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Top 12 Advantages to an Email Marketing Strategy
Learn How To Wield This Crucial Marketing Blueprint
Kanishka Kumawat & Lenore Sterner
May 21st, 2024
This article has been updated to maintain its accuracy and relevance.
Imagine cooking your favorite meal, only to forget the most essential ingredient: salt.
Suddenly, the dish loses its appeal, doesn't it?
Email marketing is that seasoning when it comes to building a marketing strategy – an indispensable component of your overall marketing strategy.
It's not just an option; it's a necessity. Email marketing is only growing more crucial as the number of email users globally continues to rise. In 2023, 4.37 billion people used email, and that number is projected to grow to 4.73 billion by 2026.
Be it giants like YouTube and Airbnb or newsletters like The Hustle and Morning Brew, it is clear that email marketing holds immense potential when it comes to growing your business.
While starting can seem tedious, the returns that you can expect out of email marketing are beyond measure.
What are the perks and how can emailing be more fruitful than social media, you ask?
In this article, we will uncover the top 10 benefits (amongst many) of email marketing and how you can get started today.
Table of Contents
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves sending targeted messages to a group of individuals via email.
While it might seem like any other marketing strategy, the main advantage of email marketing is the ability to own your audience and not rely on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Imagine not owning your audience. If you are relying on social media exclusively, should something happen to your account or prevent you from using the platform, you could immediately lose what you worked so hard to build.
Email marketing mitigates that concern because your email list is yours and can’t be lost if you have account or platform issues. And with the ban on TikTok in India in June of 2020 and the potential ban in the U.S. in 2024, ownership of your audience becomes even more critical to ensuring your long-term success.
the TikTok ban is affecting creators everywhere
it's more important than ever to own your audience before it's gone
join some of the top TikTok creators already owning their audience with a newsletter on beehiiv👇
— beehiiv 🐝 (@beehiiv)
7:30 PM • Apr 24, 2024
Owning your audience also gives you more control over your content – a benefit that is especially important as social media platforms create stricter content guidelines and algorithms change regularly.
What Are Email Marketing Content Types?
At its core, email marketing involves the practice of sending targeted messages to a group of individuals through email.
These messages span a wide spectrum from promotional offers and newsletters to product updates and personalized recommendations, each designed with a particular purpose in mind.
Let’s examine these five content types:
Promotional Offers: Many businesses use email marketing to deliver promotional offers to their subscribers – so much that Gmail categorizes promotions as a separate section of your inbox.
Most of the major businesses you can name do some form of email marketing – from Airbnb to Uber – promoting their business and letting you know about sales and discounts (often exclusive to their email subscribers).
Newsletters: The newsletter business has grown immensely over the past couple of years. On beehiiv alone in 2022, there were 3674 people with newsletters. By 2023, that number skyrocketed to 26,345 and is only continuing to grow in 2024.
Newsletters often contain a mix of valuable content, such as industry insights, company updates, and curated articles. A fitness newsletter may send out a weekly or daily newsletter featuring workout tips, healthy recipes, and success stories.
Arnold Pump Club takes it a step further by analyzing health and fitness news and breaking the latest research down into bite-sized chunks – all on a daily basis.
Product Updates: For businesses that regularly ship new updates and products, email marketing is an ideal channel for showcasing those product updates to their audience. For example, beehiiv’s product announcements newsletter delivers all of the latest features and updates to the platform.
Survey Emails: Many businesses utilize surveys and feedback emails after purchases to find out what their customers think about their product and service. This is an excellent opportunity for you to get real-time feedback for your business and learn how your subscribers think you are doing.
Surveys and emails are also a great way to find out about any negative experiences that a subscriber may have had and provide an opportunity to immediately make it right before the situation becomes more serious.
Honeygrow, a restaurant that offers healthy eating from locally sourced foods, sent this email immediately following a recent visit. They politely asked for genuine feedback to find out more about their customer’s experience and what could be improved upon.
Welcome Email Sequence: When a new subscriber joins your newsletter, give them a taste of what’s in store with an automated, personalized welcome email sequence.
This series of emails is an introduction to your brand and your brand voice and sets your subscribers up to know what to expect from future emails. This solid tactic also kick-starts your relationship with your audience.
Is email marketing a good strategy?
Yes, it is, and it continues to be one of the best strategies you can employ as a part of your marketing efforts.
With the first ever email being sent in 1971, email marketing has stood the test of time in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing.
Where traditional advertisements may struggle to adapt to technology, email marketing remains a way to get your product in front of your audience. In 2023, 912M global internet users reported using an ad-blocker. Email marketing, on the other hand, allows you to directly advertise to your audience.
