Everything you need to know about email marketing

Email marketing is a powerful channel that is highly effective, widely used, and generates a significant return on investment. While not new, email marketing is constantly evolving, with changing technological tools, customer expectations, and business strategies. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more people at home and on their devices, email helped marketers connect with consumers.

Now, with customer interaction increasingly virtual, workforces growing more remote, and digital experiences at the heart of modern business, email marketing is as valuable as ever. Whether you’re knowledgeable or a novice, everything you need to learn about email marketing today is right here in this post.

In this email marketing guide, you'll learn about:

• What email marketing is
• The benefits of a good email marketing strategy
• How email marketing works
• Automation in email marketing
• Good email marketing strategies
• Types of marketing emails
• A comparison of email marketing services
• Email marketing FAQ

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the use of email as a marketing tool to promote a company’s products or services and develop customer loyalty. As a form of digital and direct marketing intended to make people on a company’s email list aware of products and services, discounts, news, or other information, email is a way to interact with customers when they’re not actively buying.

Email marketing campaigns are among the most popular and effective ways to grow an audience, sell products, promote your brand, and more. Email is a crucial part of any successful marketing strategy, improving lead generation, brand awareness, relationship building, and customer engagement.

Email has come a long way since 1971, when a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson dispatched what is generally considered the first message. In 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent the maiden commercial email. With about 400 addresses on his email list, his messages about a new product generated $13 million in sales.

By the 1990s, the internet was widely available, people were using it to communicate instantly and continuously around the globe, and businesses realized the massive potential of email as a marketing channel. Today, approximately 4 billion people use email daily, and marketing emails are ubiquitous.

Certainly, there’s a reason spam folders and “unsubscribe” buttons exist. But the enduring value of a good marketing email is obvious — whether offering 10% off for subscribing, reminding someone about forgotten shopping cart items, or telling a brand story — especially when it contains a compelling message and appeals authentically to a customer’s needs.

The benefits of a good marketing email strategy

With social media, SEO, video, podcasts, and so many other marketing channels fragmenting audiences and competing for attention — and with email campaigns competing against each other for clicks and credit cards — it’s fair to wonder if email marketing still works.

Make no mistake — email marketing continues to be enormously influential.

Email marketing can generate an incredible 3,600% return on investment. Even with the growth of social, SEO, and other channels, email remains one of the most effective marketing strategies because of the simple fact that most people have email and use it often, including on their mobile devices.

There are many benefits of good email marketing, including:

1. Increased conversions and deals by offering exclusive discounts or sending abandoned cart emails
2. Improved awareness by reappearing in your audience’s inbox at regular (but not incessant) intervals
3. Better customer relationships, primarily through personalization and automation
4. Prompting readers to take another action, such as visiting your website or blog, shopping for products, or something else
5. Results can be easily and objectively measured, providing a clearer picture of the impact of your efforts

The global value of email marketing was $7.5 billion in 2020, according to Statista, and the market is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. Likewise, daily email users are expected to rise by 600 million over the next 3 years.

How email marketing works

The process of getting started with email marketing varies based on a company’s needs and the type of email service provider (ESP) with which they’re working. It could be very easy or quite complicated and heavily depends on the size of your company and your overall goals. No matter where your organization falls on that scale, these five steps can help you to start building a successful email marketing campaign:

Step 1: Build an email list

You’ve set goals and got your ESP, but now you need a list of people to email. To scale your business, it’s best to add a subscription sign-up form to your website — either embedded or as a pop-up — to collect customer data. You can use your ESP to create an email sign-up form that can be shared on social media as well.

You’ll also want to finalize a lead magnet that incentivizes people to opt in to receiving your newsletter. If you’re a retailer, that might be a coupon for discounted products. If you’re a service provider, it might be a free trial or access to gated content like an eBook. Whatever lead magnet you settle on, it should be something that delivers real value to prospective customers and compels them to join or stay on your email list.

Successful email marketing requires an active list of subscribers to receive your messages. This is a database of contacts who’ve not only demonstrated interest in your brand but explicitly opted in and consented to receive your marketing communications. Permission-based marketing is vital for complying with data protection laws and maintaining your brand reputation.

