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I‘m pretty sure I’ve said this in a few blog posts already, so if you‘ve heard this from me before, I apologize, but it’s true: In addition to being a blogger, I‘m in charge of curating and sending out HubSpot’s Marketing Blog newsletter.
So, I know a thing or two about email marketing and that, when done correctly, it’s as powerful as any other marketing tactic today. But notice the key phrase: done correctly.
Fortunately, I’ve created this handy dandy guide you’re about to read that will set you up for success in your email marketing strategy.
I’ll review the best ways to leverage email marketing, and benefits and statistics that show the importance of email (in case you need extra convincing).
Let’s dig in.
What is email marketing?
Getting Started with Email Marketing
How to Send Marketing Emails
Email Regulations You Should Know
Email Marketing Tips
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers via email.
The goal is building customer relationships, promoting products or services, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving sales.
In my experience, email marketing allows me to reach my target audience directly with personalized and relevant content. It’s also cost-effective, easy to track, and provides valuable data for analyzing campaign success.
Marketers have been using email as a channel for almost as long as they’ve been using the internet. The first marketing email was sent in 1978, resulting in $13 million in sales.
Email has been one of the most highly used marketing channels ever since.
This is because email is a flexible yet cost-effective way to reach many people relatively quickly. I can also personalize my message to target specific audiences and generate leads.
Email marketing can take many different forms. These campaigns can include a single email announcing new content, an ongoing newsletter delivered regularly, or contacting customers about product updates.
Email isn’t as shiny as newer channels, like messaging and social. However, email is an effective way to build an audience that gets results.
“One of my favorite parts about email marketing is its intimacy,” says Rob Litterst, head of strategy and operations for HubSpot’s Newsletter Network.
“Access to someone‘s inbox is sacred, and for a person to welcome you in, there’s already a certain level of trust that you just can’t achieve with other platforms,” he says.
Email marketing remains a powerful tactic to:
Beyond just the statistics, perhaps the best reason to use email marketing is that you own the channel. Outside of compliance regulations, no external entity can impact how, when, or why you reach out to your subscribers.
Time and time again, email proves to be an unsung hero in marketing.
While it’s the second-most used marketing channel (beat by social media), a whopping 95% of email marketers call it practical,” says Pamela Bump, head of content growth at HubSpot.
“For HubSpot — and our blog team — we’ve deeply leveraged email and even catered blog posts to our very subscribers,” she says. “Over the years, this has driven high ROI, millions of page views, countless conversions, and even customers.”
Still have doubts? Consider this:
Email marketing has an impressive ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. Furthermore, email marketing revenue is expected to exceed $13 billion by 2025, according to Statista.
In addition to boosting revenue, marketing emails can also boost traffic to your website. I know this from personal experience.
As I mentioned earlier, I run the marketing blog email newsletter. One of my responsibilities is to monitor the traffic our blog content generates.
So, I personally noticed that blog posts bring in significantly more traffic when they’re included in our email marketing newsletter.
Email marketing rules change based on your industry and who you’re marketing to. Below are some email marketing trends for B2B, B2C, e-commerce, and real estate companies that can inform your email marketing strategy.
I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the vast possibilities of email marketing, so let’s break down a few key steps to get you started building a solid email campaign that will delight your customers.
You can think of these steps as creating a successful email marketing strategy.
You can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people actually want to read. It just takes a plan (one that can be broken down into a few key steps).
Think of the following five steps as an outline for your email strategy. We’ll dive deeper into some of these in a moment.
Effective emails, whether a campaign or a one-off, start with understanding your audience.
Like everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona, understand what pain points they’re dealing with, and tailor your email campaign to your audience’s needs. To better utilize & understand more about the defined audience, use HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics software.
Usually, before I think up campaign goals, I gather some context.
I always want to know the average email stats for my industry and use them as benchmarks for my goals. This should be your process as well.
As you can see, these benchmarks vary greatly. Using this guide will help you create realistic goals for your team.
You need people to email, right? An email list (we’ll cover how to build your email list in the next section) is a group of users who have permitted you to send them relevant content.
To build that list, you need several ways for prospects to opt-in to receive your emails which we’ll cover in another section in just a moment.
Don’t be discouraged if you only have a few people on your list. It can take some time to build. In the meantime, treat every subscriber and lead like gold, and you’ll start seeing your email list grow organically.
