What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a strategic approach to customer engagement, enabling brands to share essential information, nurture leads, promote products or services and much more. Email is a direct, personalized communication channel, preferred among today’s consumers, allowing brands to deliver messages in bulk or targeted to specific audience segments. You can cultivate relationships with your audience, deliver valuable content and guide them through the customer journey, from initial awareness to conversion and beyond.
Growth Requires an Email Marketing Strategy
Email remains the most common activation point for brands, gaining consumer consent in exchange for value — often in the form of exclusive content, breaking news, discounts, rewards and more. Email marketing empowers brands to nurture the end-to-end customer lifecycle, from initial awareness to conversion and beyond, with onboarding, promotional, abandoned cart and win back emails to drive sustained engagement and repeat conversions.
While push notifications and SMS are ephemeral — highly visible but quickly buried on smartphone lock screens — email provides a repository for customers to search for specific brand communications whenever they want. This flexibility helps customers reach their goals faster, in their own time and on their own terms. For this reason, an email marketing strategy should be a top priority.
Why an Email Marketing Strategy Is Important in Cross-Channel Orchestration
Today’s consumers expect seamless experiences and consistent value across all touchpoints. Email is not just a standalone channel; it’s a vital component of a successful cross-channel strategy. Here’s how an email marketing strategy can enhance your efforts:
- Connect the Dots: Email bridges the gap between different channels, providing a central hub for customer communication. By connecting your email marketing with other channels, you can deliver more unified interactions that guide customers to take high-value actions with your brand wherever they interact.
- Drive Engagement & Conversions: Email supports a range of engagement and conversion goals, from app downloads and onboarding to web + app traffic to loyalty program enrollment.
- Personalize at Scale: By integrating email marketing into your channel mix, you can tap into data from other channels or your app and website to deliver targeted messages tailored to their unique preferences — or vice versa, leverage data from email to support personalization efforts elsewhere.
- Capture More Holistic Insights: Integrating email marketing into your cross-channel strategy also enables you to capture a more comprehensive view of the entire customer experience vs. siloed engagement channels. You can look beyond opens and clicks to obtain detailed views of cross-channel performance and see what content is driving customers to take valuable actions.
Common Examples of Email Marketing
Here are a few examples of campaigns to consider as part of your email marketing strategy:
Transactional Emails
Deliver essential, practical information based on the customer’s unique request, such as registering a new account, requesting a password reset or making a purchase. Transactional emails foster trust and ensure a seamless customer experience.
Promotional Emails
Capture attention and persuade customers to purchase your product or service. Unlike transactional emails, promotional emails focus on building long-term relationships and driving repeat conversions through engaging content and compelling offers.
Informational Emails
Educate and update your email list with newsletters, industry insights and thought leadership. Informational emails nurture leads and keep your brand at the top of their mind.
Re-Engagement Emails
Win back inactive customers with personalized, exclusive offers designed to encourage action and engagement. Whether it’s a special offer, a friendly reminder or a survey, re-engagement emails can remind your audience about your brand’s value.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Recover lost sales by sending automated emails to customers who left items in their shopping carts. Abandoned cart emails typically bring a sense of urgency and offer incentives for completing the purchase.
Top Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
Craft Engaging Subject Lines
Your subject line is the first thing recipients see when they check their email. One lousy subject line can result in your email being ignored. Craft a clear, short and engaging subject line that summarizes the content of your email to ensure it gets noticed. A/B test the content to understand what’s driving measurable results.
Personalize Content
Email personalization needs to go beyond first name mention. It should use first-party and zero-party data, such as past interactions and preferences, to tailor content to the individual. Whether you recommend new products, offer an exclusive discount or deliver thought leadership content, personalization shows your customers you know them and should be carried across all channels.
Segment Your Audience
Not all customers are the same, so your emails shouldn’t be either. Use audience segmentation to group your recipients based on their interests, purchase history or behaviors. Refine your segmentation with data collection and enrichment to get even more granular targeting and tailored messaging.
Adhere to Compliance Standards
Your email marketing strategy should comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the CAN-Spam Act.
To follow GDPR, you must:
- Have users opt-in to receive emails to obtain consent
- Be transparent about why you’re collecting their data
- Allow users to subscribe or unsubscribe at any time
- Store personal data only for as long as necessary
- Use encryption to protect consumer data
- Allow subscribers to access, change or remove their data anytime
To follow the CAN-Spam Act, you must:
- Indicate if the email is an advertisement or promotion
- Provide an unsubscribe link in every email
- Honor opt-out requests
- Buy emails from other websites
- Avoid false information
Prioritize Mobile Optimization
Most people check their email on their smartphone or tablet, so if your emails are not mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to engage customers. Prioritize mobile optimization as part of your email marketing strategy. Use short subject lines, format content for easy readability and make CTA buttons and links easy to tap.
Leverage A/B Testing & Analytics
Guesswork doesn’t lead to better results; data does. Perform A/B testing to understand the impact of different subject lines and email layouts and understand what resonates with your audience. Go beyond click-through and open rates to measure conversions, and optimize your email marketing strategy accordingly.
Understanding Email’s Synergies with Key Marketing Channels
Email marketing works with other channels — SMS, push notifications and mobile wallet — to deliver relevant moments to your customers. Here’s how you can tap into cross-channel synergies:
Email and SMS
Email and SMS complement each other perfectly. Email is great for long, detailed content, while SMS is better for short, urgent messages for your customers.
Example: Send an SMS to alert customers about a limited-time offer, followed by an email with detailed product information and a direct link to purchase.
