With 4.48 billion people1 using email around the globe, it’s no surprise that email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for businesses. It allows you to build lasting relationships with customers, drive sales, and foster brand loyalty. But what is it, exactly, and how can it benefit your business?
In this guide, we cover all there is to know about email marketing, including what it is, how it works, and how to use it to help your business grow.
In this guide, we explain:
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows businesses to connect with their customers through highly targeted emails sent directly to their inbox. It’s used to promote products or services, drive conversions, and keep your target audience engaged with your brand.
Email marketing gives you a direct line of communication with your customers and potential customers. You own your email list, so you can send targeted, personalized messages to subscribers based on their interests, behaviors, and more.
It’s cost-effective, measurable, and has the potential to deliver an incredibly high return on investment (ROI).
Email Marketing Platforms
Today, there are many different email marketing platforms to choose from. Each one has unique strengths and benefits depending on the goals you want to achieve for your business.
Some of the most popular email marketing platforms include:
At WCN, we use Mailchimp for all our email marketing campaigns. This platform is widely used by professional email marketers like ours. It offers advanced automation, A/B testing, SMS capabilities, ecommerce integrations (Shopify and Woo), and an intuitive design interface.
Mailchimp also provides detailed analytics for every email we send, allowing our team to continuously optimize and improve our strategy based on real-time data.
Email Marketing Automation Tools
Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp also offer automation tools that help you work smarter, not harder. These tools allow you to set up emails that send automatically based on specific triggers, like when someone joins your list, makes a purchase, or abandons their shopping cart. This is especially important considering the average abandoned cart rate is 75.28%.2
Instead of manually sending every email, automation lets you create a series of emails once and then set them to run on autopilot. This saves you time, ensures timely communication, and helps generate revenue by keeping your audience engaged at key moments in their customer journey.
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
Professional email campaigns are strategic, targeted, and tailored to move customers through every stage of the buyer’s journey. Whether you’re looking to build brand awareness, drive sales, or strengthen customer loyalty, the right email campaign can make all the difference.
Below, we break down some of the most effective types of email marketing campaigns, what they’re used for, and how they can help you meet your business goals.
Sales and Promotional Emails
Email is a great way to let your customers know about upcoming sales and promotions. These campaigns are all about creating urgency and excitement around your products or services. They often feature:
- Special offers
- New products or services
- Limited time discounts
- Exclusive deals
- Upcoming special events
The main goal of promotional emails is to capture attention quickly and drive immediate action. They tend to be most effective with minimal text, engaging graphics, and prominent calls-to-action (CTAs).
Company Newsletters
Loyal customers love learning more about their favorite brands, and company newsletters are a great way to keep your audience informed and engaged. These campaigns often include:
- Company updates and milestones
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Customer testimonials
- Team announcements
- Blog posts
- Industry news
The goal of a newsletter is to build long-term trust and stay top of mind with your audience, through regular, value-driven contact.
Seasonal Marketing Emails
Seasonal marketing emails are tied to specific times of the year, including holidays, and common seasonal sales like Black Friday or back-to-school. These campaigns are especially effective because they align with consumer expectations and behaviors during high-interest times of the year.
The goal of seasonal email campaigns is to increase engagement and drive timely purchases around specific holidays or industry-relevant seasons.
Lead Nurturing Emails
Not every person is ready to buy the moment they find you, and that’s where lead nurturing emails come in. These campaigns are highly targeted emails sent to people who have shown interest in your brand but haven’t converted yet.
Lead nurturing emails might include:
- Product guides or services FAQs
- Offers for free consultations or demos
- Case studies, testimonials, customer success stories
- Limited time discounts, exclusive offers, etc.
The goal is to guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey by providing helpful information, resources, and incentives to make a purchase decision.
Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are automated emails sent after someone subscribes or becomes a customer. The goal of a welcome email is to set the tone for your brand, introduce yourself, share helpful resources, and encourage a new customer’s next steps.
Content in these messages often includes:
- Helpful FAQs
- “About us” intros
- Best-selling items
- First-time buyer discounts
- Company mission statements
Setting up a sequence of multiple welcome emails is a common and effective marketing strategy. In fact, a series of welcome emails generates an average of 51% more revenue than sending just one, according to Mailchimp.3
Feedback Emails
After a customer makes a purchase or receives services, automated feedback emails are a great way to prompt them to share their experience. This includes:
- Star rating requests
- Post-purchase surveys
- Links to review platforms
- Customer service surveys
The goal of a feedback email is to gather testimonials, build credibility, and improve customer satisfaction through actionable insights. These kinds of email campaigns can also help customers feel heard, valued, and well taken care of.
Re-Engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails are automatically sent after a customer doesn’t take action. This includes people who haven’t interacted with your emails, website, or products/services for a certain period of time.
The goal is to reignite their interest and encourage them to take action, like opening an email, clicking a link, making a purchase, or simply confirming they still want to hear from you.
Re-engagement emails often include:
- Exclusive offers or discounts
- A simple “We miss you” message
- Reminders for abandoned carts
These types of email campaigns are an effective way to re-ignite interest, recover lost opportunities, and extend customer lifetime value.
Email Marketing Best Practices in 2025
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to directly connect with loyal customers and potential new ones. However, with changing consumer expectations, tighter privacy regulations, and the rise of AI, email marketing best practices are ever evolving.
