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Well-produced marketing emails can prompt sales and drive traffic to your company’s website and social media channels. You can segment your audiences and emails to deliver targeted messaging to particular people and automate many of these processes to make your marketing more efficient and timely.

All of this contributes to an extremely adaptable marketing service that is very effective if done well.

There are several key types of email marketing you should be aware of. Promotional emails are straightforward, effective communications that highlight your products, services, or offers, and these can expand into drip-fed, multi-stage campaigns that nurture your customers and prospective customers through the “sales funnel” – a journey that converts them from intrigued readers to surefire buyers.

Elsewhere, you can send newsletters, thought leadership content, or updates about your business, and your transactional emails – order receipts, shipping updates, and the like – can also form part of an email marketing strategy.

Email marketing is vital, but it can also be confusing and complex. If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve 26 key questions that should answer many of your queries – so read on!

Getting started with email marketing

1. What is an email marketing list, and how do I build one?

An email marketing list is the directory of people receiving your email marketing messages. If you don’t have a list of contacts, you won’t be able to do any email marketing.

People on your email marketing list are usually customers, prospective customers, or subscribers who have signed up to receive messages from your company. Through any of those situations, they will have agreed to terms and conditions that mean that they are willing to accept your marketing messages.

This is vital because sending email marketing messages to people who have not agreed to receive them – and possessing the data that allows you to do this – can breach GDPR and other privacy regulations and cause your business financial and regulatory issues.

2. How can I get people to subscribe to my emails?

If you want to build an email marketing list, then start by defining your target audience based on demographics, interests, and needs – the kinds of people you want to attract to your business.

Sign-up forms on your website and social media channels can be used to capture sign-ups, and you can offer discounts, webinars, ebooks, and other exclusive content and offers to encourage sign-ups.

Your website can include landing pages and pop-up boxes to encourage sign-ups, too, but be aware that you could push people away if you’re too spammy with your messaging.

You can also include sign-up forms and check-boxes on transactional emails, like order confirmations or shipping updates, to encourage more sign-ups, and ask people to fill in physical forms at in-person events.

Longer-term strategies can also be used to encourage mailing list growth. If your organization produces good content – like thought leadership pieces, articles, blogs, and videos – then you can grow your website and, by extension, capture more sign-ups. You need to ensure that your website has good SEO if you want this strategy to pay dividends.

You can cross-promote with other organizations to cross-promote each other’s products and emails and host joint webinars and other co-branded events. It’s also worth considering paying for adverts on social media, where you’ll be able to target your preferred audience demographics directly.

During your business journey, you may be offered the opportunity to buy email marketing lists. Never do it: these are often full of broken and low-quality email addresses that won’t deliver good returns for your marketing emails.

Your competitors may well be using the same lists, and purchased email lists can contain spam traps created by email service providers. You can also run into legal issues because you may use a purchased email list to send unsolicited emails.

3. What are the different types of marketing emails?

All marketing emails are designed for promotion, but you can tailor and improve your messaging by deploying different kinds of emails for particular audiences, or in different situations.

The main one – and the most popular one – is the simple promotional email. It’s designed to show off specific products, services, or solutions, and it concentrates on getting the message out in a big way, with clear, bold information, up-front special offers, and limited-time deals alongside straightforward details about that specific aspect of your business.

You can also tie promotional emails in with particular events or times of the year – think Christmas, New Year, Halloween, Black Friday, and other notable events. Holiday greetings, themed promotions, graphics, or seasonal product recommendations can all have a big impact.

If you want to go further down this road, expand your promotional emails into a nurture campaign. These spread offers and product information throughout a multi-stage email funnel that guides prospective customers through stages of the sales cycle – from awareness and interest to evaluation, desire, action, and loyalty.

These multi-stage campaigns generally go to smaller audiences, especially as you progress: it’s standard practice to only send latter emails to people who engaged in the emails that came before. But as that audience has proven itself interested in your products or services, you can tailor those emails and be more confident you’ll generate sales.

