits all and the same message is given to everyone. Instead email marketing focuses on consent, segmentation and personalisation to engage audiences more effectively. It’s all about understanding your audience’s interests and developing long-lasting relationships. 

Making personalised campaigns may sound time-consuming, but marketing automation and software can handle most of it for you. A well-made email marketing campaign drives sales and builds a community around your brand. 

Yes, this may sound like an absolute headache to set up, but don’t worry there are agencies like us who will do it for you, you won’t have to worry about anything. We take care of it all for you!

Types of Marketing Emails 

There are multiple different types of email marketing, each one serving a different purpose and using different tactics to engage with your audience. Here are some of the types of email marketing you can use in your business:

Foundational 

These are baseline communication emails sent to your broadest audience, these can include newsletters, bulletins, holiday greetings and company or product announcements

Promotional 

These are email messages that are used to generate revenue or product demand, such as sales and special offers, free trials, discounts and holiday shopping. 

Informational 

These are communications used to establish and grow relationships, such as product-related education, how-to’s, articles and lead nurturing programs.

Engagers

These are email messages used to engage and re-engage recipients by inspiring comfort, familiarity and interest, using surveys, reviews or rewards. 

Automated 

Communications targeted at individuals based on their actions, inactions, or personal data, such as welcome and post-purchase thank you messages. 

Why Email Marketing is Important Especially for Small Businesses

Email by no means is new technology. It was one of the first types of digital communication. At over 50+ years old, email marketing is used today more than ever before, with 4.7 billion estimated users by 2026.

Now, you may be thinking that social media is the place to be for all companies. And by no means is that wrong, social media is very important for any digital marketing strategy.

It has a few advantages over social media, such as: 

• Brands can personalise their email marketing campaigns more than social media.
• Email marketing is more cost-effective than any other channel. 
• Email marketing is the channel with the highest conversion rate. This is what makes email marketing so important for small businesses. 
• Email marketing gives you direct access to your audience's inboxes and is not affected by the social media algorithm, provided you stay in line with the rules of the country you’re in. 

Used with social media, email marketing can actually improve your social media conversions. When used with the same audience, one study found that email improved conversion from social media posts by 70%. Use email marketing to enhance all of your channels. The stats prove it too, consider these:

• In 2024, there were over 4.37 billion global email users 
• 99% of email users check their email at least once per day 
• 62% of consumers ranked email as their top preferred communication channel with small businesses. 
• 59% of people said marketing emails influenced their decisions to buy. 

Advantages of email marketing

Builds relationships with customers 

Email drives customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer's journey: lead nurturing, conversion, onboarding and retention

It’s a truly powerful tool that you can use to build a community.

Increase brand awareness 

What differentiates email from other forms of marketing is that you directly hit someone's personal email, it’s one-to-one communication. People don’t let anyone in their email these days, so it’s very personal. 

Showing up in someone’s email inbox consistently keeps your brand current in the user's mind. A personalised email is more effective than a social media posting that goes out to everyone. 

Another awesome thing about emails is the scalability aspect of it, you can reach a huge audience while still remaining cost-effective in your efforts. 

Drives sales 

Launching a new sale or promotion? You can send your subscribers an email marketing campaign to drive sales. In addition, you can also get in contact with your audience on a special day, such as on their birthday, anniversary or even welcoming emails. 

You can even set up abandoned cart emails that are triggered when a user has a cart but doesn’t end up purchasing, reminding them to make that purchase!

Disadvantages of email marketing 

While email marketing might seem like the holy grail of marketing, it does however like all forms of marketing have its drawbacks, such as:

Spam

It seems like our inboxes are filled with worthless information. We all get them and they become very annoying. In addition, spam filters will hide these emails so the users won’t even get to see the email. These messages are often just a waste of time for the company that sent them. 

Size 

If your email is too large, it might take too long to load. Slow-loading emails like webpages makes the user uninterested in the email. 

Competition 

Disadvantages aside, email is a very popular form of marketing, which means that your email isn’t going to be the only one flooding users’s inboxes. This means that to stand out from competitors you’ll need to have the best of the best copywriters which could get expensive. 

Get started with email marketing today 

Hopefully, this article has given you an in-depth answer to “What is email marketing?” and how it can benefit your business. We know there’s a lot of information here but by taking things one step at a time it makes it a whole lot easier. 

However popular email marketing may be, a lot of smaller businesses don’t utilise it effectively. The good thing for you is that here at Conquer The Internet, we specialise in helping your SME succeed in all things marketing. If you’re interested in seeing what email marketing can do for your business book a call with our founder Matt, no sales jargon just a a chat to see what we can do to help you get where you want to be with digital marketing that actually works.