Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that targets customers or prospects via emails sent straight to their inboxes. It’s usually used to promote products and/or services (transactional emails), but can also be used to create relationships with potential customers and to build brand awareness.

Ready to talk about your email marketing needs? Get in touch today!

An ESP (Email Service provider) is a company that provides an email platform or tool to help you send marketing emails. These tools usually allow users to create subscriber lists, create emails, send emails, check reports and analytics for campaigns, test email variations, and so much more.

Most are built around a user-friendly drag-and-drop email format, so making changes to templates can be fairly straightforward. However, we would still recommend getting an expert to make the changes for you to ensure best practices are followed every step of the way.

Email can give you round-the-clock access to your audience via their inbox, on their desktop or mobile device. A well-crafted email, delivered at the right time, can be a very effective marketing tool, and provide a strong return on investment (ROI).

Not only is email marketing still effective, it generally shows remarkably strong results. According to The Data and Marketing Association, every £1 you spend can create an average return of £32!

Plus 49% of consumers said that they like to get email newsletters and promotions from their favourite brands every week. (Statista)

Email delivery rate is the rate at which your emails reach the inboxes of your subscribers. To work out the email delivery rate, divide the number of emails sent by the number of emails that were successfully delivered.

For example: 1000 emails sent, 867 emails delivered: 86.7% delivery rate.

The open rate for an email is the percentage of people who opened it. A low open rate suggests that improvements could be made to your subject line, preview text, “from” name, and email address.

Open rate and deliverability rate are two very different metrics, so shouldn’t be confused. A deliverability rate is the rate of your emails that reach your subscribers’ inboxes. To calculate your own deliverability rate, just divide the number of emails that you sent by the number of emails that were delivered correctly.

The click-through rate (CTR) for an email is the percentage of people who clicked on a link within it. This is usually influenced by the content used within the email, as well as the call to action that you use. A higher CTR rate usually helps to increase your website conversion rate.

Any email that doesn’t reach the subscribers’ inbox is defined as a bounce. However, there is an important difference between a soft and a hard bounce.

A soft bounce occurs when a message fails to reach an inbox due to a temporary issue (i.e. the recipient’s inbox is full) and the message will be resent when this issue has been fixed.

A hard bounce occurs when the email could not reach an inbox at all. This is usually because the email address is invalid, blocked or fake.

A/B testing is used to work out the most effective version of your email. It allows you to test things such as subject lines, email layouts, added personal content, call-to-actions, headlines, images, etc.

When A/B testing, you usually send the email to 50% of your audience (25% to each version). The remaining 50% are then sent the version of the email that produced the best results.

Audience segmentation is the practice of grouping your subscribers based on shared features. This is most commonly used to create gendered segments. However, it can also be used to send your subscribers emails based on their age, occupation, loyalty, country, city etc.

Marketing automation is a form of email marketing that sends out an email automatically based on the actions of your subscribers. This is usually based on things such as subscribing to emails, a birthday, abandoned baskets, etc.

Automated emails are a great opportunity for continuing a relationship with your subscribers without having to create and send brand-new content. Setting up detailed (yet complex) automation workflows can be a great way to ensure that customers continue to receive effective service, even outside of your normal operating hours.

You should never buy a list to increase your email subscribers, as you will be acting against the terms of GDPR. Also, your email delivery rate can suffer as a result due to your emails being flagged as spam.

The best way of building your email list is to grow one by allowing people to sign up on your website.