What Is An Email Marketing Service: Everything You Need To Know

What Is An Email Marketing Service?

An email marketing service is a software that allows you to build custom email templates, automate your email campaigns, segment your mailing list based on details and behaviors and track revenue from your emails.

You can purchase the software on your own to use or you can hire an email marketing agency to manage your email campaigns for you.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is when you send emails to a subscriber list to promote your product or service and encourage customer loyalty.

How To Measure The Success Of An Email Marketing Service

Ultimately, if you’re seeing an increase in ROI from email marketing, then your email marketing service is performing successfully. If not, then it’s not.

In order to find an email marketing service that can deliver that higher ROI, these are some of the features you want to look for when evaluating an email marketing service:

• User-friendly, drag-and-drop email editor
• Customizable templates that are also mobile-friendly
• Send time optimization
• A/B testing functions
• Segmentation, personalization, and dynamic content
• Email list management
• Customer automations
• Clear analytics and campaign reports

Why Does An Email Marketing Service Matter?

Small businesses are often short on two things: time and money. An email marketing service helps you save on both.

Once you set up your email automations the first time, the software will automatically execute them according to the conditions you set every time from there on out.

You don’t have to manually send out 300 welcome emails or order confirmation emails. Email marketing services are also relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing efforts.

Once you obtain a subscriber, you no longer have to run paid ads to reach them every time. Instead, you can just email them directly.

Advantages Of Email Marketing

There are several advantages of email marketing for small businesses. Let’s take a look at the top benefits:

• Improved Brand-Consumer Trust: Trust in a brand is statistically needed in order for a customer to buy from it. Emails help establish that trust.
• More Revenue: Customers often need to have 5-7 touchpoints with a brand to make a purchase. Email marketing helps you stay in front of customers long enough to get the sale from them.
• Higher ROI: On average, businesses get $40 in return for every $1 spent on email marketing. So, not only does email marketing increase sales, but it does so at a profitable cost.
• Saved Time: Because email software can be automated, it can do the work for you while you focus on other priorities in your business.
• Target Market Research: Email marketing done well can allow you to learn more about your customers. You can segment your emails by demographics and behaviors and track their patterns to learn more about what motivates them to purchase vs not.

Disadvantages Of Email Marketing

As with any marketing channel, there are some disadvantages to email marketing as well. Let’s look at some of the most common disadvantages:

• Spam: Spam filters block and filter out unwanted, unsolicited, or virus-infected emails from reaching a user’s inbox. The filters use specific criteria to evaluate the content of emails or their senders, and then flag them as spam accordingly. You want to actively avoid creating emails that get flagged as spam, or else your customer will never see your email.
• Size: If your email is too big in size, it can take too long to load or never load at all which can be aggravating to the customer. This can cause negative associations with your brand and create a failure to purchase.
• Competition: Because of how successful email marketing has been for businesses the last 4 decades, most businesses implement it. The downside of that is that you are fighting for your audience’s attention in their inbox. You’ll need to send out emails with strong subject lines (because if those don’t hook your audience, the rest of your email won’t matter), and then the content of your email needs to deliver on what’s promised in the subject line.
• Engagement: A lot of customers will sign up for your emails for that initial offer or discount or lead magnet, but maintaining engagement after that can be difficult. You’ll need great copywriters and a strong understanding of your audience to keep open rates and email engagement high.
• Design: Recipients are accessing their emails in hundreds of different ways: on their phone, on desktop, on an iPad, via Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. The design of your email needs to be optimized so that it looks nice and reads well no matter what device or platform they’re using to open it. This can be hard to do, and therefore, emails often appear with random line breaks and oddly-sized images, which leads to deletions and unsubscribers.
• Cost: Many email marketing services say that they’re free, but then charge for any additions you want beyond a basic email, such as adding an image or exceeding a certain word count. If you hire an email marketing agency, that’s an additional cost of labor. Therefore, email marketing services can add up if you’re not careful.
• Lead-Nurturing, Not Lead-Generating: A common misconception is that email marketing can get you leads, but this is not true. Email marketing can help you close leads, but not generate them. You’ll need to have obtained the email list of people you’re sending the emails to elsewhere, such as via advertising a lead magnet.

