Email marketing works by delivering messages to a specific subscriber that has signed up for your brand’s email list.
Email marketing creates brand awareness among ideal potential customers and deepens the loyalty of your existing clients by delivering messages to consumers during their entire experience through their customer journey.
And not just any message—but the right message, at the right time.
It’s often cited that email marketing delivers the highest return on investment of all marketing: $44 for every $1 spent. One of the reasons for this impressive ROI is that, with email marketing, you can deliver a series of well-timed messages that are triggered by your individual customer’s behavior.
Email marketing delivers a targeted message.
Marketers used to aim to have the most massive subscriber lists possible. They would then send general emails out to the entire list. Today’s email marketing works differently. Time has revealed the value of developing a healthy list, as opposed to merely a large one. This means that marketers carefully fish for their brand’s ideal consumers, rather than haphazardly fill the net with whoever swims by.
Once a brand builds a subscriber list, email marketers segment the list. This helps target recipients with the perfect message tailored to where they are in their customer journey, their demographics, and prior behavior. This strategy of working with market segments helps drive the success of the call to action included within each marketing email.
Email marketing reaches known individuals.
Social media ads commonly use look-alike audiences to target consumers similar to those that already use the brand’s products, meanwhile email recipients are opted in to that brand’s list, so they’re more likely to be open to the message.
Further, word of mouth is king in marketing, and a referral made through email is worth much more than a referral made through another channel. Shares via social media are worth $2.56 in sales, while emails that are forwarded yield $12.41 in sales.
59% of marketers say that email is their most significant source of ROI.
How to measure your email marketing efforts
The insights dashboard provides you with many metrics to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
When analyzing the success of a particular email, one of the most important metrics for measuring effectiveness is the open rate. Based mostly on your email subject line, the open rate shows how many of your target recipients clicked on the email to view its contents.
You’ll also want to check the click-to-open rate (CTOR), which is the percentage of recipients that clicked on and opened the email and then clicked the call-to-action (CTA).
Engagement is another key indicator of whether your email marketing campaign is working effectively. Engagement is a measure of interaction with content. You may wonder how many recipients shared your email with others. Understanding this will help give you an overall picture of the success of your campaign.
Does it really matter?
Understanding how email marketing works can go a long way toward helping you harness its power to achieve the best results for your brand. Moreover, knowing the variety of indicators used to measure results can help you get a complete view of how your campaigns are performing and how you might adjust your strategy for even better outcomes.
What now?
Now that you know how email marketing works, why it’s valuable, and how it’s measured, you’re ready to launch a campaign that achieves better results than ever. The Complete Email Marketing Guide for Beginners will walk you through the steps necessary to create your first campaign and analyze its success.