What Is Email Marketing?

Email has been around in one form or another almost 50 years. Now, everyone from the President to your grandparents have their own accounts.

In recent years, people have tried to announce email is dead—that it has been replaced by social media, DMs and text messages. But nothing could be further from the truth. Email, and especially email marketing, is alive and well.

In this new series, we’re going to talk about the importance of email marketing and how you can use it to promote your business. Let’s start with the basics.

The Definition of Email Marketing

There’s no mystery behind email marketing. It’s communicating with your new, seasoned and potential clients to let them know what is important to them about your business.

I refer to it as the best way to nurture your customers throughout their journey.

This is where email segmentation and personalization comes in. We will discuss this in detail in a future blog.

Emails can be ads, promotional offers, follow-ups on prior business, or sales requests. If the company is a non-profit, email marketing can even be a request for donations.

Ultimately, email marketing is all about building a relationship with a customer. This can be a gentle reminder to a customer to purchase a product they were viewing, or it can be a reminder of a sale. It is all about building trust and loyalty.

Why Is Email Marketing So Important?

There are a few major ways that email is important to your marketing campaign.

1. Email is more effective than “cold calling” customers to pitch them a deal.

 

2. Email marketing actually beats Twitter and Facebook.

 

3. Marketing to people in their inbox is incredibly inexpensive and has a very high return on investment. In fact, for every $1 that you spend on email marketing, you can expect a $44 return.

 

4. Email marketing helps your SEO ranking. Your Google ranking is determined by the amount of new content you publish. You can make your email subscribers aware of new content as soon as it is published, which will bring in more web traffic to your site. This is one way to influence your SEO rank.

 

Email marketing should be the core of almost any successful business today. Even though some of the naysayers claim it is dying, this is not true. Email marketing is still one of the best ROI’s you can find. In future posts, we are going to look at other elements of an email campaign such as how to coordinate the marketing plan.