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What is Email Marketing - Step by Step Guide for Beginners

What is Email Marketing? Guide to Email Campaigns in 2025

Email marketing is a strategy in which a business or individual uses email to communicate and connect with its customer base or audience.

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.

This is 2025 and the question you should ask yourself is how are you leveraging on email marketing to grow your personal brand or business?

Email marketing is a cost-effective direct marketing channel, generating an average return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent. As of 2024, email marketing revenue was projected to reach an impressive $9.5 billion. Just for this reason alone, email should be a key pillar of your digital marketing strategy aside from running ads. Not doing any email marketing is like leaving money lying out on the table.

The 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
  • Transactional emails, such as confirmation emails or password reset notices
  • Feedback or survey emails
  • Lead nurturing emails or re-engagement emails
  • Milestone emails, such as for customer birthdays or anniversaries

Benefits of email marketing

Email marketing can be an extremely powerful marketing tool to have at your business’s disposal. While there are endless benefits, we’re sharing the top six that can directly impact your bottom line.

Increase brand awareness

Email can help you spread the word about your brand, products and services by sharing valuable resources, educational content, news, updates and more with subscribers.

You should also align your email content and design with your brand identity to create brand awareness.

Drive sales and revenue

Email can help you put your products and services in front of customers and experiment with different promotional techniques to generate more revenue. For example, you can offer discounts and free shipping to trigger purchases. Another idea is to share roundups and collections that draw attention to specific products. You can also use upselling and cross-selling techniques to increase the average order value.

Generate website traffic

Email is an excellent way to drive more traffic to your website. You can share snippets of recent articles and take interested subscribers to read the full versions on your blog. Or, add calls-to-action to your promotional emails that take subscribers to your landing pages and sales pages to learn more about your products.

Keep customers engaged

With email, you have room to experiment with your messages. There are so many different types of email campaigns you can send, and there’s plenty of room for creativity. Switching up your email campaigns keeps customers interested and excited about your brand. Plus, it helps you stay on top of their minds.

Boost other marketing channels

Email lets you integrate your marketing channels and drive traffic to other customer touch points, such as social media, landing pages, blogs, and in-person events. For example, you can ask new customers to share a review on your Facebook page, or start an Instagram challenge and invite subscribers to participate.

Gain valuable business data

Email allows you to collect customer data and learn more about their behavior. You can do this by tracking analytics, or sending email surveys and feedback forms. Leverage this information to improve your emails, business, products, and services.

Email marketing best practices

Always avoid spam filters

If your emails are ending up in the spam folder, your customers aren’t seeing them. There are a few things you can do to help avoid this fate such as regularly cleaning your contact list, improve the quality of campaign messages and ensure you are not repeatedly sending to invalid email addresses

Create an eye-catching subject lines

Subject line should be simple, quick to read and relatable to your audience, don’t complicate it with too much text. Short and captivating.

Personalize your emails

Most email marketing platform offer personalization with custom fields. Part of an effective writing involves knowing your audience. It’s tempting to think of thousands of people reading your email newsletters, but you need to remember those thousands aren’t sitting in a room together. Each one is by themselves in front of a screen and you need to find a way to make your messaging connect with your individual readers.

Measuring your success with email marketing metrics

Analyzing key email marketing metrics will teach you how to improve your strategy for future campaigns. Most ESP platforms like Yournotify have an analytics dashboard with at least the following real-time metrics:

  • Delivery/Open rate: The ratio of the number of people who opened your email divided by the total number of recipients.
  • Click-through rate: The ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the total number of recipients.
  • Unsubscribe rate: The number of people who unsubscribed divided by the total number of recipients. If this number is high, you need to review your email frequency and segmentation.
  • Bounce rate: The number of emails that failed to deliver divided by the total number of emails sent.

Conclusion

Whether you own a small business or work for a larger company, using targeted emails is a cost-effective way to improve your conversion rate. Email marketing will help you build a long-term relationship with your customers that translates to better bottom lines.

We hope this article has given you an in-depth answer to “What is email marketing?” and how it can benefit your business growth. We know there’s a lot of information here but by taking things step by step, anyone can use email marketing to grow their business. Consistency matters.

Read more related articles: How to Use Customer Feedback To Improve Your Email and SMS Marketing