Formal definition of email marketing:

• A structured, systematic process that is one of the most successful

channels for delivering highly relevant marketing communications to
targeted subscribers.
• Informal definition of email marketing: Instant inbox gratification!
the four vital steps that comprise an effective
email marketing process:
• 1. Data. The first step in any email marketing campaign should always
be the creation of a subscriber list.
• This is a compilation of email contacts who have consented to receive
your communications (they've opted in).
• You can create as many lists as you need in order to segment
• your subscribers so that you can target them with relevant,
personalized content that they willactually care about.
• Design. This step involves deciding which content you should include
in your email and the design principles you must follow, to ensure
that your email ends up in a subscriber's inbox, ready to engage and
excite them.

• 3. Delivery. This step is all about the delivery of your marketing

emails. You will learn how they are managed through an email
service provider (ESP), which facilitates everything from email style
and layout to scheduling. Step 3 covers what happens to an email
after it has been sent and delivered. You will learn how to utilize
testing to decide what your email should look like and when you
should send it to guarantee the best possible open rates

• 4. Discovery. Analysis and reporting are fundamental when revising

and refining your digital practices. Leveraging analytics tools will
allow you to track every cent spent on your email marketing
spam

• Unsolicited email means that a user didn't ask, or opt in, to receive
the email. Spam can also apply to bulk email, a term that applies to
the same unsolicited email being sent out to hundreds of thousands
of users who have not opted in to receive it. This is a practice that
can result in blacklisting, which means that the sender is added to a
list of naughty email senders
• that email clients can block and keep away from their users' inboxes.
Subscriber Management

• Before starting any email marketing campaign, the first area that you
should focus on is subscriber management. This is the first stage in
the iterative process for email, and it is primarily concerned with
data. To put it in almost offensively simple terms:
• Without email addresses you cannot conduct
• an email marketing campaign! This means you need to know:
• How to acquire subscribers
• How to segment that data to target subscribers efficiently
• How to update and maintain your subscriber lists on a regular basis
for effective campaign targeting
Offline Methods for Data Collection

• 1. Printed materials. These can include business cards, leaflets, flyers,

and packaging..
• 2. Events. You can collect email addresses at offline events such as
trade shows, exhibitions, and conferences and import them into your
subscriber list.
• Customer touch points.
• If you are serving customers in a brick-and-mortar store, this is a
perfect opportunity to ask for their email addresses so that you can
send them email updates on your products
Online Methods for Data Collection

• Website sign-up forms.

• These are a simple, nonintrusive way to collect email addresses. They
can
• be attached to a particular call to action, such as signing up for a
newsletter, and can be featured
• on any page of a website
• Social media.
• You can use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and
LinkedIn to promote offers that require users to submit their email
addresses.

• Customer touch points.

• As with offline customer interactions, there are opportunities for you
to acquire email addresses at various stages in the online customer
journey. You could include popup windows in the online buying
process and encourage online customer service reps to ask for email
addresses via social media or instant chat.
Data Segmentation

• After you have accumulated your subscriber data, it is essential that

you know how to optimize your use of that data: The true value lies
not in the data itself, but in what you do with it.
• Marketers achieve optimization through a process known as
segmentation, which is the act of dividing your subscriber list into
segments and defining those segments in accordance with your
subscribers' attributes, likes,
• dislikes, and requirements.
Common email marketing metrics include:

• Open rate. The percentage of recipients who have opened or viewed

your email.
• Total opens. The total number of times recipients have opened your
email (this includes recipients
• who have opened it more than once).
• Unique opens. The total number of opens from original, or unique,
subscribers. If you target
• 1,000 people, you can only have 1,000 unique opens.
• Click to open rate. The number of unique clicks divided by the
number of unique opens expressed
• as a percentage
• Click-through rate.
• The percentage of subscribers that opened your email and clicked on
a link With in that email.
• Unique clicks.
• The total number of unique users who clicked on a link.
• Total clicks.
• The total number of clicks from users (including those eager beavers
who clicked
• more than once!).