In the early days of the internet boom, people used to be happy receiving emails, but with today’s high rates of unsolicited scam and spam emails that find their ways flying into peoples’ inboxes, you may be left to ask if reaching people and customers through email is still worth it? The answer is yes; you’ll soon know why.

Email marketing involves the use of email to request business, send advertisements, solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build trust, loyalty, or brand awareness. This is achieved with the use of autoresponders.

Types of marketing emails that you can send

There are two broad categories of marketing emails that you can send to your subscribers: informational emails and transactional emails.

Informational emails

These are the kinds of emails you send to people to let them know of a new product launch, improved or discounted offers, and your other marketing offers. You should only send informational emails to individuals who are already in your list. The following are brief descriptions of different types of informational emails.

1. New content announcement email

You could choose to use email to announce your new eBook, product, coupon, seminar, etc. These kinds of emails usually end with a strong call-to-action where you urge subscribers to try the products or services you talked about in the main body of the email.

2. Product update emails

These are the kinds of emails you can send on a weekly or a monthly basis to subscribers on your list letting them in on the changes that have taken place with the products or services they bought from you. These types achieve results if they are short and straightforward.

3. Newsletters or digital magazine

Newsletters or digital magazines are emails that are designed with HTML elements that incorporate both text, video, and images. Because of their high graphical nature, you can use them to send product updates where you include the image of the product and a corresponding text to explain the product. You can also use them to send news laced with graphical contents. You can include links pointing to your website and then ask your readers to visit your website to read more. This way, you achieve the purpose of your email without necessarily making the body lengthy – nobody likes to read long emails.

4. Event invitation

That is, using email to promote your upcoming event, and you can always make it visual, just like newsletters.

Other types of marketing emails include;

5. Dedicated send: where you only send to a portion of your list that might be interested instead of the whole list.

6. Co-marketing email: where you can partner with some other marketers or companies to send emails for some mutually beneficial event, task, or other promotion.

7. Social media send: where you target members of social media groups like LinkedIn groups. These emails often find their ways into the inbox of the members of the groups.

Transactional emails

These are the kinds of emails you send to your people majorly through autoresponders when they take specific actions such as signing up for your newsletter, purchasing your product, etc. below are types of transactional emails.

1. Confirmation email: customers often want to know the outcome of the transactions they made; was it successful, was it declined? These are questions you can answer with confirmation emails. You can set your autoresponder to send these emails to customers who bought your product or ordered for your service.

2. Welcome email: these are the type you send to thank customers who just joined your list. You can also use these types of transactional emails to provide them more information or assistance about your product.

Why you should do email marketing

1. Email is an easy way to reach mobile customers: it is no news that the vast majority of the world’s population access their email with their mobile devices. With this knowledge, there is definitely no better way to reach mobile users than with the use of emails. You may argue that text messages could be better option, but don’t forget that text messages incur charges, and also have far lesser space for content than emails.

2. It’s an effective way to keep customers informed: that customer that subscribed to your list did so because they want to be informed about your latest offers, coupons, special sales, etc. and there is no better way to keep them informed than with the use of emails.

3. Email coupons drive up sales: everybody likes freebies, and the coupon you send through emails can help you tremendously in driving up sales.

4. You can integrate other marketing tactics into emails: there are more you can do with emails than just sending plain text. You can use emails to lure subscribers to take other desirable actions like visiting your website, especially if you know how to craft really powerful email copies.

5. It is inexpensive: This doesn’t need explanation.

Cons of marketing emails

1. spam filter: with the increasing rates at which spam emails are finding their ways into people’s inboxes, mail servers no longer deliver emails perceived as spam to people’s inbox. This means that your well-crafted email may end up in the spam folder of recipients. More and more people are also beginning to tighten their leashes on unsolicited emails. This is one of the major cons of using email as a marketing tool.

2. It takes resources and skills: for the best email marketing campaigns, you need some resources like autoresponders, and you also need to know how to write killer content.

In all, email marketing is still a valuable means of getting across to your customers. For the best results, you need to ensure that the email you are sending contains key information that your subscribers are looking for.