To get people onside, consider using case studies, white papers, educational content, or testimonials throughout these multi-stage campaigns. They’re also great opportunities to use personalization to really hook individual readers.

Newsletters are a little more considered and aim to engage your audience by sharing updates, thought leadership insights, and curated content. They’re more about building trust in your brand rather than direct selling. Include company news, blogs, industry updates, helpful tips, or event announcements.

Also, consider sending educational emails with blogs and thought leadership content to build trust and authority.

Event invitation emails are designed to sell events your company is hosting – whether they’re in-person meet-ups or online webinars. It’s important to get all of the necessary information out up-front and to send regular reminders to your prospective attendees.

If you’ve got new contacts or email list sign-ups, consider sending a welcome email. These thank-you messages can immediately start building faith in your brand, and you can include special offers, an overview of your services, and first-time user benefits to encourage more loyalty and immediate engagement.

Consider sending similar emails to re-engage dormant contacts, too: incentives, discounts, and product updates can be useful for revitalizing your relationship.

Product updates can also form a useful marketing email – sending information about vital new features to your entire marketing list can be informative and persuasive.

There are many other kinds of emails you can send, too. Abandoned cart emails can remind customers about products they almost purchased – and if you add an incentive to complete their checkout, it can get them over the line.

Similarly, transactional emails like purchase receipts, tracking updates, password updates, or subscription emails can also form part of an email marketing strategy if you include relevant content.

4. How can email marketing be used in a wider marketing strategy?

Email marketing is vital, but should never be done in isolation – it should be a crucial part of a wider strategy.

Your email marketing can combine with social media campaigns and paid social media adverts to ensure consistent messaging, and you can personalize your emails and adverts to better target particular demographics.

Email marketing can drive traffic to your website and social media channels, and if you keep your content, messaging, and branding consistent across all of those channels, you can build your image.

Similarly, email marketing can be a crucial tool for amplifying content marketing efforts and ensuring more people read your blogs, articles, white papers, and infographics – and it can also support your social media campaigns.

A key part of marketing is building customer loyalty, and email marketing is a crucial tool there, too, spreading your key messages and keeping customers updated with company news.

Your email marketing should enhance your event marketing, be a key tool in promoting product launches, and it can also be used to collect customer feedback with surveys.

You can also use the vast amount of data gathered by email marketing to create personalized campaigns and emails in the future, across multiple platforms, with better targeting.

Emails can be a central hub for your messaging across your website, products, services, and social media channels. It’s cost-effective, and it has a measurable impact. No aspect of your wider marketing strategy should sit in isolation – but email marketing is particularly important as it can tie everything together.

5. What is a nurture campaign?

Nurture campaigns are a series of strategically-timed marketing emails that guide customers through an awareness and buying journey about your products and services.

At the start of a nurture campaign, emails are all about educating customers about your products and services – making them aware of what you offer. As you progress through multiple emails, you can build trust with case studies and white papers, dive deeper into the products and services, and help customers consider your product.

Towards the end of a nurture campaign, it’s essential to prompt action with easy calls to action (CTAs) and tempting offers. These multi-stage campaigns aim to nurture your customers from awareness, through to desire, and end with a purchasing decision.

By engaging prospects over time, nurture campaigns can help you convert leads and new customers into loyal brand advocates – because you’ve spent the time to educate them and build a relationship.

Creating marketing emails

6. What types of content work for different audiences?

It’s vital to ensure that the content you produce resonates with the audience you’re trying to attract.

If you want to capture new customers, you need to introduce your brand and products with top-level, key information, incentivize those people with special offers and introductory deals, and provide educational resources to help them learn. It’s also important to build trust with real-world examples of your work, like case studies, testimonials, or white papers.

For existing customers, you want to encourage loyalty and engagement. That means personalized recommendations based on their history with your business, exclusive access to new products or features, discounts or rewards for their loyalty, and information on using their purchases effectively.

And if you want to re-engage lapsed customers, campaigns with special offers, updates about new products, and surveys to understand their lack of engagement can all be used.

If you’re marketing towards a B2B audience, in-depth case studies, industry-specific insights, event invitations, and content that really emphasizes the ROI they’ll get – think measurable benefits and financial gains.

