What is Email Marketing?

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What is email marketing? Basically the use of email to promote products and/or services. But a better email marketing definition is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing, which encompasses online marketing via websites, social media, blogs, etc. It is essentially the same as direct mail except that instead of sending mail through the postal service, messages are sent electronically via email.


Much of the spam email we all get proclaiming 'deals' on this, and that is a good example of email marketing at its worst; the mindless email barrage.


Someone somewhere buys an email list (or several!) and sends an email along the lines of "Get ___________ (the product name) for only $_____! (the amount) to everyone on the list – sometimes repeatedly. All this does is annoy everyone and give email marketing a bad name.


At its best, email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their customers.

Email Marketing Can Be Personalized
Particular groups of customers can be targeted or even individuals. Offering individual customers special deals on merchandise and/or services on the customer's birthday, for instance, is one example of email marketing personalization. (A restaurant might send an email to customers on their birthday offering 50% off an entree,) Email marketing helps a business develop and maintain a relationship with a customer over time that hopefully results in increased sales and increased customer loyalty.

Email marketing best practices include developing your own email list rather than buying an email list(s) and making participation in your email list opt-in rather than opt-out (using permission-based email marketing). Email should also be optimized for mobile usage as according to statistics over half of emails are opened on mobile devices.
source:thebalancesmb.com