This beginner’s guide will explain what email marketing is, how it works, and how to get started. By the end, you’ll have a solid grasp of the basics along with the know-how to launch an effective email marketing strategy for your business.

Especially email marketing services are taking the place more and more of direct mail. Instead of wasting time on marketing products that end up in people's trash cans, effective email campaigns that catch a consumer's eye and make social networking the bright star of the future. Email marketing also allows you to see who is reading your emails, what they like about your emails, and which products they are seeking from your emails. This makes for effective campaigning. However, there are several top email marketing companies to choose from. Most of these companies are different in one way or another so it mostly depends on the style, and even the amount of money you as the marketer are willing to pay for the service.


But if you’re a bit confused about where to start, that’s totally normal. Email is a vast discipline. It’s easy for beginners to get lost in a sea of tools, techniques, and terminology.


What is email marketing?

We’ve covered the biggest question, what is email marketing, but haven’t gotten into why email marketing is so very important for your business. Let’s talk about that now.

Email marketing is a direct marketing channel that lets businesses share new products, sales, and updates with customers on their contact list. Its high ROI makes it crucial to most businesses’ overall inbound strategy. Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization. In the long run, a well-designed email marketing strategy not only drives sales, but helps build a community around your brand.

Download Now: Email Marketing Planning Template


Types of marketing emails

This way, you can focus directly on your target audience and get the most out of the customers that you do have.


1.Promotional emails

Email marketing campaigns are used to promote special offers, new product releases, gated content like ebooks and webinars, and your brand at large. A campaign could consist of 3-10 emails sent over several days or weeks. 

2.Informational emails

Newsletters: A newsletter, as the name suggests, shares news related to your business. Such as new milestones reached, new product capabilities, or featuring valuable content like case studies. Sent at regular intervals, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly newsletters help maintain consistent touch points with your email subscribers.

Announcements: Email is the perfect way to inform customers of company announcements, new product releases, changes to the service, etc.

3.Re-engagement emails

Another important type of marketing email is the re-engagement email. As the name suggests, re-engagement emails help reconnect with customers or subscribers who haven’t been active lately.



Why email marketing is important

As other digital marketing strategies have evolved, a question that keeps coming up is: “is email marketing still important?”

In short, yes. Creating a strong email marketing strategy helps you reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales at an affordable cost. Just as other platforms and media have changed, email marketing tools give your business the ability to reach customers easier than ever.

1.Stay in contact with your audience

Emails have the ability to keep your customers informed. Consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient for them. It can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them.

2.Reach customers in real-time

According to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This is significant and should come into play when planning any marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails but all other types of media and information.

 

 

3.Email marketing is easy to measure

Most email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, and open rates.


4.Increase brand awareness

Nope, social media isn’t the only platform that helps a company’s brand awareness. Email marketing gives you the ability to increase that interest level, that brand awareness, by staying top of mind.



The Benefits of Email Marketing


Furthermore, 99% of consumers check their email every day and it is by far the preferred way to receive updates from brands.


1.Creating personalized content

One of the main benefits of email marketing is that your content can be highly personalized to your audience's needs. Your emails might have variations including different images or subject lines to increase your engagement. You can even create segmented lists based on geography or engagement levels.


2.Collecting feedback and surveys

Email marketing can help you do this. For instance, you can send customer satisfaction surveys to obtain customer feedback through email campaigns.


3.Improving sales

While email marketing is clearly an excellent marketing tool, it can actually improve your sales as well. In fact, 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI and marketers who used segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

4.Generating traffic to your site

With email marketing campaigns, you'll send traffic to your site and improve your SEO. Plus, you'll keep your audience engaged with your brand and your site.

For example, many of you might have reached this page from a marketing email from HubSpot. That's because email is a great way to provide value to our audience, and we do that by sending our content in our emails and generating traffic.


How to do email marketing

You can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people actually want to read. It just takes a plan (one that can be broken down into a few key steps).

Think of the following five steps as an outline for your email strategy. We’ll dive deeper into some of these in a moment.

Email Marketing Planning Template



1.Define your audience

An effective email is a relevant email. Like everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona, understand what they want, and tailor your email campaign to your audience’s needs.


2.Establish your goals

Before you come up with your campaign goals, gather some context.

You'll want to know the average email stats for your industry and use them as benchmarks for your goals.