Email marketing remains a viable and valuable strategy for businesses of all sizes. The effectiveness of email marketing lies in its ability to directly connect with your audience, delivering tailored content and driving conversions.
Why is email a good marketing channel?
Email has maintained its status as a prominent marketing channel due to its widespread adoption and effectiveness. It's a platform that people are comfortable with, use daily, and trust.
When executed correctly, email marketing can foster stronger customer relationships and boost brand loyalty.
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
Modern marketing strategies revolve around keeping up with trends and meeting with the ever-changing consumer behaviors.
Email marketing remains a reliable tool that continues to deliver impressive results. Email marketing is vital for a few key reasons:
It's a direct line of communication to your audience: You don’t need to worry about ad-blockers or rapidly changing social media content rules.
It drives traffic and conversion: When you can directly speak to your audience, you build a strong relationship with people who are invested in your content.
It provides valuable data and insights: Data points like click-through rates tell you what your audience is interested in and what they aren’t, so you can adjust your marketing strategy.
12 Benefits of Email Marketing
There are countless reasons why you need to include email marketing in your strategies, but these top 10 are the ones that stand out the most.
Now that we've established the importance of email marketing, let's delve deeper into its benefits.
1. Increased Reach and Engagement
Living in a state of information overload is natural because of doom scrolling and the ease of access when it comes to content.
Email marketing holds the stakes high, as it can help reach a global audience without worrying about algorithms.
Wide Audience Reach
As there are no algorithms that one has to please, email marketing transcends geographical boundaries, allowing you to reach your target audience with ease.
Whether your customers are down the street or in a different time zone, your messages can find their way to their inbox.
Smart Nonsense is a perfect example. The creators, Henry and Dylan, had amazing success on YouTube and TikTok, but they quickly realized that the algorithms on social media changed very rapidly and kept their reach unpredictable. Switching to an email newsletter became a natural choice.
Personalized Communication
Personalization is the heart and soul of successful email marketing.
You can tailor your emails based on your audience’s behavior and preferences. This can be as small as referring to them by their name. And according to a study by MailJet, this is the most common form of personalization.
Personalization goes beyond just using your subscriber’s name. beehiiv’s powerful segmentation tools allows you to tag your subscribers to create segments of your audience and provide a bespoke experience. More on this later.
Higher Engagement Rates
There are many side effects of doomscrolling, and one of them is the fading audience engagement. Compared to other marketing channels, email consistently boasts higher open and click-through rates.
People know what they have signed up for and, hence, actively check their emails and are more inclined to interact with your content when it's relevant and personalized.
Think of your emails like a package coming in the mail. It’s exciting to know that the package is coming; and when it finally arrives, you’re excited to open it. When you create great content that’s relevant to your audience, that excitement will keep them coming back for more.
2. Cost-Effectiveness
Budgeting is one of the key aspects of business strategies. Email marketing comes to the rescue as a cost-effective solution. It offers a low cost per contact, allowing you to reach thousands of potential customers without breaking the bank.
Even the elimination of expenses like printing or mailing reinforces its cost-efficiency.
Low Cost Per Contact
When we talk about the "cost per contact" in email marketing, we're referring to the amount of money you need to spend to reach an individual through email.
This cost is significantly lower compared to traditional marketing methods like direct mail or telemarketing – both of which also take up a lot of time and energy.
beehiiv just launched new pricing plans that offer an incredible amount of features and grow with you as your audience grows. And even with the increased features, beehiiv remains one of the most affordable options on the market.
Reduced Printing and Mailing Expenses
Unlike direct mail campaigns that involve printing flyers, brochures, or catalogs and incurring postage expenses, email marketing is entirely digital.
You save not only on the costs of printing materials but also on postage fees, making it an eco-friendly choice, as well as an instant one. In addition to saving money, you’re also saving valuable time and energy.
3. Monetization Potential
Email marketing campaigns can be an incredible tool for selling to your target audience, but what if your newsletter content itself could bring you money?
The beauty of marketing through email is the vast potential for monetization within your newsletter itself and the opportunity to leverage multiple income streams to grow your business.
Affiliate Marketing
When you think of blogs or newsletter content and passive income, the first thing most people will mention is affiliate marketing.
The model is simple: A company provides you with an affiliate link, and you share that affiliate link with your subscribers. When someone makes a purchase using your link, you get a commission.
The trick to affiliate marketing is to only recommend products that you genuinely enjoy. Your audience trusts you, and attempting to sell a product that your audience wouldn’t appreciate is a great way to break that trust.
