1.2 What is E-mail Marketing?

Let’s start this episode with a very important question. What is e-marketing after all? And to understand that question we need to understand the history of e-mail.

In the 90s, the internet world was going crazy over a thing called ‘Internet mail’ which would become what we call ‘e-mail’. Microsoft had just bought Hotmail, Bill Clinton had just become the first president to send out an e-mail, and word was spreading fast of this new technology. 

However, e-mail really blew up only in 2004, when Google decided to announce their best-kept secret - Gmail. Google’s shiny new baby had over 400 million users by 2012 and as of 2019 had over 1.5 Billion active users. And then you have Hotmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, Outlook taking the total e-mail users today to over 3.9 billion users worldwide. 

So it’s really no surprise that e-mail has been one of the more popular and effective marketing tools since the beginning of the internet. We may spend way more time on social media than we do in our e-mail but we tend to take our e-mail a lot more seriously.

Think about it. How much importance do you give to a single e-mail you get in your inbox, compared to, say, a billboard on the highway, or an ad on your Instagram feed? An e-mail makes you feel like the brand is speaking directly to you, and in your personal mailbox. And even if you do miss clicking on an e-mail, it’s still going to be there, waiting for your attention. So it makes sense that brands use social media, website, etc. to reach their people, but use e-mail to build a relationship with them, and importantly, drive sales. 

Which again brings us to the question we started with, what really is e-mail marketing?

In the simplest terms, e-marketing is the art of reaching your people, saying the right things and getting them to buy what you’re selling.  It’s all about knowing how to use e-mails to connect with your people, build trust, and get them to become loyal customers. And there’s just so many different ways that you can do this. It’s all about how creative you can be with it. 

Let’s take a few examples, right, Charity Water, the non-profit organisation sends a series of update e-mails to everyone who’s donated to a water project letting them know every step of the way. 

Or Buzzfeed’s Tasty that has a very popular newsletter where they send you their favorite new recipes 4 days a week. Or companies like VERO, GrooveBox, that send you a personal welcome e-mail straight from the CEO. 

What I’m trying to say is that E-mail marketing allows you to use all the power of e-mail to really create a personal connection with your people and grow your brand 

And, in this masterclass, we’re going to teach you how to do exactly that.