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2026-01-01
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2026-03-10
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<p><strong>Email marketing</strong>is a form of digital marketing that promotes your products or services to potential and existing customers and builds brand awareness.</p>
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<p><a>Email marketing</a>is a form of digital marketing that promotes your products or services to potential and existing customers, shares important information with them, or educates them about your brand. It involves reaching out via email to engage people who have explicitly signed up to receive that type of communication from you, and keep them loyal to your brand.</p>
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<p>It involves reaching out to your customer base via email, and it can be beneficial for engaging your clients and keeping them loyal to your brand.</p>
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<p>B2C brands use email marketing to connect with customers and potential customers through promotions, announcements, and other relevant content in order to:</p>
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<h2>How does email marketing work?</h2>
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<ul><li>Raise brand awareness.</li>
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<p>Using email marketing to promote your business requires creating an effective email marketing strategy. To do so, take the following steps:</p>
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<li>Sell products.</li>
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<h3>1. Select an email automation platform</h3>
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<li>Educate and inform.</li>
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<p>Email marketing software is the engine that powers your email marketing strategy, allowing you to keep your customer and subscriber data in one place, create an email campaign or set up<a>email automation</a>, and craft and send emails to your audience.</p>
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<li><a>Build long-term customer loyalty</a>.</li>
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<p>Make sure to choose a platform that:</p>
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</ul><p>Healthy ecommerce brands drive at least 20-40% of their revenue through email marketing, according to growth strategist and entrepreneur<a>Connie Cen</a>. A recent<a>Gartner survey</a>, meanwhile, reveals that email marketing continues to be a top channel investment for CMOs, and ranks as the No. 1 channel for customer loyalty.</p>
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<ul><li><strong>Collects email addresses:</strong>The email marketing platform you choose should enable you to import, organize, and use the data you collect via sign-up forms on your website.</li>
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<p>And contrary to popular belief, consumers still like email, too: depending on the type of message, 58-64% shoppers prefer email for brand communications, according to Klaviyo’s 2025<a>BFCM Forecast</a>.</p>
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<li><strong>Has email templates:</strong>Your chosen platform should offer templates that make creating email design and copy easier so you can start sending emails to the specific list of email addresses quickly.</li>
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<h2><strong>What are the benefits of email marketing?</strong></h2>
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<li><strong>Provides tracking tools:</strong>A comprehensive email marketing software includes tracking capabilities that enable you to analyze the performance of your email marketing strategy and adjust it accordingly.</li>
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<p>Compared to paid and performance marketing, which have spent the better part of a decade seducing revenue-hungry businesses with third-party targeting and long<a>marketing attribution</a>windows, email marketing has sometimes been accused of being old-fashioned, tone-deaf-even dead.</p>
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</ul><h3>2. Build an email list</h3>
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<p>With so many flashy marketing channels to choose from, why bother with email marketing? Here are a few<a>email marketing benefits</a>that make it worth your serious investment:</p>
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<p>To start reaching out to your audience, you must first<a>create an email list</a>. This list is a collection of email addresses of potential and current customers who have opted to receive marketing messages from your brand.</p>
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<ul><li><strong>Email marketing is an owned channel.</strong>That means it’s “very much in your control,” says Ari Murray, founder of ecommerce newsletter<a>Go-to-Millions</a>. In a post-iOS 14.5, privacy-first world, where building strong relationships with loyal customers depends largely on your brand’s ability to communicate with them in a way that makes them feel seen, heard, and valued, “owned channels are of the utmost importance.”</li>
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<p>While there are various ways to<a>grow your email list</a>, one of the most common methods is to<a>launch a sign-up form</a>on your website.</p>
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<li><strong>Email marketing generates steady, reliable revenue.</strong>Email marketing is also “really reliable revenue if you work it right,” Murray says. “It’s such an inexpensive way to talk to your customers.” (<a>The numbers prove it</a>.)</li>
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<p>Email marketing that Converts</p>
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<li><strong>Email marketing keeps your funnel healthy.</strong>Jen Wallace, director of digital marketing at full-service digital experience agency<a>Northern Commerce</a>, believes marketing channels like email and SMS “represent customer lifetime value,” largely because they allow you to appropriately target every stage of the<a>customer lifecycle</a>. When it comes to developing repeat customers, she says, “email is very hard to beat.”</li>
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<p>Immediate sales and lasting loyalty. That’s what brands get with email marketing that uses data-driven AI and personalization, sending your customers the right message at the right time, every time.</p>
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<li><strong>Email marketing can solve almost any business problem.</strong>What’s the one thing your ecommerce business is struggling with most right now? “Whether it’s revenue, retention, customer experience, customer engagement-all of those can be solved with email marketing,” Cen says.</li>
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<h3>3. Define your campaign goals</h3>
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</ul><p>At the end of the day, Cen says, “the major thing email marketing really helps with is getting worry off your plate.”</p>
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<p>To make the most of your email marketing efforts, set a clear objective for your emails. Some of your campaign goals might include:</p>
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<h2><strong>How does email marketing fit into a broader omnichannel marketing strategy?</strong></h2>
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<ul><li>Promoting new products</li>
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<p><a>Omnichannel marketing</a>integrates data from different channels so you can create cohesive, personalized experiences wherever your customers are-whether that’s email, SMS, mobile push, or your website.</p>
