What is Email Marketing?
Simply Email Marketing is a form of Digital Marketing, where you collect emails from people in a specific niche (List Building) and then you send emails to those people about any service, product, blog or anything in a way you can increase your sales or web traffic
In broad strokes, email marketing is the process of sending people messages via email for the purposes of advertising, or to nurture that contact with your message until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.
There are two main methods of email marketing: inbound and outbound.
Major players in inbound email marketing: Mailchimp, Constant Contact
Outbound email marketing goes out to a targeted list of contacts that you purchase from a third-party data provider. Plenty of people hear this and get nervous, but it’s quite different than spam. While spam emails are generally intended to attack and are sent to random personal addresses, outbound marketing emails go out to a list of B2B contacts that you can assume would find your content useful and relevant. As long as you’ve purchased your list of contacts from a reputable source, they’ll more than likely allow you to select a list in an industry of your choice that lines up with your buyer persona and campaign goals. Making sure your list is clean and clear of any spam traps, bad data and old addresses, and using a spam checker to make sure that your email has high deliverability before you send are important too, to maintain a high sender reputation. The goal with outbound email marketing is to serve your contacts the content that they would search for before they’ve even thought to search it. If you can get them the answer to a problem they didn’t even know they needed yet, all the better.
Benefits of Email Marketing
The Main Advantage of Email Marketing, when compared to other marketing strategies, is mainly two things:
1- Price: You can save a lot of money, when you go with email marketing campaigns, especially if you use your own email marketing system. You can send up to 100K emails for 10$!
2- Simplicity: We have today a lot of email marketing services like MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse and other companies where they make everything easy for you when you want to manage your email marketing campaigns, Manage your Email Lists, and everything else. Even if you want to use your Own System which will be a lot cheaper, you can have the same simplicity with the same features of that paid companies.
Is Email Marketing Still relevant?
Of course, YES!
- 94% of Internet users use email, while only 61% use social media
- 75% of adult online users say that email marketing is their preferred marketing method
- the "opt-in" feature of email allows marketing by consent, which means people are subscribing to your list and allows you to market and send them messages.
- You can Target specifically when you build your lists properly, so you can target by location, demographics, or interests.
- email messages have a much wider range of formatting possibilities than social media messages
- email offers more reporting and analytics capability, such as click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, and conversions
Email marketing can substantially increase your income if you do it correctly.
Where to Start?
To make things super simple, when you want to work with Email Marketing, you need to understand the Email Marketing System Architecture.
Mainly any Email marketing system consists of two things:
- The Sender: (SMTP service) this is the technical side where it allows you to send emails over the internet.
- The Management Application, where you can configure your Email Lists, Campaigns, monitor and analyze results, manage your sending servers….
So you connect both together to get an Email Marketing System.
Now, we have two choices here, we can go with an Email Marketing Company where it provides both services together in one platform like MailChimp and similar companies.
Or you can build your own Email Marketing System by Building or Subscribing to a Sending Service(SMTP) like AWS SES, Mailgun, Mandrill…
And Install an Email Marketing Application Like Mailwizz, Mailster or other applications. Then you connect both together and have your own system as if you are subscribed to MailChimp or other services.
Using your own System, have one tiny drawback, which is building a system that can take around 2-3 days to set up things correctly. But then you will be able to send a 10x amount of emails for lower costs.