How Can Email Marketing Fuel Your Overall Inbound Strategy (Tips and Tools)

The practice of email marketing began in 1978, thanks to Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corp who sent emails to 400 recipients for promoting their company’s computers.

In the next years, it just became more and more popular. At present, it is one of the most popular and effective marketing strategies, being practiced in almost all industries and businesses.

Now, the question is – why email marketing is so important for your business, and, how can email marketing fuel your overall inbound strategy?

If you are looking for the answers, we got you covered in this blog. Moreover, we will also discuss some basic things about inbound and email marketing, and share some top tips and tools. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents:

• What is the Relation Between Inbound and Email Marketing
• Importance of Email Marketing for Your Business Strategy
• How Can Email Marketing Fuel Your Overall Inbound Strategy
• Top Email Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business
• Bonus: Best Email Marketing Tools You Can Use in 2024

What is Inbound and Email Marketing, and Their Relations

Email marketing is applied in both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. However, business experts prefer to use email marketing as part of an inbound strategy. Because it is very effective to develop long-term relationships with your target customers.

Everything will be clear if you have a look at the definitions below:

Inbound Marketing in a Nutshell

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that helps draw attention and build relationships with your target audience by helping them, with useful information or content – like blogs, videos, or graphics.

The term “inbound marketing” was introduced by HubSpot in 2006. The goal of this concept is to promote your brand and product while helping your target audiences, instead of pushing your brand outwardly via ads or campaigns.

Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them.

HubSpot

While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have, says HubSpot.

What is Email Marketing

Email marketing is a marketing approach that uses email to promote your products, services, or promotions while developing relationships with potential customers or clients. Example: Sending newsletters or sales campaign emails.

It is an effective way to aware your target audiences aware of your products and offers, drive sales, and build a community or fanbase around your brand.

Email marketing is one element of a marketing strategy. It involves the use of emails to keep customers informed about company news, limited-time offers, product updates, and more.

Western Governors University

When done effectively, email marketing is a powerful tool that can build relationships with potential customers and increase your sales efforts, says Western Governors University.

The Relation Between Inbound and Email Marketing

Inbound marketing aims to develop relationships with your target customers by helping or informing them. Email marketing works as a tool to send help or information and build relationships.

Both inbound and email marketing work hand in hand although they are identified separately. In most cases, these two popular marketing strategies are applied together as their goals and use cases are almost the same.

Importance of Email Marketing for Your Business Strategy

Email marketing helps grow your business by creating brand awareness and increasing sales and website traffic. It generates leads, then develops relationships with the leads; and finally, converts the leads into customers.

Now, we will briefly discuss the importance of email marketing on the following points:

• You can reach a broad audience as almost 50% of the world’s population use emails
• A very common form of communication, 333 billion emails are sent and received every day
• The most preferred method for promotion, 70% of people prefer email to receive promotional content
• A popular and prosperous business strategy, the email marketing industry is growing by 13.3% every year
• Most trusted marketing method, 80% of professionals prefer email marketing

Data Sources: Statista, MarketingSherpa, ReportLinker, eMarketer

You will have more ideas about the importance of email marketing and its contributions to your marketing strategy if you read the next part carefully. So, stay with us.

Read this interesting article to know more about email marketing facts and statistics: The Ultimate Email Marketing Stats & Facts You Should Know.

How Can Email Marketing Fuel Your Overall Inbound Strategy

If you want to fuel up your inbound strategy, email marketing shall be your preferred marketing channel as it is very effective. But how effective, and how is it going to fuel your overall inbound strategy? Your answer is in the points below:

1. Cost-Efficient with Highest ROI
2. The Best Way to Generate Leads
3. Easy to Apply Yet Efficient Technique
4. Great Way to Develop Relation with Customers
5. Can Reach Very Specific Target Audience
6. Very Efficient to Increase Organic Traffic and Improve SEO
7. Collect User Data and Feedback for Personalization and Improvement

Now, we are going to explain each of the points with the relevant statistics in the following paragraphs so that you can easily understand and apply your learning in real life. Let’s get started.

1. Cost-Efficient with Highest ROI

Email marketing is very inexpensive. Even, you can do it free of cost using free tools like weMail. And it consists of the highest return on investment (ROI) rates.

Email marketing generates astounding 4,200% ROI, meaning it will generate $42 in return if you spend $1 only! – Data & Marketing Association (DMA)

On the contrary, other marketing approaches like ads are very expensive and have lesser ROI. So, email marketing can easily fuel your inbound and overall marketing strategy.

2. The Best Way to Generate Leads

Email marketing is very effective in generating leads. It is the most popular method of generating leads.

More than 42% businesses consider email as the most important lead generation channels – Strategic ABM

Leads are very important for inbound marketing strategy and your business overall. Because your leads can turn into customers in the future, encourage others, and enhance your brand reputation.

3. Easy to Apply Yet Efficient Technique

At present, you will not find a single professional or entrepreneur who does not know how to do email communication. Yes, you need to follow a particular strategy for email marketing, but the basics are the same.