As long as you are recommending products that you would use yourself, your audience is going to be interested because they trust what you have to say. And because all you have to do is share your affiliate link, you can make money without lifting a finger.
Already using beehiiv as your newsletter platform? If you’re loving all of the features that are helping you create world-class email content, the beehiiv Partner Program is a great opportunity to make money while promoting a product you use regularly.
The best part is the $$$: The beehiiv Partner Program offers a 50% commission in the first year for users who sign up using your link. That’s the highest commission on the internet today.
Matt McGarry used the beehiiv Partner Program as part of his overall passive income strategy with his newsletter Newsletter Operator. He was so successful, earning thousands per month, that he earned a free beach trip from the beehiiv Beach Club.
Sponsored Ad Integrations
Sponsored ad integrations are similar to affiliate marketing, but they are not passive.
Instead, a sponsored ad integration requires you to actively include a native ad in your email. The best sponsored ad integrations flow with the content as opposed to the content being solely around the advertisement.
Your audience reads your emails because they see the value in your content and because you’ve built a relationship with them. That’s why it’s important to provide an upfront value for your audience that is separate from your sponsorship if you include any type of sponsorship in your emails.
Think about it this way: Everyone skips commercials. You don’t want your emails to feel like a commercial. Instead, you should only do sponsored emails with products that you genuinely enjoy and your audience would genuinely enjoy, too.
The most successful sponsored content doesn’t feel like an ad, and it doesn’t disrupt the experience of the audience. Instead, it enhances your subscribers’ experience by offering them a product that is tailored to what they are interested in and that you genuinely use in your everyday life.
Pro Tip: If you want your newsletter to catch the attention of an advertiser, keep your content brand-safe. While that may vary between brands, the best way to do that is to refrain from creating content that a brand might want to distance themselves from.
beehiiv Ad Network
Finding sponsors is a lot of work. You have to source the sponsor, build a relationship with the brand, navigate the sponsor’s specific requests, coordinate ad release dates, and hope that you’re paid in full and on time.
beehiiv makes creating a sponsored email post easy and simple. When you are on a scale plan or higher with beehiiv, you are eligible to participate in the Ad Network.
You have full discretion over the ads that you run. If you don’t like a product or if you don’t think it would be a good fit for your audience, you can decline a sponsorship offer. Trust your gut on this one.
If the sponsor is a good fit, adding the sponsorship to your email is very easy and will result in another easy, passive income stream – and everyone is eligible to access potential sponsors.
beehiiv Boosts
beehiiv boosts is an excellent way to both earn money and gain subscribers who are actually engaged with your content.
Boosts works by recommending newsletters on other successful newsletters. You pay to have your newsletter recommended, and you get paid to recommend other people’s newsletters.
In the end, you’re not only able to build your newsletter, you’re also able to promote and support other newsletters in your niche (while getting paid for it!). You can even play 4D Chess and do both at the same time.
beehiiv Boosts is available on all paid beehiiv plans and allows you to monetize from day one.
Last, but certainly not least, you can create yet another stream of income by offering a premium subscription.
The most important thing to consider when creating a paid newsletter is whether or not your audience is going to think that your content is valuable enough to pay for it and to continue to pay for it on a subscription basis.
So when you create a premium subscription, you need to ensure that your content has clear, upfront value to your subscribers and that you’re able to commit to delivering content on that level on a regular basis.
If this sounds like you, offering a premium paid newsletter can help you make money doing what you’re already doing: producing amazing content.
beehiiv offers premium subscriptions, and what’s amazing is that beehiiv does NOT take a cut – 100% of your revenue is your revenue.
4. Targeted Marketing Campaigns
A product's true value is only realized when it successfully reaches its intended target audience.
Email marketing empowers you to create laser-focused campaigns through segmentation and personalization.
With these tools, you can reach your target group and speak directly to their interests and needs.
Segmentation
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
- Archimedes
The tools that email marketing offers can get you closer to your marketing goals, as you can segment your audience into smaller, more targeted groups.
By tagging your subscribers, you can send messages tailored to the unique needs and interests of each segment. This precise targeting leads to higher engagement and conversion rates.
This highly-effective strategy is used by marketers globally, with 78% of marketers saying that segmentation is the most effective strategy they use for email marketing campaigns.
Tailoring Content to Specific Audiences
Imagine receiving an email that addresses your specific needs, interests, and previous interactions with a brand. It feels like a personalized conversation rather than a generic sales pitch.
That's the power of tailoring content.