Conversely, B2C audiences engage more with promotions, sales, seasonal and theme campaigns, visual content, and real-world evidence with an emotional hook.

Want to go even further down this route? Consider the demographics of your audiences. Niche, specialized audiences need content tailored to their hobbies or interests, and if you address their particular pain points with specific product recommendations, you’ll go far.

To appeal to younger audiences, think of short, visually appealing content with interactive elements and messaging that emphasizes sustainability, diversity, and exclusivity. To hook an older audience, deliver clear messaging with minimal jargon, real-world examples of your work, and a focus on value, quality, and long-term benefits.

7. What kind of content works best in an email?

You need the right kind of content if you want to find success with your email marketing. Your subject lines and previews need to be catchy, concise, and attention-grabbing without seeming spammy.

Promotions and discounts are always popular, and personalized content – from the offers you provide to dynamic content that includes specific names and locations – can help potential customers engage.

Educational content, real-world examples of your work, social media proof of your success, and genuine, human stories can build trust in your brand – because people like to see evidence that your products and services work.

Elsewhere, ensure your emails have eye-catching graphics, clear calls to action that guide readers to your desired actions, and a call for feedback.

If you need some easy rules to follow, consider these: keep your emails concise, focused, personalized, and visually appealing on both desktop and mobile devices.

8. How do I write a good subject line?

It’s a balancing act that takes practice and, often, some trial and error. But to make the best start possible, follow these simple rules.

Keep them short: aim for 6-10 words and fewer than 50 characters to ensure that your subject line is readable on every kind of device.

Be clear and specific, use time-sensitive language to create a sense of urgency, and personalize if possible – people are more likely to open an email if the subject line includes their name.

It’s worth diving into the language when crafting good subject lines – every word must count. Start your subject lines with verbs to encourage action, and ask questions to pique curiosity and prompt engagement.

Focus on the benefits to your customers – focus on value and outcomes. And if you want to add some fun and creativity, consider puns and emojis.

Numbers are great attention-grabbing tools, use intrigue to encourage curiosity and avoid excessive capitalization, exclamation points, and spammy words like “FREE” if you want people to click.

9. What images work best in email marketing?

The kinds of images that work well vary depending on the type of email you want to send, but you should follow some key rules.

Want to create an emotional connection? Then, use lifestyle images to show how your product or service fits in – and improves a customer’s life. Make sure the people featured match your audience demographic and that they’re pictured in relatable scenarios.

Product images help customers visualize product usage and can convince them to make a purchase. Ensure you’ve got high-quality, well-lit images with key angles of every product feature.

If you’re presenting complex information in digestible ways, with infographics, highlight the key statistics and make sure you use clear fonts and bold colors for readability. Similarly, make sure your CTAs are big and bold.

10. What kind of layout should I use?

The best email marketing layouts balance functionality and clarity with visual appeal and clear CTAs. If you want to succeed here, follow these principles:

Single-column layouts work well for newsletters, product highlights, and special offers – they give your readers a clear hierarchy, a linear flow, and clean CTAs.

If you want something more eye-catching, ideally for offers or promotions, use a “Z Pattern” that mimics natural eye movement: concentrate your messaging across the top of the image, from the top-right corner to the bottom-left corner, and then along the bottom row. Place critical elements like CTAs and key messaging along that Z shape and you’re more likely to find success.

You can also use “F Pattern” emails similarly, with key content focused on left-to-right rows and from top-to-bottom – this also mimics how people engage with written content.

Invert pyramid layouts work well because they focus on broad starting points and then narrow focus to a singular CTA at the bottom of your email – think a larger header image, brief supporting text, and a prominent CTA at the end. It’s ideal if your campaign has a single goal, like pushing people to a particular web page.

But if you want to promote multiple elements in one email, like different products or offers, use a neat grid layout to provide consistent visuals and an organized way for people to read.

If you want to focus on visuals, then make sure your “hero image” takes up most of your email – ensure bold colors, a clear CTA, and minimal text.

