Did you know that in 2023 it is expected that the number of email users is set to hit 4.37 billion worldwide? This represents more than half of the global population. With the internet becoming more accessible, the number of emails sent and received globally has increased every year since 2017 – in 2021, there were an estimated 319.6 billion emails sent and received daily around the world. This is huge… And as a business, you simply can’t ignore or neglect email.
Yes, email is one of the oldest forms of digital communication, but it has managed to remain central of it and continues to grow in uptake, despite the increasing popularity of social media.
In addition, email marketing has the highest ROI amongst the different digital communication channels.In 2022, the average ROI of email marketing was $36 for every $1 spent.
Considering all these info, email becomes an essential tool that any digital marketer and/or brand should use in their marketing strategy.
What Is Email Marketing?
Definition of email marketing is simple; when a business promotes campaigns and communicates with its customers via email – it’s email marketing.
Let’s go into a little more detail: Email marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses sending emails to current and potential customers with the goal of increasing brand awareness, promoting specific products and services, driving engagement, nurturing leads, or making a sale.
Nowadays email marketing mostly focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization. In the long run, a well-designed email marketing strategy will drive sales and help build a community around brands. If companies use email marketing right, they can make customers (or potential customers) to visit and revisit their website. And more traffic usually means more income…
The two biggest advantages of email marketing are price and ease. Compared to other types of marketing, emailing is an inexpensive way to advertise your company and its products or services.
Most Common Email Marketing Types
There are many different types of email marketing, each serving a different purpose and taking a different way to interact with the audience. Some of the most common types of email marketing include:
- Welcome emails: Welcome emails are sent automatically when someone subscribes to your email list or purchases a product. Since it’s the very first email a new subscriber or customer will receive from you, they are incredibly important. Within these e-mails, you can thank them for subscribing to your list or shopping from you, introduce your brand/company or products/services, explain what kind of e-mails they can expect from you, and maybe even offer a discount.
Customers and subscribers anticipate a welcome email more than any other type, so welcome emails have higher CTRs than other email types, including nurture emails. Welcome emails had an average open rate of 68.59% and an average CTR of 16.05%. Those results are more than 3 times the averages for newsletters and other types of nurture emails.
- Newsletter emails: Out of all the types of email marketing types, newsletters are perhaps one of the most popular ones; newsletter emails are the second most widely used type of marketing email after promotional emails.
Businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries send newsletter emails to stay top of mind for their recipients. Don’t forget that only your most hardcore users are going to check out your website/social media/blog regularly – so it’s your job to keep them updated. With newsletter emails, you get a chance to let everyone know about what they’re missing and get more return visitors. Your newsletter emails are an opportunity to reinforce your brand voice and values so when customers are ready to shop, you will be the first one to come to their minds.
If they are done well, newsletter emails will help build brand recognition and earn your audience’s loyalty and attention. Plus, 40% of B2B marketers say newsletter emails play a crucial role in their content marketing strategy.
- Lead Nurturing Emails: A lot of people subscribe to your email lists, but then never open any of your mails or use your services. Lead nurturing emails are for those kind of subscribers in your sales funnel who has shown an interest in your product or service but haven’t made a purchase yet. The marketers send lead nurturing emails to move users from the consideration stage to the decision stage of the lead funnel. These emails intent to show more details about a product or service and highlight its best features.
Lead nurturing emails are automated and personalized email messages that are designed to educate, engage, enlighten, and inspire leads to take action. They are created to answer leads’ questions and give them useful content as they go through the sales journey.
Here is an example: Once a potential customer subscribes to your e-mail list, you can send an automated email to thank them for sharing their email address and offer an 25% discount for their first purchase.
- Re-Engagement Emails: As the name suggests, re-engagement emails are designed to reconnect with your email subscribers who may have stopped engaging with your emails for a while. If they haven’t opened or engaged with your emails, or clicked through to your website for a while, you may use re-engagement emails to check on your subscribers to see if they’re still interested or remember your brand, offer an incentive, and make sure you reinforce your value.
According to Invesp, it can be up to five times cheaper to turn an inactive subscriber into a customer than to acquire a new one. So, sending out re-engagement emails can be a more profitable strategy for your business than focusing on gaining new customers.
Re-engagement emails can take many different forms – you can share promotions, company announcements, newsletter content, and more. In some cases, re-engagement emails may nudge them to unsubscribe, but that isn’t a bad thing. To maintain good email deliverability, a smaller list of subscribers who engage with your emails are better than a huge list of subscribers who do not engage with your content. If the subscriber does not open, click, or take any other action, you may want to send one final follow-up that directly asks them whether they still want to hear from you or not.
- Promotional Emails: Promotion emails are exactly as they sound: a marketing email written to your customers, leads, or subscribers with information about a promotion you are running. These emails mostly contain coupons or discounts, by using a special offer, they encourage subscribers to purchase this.
Promotional emails are the most common type of marketing email customers receive. So, you need to make sure that yours stand out – that means you should pay special attention to the visuality and title of these emails.
- Cart Abandonment Emails: Cart abandonment email is an email sent to customers who have added products to their shopping cart but haven’t completed the checkout process. Cart abandonment email acts as a friendly reminder for the customers who may have been distracted and never checked out. Reminding your customers to complete a purchase helps create a sense of urgency. According to a research on 500 leading global brands, 44.1% of abandoned cart emails are opened, and almost 29.9% of clicks on abandoned cart emails lead to a recovered sale.
Other email marketing types are: dedicated emails, transactional emails, post-purchase or onboarding emails, review and feedback emails, seasonal emails, milestone emails, etc…