Email Marketing FAQs
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that targets customers or prospects via emails sent straight to their inbox. It is usually used to promote products and/or services (transactional emails), but can also be used to create relationships with potential customers.
What is an ESP?
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 emails and much more.
Most are built around a user friendly drag and drop format, so it’s usually fairly easy to make changes to templates. However, we would still recommend getting an expert to make changes for you
Why is email important in a digital marketing strategy?
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).
Is email marketing still effective?
Not only is it still effective, it generally shows really strong results. According to The Data and Marketing Association, every £1 you spend can create an average return of £32. This represents a great return on investment.
Also, 49% of consumers said that they like to get email newsletters and promotions from their favourite brands every week.
What is an email delivery rate?
Email delivery rate is the rate at which your emails are at reaching the inboxes of your subscribers. To work out email delivery rate, divide the number of emails sent by the number of emails that successfully delivered.
Example: 1000 emails sent, 867 emails delivered: 86.7% delivery rate.
What is an open 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.
Is there a difference between open rate and deliverability rate?
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 inbox. To calculate your own deliverability rate, just divide the number of emails that you sent by the number of emails that delivered correctly.
What is a click through rate?
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 click through rate usually helps to increase your website conversion rate.
What is the difference between a soft and a hard bounce?
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 recipients 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.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is used to work out the most effective version of your email. It allows you to test things such as: subject line, layout, added personal content, call-to-actions, headline, 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.
What is audience segmentation?
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.
What is marketing automation?
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 and abandoned baskets etc.
Automated emails are a great opportunity for continuing a relationship with your subscribers without having to send them brand new content.
Should I buy an email list?
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.
We know that industry jargon can sometimes be tricky to understand. For the ultimate list of A-Z industry terms, check out our Digital Marketing Glossary.