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<li>Boosting sales</li>
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<p><a>Email is ideal</a>for moments when customers want depth and detail. It’s a space for storytelling, rich visuals, and comprehensive product information. Within your omnichannel strategy, you can use email marketing to:</p>
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<li>Establishing brand authority</li>
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<ul><li>Announce product launches and seasonal promotions with the full context customers need to make decisions, and clickable CTAs to shop.</li>
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<li>Maintaining customer loyalty</li>
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<li>Keep customers in the loop with order confirmations, shipping updates, and account notifications.</li>
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</ul><p>Once you identify the goal of your specific campaign, it will be easier to decide which type of emails will best get your message across.</p>
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<li>Nurture relationships through newsletters, educational content, and loyalty perks.</li>
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<p>For example, if your goal is to promote new products or boost sales, send highly promotional messages to the audience that is most likely to respond to your offer. By contrast, if you want to establish your brand as an industry authority and keep in touch with your customers, send informational emails featuring industry news or similar updates that could be of interest to your customer base.</p>
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</ul><p>Email works best when it’s not working alone. By connecting email with your other channels-like following up a browse abandonment email with a timely text message, or using mobile push to remind customers about an expiring offer you initially announced via email-you can reach customers in the right place at the right time, based on how they actually engage with your brand.</p>
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<h3>4. Segment your audience</h3>
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<h2><strong>What are examples of different types of marketing emails?</strong></h2>
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<p>For your email campaigns to be successful, you need to group your contacts into specific target audiences, or segments, based on the data you have. This method is called segmentation, and it helps you deliver highly targeted emails to the audience that’s most likely to interact with and act on your content.</p>
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<p>Depending on what<a>email marketing strategy</a>you’re supporting throughout the customer lifecycle, different types of email marketing messages will work differently. These different types of emails may be:</p>
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<p>For example, you can send emails promoting a particular product only to those who have shown an interest in similar items.</p>
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<ul><li><strong>Planned (email campaigns):</strong>When planning an<a>email marketing campaign</a>, you create and design a series of messages with a particular purpose that you can either send right away or schedule for a specific time.</li>
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<h2>Types of marketing emails</h2>
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<li><strong>Triggered (email flows):</strong>Automated emails, or flows, are messages that send automatically based on specific subscriber actions, like abandoning a cart or completing a purchase.</li>
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<p>Depending on the primary goal of your<a>email marketing strategy</a>, you can send different types of marketing messages to the contacts on your email list. The emails that you send to your audience can be:</p>
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</ul><p>Here are some of the most common types of emails you can use to interact with your prospects or existing customer base:</p>
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<ol><li><strong>Planned:</strong>When planning an email campaign, you create a series of carefully designed messages with a particular purpose that you can either send right away or schedule for a specific time.</li>
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<h3><strong>1. Promotional emails</strong></h3>
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<li><strong>Triggered:</strong>You can set up automated emails, or flows, to send messages automatically based on specific triggers.</li>
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<p>A promotional email is an email designed to generate sales. Promotional emails may be campaigns or automations, but their goal is usually the same: to encourage the recipient to make a purchase.</p>
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</ol><p>Here are some of the most common types of emails that you can use to interact with your prospects or existing customer base:</p>
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<p>Common types of promotional emails include:</p>
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<h3>1. Welcome emails</h3>
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<ul><li>New product announcements</li>
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<p>As soon as a prospect opts into your email list, they should receive a welcome email. Welcome emails help present your business in a positive light and can serve<a>a variety of purposes</a>, highlighting:</p>
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<li>Time-sensitive promotions</li>
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<ul><li>Your brand</li>
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<li>Seasonal deals, with coupons or discount codes</li>
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<li>Specific products or services</li>
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<li>Post-purchase cross- or up-sell emails</li>
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<li>Welcome deals, coupons, or promo codes</li>
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<li>Abandonment flows encouraging someone to come back and complete their purchase</li>
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<li>Next steps for readers, like exploring your products and making a wishlist</li>
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</ul><p>Here’s an<a>email campaign example</a>from jewelry brand<a>Caitlyn Minimalist</a>promoting a sample sale:</p>
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</ul><h3>2. Promotional emails</h3>
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<h3><strong>2. Transactional emails</strong></h3>
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<p>The goal of promotional emails is to get the word out about your new or existing products or services to the subscribers on your email list. To encourage subscribers to make a purchase or complete another action, these emails usually contain special incentives, such as:</p>
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<p>A<a>transactional email</a>is a trigger-based automation designed to relay essential information to a customer, rather than generate sales. Common transactional emails include:</p>
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<ul><li>Special discounts</li>
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<ul><li><a>Order confirmation emails</a></li>
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<li>Limited-time deals</li>
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<li><a>Shipping confirmation emails</a></li>
