What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to connect with potential customers, raise brand awareness, build customer loyalty, and promote marketing efforts. 

In the world of online marketing, email marketing can often be a low-cost and high-impact tool with the ability to increase customer engagement and drive sales. As a result, it is a cornerstone of many digital marketing strategies today.

Explore the topic of email marketing, including the benefits of email marketing and tips for beginning your email marketing strategy.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a strategy in which a business uses email to communicate and connect with its customer base. This is a form of direct marketing you can employ to inform customers, increase brand awareness, and promote specific products and services. Email marketing has a long history, but today’s marketing professionals use automation and email marketing software to create personalized email campaigns that meet customers at whatever stage of the journey they find themselves. 

Types of email marketing

You can consider incorporating several types of marketing emails into your email marketing strategy. Some common types include:

• Welcome emails

• Email newsletters

• Promotional emails

• Lead nurturing emails or re-engagement emails

• Transactional emails, such as confirmation emails or password reset notices

• Feedback or survey emails

• Milestone emails, such as for customer birthdays or anniversaries

What does an email marketer do?

An email marketer helps companies create digital marketing materials for emailing to customers or leads. To be successful as an email marketing specialist, you’ll need creative skills like design and writing, as well as knowledge of analytics and, in some cases, programming skills. 

Email marketing jobs

If email marketing sounds like a career field you want to explore, you have several options for email marketing jobs to consider. Below, take a closer look at the roles of email marketing coordinator, email marketing specialist, and email marketing manager. 

Email marketing coordinator

Average annual salary in the US (Glassdoor): $54,336 [1]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 6 percent [2]

In the role of an email marketing coordinator, you will be responsible for creating and managing marketing campaigns. You may coordinate a team of content creators and marketing specialists, or you may directly build and deploy email marketing programs. You will also track your campaigns and report your metrics and analysis to stakeholders. 

Email marketing specialist

Average annual salary in the US (Glassdoor): $63,512 [3]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 6 percent [2]

As an email marketing specialist, you will deploy email marketing campaigns. Depending on your role on the marketing team or how big your team is, you may be responsible for writing content, creating graphics, and managing email lists. Additionally, you may need to employ technical skills like basic coding and email automation. 

Email marketing manager

Average annual salary in the US (Glassdoor): $74,806 [4]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 6 percent [2]

In this role, you will be more involved with the strategic decisions of planning marketing campaigns, and you will manage a team of professionals who help you execute those strategies. You may have the opportunity to collaborate with product managers, designers, and content writers to craft a cohesive message that supports company goals. 

Benefits of email marketing

Email is one of the most popular modes of online communication. Statista estimates that globally, people will send a total of 392.5 billion emails every day by 2026 [5]. 

The ability to reach large numbers of potential customers with just a click makes email a relatively cheap digital marketing tool with a potentially high impact. One 2023 study from Statista, for instance, found that 52.8 percent of marketers experienced a return on investment (ROI) two-time improvement rate on their e-mail marketing campaigns, and 16.4 percent saw a three-time improvement rate [6]. Statista also reported that 52 percent of marketers doubled their email marketing ROI from 2022 to 2023, with another 5.7 percent of professionals indicating they improved their ROI by four times [7]. Total email marketing revenue globally is likely to reach $37.5 billion by 2032 [8].

Email marketing best practices and tips

A successful email marketing campaign can engage your previous customers, attract new ones, and help you meet your marketing goals. To achieve this, though, you will need to create a thoughtful email campaign that strategically engages customers with relevant and well-timed messages.

As you are working on building your own email marketing campaign, keep the following tips in mind: 

1. Craft eye-catching email subject lines.

2. Intentionally structure your message.

3. Keep your design simple.

4. Only email people who opted into your list.

5. Strategically time your emails.

6. Monitor progress and run tests.

Explore each tip in greater detail below.

1. Craft eye-catching email subject lines.

A subject line catches the reader’s attention and prompts them to open the message, while the content of the message elaborates on your value proposition and urges readers to act.

The high volume of daily emails means that competition is strong in recipients’ inboxes, so a stellar subject line can help you stand out from the crowd. This reality is underscored by the fact that the average open rate for branded emails across all industries is 35.63 percent [9]. 

Standout subject lines are intriguing and relevant to recipients. Some ways to improve your subject lines include the following: 

• Clearly state a promotion: “Get 15% off Your Next Purchase”

• Create a sense of urgency: “Hurry! Our 30% Off Spring Sale Ends in 24 Hours”

• Evoke a sense of curiosity: “Ice Skating in June?”

• Highlight a specific time period: “Still Have Christmas Shopping To Do? We’re Here to Help.”

• Personalize it: “Jane, Your Subscription Has Almost Expired!”

2. Intentionally structure your message.

Structure is an important piece of any writing, but especially so for marketing emails. 

Effectively structuring your message content will allow you to immediately articulate your value proposition to readers. According to a January 2024 survey, 54 percent of adults open marketing emails if it is relevant to the products they're interested in when they receive the message [10]. The second leading factor (19 percent) is personalization beyond just mentioning their name.