Some options for building your email list include:

• Creating an opt-in form that appears on your website so potential customers who are already browsing can quickly and conveniently subscribe with the click of a button
• Targeting demographics similar to the people already on your list with ads on social media that gather email addresses or link to a dedicated landing page
• Using online giveaways, gamification, and referral programs, and offline methods of contact like business cards and corporate events

One of the best ways to get people in your target audience to join your email list is with a lead magnet — an offer that entices them to sign up. This could be a coupon, special access, or premium content, such as a free eBook that provides value to the recipient in exchange for their email address. Great content is a meaningful way to attract and grow your audience.

Step 2: Choose an ESP

There are lots of ESPs on the market, so how do you know which one is right for your business? The answer depends on factors like your needs, budget, audience, objectives, and skill level. ESPs offer a range of features, some of which will be important to you and some of which won’t matter much. Here are some key features to look for when comparing ESPs:

• Ease of use for design and sending. If you’re a novice, you’ll probably want software with a drag-and-drop editor and email templates. But if you want more control or plan to build and code emails yourself, an HTML editor is better. Some ESPs have mobile responsiveness built in, so they can automatically be viewed on smart devices.
• Ability to test. You need to test everything from subject lines and CTAs to schedule and format. Most ESPs offer the ability to scale and manage deliverability, including testing tools and control over features like spam filters and storage, which increases the chances you land in a recipient’s inbox and get read. The more you test, the better.
• Data integrations with other marketing channels. Businesses need software that connects email marketing with activities across other channels to create omnichannel marketing experiences, so make sure to look at which data integrations and applications certain ESPs offer or that you could add.
• Personalization capabilities. Some of the features ESPs can provide to personalize emails include using subscribers’ first names and offering special coupons on their birthdays or anniversaries, taking into account time zones to maximize the chance of emails being read, and leveraging behavior-triggered actions to improve interactions.
• Automation and triggered emails. Recipients react to marketing messages in different ways. Their behaviors can trigger dynamic actions that respond automatically — like showing related content or sending abandoned cart reminders. Automation creates better personalization, improving engagement and conversion rates.

The best ESPs also offer features like central workflow and customer data management so you can see the whole customer journey at once, as well as managed cloud services that improve ROI. With Adobe Campaign, Adobe's B2C email marketing and omnichannel campaign management application, you can use rich customer data to create, coordinate, and deliver dynamic campaigns through email, mobile, offline channels, and more.

Step 3: Design emails

How do you get your emails to stand out from the crowd? By combining the right strategy and message with the best design. Start with the basic email templates that come with your ESP and edit them to match your brand guidelines. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to add content, colors, images, and styles. Save the template so you can use it every time for brand consistency.

Get inspired by design trends. Make sure your copy is clear, concise, and easy to read, broken up by larger headlines, smaller digestible chunks of text, and white space. Use web-optimized images that load quickly. Include alternate text. Be consistent with branding so people recognize your emails. And remember, the majority of emails now are opened on mobile devices — so ensure your designs are fully responsive and optimized for any screen.

Step 4: Test, test, test

Email marketing is as much a science as an art, and running tests is a proven way to find out exactly what works for your brand’s audience. Test deliverability by sending to friends through different internet service providers. Use A/B testing to try different subject lines, email copy, and CTAs. Test sending messages on different days and times.

The only limit to how much you can test is your own capacity for trying to perfect email marketing. Keep testing, refining, and optimizing your approach until you find what works best for your campaign and audience.

Step 5: Schedule to send at the best time

Most marketers believe it’s important for organizations to implement a rule for frequency of contact. What that frequency actually is depends on your campaign goals, content type, email performance, and more. But making and sticking to a schedule helps you stay on track and avoid going dark for a period of time.

An ESP can help you automatically send out emails that are scheduled in advance and provide testing and insights to discover when your target audience is checking email. It’s critical to send emails when recipients are paying attention, receptive to your marketing messages, and inclined to engage. At the very least, you should figure out which days and times your audience tends to open emails and when they’re more likely to click through.

