Email marketing is a form of marketing where the communication is done via a marketing platform that allows you to send targeted emails to groups, or segments of people within your audience. It is a form of direct marketing that includes sending newsletters with updates on the company, promotional sales or useful content that you know your audience finds valuable. It is a cost-effective way of reaching new and existing customers with targeted messages.

Email marketing is a craft that involves several different steps and skills. You’ll need to start by creating a list of qualified leads and the best way to do this is by offering them a valuable opt-in lead magnet. Your next stage is to understand your goals and the different types of emails. Get to know your audience and use the segmentation capabilities wisely to send the right messages to the right people, at the right time. You’ll also need to plan your follow up emails to nurture the leads you have. While writing your campaigns, it’s important to use the right subject lines, and write your copy with a language that resonates with your target audience. Designing your emails can also help to attract the attention of your subscribers and entice them to click on your Call To Action (CTA). Lastly, once the campaign is sent make sure you track your emails and test what works best.

The major benefit of email marketing is the global reach on a relatively low budget. The personalisation and tracking capabilities offered by email marketing platforms such as MailChimp help to improve your conversions and drive revenue with email marketing. It is also a relatively easy method to get started with and can be applied to a much wider and a lot more engaged audience.

When we refer to types of email marketing, we are mainly talking about the different types of campaigns that email marketers use to capture the different segments of your audience. Some of these include:
- The Welcome Email Series
- The Standard Promotional Campaign
- The Seasonal Campaign
- The Post-Purchase Drip
- The Newsletter
- The Abandoned Cart Campaign

Email marketing works by continually optimising the message you are sending to each and every lead or existing customer in your database. Email marketers often follow CRITICAL acronym to achieve success with email marketing:
Creative - make the email appealing to your audience. Consider what resonates with your audience and message - an HTML or text-only email?
Targeting - make your emails more and more targeted with personalised messages.
Incentive - when writing your subject line think about the incentive for the recipients. They will be looking at your email in their inbox with one question in their head - “What’s in it for me?”
Timing - measure and test to identify the best day and time for the delivery of the emails.
Integration - your email campaign must be integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts. Consistency is key.
Copy - consider what wording to use for the subject line and the body of the email. Think about what sort of phrases will make the recipient click on your links and figure out where within the email is the best place to put these links.
Attributes - these refer to the subject line and the timing of the delivery of your email. You’ll need to test this to identify the best attributes for your campaigns.
Landing page - make sure you direct your customers to the correct place with your links in order to optimise the conversion rate. If you wanted them to buy your new product, you wouldn’t link them to your homepage, right?

An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer identifies and follows to achieve desired marketing goals with email advertising. This plan of action gives the businesses a direct channel of communication with prospects and customers for brand promotion. Strategies have a basic wireframe but should be tweaked as you analyse results from your email marketing campaigns.

HTML email design lets you create great-looking emails with lots of visual appeals. Instead of using plain text, you can use HTML email design to display a variety of colours, images, backgrounds, and fonts. With HTML email design, you have the creative freedom to help get your message across more effectively and draw the recipients attention to the places that matter the most - your Call To Action calls.

There are many very good email marketing tools. Most of them have very similar features, yet some are more comprehensive than others. In our opinion, MailChimp is a great email marketing tool that offers a lot of features that are not offered with other tools, such as a CRM system. MailChimp has been around for a while and continually develops its tool to meet the demand of marketers.

Email marketing focuses on communication with your qualified leads in a very personalised way based on the insights from the previous campaigns sent. What this means is that you can very easily target each of your customers and leads with a message that will resonate with them and offer them exactly what they’re looking for. This improves your conversion rate as your leads are nurtured in a way that is suited to their behaviour and needs. Your leads are more likely to become sales with a more personalised message.

Lead magnets in email marketing refer to pieces of content and offerings you use to encourage your potential leads to subscribe to your mailing list. In this way, they give you direct access to them which you can utilise by testing different marketing campaigns on them. An example of a lead magnet could be a free ebook download or a 30% off on their first purchase.