Email campaigns vary, and trying to decide between them can be overwhelming. Do you send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements? Which blog posts are worth sharing?
The answer is subjective, but I recommend starting by understanding the different types of email campaigns (here are some excellent ones). For example, there are:
Then, based on your email marketing goals, you decide what works best for your audience.
You don’t have to choose just one type. you can set up different lists for different types of emails so customers and prospects can sign up for and receive relevant emails.
Pro Tip: Need help writing your emails? I recommend Campaign Assistant, HubSpot’s generative AI tool that helps you quickly write effective marketing email copy that aligns with your campaigns.
Decide how often you plan to contact your list and inform your audience upfront.
This way, they’ll know exactly what to expect ahead of time. Forgetting this can lead to high unsubscribe lists and even get you in their spam.
In addition, once you set a schedule, be consistent. It will build trust and ensure you stay top of mind for your audience.
This should come as no surprise. As marketers, we measure everything. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails, yielding large results.
I’ll dive deeper into the exact KPIs to monitor further on, but marketers told us that the most important email marketing metrics to track are clickthrough rate, open rate, and leads/conversions from email.
Now that you understand the steps to creating an email marketing strategy, we‘ll look at what’s involved in building your email list.
An email marketing provider (ESP) is an excellent resource if you’re looking for any support while fine-tuning your email marketing efforts.
Depending on your needs and types of campaigns, there are several paid and free email marketing platforms including HubSpot, Constant Contact, MailChimp or other Mailchimp alternatives.
For example, HubSpot’s Email Marketing tool allows me to efficiently create, personalize, and optimize marketing emails that feel and look professional without designers or IT.
There are a variety of features to help me create the best email marketing campaigns and support all of my email marketing goals.
Additionally, I can analyze the success of my email marketing so I can share the data that matters most to my business with my team. The best part? HubSpot’s Email Marketing service is available for free.
Here are examples of features services like HubSpot offer to consider when choosing an email service provider:
Now to my favorite part: filling the email list with eager prospects excited to hear from you.
There are many creative ways to build your email list (and, no, purchasing emails ain’t one).
Tactically speaking, list building comes down to two key elements that work cohesively to grow your subscriber numbers: lead magnets and opt-in forms.
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Here’s how I build and grow my email list.
Your lead magnet is exactly as it sounds: It attracts prospects to your email list, usually as a free offer.
The offer can take many formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away for free in exchange for an email address.
There’s just one problem: People have become hyper-protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive an email address without exchanging it for something valuable.
Think about a lead magnet that is relevant, useful, and makes your prospects’ lives easier.
Here are a few types of lead magnets you could create:
If you’re short on resources, you can even repurpose existing content to create lead magnets.
Your opt-in form is how you get a prospect’s information to add them to your list.
It’s the gate between your future leads and the incredible asset you created with them in mind.
Here are some tips for creating an enticing opt-in form:
Your form should be branded, stand out from the page, and entice people to sign up. You want to excite readers with the offer.
While your goal is to get people to enter their information, it isn’t to deceive them. Any information on your form should be a truthful representation of the offer.
This could be one of your first interactions with your prospect. Don’t scare them away with a long long-form several fields.
Ask for only the most essential information: first name and email is a good place to start.
It may seem counterproductive to ask your subscribers to opt into your emails twice, but some research on open rates suggests that customers may prefer a confirmed opt-in (COI) email more than a welcome email.
Take yourself through the user experience before you go live. Double-check that the form works as intended, the thank you page is live, and your offer is delivered as promised.
This is one of your first impressions of your new lead — make it a professional and positive one.
Next, let’s take a moment to cover some universally accepted email marketing best practices regarding how to send marketing emails.
If all goes well, you’ll have built a robust list of subscribers and leads waiting to hear from you. But you can’t start emailing just yet unless you want to end up in a spam folder, or worse, a blocked list.
Here are a few important things to remember before you start emailing your list.
Once you’ve added people to your list, you must break them down into different segments.
That way, instead of having a monolithic email list of everybody, you’ll have easier-to-manage subcategories that pertain to your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences.
Our subscribers are humans, after all, and we should do our best to treat them as such. That means not sending generic email blasts.
Each person who signs up to receive your emails is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer (which is the ultimate goal of all this).
