Email Marketing

What is email marketing?

Email marketing helps you reach people who have explicitly opted in to receive messages in their inbox. Unlike channels that depend on algorithms, email campaigns give you direct access to your subscribers. You can use that connection throughout the customer journey, from nurturing new leads to encouraging customer loyalty.

By integrating email marketing into marketing automation, your company can automatically inform customers about the latest products or offers. Plus, you can use your email marketing tools to measure costs and revenue accurately.

Email marketing also plays a central role in an omnichannel marketing strategy. It works with SMS, social media, and other channels to support lead generation, brand awareness, relationship building, or customer retention between purchases.

A brief history of email

In 1971, computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. The message he sent was just a string of numbers and letters, but it was the beginning of a new era of communication. Tomlinson also introduced the use of the “@” symbol in email addresses.

In 1978, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation named Gary Thuerk used this new method of direct communication to send out the first commercial email to let people know about a new product. Thuerk’s email list only had 400 addresses, but the emails he sent resulted in about $13 million in sales, according to Computerworld.

By the ’90s, the internet had become commercially available to the masses. The way people communicated with one another began to change dramatically, and marketers discovered that email could be an effective way to advertise.

The emergence of marketing emails also ushered in the need for regulatory updates. The United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act, for example, now requires an “opt out” option for all marketing emails. Email has become such a popular marketing tool for businesses partly because it forces the user to take some kind of action—an email will sit in the inbox until it’s read, deleted, or archived.

Advantages of email marketing

The main advantages of email marketing include direct audience access, low costs, measurable performance, automation, and personalization opportunities. These benefits make email useful throughout the entire customer journey. You can attract potential customers, encourage purchases, re-engage inactive subscribers, and strengthen customer relationships through the same marketing channel.

In practice, email delivers measurable results, reaches people directly, and costs less than most other channels. Whether you’re launching your first campaign or refining an existing email marketing program, understanding these advantages helps you get the best results. Here’s why businesses across industries rely on email to connect with their audience.

Direct communication with your audience

Email gives you a direct line to your customers through their inboxes. It lands in a space that people check regularly rather than relying on social media algorithms to surface your content. This direct access means you can deliver personalized messages that speak to individual preferences and behaviors.

Over time, this consistent communication builds stronger customer relationships. When people hear from you regularly with content they actually want to see, they stay engaged with your brand. Keeping that connection alive encourages repeat business and helps you maintain relationships between purchases.

Cost-effective marketing

Email costs significantly less than traditional advertising channels like TV, radio, or print. You don’t need a huge marketing budget to run a successful email marketing campaign. When you target the right people with the right messages, email delivers a high return on investment.

It scales easily too—whether you’re reaching 100 subscribers or 100,000, the cost difference is minimal compared to other marketing channels. This makes email accessible for businesses of any size. You can start small, measure your results, and increase your investment over time.

Measurable results and insights

With email, you can track exactly how your campaigns perform. Using a marketing platform, you can closely monitor the most important email marketing metrics, including:

• Open rates show you how many people are reading your messages.

• Click-through rates tell you which links and calls to action resonate most.

• Conversion rates reveal which targeted emails actually drive sales or signups.

• Unsubscribe rates show how many people opt out after receiving your emails.

These key metrics help you understand what your target audience responds to, so you can refine your messaging for future campaigns. The data you collect also gives you valuable insight into customer behavior and preferences.

Drive traffic and sales

Email lets you promote products, services, and events directly to people who’ve already shown interest in your business. It can also help you encourage repeat purchases from existing customers or re-engage people who haven’t bought in a while.

Targeted links and special offers boost website traffic and move people toward a purchase. Email keeps your products and services visible to your email subscribers, which means they’re more likely to think of you when they’re ready to buy. If you add automated follow-ups, you can even bring customers back after actions like viewing a product or leaving items in their cart.

Automation and efficiency

Email automation saves your Marketing team time while keeping communication consistent. You can schedule campaigns weeks or months in advance, so emails send at optimal times without manual effort. Triggered emails based on customer actions—like welcome messages for new subscribers or transactional emails after a purchase—happen automatically.

Mailchimp’s marketing automation flows let you create automated paths based on customer actions and behaviors. This frees up time for your Marketing team to work on strategy and creative efforts rather than sending individual emails. Not only do you save time, but you can boost revenue, too. Omnisend found that automated messages made up just 2% of email volume but pulled in 30% of the revenue in 2025.

Enhanced brand awareness

Regular communication keeps your brand at the top of people’s minds. When subscribers hear from you consistently, they remember you when they need what you offer. Each message reinforces your brand identity and values. Delivering valuable content—not just sales pitches—builds trust over time.

