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Email marketing made simple
Introduction to email marketing
Whether you’re already up and running or a complete beginner, you’ll find valuable tips and concrete examples to get you on the right track to being profitable with your email marketing efforts. 
Sign up with a free account and learn how to create effective emails as you read and follow.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is, just as it sounds, using email to promote and advertise a company’s products and services, and build relationships with existing and potential customers.
As a business owner, you have direct communication with the customer through their inbox. Due to that, email marketing is one of the best digital channels with the highest potential to strengthen customer relationships and guide the customer through the entire customer journey.
How does email marketing work?
Whether your goal is to increase your company’s brand awareness or sell more products and services, email marketing can help your business grow no matter the size.
The term email marketing includes several different types of emails with various purposes. Your strategy may consist of one or all of these types, depending on what your specific goal is:
Content emails
- Purpose: To educate, engage, create loyalty, build relationships and community
- Example of content email:
- Welcome email
- Newsletters
- Emails with valuable content such as blog posts and articles
- Emails with enticing gifts and free content (so-called lead magnets)
- Email to celebrate something specific, for example, birthdays, Christmas, and New Year
Sales emails
- Purpose: To sell products and services
- Examples of sales emails
- Promotions
- Promotional email
- Product updates
Behavioral emails
- Purpose: To get the recipient to do something specific.
- Example:
- Surveys and polls
- Invitations
- Reminders
Transactional emails
- Purpose: To confirm a kind of transaction, such as a purchase
- Examples of transactional emails:
- Receipts and order confirmations
- Delivery information
- Password links
- Confirmation links, for example, sign up, double opt-in, unsubscribe
- Support cases
- Account information
- Contract changes
What do I need to get started?
First of all, you need to understand the basics of email marketing. Keep reading each part of this guide, and you’ll learn everything you need to get started with your winning sales emails and crisp newsletters.
You’ll learn how to:
- Create an email marketing strategy with a clear purpose and crystal clear goals.
- Go from idea to a finished newsletter, design great-looking emails, and write valuable copy and subject lines that will get recipients to open and read your emails.
- Build your email list and get more people to subscribe to your newsletters.
- Create newsletters so well that your recipients wait for them every week.
- Use and manage an easy and user-friendly email marketing tool.
The benefits of email marketing and newsletters
You know what email marketing is, but you may still be wondering why you should spend your valuable time on it? In this section, you’ll learn the benefits of email marketing and why you should invest in email.
Whether your goal is to sell more, strengthen your brand, or share your knowledge, email marketing can help.
One of the best benefits of email marketing is that you don’t have to work into a headwind – 83% of consumers prefer to receive communications from businesses via email.
The top 8 benefits of email marketing
1. Consistent channel over time
Email as a phenomenon is not owned by a company, as, for example, all social media channels are. Therefore, the “rules” around email do not expect to change at the pace social media algorithms, reach and advertising rates do.
Email as a channel expects to remain stable every year, and there is no risk of it dying completely. You own your email list and thus have a steady channel to your customers no matter what.
2. Cost-effective channel
Email marketing allows you to reach many people quickly at a relatively low cost. It doesn’t require loads of printed material like traditional marketing or expensive advertising assistance from agencies.
All you need is a neat and effective email template and 1-2 hours well spent at your desk. For every penny you spend on email marketing, you’ll get x36 back.
Explore our responsive email newsletter templates to save time and get started quickly with your email campaign!
3. Wide reach
Not everyone uses Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, but everyone, across all age groups, has an email address.
Email is a safe way to reach your followers and customers. In addition, email has a better average engagement and conversion rate than social media:
- Average email open rate: 22.86%
- Average email click-through rate: 3.71%.
- Average social media engagement rate: 0.58%
- Email conversion rate: 6.05%
- Social media conversion rate: 1.9%
4. Directly measurable
After dispatching, you get direct information on who opened the email, amount of clicks on links, and unsubscribes. Use this data to your advantage and immediately use it to adapt and improve your strategy and content. In addition, you can track whether your activities lead to increased sales, website visits, and so on.
Read more about Get a Newsletter’s email marketing reporting & statistics.
5. Strengthen the relationship with your customers
Email marketing can be written very personally and may lead to stronger ties between your brand and your customer. It is a channel where you can get close to the customer and maintain continuous contact.
By personalizing parts of an email, you can make it more readable and pleasing for the recipient. That is harder to achieve with, for example, traditional marketing or social media advertising.
If your goal is to increase sales, email marketing creates a perfect opportunity to use email to be a helping hand and guide the customer through every step of the customer journey. No matter if you are aiming for new customers unfamiliar with your brand or to re-engage old customers.
6. Confidence building
High-quality content signals products and services of high quality, which reinforces your brand further.
7. Activation
Email marketing is a seamless way to entertain your customers and prospects, and ensure they don’t forget about you.
In the race for customers’ attention, email still ranks high. Your email will eventually demand your recipient’s attention in one way or another and that they act on your message.
The email will be in the inbox with a number or a red notification until it is either opened and read, opened and discarded, or discarded outright. Hopefully, the behavior will be the former, but either way, the recipient had to pay attention to your message and act on it. Because of that, your business is more top-of-mind than it was before.
8. Email marketing is easy
One of the best things about email marketing is that the start-up distance is short from idea to finished email. You don’t have to be able to write a single line of HTML code yourself. All you need is an easy-to-use email marketing tool that’s tailor-made to send emails in high volume and a pre-made template that you can customize to your branding.
Are you convinced that email marketing is worth investing in yet? If not, then read this sentence once again:
For every penny you spend on email marketing, you'll get x42 back.
Use a newsletter service
You know what email marketing is, that it’s a consistent and cost-effective channel with a broad reach. You are also aware that email marketing has a huge potential to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers. You’ve decided to go for it.
So, how do you get started?
- An easy-to-use email marketing service to design and send your emails
- Choose one or more templates for your emails
- A clear strategy and schedule for your email marketing
Avoid regular email programs
It is technically possible to use your regular email programs like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo for your email marketing and newsletters. But the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
For example, you can’t create a design as neat and appealing as adding clear buttons, which leads to less engagement and clicks.
It would also lead to poorer deliverability as services like Gmail and Outlook are not made for high-volume email sendings. Their purpose is for personal use. Your emails might be flagged as spam, and your account could get suspended in the worst case. Newsletter services such as Get a Newsletter are tailor-made to scale and send emails in high volume at once.
In other words, you should always choose to use an email service whose purpose is to help you with your email marketing.
The benefits with Get a Newsletter
Get a Newsletter is one of the most user-friendly newsletter services. Our service is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to create and send great-looking and effective newsletters and to build your email lists with engaged subscribers as smoothly as possible.
With Get a Newsletter you get access to:
- Personal and fast support – experts in email marketing
- A user-friendly visual newsletter editor
- Modern and responsive newsletter templates
- Email marketing reporting – advanced reports that show who has opened and who has clicked where
- Deliverability – With Get a Newsletter as your newsletter tool, you can be sure that your emails will arrive.
Over to you
If you haven’t already done so, start a free account with Get a Newsletter where you can freely choose from our responsive templates and do your first test mailing.
This is the first part of the guide on how to succeed in email marketing. A guide where you’ll learn everything you need to know to get started, reach your goals, and become profitable with your email marketing.