No matter what layout you use, follow some fundamental rules: make sure it works on mobile devices, prioritize readability, use visuals to help readers follow common eye movement patterns, and keep layouts simple with few distractions.

11. How can I personalize my emails?

There are a few key ways to improve engagement by personalizing your emails. Use recipient names or company names to immediately engage readers, and tailor your content based on readers’ past purchasing or browsing behaviors – if they’ve bought a particular product, suggest companion products, new models, or accessories.

You can group recipients based on demographics, locations, interests, or the stages of their customer journey: some customers may benefit from beginner tutorials, while others will be more likely to engage with advanced tips.

Automated emails based on events like purchases, sign-ups, or even birthdays can engage customers, and you should always time your emails based on user time zones or activity patterns.

Too much personalization can feel invasive, so be careful – run tests to see what works. And make sure you have high-quality data, because you don’t want to add personalized names and send loads of people incorrect emails.

12. How long should I make my emails?

Different lengths serve different purposes. For announcements, offers, and transactional emails, ensure maximum engagement by keeping emails under 150 words.

Newsletters, product launches, and event invitations need more detail while being brief enough to retain clarity, so allow between 150 and 300 words. And if you’re emailing people educational content, case studies, white papers, or detailed product information, consider emails between 300 and 500 words.

No matter your length, make sure your emails are mobile-friendly, lead with your key information, and visuals, and be careful with CTAs: mention them early in shorter emails, and include them several times in longer ones.

13. How should I consider accessibility in my emails?

Creating accessible emails ensures more inclusive marketing, which means you’ll reach a broader and more diverse audience.

To ensure you’re creating accessible emails, use clear and concise language and avoid jargon and complex information. Also use simple, legible fonts that are easier to read, and avoid decorative or script-based fonts.

Make sure you’ve included descriptive alt text on all of your images, and use high-contrast images to improve image readability for people with visual impairments.

People using screen readers need emails with proper structure, so use appropriate HTML tags and clear, hierarchical headings. Avoid using tables for your layouts. And check that your emails work on mobile – most marketing emails are opened on mobile devices.

Make sure you offer plain-text versions of emails for people who can’t or don’t want to access HTML emails and test your emails with assistive technology to ensure they function as intended.

Email marketing logistics

14. How often should I email my subscribers?

This is tricky to get right – you want to ensure consistent messaging that has an impact without overwhelming your potential customers.

For newsletters, product updates, or ongoing promotions, send emails once or twice a week: it’s the perfect amount for engaging and nurturing leads without seeming spammy.

And if you’re sending high-engagement, fast-paced emails like seasonal offers, flash promotions, or time-sensitive promotions, consider sending them two or three times a week to boost urgency and create anticipation.

If you want to send summaries, newsletters, or in-depth content, send it monthly. These emails are more time-consuming for readers, so they need to be sent less often if you want to keep people engaged.

It’s worth doing some audience research here, too. Allow your audiences to select how often they want to receive content, whether in the sign-up process or surveys. Conduct testing to see what frequencies work for your audiences, and prioritize quality over quantity.

15. What days and times are best to send marketing emails?

The answers here will ultimately vary depending on your audiences, your business, and your products, but you can follow some important rules of thumb to give yourself a better chance of success.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are usually the best days to send marketing emails: people are settled into their working week and are more likely to open and engage with emails.

On Mondays, people have an influx of emails from the weekend, so they’re less likely to read yours. And on Fridays, people are ready for the weekend, which reduces their email attention spans.

Emails sent between 6 am and 9 am work well because they land at the top of people’s inboxes as they check emails – this works well for B2B audiences. Mid-morning emails often succeed because people are focused and at their desks, and early afternoons are good – people are settled back at their desks after lunch. But, to avoid a dip in response, avoid sending after 3 pm.

Evenings work well for B2C emails, especially with offers and sales- people are more relaxed, they’re checking personal emails, and are more likely to engage.

16. What legal concerns should I have with email marketing?

These will vary on a country-by-country basis, but there are key rules to follow if you want to ensure legality in most regions.

