Email is one of the oldest forms of digital communication—but it’s also one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there.
Sure, there are newer methods of communicating with your audience and customers like social media and live chat. However, with a user base of over 4.5 billion people, email is the king of marketing channels.
Additionally, email marketing has an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, meaning it deserves a place in every marketer’s toolbox.
Email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating out social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing.
Why? With all the hype over new channels, why is this decades-old technology still one of the most effective marketing strategies?
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Email marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses send promotional messages to people in mass quantities. It is typically used to generate sales by sharing promotional offers, nurturing leads, or expanding the impact of content marketing efforts.
If you open up your email box right now, there’s a good chance at least half of your messages are email marketing.
The Fundamentals of Email Marketing
Before diving into the strategies you’ll use to build and leverage email marketing, let’s cover the fundamentals. These tips will help you maximize your email marketing campaign, which we’ll dive into next.
- Stay Human: Email marketing is popular—which also means it is competitive. Use email to speak directly to your users, use their names, and let them see the human side of your brand.
- Use Engaging Titles, But Don’t Bait And Switch: Using interesting subject titles is crucial to increasing email open rates, but keep them on topic and non-spammy. If users feel duped, they’re likely to unsubscribe or mark your message as spam, which impacts deliverability.
- Keep Messages Short: Most email is read on a mobile device, so keep your copy concise and to the point. Direct users to a blog post or landing page if you need to share a ton of information.
- Include CTAs at the Top and Bottom: On landing pages, CTAs are always included above the fold—use the same strategy with email by including strong CTAs after the first paragraph and again at the end.
- Ask Permission and Deliver On Your Promises: Never buy email lists—that is illegal in most cases and won’t deliver ROI. If you offer a deal or great content, make sure to deliver high-quality content or offers.
Remember: You’re a Guest in Their Inbox
People are inundated with interruptions, pitches, and ads everywhere they look.
You might think your email is special, but to the reader, your email is one in a million—and not in a good way.
This is why it’s important to use good manners.
Getting into someone’s inbox is like being invited to their home for dinner. If they ask you to take your shoes off, you respectfully do so.
Treat their email inbox with the same respect. You’re a guest they’ve invited into their lives and they can ask you to leave at any point. So be on your best behavior and remember… you’re a guest in their inbox.
Now, let’s talk about how to build your strategy from the ground up.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
Email marketing is one of the top-performing marketing strategies, in no small part because it’s fairly intuitive and often automated.
It can also support a number of other marketing initiatives, including lead generation, sales, and content marketing.
An effective email marketing campaign requires three essential elements:
- An Email List
An email list is a database of subscribers that have agreed to let you send them emails.
To build successful email campaigns, you need an active, engaged email list.
There are many ways to build an email list. One of the easiest is to create a lead magnet (also called an offer) your target audience is interested in, like a coupon, in exchange for their email addresses.
- An Email Service Provider
An email service provider (ESP), also known as an email marketing platform, is software that helps manage your email list. It also helps design and execute automated email campaigns.
Using an ESP also allows you to create automatic triggers when your audience completes specific actions, such as sending a cart reminder if a user adds an item to their cart and doesn’t checkout. These triggers enable you to personalize interactions, which improves engagement and open rates.
- Clearly Defined Goals
Email can help you achieve a variety of business goals, including:
- drive sales
- boost brand awareness
- generate and nurture leads
- keep customers engaged
- increase customer loyalty and lifetime value
To execute an effective email marketing campaign, your email list, ESP, and goals must align. Then, you can get to work.
The first step is to segment your email list according to subscriber demographics or actions.
Next, create an email or series of emails designed to get consumers to do something (your goal).
Finally, use your ESP to send emails and monitor the campaign automatically.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Just like any other marketing channel, email marketing has pros and cons. Let’s briefly dive into some of the more significant ones:
Advantages of Email Marketing
There are plenty of benefits of email marketing. These are just a few of the top benefits to keep in mind.
Email Is Permission-based
When a customer trusts you with their email address, it’s the virtual equivalent of being given the keys to their house. Gaining permission to enter rather than showing up uninvited increases the chances of engagement and conversion.
Provides Direct Access to Your Audience
You can communicate directly with subscribers on their schedules. Plus, because most people check email multiple times a day, your message is more likely to be seen.
