What is E-mail marketing?

 

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Marketing emails can be sent to a purchased lead list or a current customer database. 

The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

In plain and simple terms it's all about “Promoting your brand, service via an email where the receiver has given you permission to send you an email.” It’s essential that one of the mail company sends out to people (but there are few approaches to it which are covered in the later section)

This is not done by g-mail, yahoo, Hotmail or other ones, this is done by automated e-mail marketing software which we will see in a while

How E-mail works:

1st case: Sunil wants to send his wishes via email to Roy on friendship day.

Let’s see what will happen when an email is sent by Sunil (sender) to Roy(receiver)

Sunil’s e-mail id: sunil.s@gmail.com

Roy’s E-mail id: roy@yahoo.com

2 nd case: Ravi wants to send his wishes via an email to Kavita on Valentine’s Day

Let’s see what will happen when an email is sent by (sender) to (receiver)

Ravi’s e-mail id: ravi@gmail.com

Kavita’s E-mail id: kavita@gmail.com

So let’s summarize the working of email and spam filters

Types of e-mail marketing

·        Permission Marketing/opt-in/legit

·        Spam marketing/il-legit

Let’s understand the difference between the two…

Let’s say Ronnie has developed a new energy drink and he is super excited about his product. He wants to message as many people as he can about his newly launched product. He thinks that the more people will hear about his product the more he will get sales. So he sits down on his computer and starts jotting down an email with eye-catching headline fancy promotional message inside the email. After writing a quick, flashy paragraph about the drink, he opens up google.com and searches as many email brokers he can. He wants to get a huge list of the email address to which he can shoot out his fancy email. He thinks that the more his message goes to people, the more potential he has in making money

Somehow he gets a list of 10,000 people and he sends out his email to everyone. This might sound easy right!! Unfortunately, not only people will identify this message as spam or e-mail marketing scam but they will delete it also A couple of people might not even open it because they might think who is this guy? I don’t know him…correct?

So here comes the most important concept in email marketing which is permission-based email marketing. In simple terms, a business or website must receive a visitor’s authorization before sending out any promotional emails. If a person receives an email from a business he never requested chances are that it will go in spam

So to summarize we can say that email marketing has 2 ways:

1. Legit (permission marketing)/ Opt-in>> collecting emails or building lists and then sending them periodic emails

2. Il-legit (spamming)>> you buy a list of the email address and send bulk emails which might be treated as a spam email.