Email Marketing

Email is often used to promote content as well as to direct people toward your website. The types of emails you might send include:

• Blog newsletters
• Follow-up emails
• Customer welcome emails
• Tips or similar content

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails:

Transactional emails

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to their high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are an opportunity to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers; to anticipate and answer questions; or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services.

Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, a special offer or a product catalog). Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they rent a list of email addresses from service companies.

Advantages

Email marketing is popular with companies for several reasons:

• significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail.
• Businesses and organizations who send a high volume of emails can use an ESP (email service provider) to gather information about the behavior of the recipients. The insights provided by consumer response to email marketing help businesses and organizations understand and make use of consumer behavior.
• Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with emails delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.