What is Email Marketing?

Home > Glossary > Email Marketing

Email marketing is an approach to advertise your business using email. From a marketing standpoint, every email sent to a potential or current customer can be considered a part of an email marketing strategy. Objectives of email marketing can differ, depending on the business and types of service it provides. Generally, there are three main objectives of email marketing, which are:

1. To encourage a customer to buy a product or service of the company
2. To raise awareness of the brand in order to attract new customers
3. To stimulate existing customers to repeat business.

Types of email marketing

Email marketing has two types of emails, which are transactional and direct.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered-based and are sent based on the customer’s personal actions related to the company’s website or advertisement. For example, in ecommerce, when you purchase a product from an online retail shop (Amazon, Best Buy), you can later receive an email with recommendations on making an additional purchase to your recent one. Also triggered transactional messages include password reset emails and email receipts.

Direct messages

Direct messages, or direct emails, is usually a conversation between two individuals, one of whom is the company’s representative. The goal of direct emails is to promote and encourage a potential customer (also known as a prospect) to buy a product or service. The content of such messages usually includes a special offer (for example, buy 1 product and get a second one for free) or a promo discount for certain goods. For these types of messages, companies collect a list of prospects and customers using surveys and organizing public events. They can also “rent” a list of prospects from other companies.

Advantages and disadvantages of email marketing

Despite the fact that email marketing is one of the most popular types of marketing with companies, there are advantages and disadvantages of adopting email marketing:

Advantages:

• Email marketing is cheap and fast, which allows to reach a larger audience.
• Businesses and organizations can use an email service provider (or ESP) to gather information regarding the efficiency of their emails and understand consumer behavior
• Most email users have at least one email address, which they use on the daily basis. Targeting right prospects using email marketing can successfully turn prospects into customers

Disadvantages:

• Spam laws violation. Delivering a high number of repeatable messages can often be blocked by system firewalls and even violate the fair use policy.
• Low deliverability rate. If many users mark direct messages from a company’s representatives as spam, the system will recognize emails from emails having this company’s domain in the email address as spam automatically, which will decrease the business’s deliverability rate.
• Legal requirements. In addition to spam violation, different countries have various laws and regulations to fight against unsolicited email marketing (for example, Canada Anti-Spam Law or Article 13)

You may also like:

Types Of Ecommerce Businesses: What Model Is Right For Your Online Business?

Ecommerce Marketing Costs — Creating a Budget From Scratch

Magento Commerce and Open Source Total Cost Of Ownership