You need to get permission from people to send emails – in the US, this is governed by the CAN-SPAM Act, and in the UK, it’s all about GDPR. Ultimately, make sure that people opt-in to your emails, and you’ll be OK.

You also must handle personal data responsibly. Only collect the minimum amount of data necessary, make sure it’s stored securely, provide clear privacy policies, and give recipients the option to access their data – and an option to unsubscribe from your emails.

17. How should I handle unsubscribe requests?

If someone doesn’t want to receive marketing emails, you must act promptly to stay within your laws. Action it quickly, make sure it’s a straightforward process for the requester, and send them a confirmation so they know their request has been fulfilled.

Make sure that the request has been fulfilled across all channels, including text messages and direct mail if your company sends those, and prevent accidental resubscription.

To mitigate the issues caused by unsubscribes, consider offering options for customers to receive specific kinds of content or less content – rather than unsubscribing completely.

18. What are hard and soft bounces?

In email marketing, a “bounce” is an email that was not delivered to its intended recipient.

A hard bounce happens when an email cannot be delivered due to a permanent problem with the recipient’s email systems. These are usually caused by incorrect or non-existent email addresses, expired domain names, or email addresses that email servers have blocked.

Soft bounces occur when emails are temporarily unable to be delivered, but they may be successful later.

These usually occur because the recipient’s inbox is full or their server is having issues – or because the email is too large and exceeds their server’s limits. To rectify this, try resending the emails over several days – most email marketing platforms include this as an automatic feature.

Remove hard-bounce contacts from your marketing lists to avoid future issues and reputational damage, and make sure you clean and check your email lists regularly to avoid bounce problems.

19. How can I build better email marketing audiences?

It takes time to build a better email marketing list – but it’s worth it because you’ll have more engaged audiences who deliver better response rates and, hopefully, sales.

If you start by clearly defining the audience you want to target with personas, demographics, and data, you’ll have a better chance of creating more responsive audiences.

By using offers, incentives, and freebies you can attract more people to sign up, and make sure that your sign-up forms are straightforward and visible on your website – the fewer barriers you put in the way of people, the better.

Promote your emails, run paid ads to gather more subscribers, and deploy a referral program to encourage current subscribers to share emails.

To improve your email marketing audiences, segment them based on demographics, behavior, or engagement to ensure that your content reaches a more appropriate audience – and optimize your strategies based on regular testing.

Email marketing software

20. What apps are best for sending and managing marketing emails?

There is no shortage of software options if you want to create, send, and manage your email marketing efforts.

Mailchimp is fantastic for beginners thanks to its drag-and-drop editor, pre-built templates, and automated workflows. Moosend is another option that’s ideal for smaller businesses and beginners, as it has great automation tools and templates.

HubSpot is a well-known and effective solution for businesses that need a complete marketing solution: it handles emails, social media, leads, and CRM functionality.

Klaviyo’s smooth integration with e-commerce platforms makes it an ideal choice for retail businesses, ActiveCampaign is an ideal choice for advanced users who want to deploy sophisticated automation and personalization, and if your company already uses Zoho software then Zoho Campaigns will integrate smoothly.

Ultimately, though, there are hundreds of choices here, so do your research, too: consider the pricing tiers available to avoid paying over the odds if you’re using smaller audiences, check out the features provided by different products, and weigh it up against your budget and how a new app will integrate with your existing systems.

21. What are the best writing and design tools for email marketing?

Many email marketing apps will have their own writing and design tools, alongside pre-made templates, but great options are available if you’d like more control.

Canva is a popular all-singing and all-dancing design tool that is ideal for producing fantastic graphics, headers, and templates. Its easy editing options and stock content library mean you get plenty of content and versatility from day one.

Similarly, Adobe Express offers fast graphic creation with pre-set templates and customizable branding – the content produced here looks sleek and professional.

Figma is a solid option for advanced, precise email design and is favored by more advanced users, and Visme is an excellent tool for creating infographics and presentation imagery – ideal for data-heavy emails where you need to break the text up.