Automation in email marketing

Let’s face it. Marketers are busy, consumers have endless choices, channels are always changing, and competition in every industry is fierce. Automation makes email marketing fast and easy, streamlining tasks like segmentation and message-sending while gathering insightful user data that helps campaigns grow smarter, stronger, and more successful.

Email marketing automation makes it simple to identify, target, and segment your audience. You can segment audiences in several different ways, including:

• Recipients who opened emails but didn't click through
• Recipients who are similar in demographics
• Customers you believe have higher potential value
• Users who abandoned their cart and could use a reminder
• Subscribers who are inactive that you want to re-engage

Many of these events trigger automated campaigns with their own subgroups and strategies.

Marketing automation can improve engagement and growth easily and instantly. With Adobe Marketo Engage, marketers have a complete toolkit to deliver winning lead-based and account-based marketing, from acquisition to advocacy.

Good email marketing strategies

Good email marketing strategies play a pivotal role in your greater marketing plan, especially given that communication and engagement with your customers are both essential for your business’s success. With a well-crafted email marketing strategy that’s rounded out with the power of automation, segmentation, and compelling content, you can unleash the full potential of email marketing. Here are a few good strategies to get you started.

Don’t buy email lists

When it comes to getting email marketing right, there are no shortcuts. So if you’re thinking about buying an email list, we’re here to stop you before you get started.

There are a few big reasons why you should avoid buying email lists. One main one is that it often leads to poor results and lower engagement rates. A driving factor for this is that these lists are typically compiled by aggregating email addresses from various sources without the consent of the people involved. As a result, email recipients are more likely to view these unsolicited emails as spam, which in turn can harm your brand’s reputation and credibility.

Plus, because these recipients haven’t expressed any previous interest your company or your products or services, the chances of them converting into actual customers will actually drop drastically. What’s more, buying email lists also violates anti-spam laws in many jurisdictions and countries, which can then result in legal consequences and financial penalties for the company.

One other big reason to avoid buying email lists is that it undermines the concept of building a genuine, organic customer base. Email marketing is most effective when it targets individuals who have willingly provided their contact information and have expressed interest in receiving communications from the company. When you buy an email list instead, you’d miss out on the opportunity to engage with a relevant and interested audience.

Sure, building an organic email list can take time and effort, but it also helps you develop a relationship built on trust and loyalty. As a result, these subscribers are much more likely to open emails, engage with the content, and ultimately convert into customers. As you invest in ethical and permission-based methods to grow your email list, you’ll enjoy a much more sustainable and effective approach for long-term success.

Maintain your email list

Another key strategy for email marketing is practicing good email list hygiene — or in other words, ensuring your email list is only filled with your most active subscribers.

An active and engaged email list empowers you to directly communicate with your target audience and build meaningful relationships. By regularly sending relevant and personalized content to your subscribers, you can stay at the forefront of your customers’ minds. This will then help you nurture leads all the way through the customer journey, from their very first interaction to lifelong loyalty.

A well-maintained email list also helps improve your chances of reaching interested individuals who have willingly opted in to receive your emails, which in turn boosts the chances of engagement, conversions, and customer loyalty.

Another key reason you’ll want to maintain your email list is that doing so provides valuable data and insights to inform your other marketing strategies. By analyzing email open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics, you can start to truly understand your audience’s preferences and behaviors. You can use this information to optimize future email campaigns, tailor content to specific audience segments, and refine your overall marketing strategies.

Plus, you’ll always keep your subscriber information up to date, so that you’ll have a better chance of improving deliverability rates and maximizing your email marketing efforts.

Focus on optimization

When it comes to optimizing your emails, there are many elements of an email to keep in mind. And when you personalize them or optimize them for performance, you can achieve greater results. Specifically, you’ll want to make sure you personalize subject lines and optimize email for both desktop and mobile.

The subject line is the first thing your recipients see when they receive one of your emails, so you need to make sure it stands out. It plays a crucial role in whether someone opens an email. By making the subject line more personal, you can capture the attention of your subscribers and create a strong sense of meaning, relevance, and individualized communication.

