what is email marketing?|email marketing for beginner

 

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What's up, everybody? So today, we're going answer the high-level question,

"What is email marketing?"

Right, a whole bunch of reasons, of course, why you'd want to understand this. If you're just getting into digital marketing, or if you understand a little bit of email marketing, but you might be missing a few pieces here and there, this is the article for you. So we're going to do a comprehensive overview of what email marketing is and the fastest way to implement it on your own business. My name is Rohit and I am a digital marketer from absolutedigitalreview.blogspot.com, let's get going.

So super high level, just getting started, what is email marketing?

So let's define this a little bit, dig into this, and talk about why it's so important.

 what is email marketing?

Email marketing is a tool that lets us do two things. One is first to provide value to users in the form of content. And two, direct users through each step of the customer journey or the sales funnel when they get stuck, right.

So we use it in these two ways primarily when we're talking about digital marketing. Email marketing is arguably the most underrated digital marketing channel out there. I, personally, love Search Engine Optimization, SEO.  but as we've grown this business more and more, I've come to the realization that email marketing is incredibly important and usually the most underrated digital marketing channel. And there's a number of reasons why, and I want to talk about that, right. Not everyone is on Facebook. Not everyone is on Snapchat. There's a number of different social channels out there. But everyone has an email address, and that's why this is so important. Your email list, you as a marketer, or you as an entrepreneur, or as a business owner, as you grow your email list, that email list can go with you, right. It is a portable asset.

So there are many digital marketing channels out there that change very dramatically or they die, right. So what has value today might not necessarily have value tomorrow.

Ranking number one on Alta Vista in 1997 was fantastic. It was probably great for any business. It's not that important now. Does Alta Vista even exist? Having the dopest Myspace page. Back in 2002, it was probably awesome. Probably doesn't matter as much now, right. So spamming your way to growth through social invites. They learned this the hard way. They did this with FarmVille back maybe five, 10 years ago. Got a lot of early growth, and then Facebook changed the rules with social invites, and their stock price slid, as well. It was a very tough break for them. Praying Google doesn't change the rules. Demand Media basically went public off of kind of low-quality content marketing, and then Google's Panda update really slapped them, and their stock price took a very dramatic drop, as well. So rules change all the time, right. Google and Facebook can change their rules all the time.

Different social networks can expand and contrast all the time. Stuff can often change a lot, right. But email often doesn't change. It is not a social channel, right. It is a web protocol, and I want to talk a little bit about this and what that difference is, right. So the internet is made up of protocols and applications. So web applications are a lot of these sort of private companies that you use every day. Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat And they often sit on top of web protocols. When we talk about web protocols, we're talking about DNS, the Domain Name Service. HTTP, FTP, IRC, SSL, or SMTP. These are all kind of standardized digital communication platforms, digital communication languages effectively, that we all use on a day-to-day basis. They're not necessarily owned by a private company. They are this kind of standards that we all use when we use the internet. SMTP is email. And so when you're doing email marketing, you're using the SMTP protocol.

You're not using Facebook's terms of service or Goggle's terms of service. This is a really important distinction, and that's why your email list is effectively this portable asset that moves along with you. So companies can change their rules, platforms can become unpopular, but protocols don't really die. People are getting really excited about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies now because some people are saying, "It's a new protocol for money.

The protocols are really rare. They're very fascinating and they're very interesting, as well, right. So keep that in mind. Companies change their rules, platforms can become unpopular, but protocols don't really die. So until people stop using email, until people stop using the SMTP protocol, your email list is a portable asset.

The chances are very good that we're probably still going to have the email in 25 or 50 years. That's why this is really important to build now, right. Let's talk a little bit about the details here though.

So there's really only three different types of email when we're talking about email marketing. Transactional email, content email, and conversion email.

We'll dive into these a little bit here. The first is transactional email, so let's look at some examples of a transactional email. This might be things like receipts. You buy something on Amazon, you get a transactional email receipt. Maybe an order confirmation, forgot password, support tickets, sign-up details, your double opt-in for your email list, and unsubscribing email, or maybe shipping details. These are all transactional things.

Maybe a user's doing something on your site, and you're kind of giving them an update via email. Next is your content email. So content email would be things like a welcome email. Maybe you just got their email address or they just signed up as a customer, right. It's a new blog. Maybe something like a new blog post. "Hey, everyone. We just posted this new blog post. So check it out." A lead magnet or a value sequence, something like your newsletter.

Your weekly or monthly newsletter, any type of social posts, or social post reminder. "Hey, go check out this post on Facebook." Free tools or exclusive content, any content that you create is a content email.

And the third one is a conversion email. So any type of promotion, a sale, lead magnets can also be in this group, as well. If you're launching a new product, you're upgrading users, you're offering a discount, you're doing an affiliate, anything like that would be a conversion email, usually when money is changing hands. Okay, so we talked about the three different types of email. Let's talk a little bit about email distribution now. So there are three different types of email, but there's really only two means of distribution or at least two you should be focusing on.

Usually, that's broadcast email and automated email. So there are two different types of email. Most of your email should be automated. If you're doing most of your emails now as manual broadcast, in general, for most businesses, that is not ideal, right. Sometimes it's understandable, especially if you're smaller. But in general, most of your email should be automated, right. Let's talk about these differences first. First is broadcast email.

you should only broadcast two types of email; great content suitable for your entire list and one-off promotions. So in general, like when you create something absolutely amazing, and you want to tell your whole audience about it, fine. Go ahead do a broadcast. Or, if you're doing the kind of a seasonal or a time box promotion, Christmas 2020, or seasonal whatever, you go ahead and do that as a broadcast. That's totally fine. Everything else should be automated, based on user actions.

So in general, you want to be automating email based on what the users are doing on your site. This allows you to send out content and messaging that is much more specific and relevant, contextually relevant to the users.

Instead of just blasting out everything that you have, you want to be sending them emails based on what they're interested in, and based on the actions that they're taking on their own side.

So examples of automated email might be something like receipts, order confirmations, forgot passwords, welcome emails, a value sequence. Maybe cart abandonment,  if they add a product to the cart and then leave. Lead magnets or upgrades. And you want to do this in a contextually relevant way that's based on the actions they're taking on your side. So that's really it. I just wanted to do a super high-level overview and answer the question, "What is email marketing?"

So that's it. I hope that was useful.  Is this how you think about email marketing?. Finally, if you want all of email marketing resources,  click that link for a free 30 day trial period, to grab all of our email marketing resources right now. Thanks a lot.