And for writing, you can’t go wrong with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Apple Pages, and LibreOffice and OpenOffice are solid free, open-source alternatives.

Marketing analysis questions answered

22. What are key email marketing metrics?

Delve into any email marketing app, and you’ll be confronted with dozens of data points that can be used to measure the success of your campaigns. It can be overwhelming, but if you stick with these key data points, you’ll be OK.

Open Rate and Click-Through Rate, also known as OR and CTR, are two of the most important. The first measures how many people opened your email, and the second displays the number of people who clicked a link inside your email – the former is helpful, but the latter is crucial for proving how many people have actually engaged.

Conversion rates measure the number of people who completed purchases, registrations, or sign-ups after clicking, and you can delve into email sharing and forwarding rates to see if your messages are being sent to extra people.

If you want to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing, also monitor how long people spend viewing your emails, your unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates.

23. How can I measure email marketing metrics like OR, CTOR and CTR?

Every decent email marketing platform has a built-in analytics dashboard that presents you with key data points from your email campaigns. That makes it very easy to track the numbers.

You can gather more data on the actions people take after reading emails by integrating with web analytics tools like Google Analytics, and in most email marketing tools you can create your custom data points if you’d like to measure specific results from your campaigns.

24. What are good results for email marketing?

A good open rate for email marketing should be at least 15%, although this will vary hugely depending on your industry – often, the IT, media, real estate, and hospitality industries experience open rates of 20% or beyond.

The click-through rate is a trickier result to improve – it’s one thing to open an email, but it's entirely another to get people clicking.

If your click-through rate sits at 2% or above, you’re doing well, and anything above 4% is considered an excellent return. It’s a similar story when it comes to conversion rate – anything above 1% is good, and anything above 3% is exceptional.

If you combine those two statistics use the Click-to-Open Rate, to see results of 10% or beyond, with 15% and above the sweet spot.

Try to keep your bounce rate below 2%, regularly clean your email lists to keep that figure low, and ensure that your unsubscribe rate sits below 0.5%.

25. How can I improve email marketing results?

Email marketing is complex, but that means you’ve got plenty of opportunities to analyze and improve.

Optimize your content with engaging subject lines, personalized content, and a focus on value, with bold visuals and a strong CTA, and segment your marketing lists properly – if you create segmented lists and market to those demographics carefully and specifically, you’ll find more success.

Use responsive, mobile-friendly design, make sure you’re sending at the right times and days, clean your lists, test what you’re doing, and make sure you’re providing excellent content.

26. What is A/B testing?

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method that’s used to test email marketing performance. It’s an experiment: you divide your audience into two groups and send two versions of your emails with differences based on what aspects you want to test.

You can then see which version of the email produces better results, which gives you a better idea of what works – and what doesn’t.

During A/B testing you can try different subject lines, CTAs, layouts, sending times, and levels of personalization. You can alter the content, graphics, special offers, and many other aspects of your emails.

Test single variables at a time to avoid getting confusing results, use a large enough sample size, and define clear metrics and outcomes so you can easily conclude which version of your email was the most successful.

A robust A/B testing regime will help you identify what attributes work well in emails sent to your particular audiences, and over time you’ll be able to refine your messaging based on objective evidence.

Email marketing – a transformative tool

Email marketing is complex and potentially overwhelming, especially if it’s something you haven’t explored before. But if done right, it can form a crucial part of your marketing arsenal and help you sell products, build a brand, create trust, and find business success.

And if you take the time and go step-by-step, there’s no reason why you can’t turn your business into an email marketing powerhouse.

Just starting out? Don’t worry. Start by defining your goals and objectives, understanding the audience you want to reach, and putting plans in place to grow your marketing lists effectively.

Choose the right management platform at the right price, run A/B tests, and develop a content plan covering what you want to promote and how you want to promote it – cover templates, frequencies, and personalization.

And then, when you’re sending emails like a pro, make sure you keep running tests, keep analyzing your results, and refining your approach.

Email marketing is difficult, but it’s a highly effective and worthwhile part of an overall marketing strategy. We’ll see you in the inbox!

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