Therefore, you can train and assign any of your marketing people to carry out the email marketing activities. Don’t worry. You won’t have to invest a lot in the training.

Besides, it is very efficient as you can send thousands of emails at a time with just one click.

4. Great Way to Develop Relationships with Customers

If you want to develop relationships with your customers, you should choose email marketing without any hesitation. Because, like inbound marketing, its goal is to develop relationships with the customers.

You can develop relationships with your customers by helping them solve problems, offering great deals, and greeting them on different occasions like festivals and birthdays.

5. Can Reach a Very Specific Target Audience

Email marketing lets you reach your target audience very specifically and send them personalized messages. Such specification is preferred by marketers as it generates a very good outcome.

Nearly 62.0% of marketers prioritize audience segmentation to manage campaigns. And segmented campaigns drive a 760% increase in revenue – eMarketer, Campaign Monitor

Personalization is very important for marketing in the 21st century. Because you won’t bother with any promotion if it doesn’t seem relevant to you. Check this article to learn what is audience segmentation and how to do it.

6. Very Efficient to Increase Organic Traffic and Improve SEO

When you help your target audiences with the information or content they need, they will highly likely visit your website and spend some time reading or interacting with that content.

Such visits will increase organic (non-paid) traffic to your website. Organic traffic, user interaction, and session duration on a site are very crucial to improving SEO performances.

Read this useful article if you are interested to know more about search engine optimization: Step-by-Step SEO Guide for Beginners.

7. Collect User Data and Feedback for Personalization and Improvement

User data is a valuable asset in marketing as it influences almost all of your marketing efforts. Email marketing lets you collect that data through surveys or asking direct questions.

At the same time, with the help of email marketing, you can collect user feedback on your brand and product, which is very important for future improvement and R&D.

In simple terms, email marketing deals with almost everything that you need to fuel your inbound strategy – from drawing users’ attention to increasing conversion rates.

Top Email Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business

You wanted to know how can email marketing fuel your overall inbound strategy. Your learning will remain incomplete if we don’t tell you how to apply it effectively. The top email marketing practices you should follow right now are:

• Send Welcome Emails First
• Segment Your Audience and Send Personalized Message
• Write Compelling Subject Lines and Copies
• Use a Tracking Tool and Create Your Buyer Persona
• Include an Attractive CTA Button
• Maintain a Schedule, Don’t Send Mails Frequently and Randomly

Let’s discuss the tips in detail to help you understand why they are so important.

Send Welcome Emails First

You shall not start promoting your products and brands after collecting the contact information of your target audiences. It is better to send a welcome email first, the #1 step to developing the relationship.

Besides, the open rate of the welcome email is about 50%, the highest among other emails.

Segment Your Audience and Send Personalized Message

Nobody even likes to receive an email that is not relevant to them let alone check it.

To make your emails more relevant to your audience and increase open rates, you shall focus on audience segmentation and personalize your messages.

Write Compelling Subject Lines and Copies

The subject line is the most important part of your email. If your subject line isn’t attractive, your audiences are more likely not to open those emails.

At the same time, you need to write compelling but short copies to increase user interaction.

Use a Tracking Tool and Create Your Buyer Persona

It is very important to know your audience better to make your email marketing efforts fruitful. Drawing a buyer persona can help you do that.

Therefore, you should use tracking tools and metrics to collect user data and build the persona.

Include an Attractive CTA Button

Do you want your audience to interact with your email and get some clicks and traffic to your website?

Then, you should give special attention to the call-to-action (CTA) buttons. You must include one CTA button (better not to include multiple) in every email and make them very attractive.

Maintain a Schedule, Don’t Send Mails Frequently and Randomly

Maintaining continuous communication with your audiences is a very crucial part of an inbound email marketing strategy. But it doesn’t mean you can send emails one after another whenever you want.

So, you must maintain a schedule instead of bothering them with frequent and random emails.

Relevant Articles to Read: 7 Proven Email Marketing Tips to Increase Your Sales or 8+ Email Marketing Best Practices to Boost Your Sales.

Bonus: Best Email Marketing Tools You Can Use in 2024

The success of your email marketing efforts and their impacts on your inbound strategy mostly depends on how you do it. As you already know the best practices, now you need some tools to apply them effectively.

The best email marketing tools you can use in 2024 are:

1. Mailchimp: The Best Overall and the Most Popular
2. Hubspot: The Best All-in-One Marketing Suite
3. weMail: The Simplest and the Most Cost-Efficient Tool
4. MailPoet: The Most Popular for Newsletters
5. OptinMonster: The Most Popular for Popups and Forms

You can learn more about these tools and their uses by following this article: Top WordPress Email Marketing Providers.

Final Thoughts on Email Marketing and Inbound Strategy

We believe our efforts have helped you properly understand how can email marketing fuel your overall inbound strategy. We hope you will apply your learnings in real life.

To make your email marketing more robust, we recommend you integrate subscription management along with it. Read this article to know more: Email Marketing and Subscription Management in 2024 (One-Stop or Independent Solution).

Please feel free to let us know in the comment section if you have any queries or suggestions, and stay connected with us on social media.