Email marketing

Renaud Garelli

Email marketing, also known as Emailing, is a digital marketing strategy that uses email as its medium.

It is one of the most widely used communication channel in the world, offering low costs and high profit margins.

Email marketing can be segmented into several branches, each designed to meet specific marketing needs:

 

– Newsletters:

Newsletters are the most widely used form of email marketing, enabling an entity to keep in regular contact with its members/customers, offering them content on what’s new, on recently published features, or to promote a product or offer specific benefits (promotions, sales, …). These emails are bulk sent to an entire list of email addresses, and often use an email marketing software dedicated to this type of sending, called an email router.

 

– Transactional emails:

Transactional emails are emails that are sent automatically and individually following a given action. This will very often be a registration confirmation, a purchase or reservation confirmation, an invoice sending, or any other email that is triggered following an action performed by the customer. Unlike newsletters, which are bluk sent, transactional emails are only sent sporadically, and therefore have a higher read rate. As they are only sent in response to a specific action, it’s important that they arrive in the inbox folder (and not as spam), otherwise they may trigger frustration or misunderstanding on the user side.

 

– Marketing automation emails:

Marketing automation emails are unitary emails that are triggered by events of a defined scenario. This is often the case, for example, when an email is sent to wish a customer an happy birthday, or to follow-up on an abandoned shopping cart. This kind of email marketing is similar to a newsletter in its purpose, but is only sent when a specific event is triggered by a given person.

 

– Cold emails:

Cold emails are direct contacts between professionals in a related business sector. They enable professionals to share their products to other professionals, with the aim of finding new customers or creating new partnerships. In order to save time and reach a greater number of people, specific softwares has been created to automate these actions, enabling to manage content customization and specify sending time, to simulate as closely as possible the sending of the email like a human (which confers better deliverability). One particularly effective cold email solution is woodpecker.

 

Laws in each country (including the RGPD in European countries) regulate access to email marketing, and define the rules for authorized or prohibited uses of these different categories of marketing solicitation.

One of the rules of email marketing widely adopted around the world is the ability to immediately unsubscribe from any email marketing solicitation, through an “unsubscribe” link that must be present in each email marketing communication. Absence of this link (or failure to respect a user’s unsubscribe request) represents a negative metric that reduces the reputation and therefore the INBOX deliverability of an advertiser’s emails.

 

Email marketing is one of the main digital marketing channels, along with SMS marketing and social networks.