Some ways to personalize the subject line include using the recipient’s name, referring to their past interactions or purchases, or tailoring it to their specific interests or preferences. This level of personalization both increases open rates and improves engagement and click-through rates, because recipients are more likely to perceive the email as valuable and worth their time.

Looking beyond the subject line, you also need to make sure you’ve optimized your emails for both desktop and mobile reading. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, a whopping 49% of emails are opened on mobile devices. As a result, if you don’t make sure your recipients can easily open and read emails on mobile, they’ll get a poor user experience — and you’ll see reduced engagement and missed opportunities.

Fortunately, the opposite is true as well. By ensuring that emails are responsive and adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and resolutions, you can deliver a consistent, user-friendly experience across all devices. This includes using mobile-friendly layouts, appropriately sized fonts and images, and a clear CTA that’s easy to tap on smaller screens. By catering to both desktop and mobile users, you’ll maximize the reach and impact of your email campaigns. And you’ll provide a positive experience across the board.

Track your progress

One last strategy we’ll cover here is to ensure you keep an eye on how well your marketing is doing. Metrics and KPIs will show how successful your efforts are, as well as if there are any aspects you’d like to focus more effort on.

These metrics can provide valuable insights into your campaigns’ effectiveness or success. By looking at metrics like open rates, conversion rates, revenue generated, or more, you can evaluate the performance of your emails and identify room for improvement. Those same metrics can also help you understand customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns, helping you refine your strategies and optimize future campaigns. Equipped with these metrics, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions and seize opportunities to enhance your efforts.

Tracking your progress also helps you plan and achieve your goals. By setting specific goals and aligning them with measurable metrics, you can assess whether they’re meeting your objectives. Maybe your goal is to increase open rates, or maybe it’s to drive website traffic. Whatever it is, tracking the right metrics will help you monitor progress and make adjustments as needed. Plus, they’ll also help you compare your results against industry standards or previous campaigns. As a result, you’ll be empowered to measure your success objectively, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve your strategies to achieve the best results.

Types of marketing emails

In the world of email marketing, there are several types of different emails you can use to achieve success. Here are just a few of some of the most common ones that marketers use.

Welcome emails

Welcome emails serve as the first point of contact between a company and a new subscriber, making them crucial for establishing a positive and engaging relationship. You can use welcome emails is to greet and thank new subscribers for joining, while also providing valuable information about your company, its offerings, and any exclusive benefits or incentives. By delivering a well-crafted welcome email, you can make a lasting impression, set expectations, and nurture new leads, ultimately increasing the likelihood of conversion and long-term customer loyalty.

Lead nurturing emails

Lead nurturing emails play a vital role in guiding potential customers through the sales funnel and building a strong relationship with them. The purpose of lead nurturing emails is to provide relevant and valuable content to leads at different stages of their buyer's journey, addressing their specific needs and pain points. By delivering personalized and targeted messages, you keep leads engaged, build trust, and position your company as a trusted authority, increasing the chances of conversion and driving long-term customer loyalty.

Newsletter emails

Newsletter emails serve as a valuable communication channel where you can share updates, industry insights, and valuable content with their subscribers on a regular basis. A key reason you may consider using newsletter emails is to keep subscribers informed, engaged, and connected to your company's brand and offerings. By providing curated content, promotions, and exclusive information, newsletter emails deliver value to subscribers, establish the company's expertise, and foster a sense of community, leading to increased customer engagement and brand recognition.

Dedicated emails

Dedicated emails are specifically crafted to highlight a single product, service, or offer to a targeted audience. You may want to use dedicated emails if you want to create focused and impactful messaging that drives immediate action, like making a purchase or signing up for an event. These emails are highly effective in generating conversions and maximizing the return on investment for a particular campaign, as they capture the attention of recipients and provide a clear call-to-action, resulting in increased sales and engagement.

