What Is Email Marketing? Benefits + Best Practices

Key takeaways

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to connect with potential customers, raise brand awareness, build customer loyalty, and promote marketing efforts.

• Email marketing is an important digital marketing channel.

• It's used to inform customers, build loyalty, and promote specific products through personalized and automated campaigns.

• Email marketers handle numerous responsibilities, including building and monitoring email campaigns, segmenting audiences, and analyzing key metrics.

Explore the topic of email marketing, including the benefits of email marketing and tips for beginning your email marketing strategy. Afterward, build your digital marketing skills with the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that businesses use to communicate and connect with potential and existing customers. This is a form of marketing used to inform customers, increase brand awareness, and promote specific products and services.

Why is email marketing important?

Email remains one of the more powerful (and stable) channels when it comes to reaching an audience. It serves as a direct line of communication that businesses fully own and control. Some of the benefits of email marketing include:

• High ROI: Email marketing can consistently deliver a high return on investment

• Owned audience: As a channel, email marketing is owned media, meaning you can have a wider impact at a lower cost as opposed to channels where you need to pay to surface or send messaging.

• Personalization at scale: Email marketing tools allow for adaptive segmentation, so you can build a more personalized messaging flow to achieve different goals.

• Conversion drive: With email, subscribers have explicitly opted in—or avoided opting out—to hear from a brand. This high-intent audience is more likely to engage with content.

• Measurable results: Every action, such as opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and purchases, is trackable. This provides immediate, granular data that allows marketing teams to pivot strategies and prove the value of their campaigns to stakeholders.

What kind of emails does an email marketing team send?

There are different types of email marketing. Some common emails that an email marketing team might send include:

• Welcome emails

• Email newsletters

• Promotional emails

• Lead-nurturing emails or re-engagement emails

• Transactional emails, such as confirmation emails or password reset notices

• Feedback or survey emails

• Milestone emails, such as for customer birthdays or anniversaries

What does an email marketer do?

There are several different email marketing roles worth exploring depending on the function you'd like to carry out. Some are more creative, while others require more leadership.

Generally, an email marketer sits at the intersection of creativity and data science. Their primary goal involves understanding a company's prospective and existing customers, segmenting audiences into the appropriate email flows, building email campaigns, and monitoring performance.

Key responsibilities:

• Designing and automating campaigns: Developing single-send and longer email flows based on specific user behaviors, such as signing up for a newsletter or abandoning a shopping cart.

• Creating content: Crafting copy and collaborating on visuals. This includes optimizing subject lines for open rates and designing clear calls to action (CTA) to drive a higher clickthrough rate.

• Segmenting lists: Organizing different audiences into specific groups based on demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels to ensure content remains relevant to the recipient.

• Conducting A/B tests: Regularly running experiments on send times, lead imagery, and headlines to determine which versions yield the highest return on investment (ROI).

• Analyzing performance: Monitoring and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as open rates, clickthrough rates (CTR), and bounce rates to iterate on future campaigns.

Learn more: How to Learn Email Marketing

Email marketing best practices

A successful email marketing campaign can engage your previous customers, attract new ones, and help you meet your marketing goals. To achieve this, though, you will need to create a thoughtful email campaign that strategically engages customers with relevant and well-timed messages.

As you are working on building your own email marketing campaign, keep the following tips in mind: 

1. Craft eye-catching email subject lines.

A subject line catches the reader’s attention and prompts them to open the message, while the content of the message elaborates on your value proposition and urges readers to act.

The high volume of daily emails means that competition is strong in recipients’ inboxes, so a stellar subject line can help you stand out from the crowd. This reality is underscored by the fact that the average open rate for branded emails across all industries is 35.63 percent [1].

Standout subject lines are intriguing and relevant to recipients. Some ways to improve your subject lines include the following:

• Clearly state a promotion: “Get 15% off Your Next Purchase”

• Create a sense of urgency: “Hurry! Our 30% Off Spring Sale Ends in 24 Hours”

• Evoke a sense of curiosity: “Ice Skating in June?”

• Highlight a specific time period: “Still Have Christmas Shopping To Do? We’re Here to Help.”

• Personalize it: “Jane, Your Subscription Has Almost Expired!”

2. Intentionally structure your message.

Structure is an important piece of any writing, but especially so for marketing emails.

Effectively structuring your message content will allow you to immediately articulate your value proposition to readers. According to a January 2024 survey, 54 percent of adults open marketing emails if it is relevant to the products they're interested in when they receive the message [2]. The second leading factor (19 percent) is personalization beyond just mentioning their name.

To optimize open rates, consider these ways to maximize impact:

• Put the most important information at the top of your email, such as the promotion you most want your audience to see.