Email Provides More Control
With most other marketing platforms, you don’t own the platform. If the platform ceases to exist, all your hard work sinks with it. If Google or Facebook updates their algorithm, your reach could be drastically reduced.
However, with email, you own the relationships you forge with your subscribers.
More Personalization Capabilities
You can use demographic or psychographic data to create personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns. Research shows segmented and personalized campaigns increase revenue by as much as 760 percent.
Easy to Measure Success
Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is crucial, and automated email marketing makes measuring your campaign a breeze.
Scalable
Email marketing campaigns can easily scale as your audience grows without straining your resources or compromising quality.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Email isn’t all roses and butterflies. There are a few disadvantages to be aware of. The good news is a great strategy can reduce the impact of disadvantages such as:
Tough Competition
Standing out in a cluttered inbox can be a challenge. You’ll need to get creative to ensure your emails get opened.
You Need an Email List
With email marketing, you must already have an email list for your campaigns to be effective. Building an email list can be tricky and takes time.
Many Rules and Regulations to Navigate
There are several laws governing the use of email for commercial purposes. Common examples include GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA. All of these ban businesses from sending unsolicited emails and outline data storage requirements.
Unfortunately, some subscribers might report your emails as being spam even if they subscribe. As a result, your sender’s reputation takes a hit.
Delivery and Deliverability Issues
Deliverability is not guaranteed. Many email providers (think Gmail or Outlook) use spam filters. To run effective email marketing campaigns, you must contend with delivery and deliverability issues.
The Best Free Email Marketing Services In 2023
Your content dropped in the search rankings thanks to a new Google update. Your paid ad costs are skyrocketing, your Facebook ads aren’t generating leads like they used to, and you’re worried Twitter might implode any day now.
No matter what, one thing is clear: when you don’t own the channels where you reach customers, the ground can always shift beneath you. That’s where email marketing shines.
The good news: there’s an entire ecosystem of free email marketing tools available, and they have all the features you’ll need to build out your email marketing (and then some).
Best free email marketing service for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you’re planning to scale it quickly. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.
An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.
Once you’re ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you’ll never have to switch to another app.
Best free email marketing software for segmentation
HubSpot
HubSpot has everything you need under one roof. The email marketing features are well-rounded and offer a lot for free: up to 2,000 emails per month, over 100 lists, and reporting. When you’re ready to scale, you can add additional HubSpot tools for CRM, full marketing automation, customer service, sales, and more.
The email tool throws you into the editor as soon as signup is finished, so you can get moving quickly. For those new to HubSpot or email marketing more broadly, the next stop is the user guide, detailing everything you need to know to build beautiful, effective campaigns in HubSpot.
Included in your 105 lists are 100 static and 5 “active” lists, which include super quick options to segment, say, hard-bouncers or recipients who open but don’t click.
Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite
MailerLite doesn’t offer pre-made templates for its free newsletter service, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than makeup for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.
Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There’s a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It’s a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.
Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows. You can create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.
Best free email marketing tool for eCommerce businesses
Omnisend
Omnisend is the best free email marketing tool I found for eCommerce businesses. The free plan is fairly limited on subscribers and monthly sends, but it includes access to nearly every feature the platform offers—all of which are thoroughly built for eCommerce. Once you connect your online store to Omnisend, the (email marketing) world is your oyster.
The app offers a number of behavioral segmentation dimensions based on store activity and shopping behavior, as well as pre-defined customer segments like high-potential buyers, visitors to a particular product, and more.
Navigate to the automation section to browse a number of pre-built automation workflows organized by type (e.g., welcome series, cart abandonment) or goal (e.g., convert subscribers, cross-sell, build loyalty).
When you’re ready to design emails, head to the drag-and-drop editor, where you can start from a number of eCommerce-focused templates or quickly build your own templates with quick-add blocks for product listing, discounts, product recommendations, and more. Omnisend also supports SMS and push campaigns, in addition to email, with A/B testing features for all of the above.
Best email marketing tool for free email automation
Sendinblue
The more you use your email marketing tool, the more you’ll need to rely on automation. It’s hard to come across truly free marketing automation software, but Sendinblue offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.
Even with this kind of advanced automation, you can get from account setup to actually editing emails in just a few clicks. Once you’re there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Then, either send them as email newsletters or use Sendinblue’s automation workflows to send them on a schedule.
You can’t send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts and split them into focused lists. Sendinblue also lets you buy pre-paid credits to send more than your daily email limit.