This trust translates into loyalty, which is what every business needs to grow. Email helps you engage customers while staying relevant and visible in a crowded market. That repeated exposure builds strong brand recognition and makes your business come to mind first when people need a product or service like yours.

Challenges of email marketing

The biggest email marketing challenges involve maintaining subscriber interest, managing costs, and adapting campaigns over time. Success also depends on factors beyond the email itself. You must follow applicable regulations and the rules set by your email service provider. Otherwise, you risk damaging your sender reputation—the score used to decide whether your messages reach inboxes or hit spam folders.

Email marketing delivers strong results, but it comes with obstacles that every business needs to be able to manage. Understanding these challenges helps you build a winning email marketing strategy that actually works. From getting your commercial messages into inboxes to keeping subscribers engaged over time, these are the realities you’ll face when running email campaigns:

Deliverability and spam filters

Getting your emails into inboxes—what email marketers call deliverability—isn’t guaranteed. Spam filters have gotten more sophisticated, and they don’t just look at your content. They also evaluate your sender reputation, engagement rates, and technical setup. If your emails consistently go to spam folders, your subscribers never see them.

You need to follow guidelines like the CAN-SPAM Act, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL). You should also understand the rules that apply to unsolicited emails in each location. Beyond that, you must maintain a clean email list and monitor your deliverability metrics. Poor deliverability wastes your email marketing efforts and prevents you from reaching your target audience.

Mailchimp helps with this using built-in deliverability tools. These tools monitor your sender reputation, provide guidance on best practices, and automatically handle technical requirements to improve email deliverability.

Email fatigue

Email marketing isn’t something you can set up once and walk away from. What works today might not work next month. You need to constantly test subject lines, review your email marketing plan, analyze campaign performance data, and adjust your approach. This takes time and resources from your Marketing team.

You’re competing for attention in crowded inboxes, so your email marketing strategy needs to evolve based on what your customer data tells you. Mailchimp supports your efforts with built-in A/B testing, email marketing performance reports, and optimization recommendations. The email marketing platform shows you what’s working and where to improve. That way, you can refine your email marketing strategy without starting from scratch every time.

Cost considerations

Email marketing is more cost-effective than traditional channels, but it’s not free. You need to pay for the right email marketing platform that fits your needs. As your list grows, so do your costs. Many email marketing services charge based on subscriber count or email volume.

Beyond the platform itself, you might need a budget for design work, copywriting, email marketing tools, and analytics. If you want advanced features like SMS marketing capabilities or robust customer relationship management integration, those often come at a premium.

Mailchimp provides free email marketing services for smaller lists, and our pricing scales with your business. You get email templates, automation, and analytics included, which reduces the need for separate tools or extensive design resources.

Email marketing types and examples

There are many different types of email marketing. Welcome emails introduce new subscribers to your brand, while newsletters maintain existing customer relationships. Lead nurturing emails move prospects toward purchases, and promotional emails sweeten the deal with special offers. Your business can also support specific customer actions using emails tailored to different needs and goals.

As you can see, each email type serves a different purpose and takes a different avenue to engage with your audience. We are going to look at some of the many different types, so you can create the best email marketing campaign for your company.

Welcome emails

Welcome emails introduce new customers to your brand and encourage them to learn more about your product or service. They often offer a trial, discount, or other bonus. You can automate a welcome series of 1-3 emails spaced several days apart to keep new subscribers engaged without overwhelming them.

Newsletter emails

Newsletter emails are very popular, and they often highlight new products and services. They may also include articles, blog posts, and customer reviews. Usually, there will be a call to action (CTA) to move the reader to do something, whether that is reading a new blog post or checking out a new product.

Lead nurturing emails

Lead nurturing emails target a specific audience through a series of messages in the hope of eventually converting them. Typically, lead nurturing emails focus on customers who are interested in a product or service and then build their interest with additional information or relevant promotions. The goal is to push users from the consideration stage to the purchasing stage.

Confirmation emails

Confirmation emails land in the inboxes of people who have recently signed up for emails or newsletters or purchased an item online. This lets users know that their purchase went through or that their signup was successful and can include more actions for them to take.

Dedicated emails

Dedicated emails go out when you want to reach a specific segment of your email list. This segment may be based on recent purchases, inactive clients, new members, and other specific types of criteria. For instance, you can send abandoned cart emails to shoppers who left items behind or deliver back-in-stock alerts to customers waiting for a product.

Invite emails

Invite emails often announce upcoming events, new product launches, and seminars. Most companies use these types of emails when there is something special going on to gain attention and increase awareness about special events. Ideally, you want to send these a few weeks ahead, with 1-2 reminders as the date approaches.

