Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on sending different types of communication by email.
There was a time when some people declared this strategy obsolete because it had become associated with spam and intrusive communications. Today, however, thanks to the automation tools available, it has become a powerful way of delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Email marketing is characterised by sending communications to a list of email addresses taken from a database or built through lead generation.
Once undervalued because of its association with spam and ineffective communications, email marketing now benefits from a wide range of automation tools that make it possible to reach the target audience with the right message. Messages can be personalised according to user actions, for example by sending emails to people who purchased something on your website, to those who visited your website but did not make a purchase, or by resending a communication to someone who did not open it the first time.
Although social media has gained enormous prominence in digital communication in recent years, email marketing is the only tool that allows you to reach all the members of the audience you want to target.
If you publish something on your company’s Facebook or Instagram page, only a small percentage of your followers will see the post. Even if you invest in paid promotion optimised for your target audience, you cannot identify the people to whom you want to deliver the message by name, for example, but only through certain preferences, interests and demographic data.
Email marketing is different. This strategy allows you to deliver value propositions to people who are open to receiving them.
Although it may not seem so, the General Data Protection Regulation has actually brought even more advantages to email marketing by requiring companies to optimise their databases so that they contain only contacts who are willing to receive communications about the company.
As a result, although companies were required to remove contacts for whom they did not have the owner’s permission to send communications, they were left with smaller databases that were more efficient and more receptive to the information they wanted to send.
Examples of email marketing you have probably already received:
- Promotions
- Newsletters
- Online purchase confirmations
- Information about scheduled trips
According to the US-based Pew Research Center, 92% of adults with an online presence use email, making email marketing a far-reaching strategy with strong potential to create major opportunities and generate many business leads.
