Email marketing is an important part of your overall digital marketing strategy. It’s a field that’s always evolving and changing within the digital landscape, but thankfully there are authors keeping tabs on everything we need to know. Enjoy this roundup of the best email marketing books and digital marketing books, and use them as tools for your email marketing strategy.
Email marketing: An important part of digital marketing
Sure, email marketing does not quite have the fresh excitement or glamour of its newer-to-town cousin, social media marketing. However, the hidden truth is that you will often get more bang for your buck with email marketing than many of the newer forms of digital marketing.
Email marketing is still the only way to get a direct line into your potential customer’s inbox. However, it is far too easy to frustrate your subscribers by sending the wrong type of marketing emails. Are you emailing your list too frequently? Are your emails not getting opened?
Taking some time to understand the ins and outs of email marketing is well worth it. It can make the difference between a responsive email list that results in increased sales versus a list that quickly dwindles due to poorly written email newsletters.
10 of the best email marketing books
Here, in no specific order, are some of the best email marketing books around. We chose books that were highly rated by reviews online, as well as those that are useful and accessible for people of various knowledge levels.
1. E-Mail Marketing For Dummies by John Arnold
Yes, it’s another one of those “for dummies” books with the bright yellow and black cover. And, of course, if you are already an experienced digital marketer, you probably don’t need this book whatsoever.
However, if running email marketing campaigns is something brand new to you, then start with this book. It will get you more confidence about the basics, so you can then move on to more higher-level strategy books.
2. Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business by Susan Gunelius
This book is an excellent choice for small business owners who need to learn the step-by-step basics of building a list and using it to increase revenue.
This instructional book explains how to offer freebies to inspire people to sign up for your mailing list, set up successful conversion funnels to drive sales, and leverage list segmentation to target the right audience for each message.
Other topics include analyzing email list performance with key metrics and using automation and personalization to save time while creating strong customer relationships.
3. Email Persuasion: Captivate and Engage Your Audience, Build Authority and Generate More Sales With Email Marketing by Ian Brodie
While this book has now been out for five years, it is still an important entry in the world of email marketing. Banking expert and author Howard Lothrop said of this book: “A results-getting tour de force. This is simply the best book on email marketing I have ever read.”
In 2017, an Amazon reviewer wrote, “I used the advice in this book with my ecommerce business. I was able to generate over $80k in sales over a 12-month period with no other advertising. Email marketing works. And the strategies in this book are sound.”
4. Email Marketing Demystified: Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy that Converts and Generate More Sales (Internet Business Series) by Matthew Paulson and Elisa Doucette
This email marketing advice book is the #1 Best Seller on Amazon in the category “Mail Order Small Business.” It is also extremely cheap, costing only $2.99 (at the time of publishing) for the Kindle ebook edition. The book shares strategies that the main author used to grow an email list to 300,000 subscribers.
5. Email Marketing Rules: Checklists, Frameworks, and 150 Best Practices for Business Success (Third Edition) by Chad S. White
Email Marketing Rules author Chad S. White has been acknowledged as the number one email marketing expert on Twitter.
As research director at Litmus, he gathers data from thousands of marketers every year for the Litmus State of Email Research Series. In 2018, he was recognized as the Email Experience Council’s Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year.
In this book, he takes his vast email marketing knowledge and provides a very thorough resource on how to best leverage your email subscriber list to succeed in the online business game.
6. Mastering Online Marketing: Create Business Success by Magnus Unemyr
Email marketing is just one piece of your digital marketing puzzle. You could have the best email list and finely crafted electronic newsletters to send them, but if you do not have your landing pages and websites optimized, then you will lose potential sales.
The book Mastering Online Marketing gives you a comprehensive view of the big online marketing picture, along with very good information on email marketing.
7. The Email Lifeline: How to Increase Your E-Mail Marketing Profits by 300% Using a Simple Formula by Anik Singal
Sometimes you just want to get started and launch your email list without a lot of excessive strategizing, research, and pre-planning. If this is the case, then Anik Singal’s book is the book for you.
You don’t have to put in a ton of (often wasted) effort to make your email list a success. This book helps you with building your list, choosing the right products to promote, how to leverage event-based marketing, and more.
8. The New Email Revolution: Save Time, Make Money, and Write Emails People Actually Want to Read! Kindle Edition by Robert W. Bly
One of the biggest challenges in email marketing is getting people to read your messages. This handy book covers this challenge, as well as other aspects of email marketing.
Learn how to choose the right templates for your email campaigns, incorporate images, audio, and video into your emails, and draft compelling emails that people want to read.
9. Email Marketing Mastery: The Step-By-Step System for Building an Email List of Raving Fans Who Buy From You and Share Your Message Kindle Edition by Tom Corson-Knowles
This is a really great book for people who want to learn email marketing without all the technical mumbo-jumbo. You will learn how to set up your first email list, send traffic to it, and get the most out of your list. A case study is included in the book which shows how the author set up an autoresponder to promote one of his books.
10. Email Marketing Mastery: The Step-By-Step System for Building an Email List of Raving Fans Who Buy From You and Share Your Message Kindle Edition by Tom Corson-Knowles
This book covers all the basics of email marketing and includes as a bonus 8 “useful factors” to consider in regards to setting up email marketing for your company. With 5 stars from many happy readers, this book is cited as being extremely helpful.
Beyond books: What else should you be reading about email marketing?
When learning about email marketing, don’t just stop at books. Of course, you want to be reading the best websites about digital marketing and email outreach you can find.
But here’s a really important way to understand email marketing: Put yourself into the mindset of a consumer. How do you do this? Well, it’s easy.
1. Research your competitors, as well as other successful online businesses.
Start compiling a list of your competitors, but don’t stop there. Take note of companies that might be going after your target market but maybe are not direct competitors. You will want to look up businesses that are just doing really great things online with their sales, as well as up-and-coming companies who may have innovative ideas you can learn from.
2. Sign up for and read their mailing lists.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but a lot of digital marketers forget that one of the best ways to see what works and what doesn’t is to analyze the competition directly—and that means going beyond analytics and actually experiencing what the customer is experiencing.
Numbers can only show you so much. Take some time to analyze the emails that are sent to see how they are composed, what language they use, and whether they speak to you (or the target audience) or not.
3. Create a portfolio of sample email marketing messages.
Take the best (and possibly, the worst) email marketing messages from your chosen email lists to make an email marketing campaign portfolio. You can then review this portfolio for ideas, inspiration, or even “what-not-todos” before starting your next email marketing campaign.
Wrap up
While email marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing on the Internet, it is going nowhere. It will continue to evolve, however. Text messaging apps, for example, are now being used as an email replacement. How will that affect your email marketing campaigns?