Promotional emails

Promotional emails are common, tend to be generic, and go out to a large audience. They help maintain brand awareness and may tease new products and services. A strong promotional email pairs a clear offer with a direct CTA that tells subscribers what to do next.

Survey email

Survey emails gather feedback from customers to help drive the success of your business. Sending out these emails tells your customers that you value their opinion and want to create an experience, product, or whatever you’re offering that they’ll enjoy. Businesses can use the feedback from these surveys and apply it to their offerings, creating what is hopefully a better product.

Seasonal marketing emails

Seasonal marketing emails reach customers with information on upcoming sales and promotions during certain seasons or for special occasions. Email marketers commonly send them out around holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. Not everyone wants a reminder of the holidays, though, so give subscribers the option to skip them without unsubscribing from everything.

10 best practices for high-performance email marketing

Implementing best practices will help you not only optimize open and click-through rates, but also build a lasting relationship of trust with your audience, improving brand perception and increasing final conversions. Here are the most important best practices followed by email marketing experts:

• Optimize the subscription process.

• Always ask for explicit consent to receive your emails.

• Simplify the unsubscribe process.

• Operate in compliance with privacy laws.

• Clean your subscriber lists frequently.

• Segment your audience.

• Write subject lines that trigger clicks.

• Choose a simple, responsive design.

• Focus on truly actionable calls to action.

• Experiment and optimize with A/B testing.

1. Optimize the subscription process

Simplify the subscription process by only asking for essential information (such as name and email address) in the form, clearly define from the outset which content you will send and how often, and offer valuable incentives (discounts, samples, or guides) to motivate the user.

2. Always ask for explicit consent to receive your emails

Use permission-based marketing by sending emails only to those who have given explicit consent. Consider adopting double opt-in, where subscribers sign up through your form and then confirm their address by clicking a follow-up email. This helps you eliminate misspelled email addresses, avoid spam filters, and build a loyal audience genuinely interested in getting your messages.

3. Simplify the unsubscribe process

Include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in every email to maintain the quality of your contact list. Having only active users improves the performance of your email campaigns. You can also create a preference center to let subscribers choose their interests and how often they hear from you.

4. Operate in compliance with privacy laws

Ensure that every aspect of your strategy is strictly compliant with current regulations. This includes the GDPR for the European Union and the CAN-SPAM Act for the United States. For both of these regulations, your business must follow rules around consent, transparency, and opting out of marketing emails.

5. Clean your subscriber lists frequently

Keep your lists clean by avoiding sending to obsolete contacts. If users haven’t interacted in months, ask for a resubscription before forwarding the next email. Remove contacts who remain inactive to reduce bounce rates and keep your list focused on engaged subscribers.

6. Segment your audience

Divide audiences based on demographics or behaviors. Then, use personalization tags (such as the recipient’s name) to send relevant messages and offers. Together, these strategies drive more revenue, with segmented campaigns increasing email revenue by up to 760%, according to Campaign Monitor.

7. Write subject lines that trigger clicks

A strong subject line with clear branding can help you meet or exceed the average email open rate of 35%. The secret is to write short, effective subject lines in your brand voice, previewing the content without being misleading. Avoid sensational or sales-focused tones. Instead, give readers a clear reason to open the email, like an exclusive deal only subscribers get.

8. Choose a simple, responsive design

Keep a simple, clean layout to avoid distractions. Ensure the design is responsive for proper viewing on mobile devices and computers, as well as on any email provider. Test your emails before sending to confirm images, links, and other elements display and work as expected.

9. Focus on truly actionable calls to action

Make CTA buttons highly visible, colorful, and strategically placed where they are easy to find and click. Use action-oriented copy with direct, clear verbs that explicitly explain the benefit of clicking. It’s often best to only include 1 CTA per email so readers can quickly identify the most important next step.

10. Experiment and optimize with A/B testing

Refine your strategy throughout the email marketing process by identifying what works and what needs improvement. A/B testing allows you to optimize your email campaigns, maximizing conversions and reducing wasted effort and budget. Testing also helps you get more from your investment. Litmus reports 35% of companies see email marketing returns of $10 to $36 per $1 spent, equal to a 900% to 3,500% ROI.

Quick tips for building your email marketing list

But how do you build an audience of people to send email to as part of your internet marketing efforts in the first place? There are a few ways, and all of them have to do with treating your customers right, taking into consideration marketing best practices.

Don’t buy email lists. Many email marketing companies (including Mailchimp) have a strict, permission-based policy when it comes to email addresses, which means that sending to purchased lists is prohibited.