If you send a discount coupon for your product to subscribers that don’t even know how to diagnose their problem, you’ll probably lose them. That’s because you’re skipping the part where you build trust and develop the relationship.
Every email you send should treat your subscribers like humans you want to connect with, as opposed to a herd of leads you’re trying to corral into a one-size-fits-all box.
The more you segment your list, the more trust you build with your leads, and the easier it’ll be to convert them later.
The first step in segmentation is creating separate lead magnets and opt-in forms for each part of the buyer’s journey. That way, your contacts are automatically divided into separate lists.
Beyond that, email marketing platforms allow you to segment your email list by contact data and behavior to help you send the right emails to the right people.
Here are some ways you could break up your list:
In reality, you can segment your list any way that you want. Just make sure to be as exclusive as possible when sending emails to each subgroup.
Not all email lists are created equal. Some audiences prefer personalization, and others will think it’s spammy. Some audiences will like bright, eye-catching CTA buttons. Others will prefer a more subtle call-to-action.
You’ll never know what type of people make up your email list until you test the variables. That’s where A/B testing comes in handy.
“If you‘re considering making any structural or content alterations to your email marketing, A/B testing is an excellent way to determine if the changes will be successful or worthwhile before they’re implemented on a larger scale,” says Madison Zoey Vettorino, former marketing manager and SEO content writer for HubSpot’s Website Blog.
Surprisingly, not many brands leverage it. A 2021 Litmus study found that 44% of marketers rarely A/B or multivariate test their emails. Only 19% do it often or always.
A/B testing, or split testing, is a way to see what type of email performs best with your audience by analyzing the results of email A against email B. This can be especially helpful when working with templates.
“Since emails often have the same template, A/B testing is smart because you can usually control variables outside of the test and get a solid signal on what performs better,” HubSpot’s Litterst says.
Here’s the step-by-step process for A/B testing your emails:
Most email service providers will have A/B testing built into their software, which will make it easy for you to compare email results without much manual work.
When conducting an A/B test, consider these tips:
“For example, try the same email with a different subject line. Or the same email and same subject line with a different CTA,” says Curtis del Principe, a content strategist and writer at HubSpot.
“It might be tempting to make several changes at once, but that makes it harder to pinpoint the true cause of your wins or losses,” he says.
A/B test should be run with intention. Making quick changes and approaching results unscientifically can lead to incorrect conclusions.
“You might be tempted to run an informal A/B test by making a change and then casually paying attention to the responses that you get. This unscientific method can easily be skewed by factors outside your control (like seasonality or deliverability),” says del Principe.
“It also leaves out a ton of valuable data, like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, or sharing/forwarding rate.”
Instead, use an email marketing tool, like Marketing Hub or BuzzStream, to help you get a broader and more accurate understanding of your email performance.
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Once you’ve got your first few campaigns, it’s time to see how they’re performing.
By diving into your email marketing analytics, you‘ll be able to make better decisions that will help your business’s bottom line, resonate with your subscribers, readers, and customers, and justify your work to the rest of your company.
Here are the best ways to analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
There are four key metrics to pay attention to when evaluating the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.
Many factors impact your KPIs, and it will take some experimentation and guesswork to figure out which tweaks to your emails will yield the biggest significance.
If you aren’t getting the desired numbers, try playing with these variables to improve your email results.
Once you’ve got some campaigns under your belt, it’s time to look at how they performed. Your data does no good if you can’t report it in an organized fashion.
An email marketing report is a spreadsheet where you can record your results in one place to help you make inferences from your KPIs and take action to improve them.
Here’s how you should organize your report.
Email regulations are important to follow as they regulate and protect consumers’ desires to know how and why their information is being used.
If there’s anything we care about, it’s complying with what our customers—or potential customers—want.
There are a few key ones that you should understand:
Technically, CAN-SPAM is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (because sometimes the two go together).
In practice, it’s a way to protect your subscribers’ right to only receive emails that they’ve requested.
The law was passed in 2003 and applies to any commercial emails used for business purposes.
Here are the ways to ensure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant:
Please note: This is not to be confused with legal advice. See the FTC’s site for more specific legal information regarding CAN-SPAM laws.
While some may view these newly implemented email regulations as burdensome and unnecessary, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) moves us closer to building long-lasting, trusting customer relationships.
GDPR is about giving your customers the right to choose. They choose your emails. They decide to hear from you. They choose your products. And that is exactly what inbound marketing is about.