Reengagement emails

Reengagement emails are designed to reconnect with inactive subscribers and rekindle their interest in a company's offerings. You can fold reengagement emails into your email marketing strategy to revive engagement, reduce email list attrition, and potentially convert inactive subscribers into active customers. By offering incentives, personalized content, or exclusive promotions, reengagement emails can remind people why they interacted with your company in the first place, prompt action, and help your company maintain a healthy and interested subscriber base.

Compare email marketing services

Of course, you might have the best email marketing strategy around. But without the right tool for your business, you won’t be able to get off the ground. Here’s a collection of a few email marketing solutions you can compare, to give you an idea of what’s available and what might be the right fit for your business.

Adobe Campaign

Adobe Campaign makes it simple to visualize and connect personal customer journeys across every channel. Drawing from a base of rich customer data, you can create, coordinate, and deliver dynamic campaigns using an integrated, no-code interface. With Adobe Campaign, you can control both online and offline customer journeys, delivering tailored experiences to every single customer. Rooted in email but extending across all channels, it synchronizes campaign elements into one manageable workflow.

Brevo

Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is a platform that can help you build customer relationships across email, SMS, chat, and more. With Brevo, you can deliver campaigns straight to your customers’ inboxes, create visually engaging emails, and grow your email list organically. It also offers a built-in capability to analyze your email results so you can make adjustments accordingly.

MailerLite

MailerLite can help you create and send targeted, engaging emails quickly. Its solution also helps you manage campaigns and subscribers, so you can be confident that your emails are reaching the people who want to be reached. Plus, you can automate your workflows and deliver emails or update customer fields in a flash.

Klaviyo

With its robust platform, Klaviyo can help you deliver targeted, personalized messages that are backed by your customer data. Klaviyo offers advanced segmentation and behavior-based automation to help you target the right people and trigger messages based on channel engagement, event data, and more. And with its AI-driven optimization, you can proactively message customers by predicting future order dates, churn risk, and lifetime value.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit positions itself as the go-to marketing hub for creators, specifically focused on helping its customers grow and monetize their audiences easily. The tools in ConvertKit also offer the ability to sell your digital products or subscriptions to drive higher conversions.

Email marketing FAQ

Should I buy an email marketing list?

No. First, most ESPs require permission-based emailing, so they’re not allowed to send to purchased lists and won’t work with them. Second, sending unsolicited messages and storing someone’s data without their consent is illegal in many places. Third, recipients are likely to mark such messages as spam, which damages your reputation and could land you on an email blocklist. Fourth, some email addresses on purchased lists are inactive spam traps.

Remember, people don’t give their email addresses away for nothing — you have to earn the right to be in someone’s inbox. Buying lots of random email addresses and cold messaging them is a good way to receive resentment and an unsubscribe click. Marketing is always about developing authentic relationships, and that’s just as true with building an email list.

Are there email laws I need to know?

Yes. With the rise of email marketing came consumer protection and privacy laws. In 2003, the United States passed the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires commercial or promotional emails to be marked as such. Senders must be honest and transparent about who they are, what they’re sending, and how they can be reached. Recipients must be allowed to opt out easily and promptly. The penalty for violation of the law can be a fine of more than $40,000.

In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation requires the protection of personal information and applies to all EU nations, as well as any entity that interacts with EU parties. Elsewhere, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries have similar laws, and it’s important to be aware of all regulations relevant to your location, industry, and application.

How often should I send emails to my subscribers?

The frequency of email sending depends on your audience and the nature of your business. It's important to strike a balance between staying top-of-mind and avoiding overwhelming your subscribers. A good starting point is sending emails once a week or every two weeks, and then adjusting based on subscriber engagement and feedback. Regularly monitoring metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates will help you gauge the optimal frequency for your specific audience.

How can I improve email open rates?

We already touched on how building organic email lists and personalizing subject lines can help. Beyond that, you can also segment your email list based on demographics, interests, or past interactions to deliver more targeted and personalized content.

Start your email marketing journey today

Email marketing can help you reach and connect with your audience to promote your brand, improve lead nurturing and customer relationship management, and increase sales.

Learn more about Adobe Campaign and how it can take your email marketing strategy to the next level. Or watch a demo to get a better look at how Campaign works.