To optimize open rates, consider these ways to maximize impact:

• Put the most important information at the top of your email, such as the promotion you most want your audience to see.

• Make it scannable so readers can easily find the information they need.

• Keep text at a minimum and use links to redirect readers to longer pieces, such as blog posts referenced in the email.

• Include CTAs, such as links, throughout your piece.

• Make sure you add a clear CTA at the end of the email to direct those who have scrolled through the whole email.

3. Keep your design simple. 

The line between eye-catching and distracting can be thin. On one hand, you want to create a dynamic visual design that attracts attention. On the other, you want to make sure that you convey and highlight vital information. A simple design, then, is generally more effective than a more complicated one. 

Some key considerations when designing a marketing email include: 

• Use three or fewer colors in your email. A reduced palette will be eye-catching but not overly distracting.

• Emphasize your logo and branding. You want the recipient to quickly know exactly who sent the email and where they can go to get your product.

• Visually emphasize CTAs.

• Optimize your message for mobile devices. Many people read their email on their smartphones, so your messages should be well-suited for their devices.

4. Only email people who opted into your list. 

It is important that you only email individuals who have opted to receive them, for several reasons. First, while it is technically possible to purchase lists of email addresses from third-party sellers, this practice is forbidden on many marketing platforms.

Second, in some cases, it may actually be illegal for you to send marketing emails to individuals who’ve opted out of receiving them. In the United States, for example, the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act) is a 2003 law that expressly forbids sending emails to those who have previously opted out of them [11]. 

Additionally, sending unsolicited emails can be inefficient. While it may seem like sending as many emails as possible will help you reach your marketing goals, the reality is that email marketing is most effective when you are targeting a specific audience. Rather than sending emails to people who don't want them—and risking your emails being sent to spam folders or boosting your unsubscribe rates—it makes more sense to advertise your product or service to those who have already expressed an interest. 

5. Strategically time your emails. 

In many ways, email marketing is all about timing. Sometimes, sending the right message at the right time is the best strategy to improve customer engagement and meet your email marketing goals.

As a form of digital marketing, email marketing benefits from being easily automated. Marketing automation allows you to automatically send emails to a targeted audience. You can use email automation to send emails at certain times of the year, such as during the holidays, or to create an automated email series to send after a potential customer takes a specific action, such as subscribing to your email list.

Automated nurture sequences help keep recipients engaged by automatically sending out relevant emails that maintain brand awareness and guide them through your marketing funnel. 

6. Monitor and run tests.

One of the benefits of digital marketing is that you regularly receive data on the efficacy of your campaigns. As you further develop your marketing campaign, this data can be invaluable in finding more efficient approaches to reaching and communicating with your target audience. 

Email marketing platforms allow you to keep track of important data, such as your open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. Furthermore, many of them also allow you to run A/B tests, which compare the performance of two different campaigns to identify the characteristics of high-performing emails.

Routinely analyzing your data and conducting tests can help you improve the performance of your overall email marketing campaign. Additionally, as you collect data, you can develop email templates based on what tends to work for your business and further your efficiency for future campaigns.

Email marketing platforms and tools 

Email marketers tend to use a range of email marketing software and platforms to maximize their team efficiency. As you are implementing your marketing strategy, these platforms offer advanced features that can help you design personalized emails, manage your contact list, send automated emails, and monitor your email marketing efforts. 

Some common email marketing platforms include: 

• Brevo

• Mailchimp 

• Omnisend

• Get Response

• Constant Contact

• Active Campaign

Whatever your marketing goals, you can use these platforms to execute your email marketing strategy. 

Email marketing glossary 

Digital marketers use a variety of terms to describe the email marketing process. This glossary includes some key terms you can get to know: 

• Acceptance rate: The percentage of messages recipients’ email servers receive.

• Bounce rate: The percentage of messages recipients’ email servers do not receive.

• Open rate: The percentage of emails that recipients opened. An email campaign’s open rate is one of the key metrics for determining its success. The higher the open rate, the better. 

• Subject line: The text that shows up in a recipient’s inbox describing the email. Subject lines should be intriguing and relevant to recipients. 

• Call to action (CTA): A link or button that connects to a download or website, such as a product page, blog post, or scheduling page.

• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click on a CTA in an email.

• Conversion rate: The number of recipients who follow through with a CTA by clicking a link or making a purchase, such as when a recipient clicks on a link to your website.

• IP warming: The practice of gradually sending an increasing number of emails to a recipient in order to establish your IP address. 

• Opt-in/opt-out: To either subscribe (opt-in) or unsubscribe (opt-out) from an email list.

• Nurture sequences: A series of automated emails that you send when someone signs up for your email list. Nurture sequences foster engagement throughout the customer journey and help push customers further along the marketing funnel. 

Strengthen your email marketing campaign with Coursera

A strong email marketing campaign has the potential to lead to future marketing success. Prepare for a career in marketing with a flexible online marketing certificate, like the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate. Or gain in-demand technical skills to help you better analyze your marketing campaigns with the Meta Marketing Analytics Professional Certificate on Coursera.