Email marketing is a direct line to your targeted potential customers, as well as one of the best sources to generate, attract, and convert high-quality leads.
Not sure where to start your email marketing journey? 😕
In this article, I’ll explain email marketing definition, its importance and benefits, how it works, and many other related topics you may have questions about.
So, let’s get right to it! ➡️
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a direct communication channel for reaching potential customers.
Simply put, email marketing is the use of email tools to send commercial, transactional, or interactive messages to potential & regular customers to promote a product or service, attract new prospects, or engage with previous clients.
Businesses of all sizes can use this tool at all marketing and sales funnel stages. For example, email marketing is used for lead generation, branding, persuading customers to purchase, informing new articles and updates, customer engagement, and many other marketing purposes.
Where Did Email Marketing Come from?
Email marketing is one of the oldest and, at the same time, the most up-to-date digital marketing tools. You may ask HOW?!
Email marketing is about 46 years old. Only a few years after introducing the first free Email Service Provider (ESP), Gary Thuerk, an American marketing manager, ran the first email campaigns by sending 400 emails to 400 customers. This campaign generated about $13 million in sales (Source: Computerworld).
Having said that, email marketing is also a modern tool. That’s why, in recent years, unique features have been added to it, some of them including:
- Automation ⚙️
- User segmentation 👥
- A/B testing 🔬
- Email list building 📩
- Send time optimization ⏱
- Email personalization 👤
- Reporting & analyzing user behavior 📜
As such, we no longer consider email marketing just an advertising tool. With new features, it is a popular tool for creating personalized and constant interactions with potential customers.
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
Today, business owners and marketers are using email marketing for their marketing purposes as the number of people using email is increasing.
According to Statista, about 4.48 billion people use email across the world. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the growth of mobile messengers and chat apps, experts expect this figure to reach over 4.89 billion users by 2027.
Still don’t believe us? So, let’s take a look at the statistics proving the importance of using email marketing:
- Over 361.6 billion emails were sent and received per day around the world in 2024.
- 69% of B2B marketers use email marketing to distribute content and advertise their products, services, and brand.
- Over 59% of people say that email campaigns affect their purchasing decisions.
- The rate of Return on Investment (ROI) in email marketing is as high as 4400%.
All these statistics indicate the effectiveness of email marketing for businesses.
The Pros and Cons of Email Marketing Campaigns
Today, more than 95% of people around the world use the Internet, which means that most users also take advantage of email.
✔️ The Pros
Some of the most important benefits of email marketing are as follows:
1. High Return on Investment (ROI)
Email marketing is among the highest ROI channels for businesses of all sizes and industries, with a $42 ROI per $1 invested.
Simply put, ROI means how much you earn for what you spend. The ROI of email marketing can be accurately calculated.
More importantly, the ROI will be very high if email marketing is done right.
2. Easily Measurable
Emails provide businesses with the ability to track KPIs and metrics.
Using email marketing automation and analytics tools, you can effortlessly measure the performance of your email campaigns with KPIs and metrics, including open rates, conversion rates, engagement rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, and more.
It helps marketers and businesses optimize future email marketing campaigns and strategies.
3. Scalable and Cost-Effective
One of the main benefits of email marketing is its scalability. Compared to other marketing channels, emails can be sent to a huge number of recipients while remaining affordable.
Businesses can improve their reach to thousands or even millions of customers without spending a single dollar on advertising and content sharing.
In addition to the above perks that I’ve described in detail, email marketing has other upsides that I’ll mention in a list:
- Fast and easy to share
- Increasing web traffic
- Direct audience access
- Better personalization
- Easy segmentation
- Getting customer feedback
- Better brand awareness
✖️ The Cons
Although email marketing has many advantages, no approach and tool can be flawless, and this marketing strategy is no exception. Let’s examine some of the significant downsides of email marketing campaigns:
1. Spam Issues
Email spamming is the worst thing that can happen in email marketing. You must have seen that some businesses or people say to check the spam folder before sending an email.
You can use spam filters and email verifier tools like CUFinder to avoid your domain being marked as spam.
2. Undelivered and Unopened Emails
Email marketing can also result in many unopened emails or may even be susceptible to undeliverable emails. This is one of the major challenges that can drastically reduce your business ROI. Accordingly, try to keep your email list clean and updated.
