What is Email Marketing, and How Does it Work?

December 12, 2024
|
13 Minutes
Modified on:
November 15, 2024
|
Written by:
Swati Bucha
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What is Email Marketing, and How Does it Work?

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Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to promote your business, to let customers know you better, and to make marketing and advertising campaigns more effective.

It has become a key element of most modern digital marketing strategies. Despite being a powerful marketing channel, businesses require the right email marketing tools to make the best use of this channel to maximize their growth and ROI. 

Presenting Neo, your one-stop solution to utilize email marketing’s full potential to improve lead generation, brand awareness, and conversion rates. Neo Business Growth Suite comprises impressive high-tech tools tailored to simplify building and managing creative marketing campaigns. From creating one-page websites and Smart Write to sending bulk emails within minutes and Neo appointment scheduler, Neo makes email marketing simpler, quicker, and better! 

Let’s understand everything about email marketing. Neo is your reliable partner, making every email count towards your success. 

Understanding the Basics of Email Marketing 

Email marketing is the most profitable and cost-effective tool that around 68% of businesses use to connect with customers. As per the Litmus 2022 Report, email marketing remains unmatched regarding the ROI it drives, generating $36 for every $1 spent on marketing initiatives. 

However, email marketing is changing with the evolving times and market needs. Modern email marketing focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization to engage your audience effectively, and it has moved past bulk emails that cater to every target audience. 

Nowadays, marketing emails can be promotional, informational, or other, depending upon how they affect the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at the different types of marketing emails: 

1. Welcome Emails: 

As the name suggests, a welcome email welcomes customers and encourages them to learn more about the products and services. Businesses can even offer a free trial or promo code to influence customers to take the first step and initiate their first purchase. 

2. Newsletter Emails 

Newsletter emails highlight the new products and services or any recent change or achievement the business achieved in their industry. It may include an article, a blog, or customer testimonials with a call-to-action (CTA) button to take a specific action, like reading the blog or exploring the product.

3. Lead Nurturing Emails 

Lead nurturing emails are sent to convert potential leads into buyers, pushing the customers from the consideration phase to the purchasing phase. This type of email targets a specific audience interested in a particular product or service. The motive is to build the audience's interest through emails offering additional information or relevant promotion. 

4. Confirmation Emails 

Confirmation emails are a part of the email marketing strategy, which is sent once the buyer buys any product or service or an individual subscribes to the newsletters. The type of email conveys the confirmation message to the user that their purchase was successful or the sign-up was successful and may contain further actions or CTA buttons the users can take. 

5. Promotional Emails:

Promotional emails are usually generic and tend to cater to a large audience. Their main motive is to create awareness about the product or tease a new product or service to the audience base. 

6. Survey Emails 

Survey emails help collect user feedback, which helps businesses analyze the high and low points of the product or services—the insights from this data help them take strategic steps to improve their services and retain their customers

A strong and strategic email marketing service drives growth and business. It requires more than a creative marketing campaign; you need a robust email marketing service provider. 

How Does an Email Service Provider Come to the Picture?

An email marketing service, or ESP (Email Service Provider), is a tool that assists marketers in managing all their email marketing activities. These services include a system that allows you to create emails and keep track of your contacts and a delivery engine that helps you send emails.

Furthermore, providers generally offer core services like email marketing campaigns and branding for enterprises, and advanced features such as automation, audience segmentation, relationship management, and analytics tools are added.

Neo provides robust and reliable email service and guarantees that all your emails are received by their intended recipients. Users can easily unsend emails, schedule emails with the Send Later option, send bulk mail easily, and much more!

Merits of Email Marketing 

Email is used for everything from newsletters to order confirmations, making it essential for running and expanding your company. 

Promotional Sales:

Need to start selling or advertising? Send email marketing campaigns to your subscribers to increase sales. Try these email marketing techniques to increase your conversion rates even more:

  • Re-engage viewers by sending them coupons, special offers, or welcome emails for their birthdays/anniversaries.
  • Set up abandoned cart emails triggered when a visitor adds items to their cart but doesn't make a purchase.

Increase Brand Awareness

The biggest advantage of email is contacting someone directly. Nowadays, people don't just send anything to anyone's mailbox; it's a space curated with carefully selected brands and publications.

Showing up in someone's inbox keeps your brand in front of subscribers. Personalized marketing emails have more impact than social media posts, where you don't know if someone saw your message.

