Email marketing
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the use of email to reach an audience that agreed to hear from you: announcements, offers, editorial, order follow-ups. It is the only channel where the list belongs to you rather than to a platform, which is why its value grows while rented reach on social networks keeps getting more expensive.
The kinds of email
- Newsletters and campaigns: news, offers and articles sent to the whole list or to a part of it.
- Automated sequences: a welcome series for new subscribers, a reminder about an abandoned cart, a request for a review after delivery, an offer before a contract ends.
- Transactional email: order confirmations, invoices, tracking numbers. Opened by almost everyone, and often wasted as plain receipts.
In the EU, marketing email needs the recipient’s consent, or an existing customer relationship for similar products, and every message needs a working way to unsubscribe (GDPR and the ePrivacy rules).
Example
An online pet food shop has 6,000 subscribers and sends one newsletter a month, which brings about 40 orders. Then it adds two automated emails: a reminder three hours after an abandoned cart, and a “time to restock?” email 28 days after each order of a large bag of food.
The cart reminder recovers 9% of abandoned carts, about 35 orders a month. The restock email brings 120 orders a month, three times the newsletter, because it arrives when the bag is nearly empty. At an average order of €38, the two emails bring about €5,900 a month and cost almost nothing to send once they are set up.
Why it matters for a business
An email list is the one audience a business owns. Reach on social networks and in search is rented and changes with every algorithm update; a list of people who asked to hear from you stays, and costs almost nothing per message. It works best with those who already know you: past customers, people who asked for a quote, readers of your articles. That is why email is usually the cheapest channel for repeat sales and customer retention.
Open rates now overstate how many people read an email, because some mail apps load images on their own. Clicks, orders and replies are the numbers to trust. And to reach the inbox at all, the sending domain has to be set up properly, including a DMARC record, which Gmail and Yahoo have required from bulk senders since 2024.
What to ask
- How many people on our list have opened or clicked anything in the last six months?
- Which automated emails do we have, and how many orders does each one bring?
- Do we measure email by clicks, orders and replies, or only by opens?
- Is our sending domain set up with SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
Email is the cheapest channel to people who already know you. Where it sits in the plan, next to search and advertising, is decided in our digital marketing work.