Here’s what you need to focus on in 2025:
Re-Follow All Legal Guidelines and Regulations
Email is a highly regulated industry. There are lots of different laws designed to protect people from spam, including GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and more.
Following all data protection laws and spam guidelines helps keep your business compliant and out of legal trouble. It also helps ensure your emails deliver properly, without getting stuck behind spam filters.
Use Double Opt-In Signup
Email marketing laws require you to collect consent from every subscriber. Double-opt-in is an easy and effective way of verifying a subscriber’s consent. This is a two-step process for signing someone up to your email list.
First, a person fills out your signup form. Then, they receive a confirmation email asking them to verify their subscription by clicking on a link. Only after they confirm are they officially added to your email list.
It’s a small extra step, but it leads to a cleaner subscription list, more engaged subscribers, and better results in the long term.
Maintain a Clean Email List
A clean email list means you’re sending messages to people who actually want to hear from you. This leads to better open rates, fewer spam complaints, and stronger overall performance.
Here’s how to keep your email list clean and healthy:
- Remove invalid addresses to reduce bounce rates and improve deliverability
- Remove duplicate contacts for more accurate reporting
- Remove inactive subscribers who don’t respond to re-engagement campaigns
- Make unsubscribing easy so your list is full of people who actually want to be there
Maintaining a clean email list directly impacts your deliverability, engagement, and revenue. It’s one of the simplest, most effective ways to improve your email marketing results.
Optimize for Deliverability
Deliverability refers to your ability to land in a subscriber’s inbox and not their spam folder. Poor deliverability means fewer people see your emails and lost revenue opportunities.
To optimize emails for deliverability:
- Maintain a clean mailing list
- Avoid spammy language and formatting
- Only send emails to consenting subscribers
- Authenticate your domain with your email service provider
- Respect inbox fatigue – focus on quality over quantity
Optimizing for deliverability ensures your emails reach your audience, which maximizes your results and protects your reputation.
Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your audience means dividing your email subscriber list into smaller groups based on things like purchase history, location, behavior, interests, and more.
This lets you send more relevant, targeted messages and personalized content to subscribers, maximizing the effectiveness of each campaign.
Use Automation Tools
As we mentioned above, email automation tools allow you to send the right message at the right time without ongoing manual work. These tools can automatically send emails based on triggers like sign-ups, purchases, or even a customer’s inactivity.
This saves you time and effort in keeping your audience engaged and informed.
Customize and Personalize
Every email your business sends out should look, sound, and feel like your brand. Email customization means using your brand’s colors, fonts, logo, and tone of voice consistently across every campaign. When your emails match the rest of your marketing, your brand becomes easily recognizable, and it builds trust with your audience.
Personalization takes this even further by tailoring the content of each email to the individual receiving it. This can include things like sending product recommendations based on past purchases or adjusting messaging based on where someone is in the customer journey.
Together, customization and personalization make your emails more relevant, more engaging, and more likely to convert.
Deliver Real Value
Your customers’ inboxes are crowded, so every email you send needs to earn its place. It’s more important than ever to provide your subscribers with content that’s truly helpful, interesting, or rewarding. This could be expert tips, exclusive offers, early access to products, or insights that make your audience’s life easier.
Think of email marketing as a relationship-building tool, not just a sales channel. Subscribers expect quality over quantity, and they don’t want to feel like they’re constantly being sold to.
When you consistently deliver real value, you build trust, increase engagement, and stay top-of-mind without overwhelming your audience.
Use Clear CTAs
Clear calls to action (CTAs) are a must for every email you send out. As we covered above, people value quality over quantity, especially in marketing, so it’s important for every email you send to have a clear purpose.
Whether you want someone to shop a sale, download a guide, or leave a review, your CTA should be obvious, specific, and easy to act on.
It’s also important to use action-oriented language like:
- “Shop the Sale”
- “Get Your Free Quote”
- “Start My Free Trial”
- “Download the Guide”
- “Buy Now”
Clear CTAs improve click-through rates and help you measure the success of each campaign.
Grow Your Mailing List Organically
The best email lists are built, not bought. Growing your mailing list organically means attracting people who genuinely want to hear from you. You can do this through website pop-ups, lead magnets, checkout opt-ins, social media, and more.
In 2025%, getting marketing consent is more important than ever, especially with privacy laws tightening. Organic growth not only protects you but also ensures better engagement and long-term results.
Measure, Test, and Improve
No email marketing strategy is complete without performance tracking. To get the best results, you need to track what is working and where you can improve. It’s important to monitor key performance metrics (KPIs) like open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and unsubscribes.
Even small tweaks based on real-time data can lead to big gains in performance. Consistent analysis helps refine a strategy, boost ROI, and stay ahead of what your audience responds to best. The more you learn, the better your results will be.
Create an Email Marketing Strategy that Drives Results
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools, providing businesses a direct way to reach, engage, and retain customers. At West County Net, we have years of experience helping businesses of all sizes create email marketing strategies that drive real results.
Whether you’re new to email marketing or refining your current strategy, our specialists have the insight and skills to help your business thrive.
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References
- Statista. (2024b, September 16). Number of e-mail users worldwide 2018-2027. https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-users-worldwide/
- Shopping cart abandonment rate for eCommerce. (n.d.). https://marketing.dynamicyield.com/benchmarks/cart-abandonment-rate/
- A winning welcome email series | Mailchimp. (n.d.). Mailchimp. https://mailchimp.com/resources/make-lasting-connections-with-welcome-emails/