Instead, concentrate on encouraging folks to opt into receiving messages from you by using lead magnets. You could offer a discount on your customers’ first orders when they sign up for your email list via a custom signup form.

Or maybe you can offer new subscribers free shipping on their next order—or give them a chance to win a prize when they join your list. Here are some more tips to help you build an email list.

Be aware of national (and international) email regulations

Make sure you adhere to any legal requirements and applicable laws in your area when sending automated emails. These may include the CAN-SPAM Act in the US, CASL in Canada, or the GDPR in the European Union. The regulations depend on both your location and the location of your subscribers.

It’s your responsibility to know which laws apply to you. You’re not totally on your own though, as many email marketing platforms offer tools to help manage consent, subscriber preferences, and opt-outs. Just be sure to review the applicable laws regularly, since privacy and email marketing rules change over time.

Use email to have a conversation with your customers

Email is a great marketing tool, but it can help your business in other ways, too. Consider taking the occasional break from your regular marketing content to send out surveys, tell your customers how much you appreciate them after buying from you, follow up after an abandoned cart, or just say hello.

Not only does it give your audience a chance to provide you with valuable feedback, but it also allows them to get more insight into the person behind the business.

Only send when you really need to

Once someone has trusted you with their email address, don’t abuse that trust. Flooding your audience’s inbox with superfluous emails will cause them to lose interest or unsubscribe entirely. Focus on sending them relevant, engaging messages about the stuff they like, and they’ll be loyal for a long time to come.

Automation can help you send emails only when they’re relevant. Set up triggers based on customer actions so messages reach subscribers when they have a reason to engage. For example, a new signup could trigger a welcome series instead of waiting for your next scheduled email campaign.

Drive better results with email marketing

Email marketing gives you access to your target audience, measurable results, and a cost-effective way to grow your business. It’s also a channel on the rise. The global email marketing space hit $12 billion in 2026 and could reach $22 billion by 2030. With the right platform and strategy, you can make the most of this growing digital marketing channel.

Mailchimp simplifies email marketing with tools designed to save you time and effort. Our email marketing templates get you started quickly, while segmentation and automation ensure you’re sending the right message to the right people.

Built-in analytics show you what’s working, A/B testing helps you improve, and deliverability tools keep your emails landing in inboxes. From list building to email campaign optimization, you get the tools, insights, and support to make each send more effective than the last.

"A key best practice for improving email deliverability and engagement is maintaining a clean, segmented email list. Regularly remove inactive subscribers, use double opt-ins to ensure quality signups, and segment your audience based on behavior or preferences. This helps prevent your emails from being marked as spam and ensures you’re sending relevant content to the right people."

                  — Denzil Charles, Head of Partnerships, INSIDEA

Email marketing FAQs

How to get started with email marketing?

Many email marketing platforms make it easy to get started. All you have to do is sign up for a free account or test a paid account. You can easily upgrade later as your email list grows. Mailchimp offers more than 130 industry-specific email templates based on your intent to make it easy for you to create your marketing emails.

How important is the email subject line?

The subject line is crucial. A poor subject line can cause your email to end up in the spam folder. If it isn’t captivating, it may not grab the reader’s attention and end up deleted before it is even opened. The subject line should make the reader want to open and read the email.

How do I connect with my audience?

The best way to connect with your audience is to create email campaigns that have value. Cost savings, new products, new services, and product benefits show the reader that the email has value to them, and they should keep on reading.

What can email marketing campaigns do for my business?

Marketing by email is a great way to keep your business top-of-mind with customers and prospects so they don’t think of your competitors. When done correctly, your email marketing campaign can show great success and lead customers to act, which is what all businesses want when developing their campaigns.

Can email automation improve my return on investment (ROI)?

Absolutely. Email marketing automation boosts ROI by sending timely, behavior-based messages to potential and existing customers without manual effort. Mailchimp users earn up to 9 times more revenue through marketing automation flows compared to bulk emails. That’s because automation reaches customers at the right moment and makes every campaign work harder for you.

Can I combine email marketing with SMS and other digital marketing channels?

You can pair your email marketing strategy with SMS, social ads, and landing pages for an omnichannel approach. And it doesn’t have to be more work. Email marketing software with built-in automation coordinates every channel for you, triggering messages based on customer behavior. This helps you reach customers at the right time and place without adding hours to your week.

What are the differences between free and paid email marketing tools?

Most email marketing services offer different plans based on your audience size and automation needs. Free plans limit contacts, sends, and features to help you get started without any up-front cost. Paid plans scale with your business, adding advanced segmentation, automation flows, and custom reporting. Plus, you get higher send limits so you can reach a larger audience effectively.