It is important to note that GDPR only applies to businesses operating in the European Union and businesses that market to EU citizens.
Noncompliance will result in significant fees that aren’t worth the risk, so make sure to read the GDPR guidelines entirely.
Here’s an overview of how you can comply with GDPR laws:
These regulations will be taken seriously (as they should), so it’s a good idea to create a GDPR strategy for your business before sending emails.
You spend time creating the perfect email and adhering to regulations, so the last thing you want is to end up in a spam folder.
You’ll want to avoid the spam folder because:
You can avoid being deduced to spam with the following.
A whitelist is a list of approved senders that can reach the subscriber’s inbox. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have your new subscriber add your email address to their address book.
Include directions on how to do this in your welcome email.
Avoid using all caps and multiple exclamation points, as well as spam trigger words, like “opt-in,” “click below,” and “order,” that are easily detected and marked down by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Your email service provider’s reputation affects your deliverability, so stick to established, well-known companies.
Once someone opts in to your email list, send an email asking them to confirm. This ensures that your new subscriber is genuinely interested in your emails and will likely be more engaged.
(Check out more ways you can avoid the spam filter.)
And last but certainly not least, you need to consistently measure the success of your email marketing efforts. There are a number of options you can choose from when it comes to your business’s email marketing analytics.
While you probably don’t think twice about the formatting or subject line of an email you send to a friend, email marketing requires a lot more consideration.
Everything from the time you send your email to the devices on which your email could be opened matters.
Your goal with every email is to generate more leads, which makes crafting a marketing email a more involved process than other emails you’ve written.
Let’s touch on the components of a successful marketing email:
Copy: The copy in the body of your email should be consistent with your voice and stick to only one topic.
Images: Choose images that are optimized for all devices, eye-catching, and relevant.
CTA: Your call-to-action should lead to a relevant offer and stand out from the rest of the email.
Timing: Based on a study that observed response rates of 20 million emails, Tuesday at 11 AM ET is the best day and time to send your email.
Responsiveness: 55% of emails are opened on mobile. Your email should, therefore, be optimized for this as well as all other devices.
Personalization: Write every email like you’re sending it to a friend. Be personable and address your reader in a familiar tone.
Subject Line: Use clear, actionable, enticing language that is personalized and aligned with the body of the email.
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Pro tip: Leverage AI for email marketing. By using tools like our AI Email Writer, you can generate copy that suits your goals, saving time along the way.
“Personalization isn’t just about adding a contact’s name to the subject line anymore but is all about creating personalized experiences that demonstrate you understand them and have insider knowledge about how they can use your products to succeed,” Aleia Walker, growth marketing manager at HubSpot.
Now that you know who you’re emailing and what’s important to them, sending emails with personalized touches will be much easier.
Sure, you’re speaking to 100+ people at one time, but your leads don’t need to know it.
Personalized emails have higher open rates. In addition, 83% of customers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience.
You’ve gathered all this unique data. Your email marketing software allows for personalization tokens. You have no excuse for sending generic emails that don’t make your leads feel special.
“It’s more impactful to base email personalization on two or three factors instead of just what a contact is engaging with on your side,” Walker says.
Walker suggests, “Consider personalizing emails based on what you know about your contact, such as their location, industry, employee size, etc., alongside how they engage with your content.”
Here are a few ways to personalize your emails:
Email marketing templates — like these ones from HubSpot — are another great resource to help you with your email marketing.
Unless you’re a designer and developer, on top of being a skilled marketer, templates will save you a ton of time — they take the design, coding, and UX-definition work out of crafting your emails.
Just one caveat: when making your selection, choose email templates that are proven to be effective.
The highest-quality templates come from the most reputable ESPs that have tested them against thousands of alternatives. So, stick with the professionals.
If you’re struggling with the above tips, HubSpot offers e-mail marketing tools to help personalize your marketing emails, optimize your emails with A/B testing, and create aesthetically pleasing emails using templates.
Furthermore, HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant uses AI technology to generate copy for marketing emails.
While there are many rules to sending a marketing email, the most important is this: Treat the reader on the other end like you’re writing to a friend.
Trust me, you can achieve all of your email marketing goals if you keep this golden rule top of mind in every autoresponder, lead magnet, and subject line.
And remember, the more you help your subscribers, the more they will want to hear from you and look forward to opening emails that you send.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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