Scalability is one of email marketing's main benefits, allowing you to send emails to many recipients and remain cost-effective compared to other marketing channels.

Build Customer Loyalty

Email increases customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer's journey: leads, conversions, engagement, and retention. It is a necessary tool to use with CRM to optimize communications.

Email marketing is not a tool to build relationships; it's a powerful way to build a community. 

How Does Email Marketing Work? 

Email marketing works by using the power of your email marketing services, such as Neo, to send targeted, personalized, and relevant messages to your email list. The goal of your email marketing campaign should be to increase engagement and generate more sales. To get the best results, you need an email list of people who have voluntarily signed up to receive your messages.

Here’s how email marketing works: 

1. Discover the Marketing Strategy. 

Don't rush your email marketing campaign. Before you begin, take the time to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your marketing emails? Ensure that your email marketing strategy's goals align with your business's overall marketing goals. Additionally, use an email verifier to ensure your contact list is accurate, which will improve deliverability and engagement. Align your email marketing strategy’s goals with your overall business objectives for the best results.

2. Select the Type of Marketing Campaign.

You must select the campaign type you want to create and run based on your defined marketing goals. With Neo’s email marketing best practices, you can send rich marketing emails of different types. Regardless of the type of campaign you choose, it's important to include a call to action (CTA) to make your email actionable.

3. Build and Grow Your Email List.

The success of email marketing depends on the quality of your email list. Adding random individuals who haven't subscribed is an ineffective strategy. While building an email list can be challenging, using the right approach and tools can turn it into a valuable asset for your business. Here are the best strategies by Neo to increase your email list:

  • Post useful content on your website - Post blogs, articles, and guides relevant to your target audience that educate, inform, inspire, or solve a problem for them. It will not only drive organic traffic, but the audience will perceive you as knowledgeable and reliable and take more action to interact with the brand. 
  • Offer incentives - Free ebooks, trial offers, and other gifts are excellent incentives for users to subscribe with their email addresses.
  • Make opt-in easy - Place your opt-in button where users can easily see it on desktop and mobile versions of your website. It makes a difference in how many people sign up for your email. 
  • Don't ask for too much information - Visitors might abandon the registration process if too many details are asked. Creating an email list with just one person's name and email address is best.
  • Send a welcome email - Send your newly registered customers a welcome email and briefly explain what they can expect.

4. Segment List as the Criteria. 

Next, segment your email list and send relevant, personalized messages to your subscribers. This involves dividing subscribers into smaller groups based on certain criteria. 

Segmentation is a technique that enhances engagement and boosts conversion rates. The surest way to segment your list is through subscriber activity, such as

  • Active subscribers (individuals who regularly open and respond to your emails),
  • Buyers (those who have purchased one or more products from your store),
  • Inactive subscribers (individuals who don't interact with (don't open) your emails),
  • Interests (group subscribers based on interests expressed through surveys or interactions with your content). 

5. Set up Email Automation tasks.

With automation simplifying operations in every industry, you can utilize AI to automate the manual tasks related to email marketing. It includes sending targeted emails to your subscribers based on their activity without human interference. The most common tasks in email automation are:

  • Sending a welcome email when a user subscribes to your list.
  • Sending a series of emails (create a sales funnel).
  • Sending an email to website visitors who have added products to their cart but have not checked out
  • Offer products to customers based on their purchase history
  • Request customer feedback X days after purchase.

Email automation is a feature you set up in your email marketing software. Besides, there are many other ways to integrate AI in email marketing to boost efficiency. Most modern platforms provide a visual editor, allowing you to create customer journeys and maximize the potential of your email list. Like Neo’s Smart Write feature, a part of the Neo platform, which offers context-aware suggestions per your brand tonality to draft compelling promotional emails and informative newsletters. 

6. Measure Campaign Performance.

After hitting the send button and your promotional email arrives in your subscribers' inboxes, you can begin monitoring your campaign performance. Reports on campaign performance can come from two main sources: email marketing services and website analytics tools. If you’re managing data across multiple channels, exploring Supermetrics or its alternatives may help streamline data tracking and provide a more unified view of your campaign’s impact.

Depending on the services and tools of the provider, you can obtain data that includes unique open rate, bounce rate, unopened emails, unsubscribe rate, click-through rate, sharing, spam complaints, and more. Along with the metrics, you will be able to get an insight into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns or any gaps that might exist by enabling you to implement improvements to the process.