Email and Push Notifications
Push notifications deliver real-time alerts, while email provides a persistent record of communication. Use push notifications to capture immediate attention and email to provide context and follow-up.
Example: Send a push notification to announce a shipping update, followed by an email with detailed tracking information and delivery estimates.
Email and Mobile Wallet
Email can be used to deliver mobile wallet passes, coupons and loyalty cards, providing customers with tangible value and convenience. Mobile wallet items are highly visible on lock screens and can deliver real-time updates.
Example: Send an email with a link to add a digital coupon to a customer’s mobile wallet or to add a digital boarding pass. You can then send updates via mobile wallet when the coupon is about to expire, or if the boarding gate has changed.
How to Measure the Success of Your Email Marketing Strategy
Measuring the success of your email marketing strategy goes beyond basic metrics. It’s about understanding the impact of campaigns on your business goals. While open rates and click-through rates (CTR) are important, consider these additional metrics:
- Conversion Rate: Track how many recipients complete desired actions (e.g., purchases, sign-ups)
- Revenue Attribution: Measure the direct revenue generated by email campaigns
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Assess how email marketing contributes to long-term customer value
- Bounce Rate: Track the percentage of emails that fail to deliver
- Spam Complaint Rate: Monitor how many recipients mark your emails as spam
- Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of users who removed themselves from your email list
H2: How Airship Helps Brands Integrate Email Marketing into a Cross-Channel Strategy
Airship empowers brands to create, test and optimize personalized customer experiences across apps, websites and channels — email, SMS, push notifications and mobile wallet. With our cross-channel capabilities, we help our customers tap into the power of email where and when it matters most, while integrating email campaigns seamlessly with other channels.
Here are just a few ways that Airship can help you scale and optimize your email marketing efforts:
Build & Send Visually Appealing Emails with our No-Code Editor
Create and visually render emails with Airship’s no-code drag-and-drop editor. You can leverage trusted templates for common campaigns or build bespoke emails from scratch in minutes, with full design control over fonts, colors, buttons and more. Existing content blocks can be repurposed to save time and resources in future. Or you can tap into Airship’s generative AI capabilities to get a head start on content creation, and focus your time on refining vs. creation.
Orchestrate Email with Other Marketing Channels
Create, orchestrate and optimize seamless customer journeys across email, SMS, push notifications, mobile wallet, app and web. Airship’s in-app Preference Center capabilities enable brands to collect customers’ preferred communication channels and give them control over how, when and where they receive specific content.
Build automated workflows that trigger email campaigns based on real-time customer actions and interactions across all channels. Or use channel coordination capabilities, such as brand priority or fall back channels, to automate and optimize your channel selection.
Collect and Enrich Customer Data for Advanced Segmentation and Personalization
Airship’s robust data collection and enrichment capabilities, including Surveys, Forms and Preference Centers, empower customers to share zero-party data to inform email hypersegmentation and personalization. Get even more precise with your segment with behavioral data and purchase history. You can also sync customer data from your martech stack — external feeds, CDPs, data warehouses and data lakes — to capture the most up-to-date and accurate customer information.
Experiment and Track Performance to Optimize Email Performance
Embrace a culture of experimentation to optimize your email marketing and learn what resonates most with your audience. Quickly test messages and experiences on small customer segments, receive real-time feedback and then launch the best ones to engage all your customers. With Airship’s Experimentation Hub, you can bring together all your experiments and tools in a single dashboard, including A/B & Multivariate Tests, Feature Flags and Holdout Experiments. Anyone in your organization can use it to visualize, test and optimize experiences.
How Online Marketplace bol Boosted App Downloads & Opt-Ins with Email, Push Notifications and In-App Experiences
The success of our customers highlights the value of integrating your email marketing strategy into cross-channel efforts. bol is a leading online retailer and marketplace platform based in the Netherlands and Belgium featuring a wide offering. Despite recognizing the value of their app users, bol noticed a decline in new app downloads and stagnation in opt-ins. The online marketplace needed to position the app as a central place for browsing products and making purchases, while encouraging customers to opt in to brand communications.
The team at bol set out to create and scale unique selling propositions for its app to outpace steep e-commerce competition, all with limited resources. Here’s how:
- Scaling Zero-Party Data Collection with Email + Push + In-App Messaging: bol conceptualized a new “Price Alert” campaign centered around gathering customers’ product wish lists to understand their wants and needs, positioning it as a unique feature to attract new users and increase opt-ins. Spanning email, in-app messaging and push notification, the team encouraged customers to share their interests in products and, in turn, receive exclusive alerts when those products were discounted.
- Delivering Targeted Alerts to Encourage App Purchases: Once customers filled out their wish list, the bol team was able to deliver tailored messaging and offers as soon as their desired products were discounted, making it a key driver for engagement. This approach was particularly powerful in the days leading up to major sales events, generating excitement among customers to snag the best possible deal.
- Optimizing Engagement through Experimentation & Automation: bol automated the “Price Alert” notifications with backend queries running every hour to identify discounts. Robust experimentation with minimum discount percentage and contact frequency optimized the campaign over time to improve open rates and conversions. bol also expanded the campaign with new experiments, targeting search behavior and abandoned carts, to identify the best segmentation strategy and to boost engagement.
The Airship Experience Platform helped bol achieve outstanding results for their 10 Days Campaign:
- 3X higher opt-in rates
- 2X higher app installs
- +25% uplift
Optimize Your Email Marketing Strategy
If you’re ready to take your email marketing strategy to the next level, let’s talk! We would love to hear about your goals and priorities, and discuss how we can help you achieve them faster.