Customizing your content to cater to the preferences and behavior of your audience is akin to crafting a bespoke suit. This tailored approach is a necessity in the world of marketing, and emailing can help you build on that.
5. Improved Conversion Rates
The primary goal of marketing is to generate revenue through higher conversion rates.
Email marketing excels in this domain by optimizing call-to-action effectiveness and nurturing leads through your sales funnel.
Emailing can help you build awareness and conversions, ensuring that your efforts yield tangible results.
Call-to-Action Effectiveness
CTAs serve as your remote control to encourage people to take a desired action, be it making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a resource.
Optimizing your CTA can guide your audience to go beyond your emails and maximize conversion rates. Even optimizing your sign-up page can boost your conversion rates by a significant percentage.
Nurturing Leads Through the Sales Funnel
Email marketing excels in guiding leads through the sales funnel.
At each stage of the customer journey, you can nurture your leads. Email automation can take some of this work off your plate.
6. Measurable Results and Analytics
“Your job isn’t done until the job is done.”
If your marketing doesn’t drive results, it hasn’t been done well enough or there is some area you need to refine.
Email marketing can help you make data-driven decisions, as it provides a treasure trove of data through email metrics and tracking. Dive deep into open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to gain invaluable insights. A/B testing can take your campaigns a step further, allowing continuous optimization for better outcomes.
Email Metrics and Tracking
Tracking your email campaign metrics is essential as you get insights into open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more.
This can help you make informed and calculated decisions, enabling you to know what needs to be tweaked and what you should double down on to refine your marketing strategy.
A/B Testing for Optimization
Your subject line is the first point of contact between you and your subscribers.
A/B testing helps you to experiment with different elements of your emails – from subject lines to content – to find the winning formula for your audience.
7. Time Efficiency and Automation
As a creator or business, you have to wear many hats when it comes to getting work done. Wouldn’t it be amazing if somebody could help you with it?
Email marketing can alleviate some of your workload with scheduled email campaigns, drip marketing, and autoresponders.
Automation streamlines communication and removes the time-intensive aspect of sending emails. Your emails will get in front of the audience that needs to see them, when they need to see them.
Scheduled Email Campaigns
When a new subscriber signs up for your email, the first point of contact is the welcome email. You must make sure that they are happy with their choice of opting in for your email list through this touchpoint.
In 2023, beehiiv’s welcome emails were opened 47.05% of the time, on average. The best
part is that you can see similar numbers without lifting a finger by using automation.
Automation is a game-changer in email marketing. You can schedule your email campaigns in advance, ensuring timely and efficient communication with your audience.
Drip Marketing and Autoresponders
Nobody wants to be spammed with 10 emails a day by a sender they subscribed to a week ago. 59% of Americans say that most emails they receive are not actually relevant to them.
You can share your best emails over a period of 15 days rather than blasting your audience with too much information at one time.
Drip marketing can help in engaging with customers over a period of time. These automated sequences deliver the right message at the right time, boosting customer retention.
8. Building Customer Loyalty and Relationships
“It takes years to build trust and seconds to destroy it.”
Loyalty and trust are the cornerstones of lasting customer relationships.
Email marketing strengthens brand awareness by consistently appearing in your subscribers' inboxes. Transparency and community make people feel seen and valued.
Strengthening Brand Awareness
Consistent email communication reinforces your brand's identity. By regularly appearing in your subscribers' inboxes, you strengthen brand recognition and awareness.
Your brand colors, introduction, CTAs, and content are synonymous with your brand, and that is how your subscribers will recognize you.
Big Desk Energy is a great example of branding with the website, newsletter, graphics, and colors all evoking a retro, “old pc” feel.
Your brand voice is what will keep your audience around and make them want to read more of your content.
Michael Houck built his newsletter from his personal brand as a start-up founder and cross posts content on various social media platforms. Because he built a relationship first on social media, he was able to very quickly scale his newsletter by leveraging those existing brand relationships.
Establishing Trust and Credibility
Regardless of your niche, if it is valuable and reliable, your subscribers will trust you and feel more connected with you.
This is the foundation that helps to build long-lasting customer relationships.
The best way to build trust? Let your audience know that you’re listening. beehiiv makes it easy to add polls to your newsletters to find out what your audience likes and doesn’t like about your content, giving you the opportunity to show your subscribers that you care what they think.
9. Easy Sharing and Forwarding
The simplicity of sharing and forwarding emails cannot be understated. If your content speaks to your subscribers, they will share it with their friends and family.
Emails, by their very nature, are designed for easy forwarding. With just a click of a button, people can pass along your message to others who might find it relevant or interesting.
