Introduction: Email Marketing

"I want to do business with a company that treats emailing me as a privilege, not a transaction."

— Andrea Mignolo

Email marketing

The beauty of email marketing is that it takes a tool we all already use—our inbox—and turns it into a channel for brand affinity and customer acquisition.

The best email marketing is permission-based, meaning that customers opt in to the type of communication they want from you. If you play email right, customers will want to hear from you—because you’re a friend in their inbox.

However, inboxes are overwhelming. As you read through this module, remember that the best approach is a human one: Show subscribers that there are humans behind your emails—people who truly want to help solve their problems.

Revenue follows trust.

How we got here

Email marketing evolved from direct mail marketing:

• Catalogs to get people to order products.
• Coupons to people to come into stores.
• Brochures to book sales calls for vacations.
• Magazines to build brand awareness.

But as email rose in popularity, it became more efficient to send campaigns to inboxes instead of mailboxes.

After all, it costs money to send physical mail out to thousands of people.

The process hasn’t changed much from direct mail marketing: Send communication to an audience that builds brand and generates revenue.

Only the medium has changed.

Why you need to learn email marketing

Collecting an email address goes a lot further than collecting, say, a Twitter follower.

Email is an owned channel

It’s great to grow a Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn following. But, with social media, only a fraction of your audience will ever see your organic content. You’re at the mercy of an algorithm that decides whether or not to surface your content.

Take a post on Instagram:

• Instagram surfaces your organic post to 10% of your followers.
• If it gets strong engagement, it goes to the next 10% of your followers. If it doesn’t get strong enough engagement, Instagram stops surfacing your post.

With email, you're directly in subscribers’ inboxes. No gatekeepers.

Well, the only gatekeeper is how much they trust you. Whether you’ve proven you’re a good use of their time.

Email is high ROI

Email is the most profitable marketing channel.

On average, email earns $40 for every $1 spent.

Why? Because it’s cheap to send emails and your best-converting customers are people who already know who you are.

The next highest ROI channel is almost half as valuable: SEO with about $22 return for every $1 spent.

What we'll cover in this module

• Strategy and types of emails
• Ways to grow your list
• How to create a good email
• How to use segmentation
• Deliverability best practices
• Tools for automation

Want to make sure your subscribers actually see and open your emails? You'll want to optimize your email deliverability. This course has a very high-level overview of email deliverability. If you'd like to go even deeper, check out Own the Inbox, our video course created with email specialist, Drew Price (ex-Grammarly).