The bottom line is that email marketing will be around for a while. To stay competitive in today’s digital market, you need to stay on top of email marketing strategies & techniques as trends continue to change.
The Most Common Types of Email Marketing
Now that you know the concept of email marketing, its importance, and benefits, you may be wondering what it is used for.
There are different types of email marketing, each of which pursues a specific purpose in the buyer’s journey and takes a different path to interact with them.
In this section, I’ll discuss some of the most important types of marketing emails so that you can create the best email marketing campaigns for your business.
Let’s dive in! 🏊
1. Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are the most important type of email marketing. They are the first emails your audiences receive after subscribing, signing up, or submitting their email addresses to your company.
Welcome emails have 4x higher open rates and 5x higher click-through rates than other email campaigns. (Source: Mailmodo)
They help you introduce your brand to new customers and create an incredible first impression for the audience. They include sign-up forms, videos, or a friendly & simple welcome message.
2. Promotional Emails
The purpose of these emails is to promote products, services, or special offers to subscribers to increase sales and conversions.
Based on a survey of millennials, 68% of respondents say promotional emails have influenced buying choices. (Source: Facebook)
Promotional emails include compelling offers, special discounts, or limited-time deals to entice recipients to take action or purchase.
3. Newsletter Emails
As the name suggests, newsletter emails share news related to your brand and industry. These informational emails inform customers about updates, new milestones, new product or service features, or valuable content such as customer case studies.
40% of B2B marketers consider email newsletters critical to their content marketing success. (Source: HubSpot)
Newsletter emails should contain entertaining, interesting, and useful information, insights, thoughts, and tips for readers. Otherwise, if the content is boring and worthless, your audience may unsubscribe from your email.
4. Confirmation Emails
Transactional or confirmation emails are auto-responder emails generated after people interact with your website. They have a higher Click-through Rate (CTR) than other types of emails.
These emails can provide activation details when purchasing services or products, guidance for the next steps, shipping updates, or additional buying opportunities.
64% of clients consider confirmation emails to be the most valuable type of email due to their high open rates (65%). (Source: Mailchimp)
Transactional or confirmation messages usually include one of five types:
- Subscription confirmation emails
- Refund confirmation emails
- Order confirmation emails
- Registration confirmation emails
- Booking confirmation emails
This type of email especially helps create a sense of trust and improve a new customer’s experience.
5. Survey or Feedback Emails
Survey emails are a common method of data collection used to gather quantitative data from potential customers. In this way, surveys or questionnaires are sent to individuals via email.
The average response rate to feedback or survey emails is approximately 24.8%. (Source: FluidSurveys)
The survey emails help marketers collect feedback from prospects or customers to improve customer experiences about content type, interest gauge, service type, or recent purchases.
6. Behavioral Emails
Behavioral emails are targeted, personalized, and planned emails that are triggered by specific user actions or behaviors, such as abandoning a shopping cart or browsing a product page.
More than 75% of email revenue is generated by behavioral emails. (Source: Direct Marketing Association)
These behavioral or triggered emails give customers or prospects exactly what they want or need, so they perform better than promotional emails.
How Do You Create Email Marketing Campaigns? [7+ Tips for 2025 by Experts]
Is an email marketing campaign easy? The short answer is yes, it can be—if you do it properly. Well, how? The expert tips will help you create a winning email marketing campaign.
Here’s a high-level look at some of email marketing best practices and tips: 👇
1. Understand Your Audience’s Persona
One of the most important principles of an email marketing campaign is a deep understanding of the audience.
To do this, you should collect necessary and detailed information about your prospects, such as the name, job title, industry, location, gender, age, interests, preferences, behavior, and more.
Lack of knowing the target audience highly increases the bounce rate of your website. Bounce rate refers to the number of users who leave your website immediately after receiving an email!
2. Build Your Targeted Email List
After understanding your audience, to start your email marketing campaign, you need to create a targeted and verified email list.
This list is a database of high-quality leads from your audiences or subscribers who are interested in what you offer.
There are many common methods to gather email addresses, such as offering a free ebook or newsletters in exchange for an email address, creating attractive opt-in forms on your websites, etc.
One of the easiest ways to build a verified and qualified email list is to use the right and reliable email finder tools, like CUFinder.
With CUFinder’s email finders, you can start creating your targeted and accurate email list immediately. CUFinder cleans your list for free by verifying the accuracy of email addresses.