• Make it scannable so readers can easily find the information they need.

• Keep text at a minimum and use links to redirect readers to longer pieces, such as blog posts referenced in the email.

• Include CTAs, such as links, throughout your piece.

• Make sure you add a clear CTA at the end of the email to direct those who have scrolled through the whole email.

3. Keep your design simple. 

The line between eye-catching and distracting can be thin. On one hand, you want to create a dynamic visual design that attracts attention. On the other, you want to make sure that you convey and highlight vital information. A simple design, then, is generally more effective than a more complicated one.

Some key considerations when designing a marketing email include:

• Use three or fewer colors in your email. A reduced palette will be eye-catching but not overly distracting.

• Emphasize your logo and branding. You want the recipient to quickly know exactly who sent the email and where they can go to get your product.

• Visually emphasize CTAs.

• Optimize your message for mobile devices. Many people read their email on their smartphones, so your messages should be well-suited for their devices.

4. Only email people who opted into your list. 

It is important that you only email individuals who have opted to receive them, for several reasons. First, while it is technically possible to purchase lists of email addresses from third-party sellers, this practice is forbidden on many marketing platforms.

Second, in some cases, it may actually be illegal for you to send marketing emails to individuals who’ve opted out of receiving them. In the United States, for example, the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act) is a 2003 law that expressly forbids sending emails to those who have previously opted out of them [3].

Additionally, sending unsolicited emails can be inefficient. While it may seem like sending as many emails as possible will help you reach your marketing goals, the reality is that email marketing is most effective when you are targeting a specific audience. Rather than sending emails to people who don't want them, and risking your emails being sent to spam folders or boosting your unsubscribe rates, it makes more sense to advertise your product or service to those who have already expressed an interest.

5. Strategically time your emails. 

In many ways, email marketing is all about timing. Sometimes, sending the right message at the right time is the best strategy to improve customer engagement and meet your email marketing goals.

As a form of digital marketing, email marketing benefits from being easily automated. Marketing automation allows you to automatically send emails to a targeted audience. You can use email automation to send emails at certain times of the year, such as during the holidays, or to create an automated email series to send after a potential customer takes a specific action, such as subscribing to your email list.

Automated nurture sequences help keep recipients engaged by automatically sending out relevant emails that maintain brand awareness and guide them through your marketing funnel. 

6. Monitor and run tests.

One of the benefits of digital marketing is that you regularly receive data on the efficacy of your campaigns. As you further develop your marketing campaign, this data can be invaluable in finding more efficient approaches to reaching and communicating with your target audience. 

Email marketing platforms allow you to keep track of important data, such as your open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. Furthermore, many of them also allow you to run A/B tests, which compare the performance of two different campaigns to identify the characteristics of high-performing emails.

Routinely analyzing your data and conducting tests can help you improve the performance of your overall email marketing campaign. Additionally, as you collect data, you can develop email templates based on what tends to work for your business and further your efficiency for future campaigns.

Email marketing tools 

Email marketers tend to use a range of email marketing software and platforms to maximize their team's efficiency. As you are implementing your marketing strategy, these platforms offer advanced features that can help you design personalized emails, manage your contact list, send automated emails, and monitor your email marketing efforts. 

Some common email marketing tools include:

• Brevo

• Mailchimp 

• Omnisend

• Get Response

• Constant Contact

• Active Campaign

Whatever your marketing goals, you can use these platforms to execute your email marketing strategy.

Common email marketing terms 

Digital marketers use a variety of terms to describe the email marketing process. This glossary includes some key terms you can get to know:

• Acceptance rate: The percentage of messages that recipients’ email servers receive.

• Bounce rate: The percentage of messages that recipients’ email servers do not receive.

• Open rate: The percentage of emails that recipients opened. An email campaign’s open rate is one of the key metrics for determining its success. The higher the open rate, the better

• Subject line: The text that shows up in a recipient’s inbox describing the email. Subject lines should be intriguing and relevant to recipients.

• Call to action (CTA): A link or button that connects to a download or website, such as a product page, blog post, or scheduling page.

• Clickthrough rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click on a CTA in an email.

• Conversion rate: The number of recipients who follow through with a CTA by clicking a link or making a purchase, such as when a recipient clicks on a link to your website.

• IP warming: The practice of gradually sending an increasing number of emails to a recipient in order to establish your IP address.

• Opt-in/opt-out: To either subscribe (opt-in) or unsubscribe (opt-out) from an email list.

• Nurture sequences: A series of automated emails that you send when someone signs up for your email list. Nurture sequences foster engagement throughout the customer journey and help push customers further along the marketing funnel. 

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