This feature enables your content to reach a broader audience organically, all through the actions of your existing subscribers. It's like word-of-mouth marketing in the digital realm.
Encouraging sharing and forwarding should be a deliberate part of your email marketing strategy. Including social sharing buttons within your emails can further facilitate the process.
You can even incentivize sharing your content by creating a referral program. Using Big Desk Energy as an example again, you can give your audience a discount for each referral – which, in turn, also helps drive sales, too.
Email content that resonates with your audience has the potential to go viral. As your recipients share your emails with their contacts, your message can reach an even broader audience.
The essence of email content that goes viral lies in its ability to resonate with your audience on a profound level. It could be a captivating story, a humorous video, or a thought-provoking article. When your audience finds your content resourceful and engaging, they become enthusiastic advocates and first adopters who willingly share it with their friends, family, and colleagues.
The ripple effect of viral email content can be astonishing. As each recipient shares your email with their own contacts, your message spreads exponentially. This organic growth can lead to a surge in new subscribers, increased website traffic, and heightened brand visibility. It's a powerful phenomenon that demonstrates the far-reaching impact of well-crafted email marketing campaigns.
Viral email content requires a deep understanding of your audience, a knack for storytelling, and an element of surprise or delight that captures attention.
While this might seem unrelated to emailing, Paul Graham’s essays on work and life have inspired many people, and you can see hundreds of people talking about it on Twitter every other week. That’s just how valuable it is, and people can’t stop sharing it.
11. Integration With Other Marketing Channels
Integration extends beyond mere coexistence; it involves orchestrating a symphony of marketing efforts that complement and enhance one another. Here's why the integration of email marketing with other channels is vital:
Consistency in Messaging
When your email marketing aligns with your social media, content marketing, and advertising efforts, your brand's messaging remains consistent across all touchpoints.
This consistency reinforces brand identity and fosters trust among your audience because they know what to expect.
Maximized Reach
By combining email marketing with channels like social media and content marketing, you can maximize your reach. Promote your email campaigns on social platforms to attract new subscribers and vice versa.
Zillow Gone Wild uses that strategy for maximum reach. Samir Mezrahi, Zillow Gone Wild’s creator, realized that Facebook was really driving subscribers to his newsletter, so he shifted his strategy to focus on building from there.
Your strategy can go beyond social media platforms, too. For example, share your blog content via email to engage your subscribers and drive traffic to your website.
Cross-Promotion
Integration enables cross-promotion opportunities. For example, use email to promote your upcoming social media contests or share user-generated content from social platforms in your emails.
If your audience leaves you great reviews on social sites, share it in your emails! Check out this example from beehiiv:
A tweet like that can be an easy promotion to add to your email marketing strategy, with only a screenshot required.
Data Synergy
Data collected from different channels can provide valuable insights into your subscribers’ behavior and preferences.
Email metrics, social media analytics, and website data can be analyzed collectively to refine your marketing strategies and content.
Think of the different data points like pieces of a puzzle: When you put them all together, you can see the big picture of how your marketing strategy is and is not working.
Enhanced Customer Experience
A seamless customer experience is a hallmark of successful businesses. Integration ensures that your audience receives consistent messaging and experiences across various touchpoints, enhancing their overall interaction with your brand.
12. Customized Experience for Audience
Email marketing offers a customized experience that you won’t find in other forms of marketing.
The limit is really only your imagination and the limitations of the platform that you choose. Make sure to consider what customization features are available to give your audience the best possible experience.
beehiiv just released a new website builder that lets you build a custom landing page experience for your audience – without needing to learn any code.
Having the ability to make your newsletter’s home look amazing without having to learn HTML is a game changer – and one that can save you money by being a one-stop shop.
You can run your email marketing campaigns; and if you host your newsletter on beehiiv, you don’t need to seek out a separate landing page option – saving you time and money. And while everyone gets a landing page included in their plan, Scale plans and higher feature additional customization.
Why Email Marketing Has To Be a Part of Your Marketing Plan
I’ve heard this phrase multiple times while reading about marketing and selling: “If you want to sell something, talk about its benefits and not the features.”
Here’s what our CEO Tyler Denk thinks about having email marketing as a part of your toolkit.
Whether you want to segment your existing email list or automate your welcome sequence, beehiiv does it all. You can start today for free.
beehiiv boasts a simple user experience and a no-code template editor; and if you ever feel stuck, the beehiiv support team is always there to help. beehiiv was built by creators for creators.
Why trust me? I have been a writer for six years and part of the beehiiv content team for over a year now. This has given me a deep understanding of the benefits of email marketing and the power of ESPs and automation.
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