Here are just a few of CUFinder’s top features:
- Free email verification
- High accurate email list
- Large database of contact & business leads
- Global & local coverage
- Flexible & affordable prices
- Free trial & credits
- GDPR & CCPA compliance
- User-friendly interface
- CRM integration & API
Want to learn more about our email finder services? Let’s get started with CUFinder’s Email Enrichment Services for free!
3. Create Your Email Text
Now that you know your audience, and you’ve created an email list by email finders, it’s time to write the email text. The text of the email should show the value and features of your product to the audience.
When writing the text of the email, consider the following expert tips:
- Choose a compelling and captivating subject line
- Start with a salutation or greeting
- Personalize your email content using your prospects’ names (Personalized emails are 6× more likely to drive conversions)
- Write an interesting, valuable, and persuasive opening line that will compel the recipient to read the email until the end
- Tell a story and speak about your audience’s interests and needs
- Show your brand personality
- Keep it short and sweet
- Use clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs) to engage and convert readers
- Employ the email signature at the end of the email
4. Always Test, Iterate, and Optimize
Testing your email marketing strategies is a must for the best results in email campaigns. As a matter of fact, when you know what works, you know what to keep doing to reach your goals.
For example, you can run A/B tests on personalized subject lines to see which emails your audience opens, responds to, or gets engagement the most.
When you’re doing tests, the best advice I can give you is to take action and optimize your email marketing campaigns by implementing what you’ve been told and learned— this is a helpful way to achieve the success of your email campaign.
5. Choose the Right Email Marketing Automation Tool
Selecting the right email marketing platform, such as HubSpot or Mailchimp, is vital to accelerating and simplifying the process of sending cold emails to your target audiences.
Marketing automation services help email marketers make email segmentation and personalization possible at scale.
Besides, look for practical features and tools such as analytics, easy-to-use design, customizable email templates, live content, and email follow-up.
6. Optimize Your Email Campaigns for Mobile Devices
According to recent data, over 85% of users access their inboxes on a mobile phone, and 75% say they check their email most often via smartphones.
As a mobile-responsive email design can increase unique mobile clicks by 15%, it’s very crucial for marketers to use mobile-friendly emails in their email marketing strategy (56% of marketers perform mobile optimization for their campaigns).
7. Get the Timing Right for Effective Emails
Choosing the best time and the best day to send your email campaign is a necessary and basic piece of your overall email marketing strategy.
The best time to send an email campaign depends on different factors, such as your target audience, type of business and industry, and the purpose of your email marketing campaign.
Now, you may be wondering what is the best time and day to send an email.
While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, here are some general points to consider when determining the best time to send your email:
- Consider your audience’s time zone, typical work hours, and leisure times
- Avoid sending emails during busy times, for example, Mondays & Fridays
- Avoid sending emails on holidays and weekends because they might result in lower engagement
- Send emails on your audience’s commute or during downtime, for example, mornings and evening times
As such, according to recent studies, the best time to send email campaigns is on weekday mornings around 9-11 AM and early afternoon around 1-3 PM.
8. Avoid Common Mistakes in Your Email Campaigns
If you’re still struggling with low open or unsubscribe rates from your email campaigns, avoid these seven common email marketing mistakes.
Summing Up
There’s no doubt that email marketing is a powerful and popular strategy for any brand or industry.
In this article, I investigated the concept of email marketing, explaining its importance, benefits, types, strategies and best practices.
Keep in mind that you can always be better and faster at email marketing strategy using email marketing automation tools and email extraction platforms like CUFinder.
Ready to start your email marketing journey right now, but you still have questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us and comment! At CUFinder, our experts answer you immediately.
FAQs
1. Is email marketing still working in 2025?
Email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool that can benefit businesses of all sizes in 2025, such as generating new leads, connecting with their target audience, driving engagement, and achieving marketing goals.
2. How can I become an email marketer?
To become a specialist in email marketing, develop relevant skills, stay updated, build a portfolio of successful campaigns, experiment with different email campaigns & strategies, and take online email marketing courses.
3. What are the key metrics for measuring the success of email marketing strategies?
Several key metrics are used to measure email marketing success, including CTR, open rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate, campaign ROI, and spam complaint rate.
4. What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign, simply put, involves sending a series of emails to multiple recipients over a period of time.
5. What are four effective email marketing strategies for 2025?
The most effective email marketing strategies that have been prov
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