How does email marketing work?


Email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email. It helps you boost conversions and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help achieve their goals. Now let's review when you should use email marketing and some benefits and statistics that support the reason why email marketing is so valuable.


When to Use Email Marketing

There are many ways to use email marketing — some of the most common including using the tactic to:

  • 1.Build relationships: Build connections through personalized engagement.
  • 2.Boost brand awareness: Keep your company and your services top-of-mind for the moment when your prospects are ready to engage.
  • 3.Promote your content: Use email to share relevant blog content or useful assets with your prospects.
  • 4.Generate leads: Entice subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable.
  • 5.Market your products: Promote your products and services.
  • 6.Nurture leads: Delight your customers with content that can help them succeed in their goals.
  • 7.There are 3.8 billion email users worldwide, so if you’re looking for a way to reach your customers, email is the perfect place to find them.
  • 8.On average, email generates $38 for every dollar spent, which is a 3,800% return on investment.
  • 9.Two thirds of customers have made a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing message.
  • 10.Only 20% of leads that are sent directly to sales are qualified, meaning they need to be nurtured via email and great content.
  • 11.When it comes to customer acquisition, email is 40X more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
  • 12.Perhaps the best reason to use email marketing is that you own the channel. Outside of compliance regulations there is no external entity that can impact how, when, or why you reach out to your subscribers.


Email Marketing Stats by Industry




Email marketing rules change based on your industry and who you’re marketing to. Below are some email marketing trends for B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and real estate companies that can inform your email marketing strategy.


Email Marketing Stats for B2B

  • Emails that are triggered by an action perform 3x better than nurture emails or drip campaigns
  • For 86% of professionals, email is their preferred communication channel
  • 60% of marketers believe that email marketing produces a positive ROI
  • Click through rates are 47% higher for B2B emails than B2C
  • Subject-line emojis accounted for increased open rates for 56% of brands

Email Marketing Stats for B2C

  • 78% of consumers have unsubscribed from lists because a brand was sending too many emails
  • Over 90% of consumers check their emails daily
  • Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share social content than others

Email Marketing Stats for e-Commerce

  • 86% of consumers would like to receive a promotional email from brands they subscribe to at least once per month
  • Segmented emails generate 58% of company revenue

Email Marketing Stats for Real Estate

  • The majority (53%) of real estate companies obtain subscribers from their website
  • Businesses that blog get twice as  much traffic from email as those that don’t
  • 40% of real estate companies use list segmentation



Monitor and improve campaign performance through A/B testing

a-b-testing-principles

Besides having the right type of people subscribed to your list, to run successful email marketing campaigns, you need to do a lot of A/B testing.

A/B testing will help you find out what kind of email messages can potentially generate higher user engagement more conversions.

Things to test with A/B testing include:

  • The length of the email subject titles
  • The format of the emails (HTML, text, with or without images)
  • The length of the email body
  • The frequency of sending emails
  • The level of promotional messages within the email
  • Placement of your signup forms
  • The message used in your signup forms
  • The ‘offers’ used as incentives for email signup
  • The authentication method used to verify the validity of emails (no authentication, double-opt-in)

To perform any kind of A/B testing (not just emails), you need to monitor the right metrics and eliminate any factors that can influence the results of your testing.

For email marketing, you need to monitor the following metrics:

  • Number of new email subscribers per day
  • The exact method they have used to subscribe to your list (if you have multiple placements like sidebar, exit popups, etc.), you need to know which one they used to register
  • Email Open and Click-through rates (how many people opened a specific email campaign and how many people clicked a link in the email)
  • How many people visited your website from a link in an email
  • How many conversions were generated from email (and from which campaign)

Regularly ‘clean up’ your email lists





As a beginner to email marketing, you need to understand three things:

A large percentage of your email subscribers will be inactive –

 It is normal to have a lot of inactive subscribers to your list. The average email open rate for an email campaign is around 20% and this means that a large majority of the people on your list will not read your messages.

Having a big list is not always the best approach –

 Sending emails that get opened by a small percentage of recipients will mark your emails as spam. This means your reach will gradually decrease. On the other hand, emails that get opened by the majority of recipients, help the overall performance of the campaign.

Big lists will cost you a lot of money to maintain – 

As your email list grows, so does the monthly expense. When you reach 10,000 subscribers you may have to pay more than $150 per month to have a subscription with a good email marketing tool.

One of the ways to minimize your costs and increase the healthiness of your list is to occasionally perform a list cleanup and remove inactive subscribers from your list.

Users that registered to your list but do not open your campaigns are not useful for your business goals and it’s better to remove them.

Remember that it’s better to have a smaller list but with active subscribers than a big list of inactive subscribers.