Introducing Neo: Your Reliable Partner to Boost Email Marketing Efficiency

Creating and running an email marketing campaign may seem daunting for beginners, but templates make it quick and easy. Neo offers a selection of templates for marketers to choose from, organized by purpose.

There are templates for announcing new products, offering seasonal greetings, transactional email templates like order confirmations, and feedback emails that ask customers for their thoughts on their purchases.

Neo offers premium templates and buildable content blocks. You can easily drag and drop dynamic content that changes in real-time based on your audience.

You can follow the given steps to write an email using a template offered by Neo:

  1. Open templates. 

When you subscribe to Neo’s platform, click on the Template library in the Templates tab to find Neo’s preload business email templates. 

  1. Choose a template. 

Pick a relevant template as per your preference. You can even create your template by clicking on Create a New Template, and you can start creating a template tailored to your specific needs. 

  1. Add specific details. 

After choosing a template from the library or creating your own, you can start customizing the template by writing the information. If you don’t know where or how to begin, the Smart Write feature has your back. Besides, the preloaded templates have prompts to enter customized information for your recipients. 

Sending Bulk Emails Became Easier with Neo

Email campaigns are great tools to enlarge the target audience, strengthen the marketing power, and raise conversions. Through a number of bulk email senders around, Neo provides you with additional features that fit your specific audience, giving you better capabilities and outcomes.

With Neo, you can forward leads, accelerate sales, and give your clients feedback or other user-related assistance. Here's how you can use Neo to send bulk emails for marketing:

1. Log in to Neo.

First, log in to your Neo account. If it's your first time, take some time to get used to the layout. As the interface is friendly, this won’t take much time.

2. Create an email.

Click the “Compose” button on the dashboard. Here's a quick tip: press "C" for the shortcut. Click the Campaign button next to Submit in the compose window to enter Campaign Mode. This will set up your email for bulk sending. Add recipient names or contact groups along with writing an important headline. Use an HTML template or choose from Neo's pre-designed content templates.

3. Adjust and submit.

When you're finished, click Submit. If you intend to reuse this email, choose 'Save this campaign in the template for future use.' Later, you can find it in the 'My Templates' section.

Check the Sent folder to see if the campaign is marked as 'This feed was sent from an email campaign.' To gauge engagement, utilize Neo's read receipts feature to track who opens your emails.

One of Neo's unique features is its read receipt system. Gone are the days of sending out emails blindly, hoping they will be seen. Neo's read receipts let you know if and when your email was opened. This provides valuable information to help you determine the optimal time to send emails and understand recipient interactions at a granular level.

The Bottom Line

Email marketing should be a vital part of your marketing arsenal. It has the potential to generate significant profits with minimal effort, training, and cost. In email marketing, asking for permission before sending promotional emails is crucial.

Delivering what your subscribers expect dictates your email marketing strategy. Email marketing is always unique to each company and brand. Your followers will remain loyal as long as you keep it relevant, engaging, and fresh.

Neo is a great tool for creating and distributing simple, advanced email marketing campaigns. This makes contact management easier and allows better segmentation for better targeting. You can also send bulk emails and deliver targeted messages to your audience at the right time. Neo has several features that help you create interesting, engaging, and relevant emails on the go. Transform your email marketing with Neo! Join Neo today and experience the power of email marketing!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How does email marketing work?

Email marketing is one of the different marketing techniques that help businesses convey the latest news about new products, new promotions, and so on to the mailing list recipients. It can also be the case of a soft sell in educating your audience about the brand's values or maintaining their engagement between purchases.

2. Can I send marketing emails to my customers? 

Avoid targeted digital marketing emails to people or customers without their explicit permission. If an existing customer has willingly opted in for email, market bulk emails become essential for their consent to be obtained. You may send marketing emails and text messages to the customers using the company’s domain and the respective company's email address.

3. How does email marketing retain customers? 

Email marketing is a great option for your business marketing strategy as it offers the precise leads you aim to target. Customers who connect with your company stay with you as they understand your brand fulfills their needs. Thus, it also expands the average customer service lifetime and long-term profitability.

4. What is email marketing deliverability? How can I make sure my email was delivered correctly? 

Email deliverability is the aspect that tells the software users whether the email is inboxed where it is supposed to be or if it has gone into the spam folder and is never seen again. Neo covers all aspects of forwarding, spam, and how you can be sure that your emails end up in your subscribers´ inboxes.

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