Email Marketing Types

There are several email marketing types and examples that businesses can use to increase their revenue. These are the top 9 email marketing types:

• Welcome Emails: This is the first email your customer receives, and it often contains a lead magnet or a discount code or whatever incentive was advertised to encourage them to sign up for your emails in the first place. It should introduce your brand and the type of emails they can expect from you moving forward.
• Newsletter: These are one-time emails that contain value for the reader. These emails could highlight new product features, share how-to’s and tutorials, point to a new blog post, share a new testimonial, etc.
• Lead Nurturing: These emails are sent to subscribers who have taken certain actions and/or are known to be warm. These emails are sent with the goal of converting leads into paying customers or clients, and therefore the content of these emails can provide more information, give value, and/or overcome potential objections.
• Confirmation: Confirmation emails are automated emails that confirm customer actions such as an order received, an order shipped, a call scheduled, etc. These are important to keep the customer informed on the status of their purchase and any other key events in their customer journey.
• Dedicated: If you want to email a specific segment of your email list, this is called a dedicated email. These emails can be based on recent purchases, website behavior, email behavior, inactive clients, new members, or any other specific criteria.
• Invite: Invite emails are used to alert your email list of special updates, such as any upcoming events, webinars, new product launches, and anything else you’d like to invite your audience to be a part of.
• Promotional: Promotional emails promote your products and services and direct people to your website. These emails tend to be more generic in nature and therefore are sent out to bigger audiences as opposed to segmented audiences.
• Survey: Survey emails allow you to get feedback from existing customers. You can then take that information and adjust your product or service accordingly to better meet your customers’ needs. Survey emails often make your customers feel valued and deepen their trust in your brand.
• Seasonal Marketing: Seasonal marketing emails are emails made to celebrate any holidays that are relevant to your brand and customers. Some seasonal holidays could include Christmas emails, Black Friday emails, Mother’s Day emails, Father’s Day emails, Teacher Appreciation Day emails, Memorial Day emails, and more. They are often accompanied by a temporary discount code or sale that’s specific to the holiday.

Quick Tips For Building Your Email Marketing List

If you want to make the most out of your email marketing service, there are some things you can do and not do to maximize your ROI from email marketing.

Check out these tips for email marketing:

• Don’t Buy Email Lists: Most email service providers have a policy that states the people you send emails to must opt-in to receive emails from you. Buying your email list is not allowed and can lead to your account being banned from sending emails. Instead, you want to attract your target customers with a well-thought-out lead magnet and have them willfully opt-in to receive emails from you. A lead magnet is a piece of free content such as an ebook, webinar, discount code, or what have you that is related to what you offer and of high value to your audience.
• Be Aware Of National (And International) Email Regulations: Make sure you follow any laws in your area related to email marketing, such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union for the treatment of personal information. Email regulations are based on both your location and the location of your subscribers, and failing to adhere to them can result in your email account being banned.
• Have Real Conversations Via Email: While yes, the ultimate goal of email marketing is to increase revenue, make sure you’re also using email to have genuine conversations with your audience. Trust and authenticity are needed in order for the customer to make a purchase from your brand, and you can establish that with conversational emails that make the customer feel cared for and valued.
• Don’t Send Too Many Emails: One of the quickest ways to lose subscribers is to blow up their inbox with new emails multiple times a day every day. Flooding their inbox can cause them to be overwhelmed and ultimately unsubscribe from your emails.

Email Marketing FAQs

What are the four types of email marketing?

The four main types of email marketing campaigns are promotional, transactional, educational, and nurturing.

Is Gmail an email marketing service?

Gmail is an email marketing platform, but it does not have all of the automated and segmentation tools an email marketing software has.

What is meant by email marketing?

Email marketing is the process of using emails to nurture potential customers into paying customers by providing value to them and promoting your products and services.

How much does email marketing cost?

Email marketing costs between $500-$1,400 a month or more depending on the scope of work being done and the size of your email list.

How can I set my emails apart from spam?

In order to avoid having your emails filters into the spam folder, encourage your subscribers to add your email to their “safe contact” list, avoiding spam triggers, including unsubscribe links in your emails, having users double opt-in, and avoiding the use of attachments.

Can I combine email marketing with other types of marketing?

Yes, you can combine email marketing with other types of marketing and it is encouraged! For example: you could use social media ads or Google Ads to advertise a great lead magnet and capture email addresses. Then use your email marketing efforts to nurture them until they become a paying customer.

How important is the email subject line?

The email subject line is arguably the most important part of your email because if people are not hooked by the subject line, the contents of the email won’t matter- because they’ll never see it. Make sure your subject line speaks directly to the goals and pain points of your target audience.