3.Build your email list

You need people to email, right? An email list (we'll cover how to build your email list in the next section) is a group of users who have given you permission to send them relevant content.

4.Choose an email campaign type

Email campaigns vary and trying to decide between them can be overwhelming. Do you send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements? Which blog posts are worth sharing?

5.Make a schedule

Decide how often you plan to contact your list and inform your audience upfront.


6.Measure your results

This should come as no surprise. As marketers, we measure everything. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails that will yield large results.


What Email Marketing Service Is Best

Before you email anyone, you need 2 things:


1. Their permission

2. A business email set up



If you started with an optin, you got that permission, so hooray! If you didn’t use an optin, we don’t recommend sending marketing emails to them unless you have their permission.

You risk them flagging your emails as spam. So not only will they not buy from you, but you can also face negative consequences.

Instead, you can use a tool like OptinMonster to create smarter optin forms. You can collect leads and subscribers who want to get your marketing emails.

Email service providers handle all the formalities and expensive technicalities involved. All you need to do is sign up and use their service.

Here are the best email marketing services that we recommend:

1.Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the largest and best email marketing platforms in the world. They allow you to manage your subscribers and create professional email designs with templates and drag-and-drop editing tools.

You can also send automated emails to new subscribers using Constant Contact Lists + OptinMonster and track their performance.

You can try ConstantContact for free for 60 days. After that plans start at $20/month.

WPBeginner rates ConstantContact the best email marketing service. And if you get started with Constant Contact, you may be interested in the following article: How to Create a Constant Contact Popup for WordPress.

That resource will have everything you need to grow your Constant Contact email list.

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is not only a complete email marketing software for businesses, but also an SMS marketing software. And it’s all in an easy-to-use marketing platform with drag and drop tools you can use to create highly-engaging emails, build automated workflows, and segment users.

You can send up to 300 emails per day for free with Sendinblue’s branding. Paid plans start at $25/month and you can add on SMS for an additional cost that’s based on your sending needs.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is known for its CRM platform, but they also offer powerful email marketing software for small businesses. With the drag and drop editor and ready-made templates, you can easily create beautiful emails without the help of a designer. The software also comes with personalization features, A/B testing, and more.

You can send up to 2,000 emails per month for free with HubSpot. If you want to send more emails and remove HubSpot branding, you can upgrade to a premium plan starting at $45 per month.


4. Drip


Drip is a marketing automation tool that allows users to create complex email automation workflows and conditional statements within email messaging. Campaigns, workflows, and triggers are well-organized and Drip is as simple or as complex as you need it to be. Creating lists and nurturing leads is even easier using Drip + OptinMonster.

Drip plans start with Basic at $49/month for up to 2,500 subscribers and Pro at $99/month up to 5,000 subscribers, both with a 14-day trial period. Enterprise users (5,000+ subscribers) need to get a quote.

5. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an excellent choice if you are just starting out but you know that you are going to need some advanced features in the future, such as complex autoresponders (which you can do quite easily using ConvertKit Tags + OptinMonster). It’s kind of like a CRM tool, without the heavy price tag.

ConvertKit is targeted for professional bloggers, authors, and speakers.

Pricing starts at $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers and goes up incrementally from there.

Some users have asked what the difference is between OptinMonster and ConvertKit and why they need both. For more information, check out this post on OptinMonster vs. ConvertKit and which is best to grow your list.

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing software. It is great for people who are just starting out, as it is easy to set up and it provides an intuitive user interface. You can also add new subscribers to specific segments using Mailchimp Groups + OptinMonster.

Mailchimp has a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers making it the best free email marketing service.

However, if you want to use autoresponders or any other powerful feature, then you will have to switch to a paid plan. Paid plans start as low as $10/month and can go up to $30 for 2,500 subscribers. The bigger your list size, the more you’re going to pay.

7. MailerLite



MailerLite allows you to create responsive emails and autoresponders with A/B testing capability built in. You can also send targeted emails to specific subscribers.

You can get started for free for a list size of up to 1,000 subscribers.

Besides the providers listed above, you can also look into ActiveCampaign or HubSpot, which is a full-fledged suite of marketing tools.

Once you have your optin form and your email marketing service in place, you are ready to start building your email list and making sales!


In conclusion, This guide is a great way to build the best email marketing strategy and we encourage you to follow it! We also have a great post on how to run a successful email marketing campaign that you should definitely check out.