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<li>Seasonal or holiday promotions</li>
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<li>Delivery updates</li>
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<li>VIP-exclusive deals</li>
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<li>Product subscription updates</li>
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</ul><h3>3. Transactional emails</h3>
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<li>Account updates</li>
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<p>Transactional emails are triggered by particular actions a single customer takes, such as ordering a product from your website or signing up for a special offer.</p>
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</ul><p>Importantly, a customer doesn’t need to subscribe to your<a>email list</a>in order to receive transactional emails. That means people who unsubscribe from your list, aka suppressed email addresses, will still receive transactional emails, unless:</p>
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<p>The most common<a>types of transactional emails</a>include:</p>
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<ul><li>The<a>email bounces</a>too many times.</li>
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<ul><li><a><strong>Order confirmation emails</strong></a><strong>:</strong>Sent to customers immediately after they make a purchase, these emails serve as proof of the transaction that customers can later refer to if necessary.</li>
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<li>The email address is invalid.</li>
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<li><a><strong>Shipping confirmation emails</strong></a><strong>:</strong>These emails let customers know their order has been processed and shipped. They typically include the shipping address, expected delivery date, and tracking information to help customers check on the status of their shipment.</li>
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<li>The recipient previously marked a message as spam.</li>
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<li><strong>Order refund notifications:</strong>Informing customers that a refund for their order has been processed, these emails provide any relevant refund details. They’re important for maintaining transparency and trust with your customers, potentially encouraging them to make future purchases despite the refund.</li>
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</ul><p>Here’s an example of a straightforward, on-brand account creation confirmation email from fashion brand<a>DKNY</a>:</p>
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<li><strong>Subscription confirmation:</strong>Sent to verify that a customer has subscribed to your offer, these emails typically include a clickable link or button to confirm their intent to keep receiving communications.</li>
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<h3><strong>3. Educational emails</strong></h3>
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<li><strong>Thank-you emails:</strong>These<a>post-purchase messages</a>express gratitude to your clients for supporting your business, ensuring they feel appreciated. This may prompt them to choose your business over other options in the future as well.</li>
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<p>Like promotional emails, educational emails can be either campaigns or automations. What they can’t be is-you guessed it-promotional.</p>
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</ul><h3>4. Newsletters</h3>
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<p>The goal of an educational email is to educate your audience, not sell them something. Common types of educational emails include:</p>
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<p>Email newsletters help your business share valuable information with your subscriber community. Whether you use them to present product innovations or share industry updates,<a>creating a newsletter</a>can sustain your relationship with your audience and help you stay in touch with them.</p>
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<ul><li>Welcome flows that introduce new subscribers to your brand’s background and mission</li>
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<p>To ensure your business remains on the customers’ radar, send newsletters periodically. They can also help build credibility for your brand, which may make customers more likely to choose your product or service the next time they’re ready to make a purchase.</p>
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<li><a>Brand newsletters</a>that showcase your employees, customer testimonials, or efforts to give back to the community</li>
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<h3>5. Re-engagement emails</h3>
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<li>Post-purchase emails with tips on how to use or style a product</li>
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<p>By examining customer behavior, you can identify a target audience for re-engagement emails. These emails are best for subscribers who have interacted with your brand in the past but then became inactive. For example, you can send:</p>
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</ul><p>Here, take a look at tinned fish brand<a>Fishwife’s</a>thoughtful email newsletter summing up their year:</p>
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<ul><li><a><strong>Abandoned cart emails</strong></a><strong>:</strong>These emails remind your shoppers that they placed items in your cart but didn’t proceed to check-out, encouraging them to finish the purchase.</li>
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<h2><strong>How does email marketing work?</strong></h2>
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<li><strong>Wishlist reminders:</strong>If a customer placed one of your products on their wishlist, you can send them an email as a friendly nudge to make the purchase.</li>
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<p>The best thing about email marketing is that it’s (virtually) free. It’s also low-risk because it’s easy to get started and test out-especially these days, thanks to AI.</p>
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<li><strong>Win-back emails:</strong>These messages are sent to customers who haven’t purchased in a while to rekindle their interest in your brand and show appreciation for their previous purchases.</li>
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<p>If you’re ready for a deep dive, read our blog on creating an<a>email marketing strategy</a>. Otherwise, here’s a quick overview of how it works:</p>
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</ul><h2>What are the benefits of email marketing?</h2>
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<ol><li><strong>Conduct an audience and content audit.</strong>Track customer sentiment and feedback (<a>AI can help, here</a>), conduct market research, and talk with your customer service and product development teams to get an idea of your audience’s lifestyles, needs, and pain points. This will inform your segmentation strategy later.</li>
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<p>Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. According to Klaviyo’s<a>marketing mix report</a>, email marketing is among the top 3 ROI-generating marketing channels for 78.68% of businesses. </p>
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<li><strong>Set email marketing goals that align with your overall brand goals.</strong>For example, if you’re just starting out, your goal might be email list growth. If you have a solid base of subscribers who are ready to buy, your goal might be revenue or retention.</li>
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<p>Some of the main benefits of email marketing are:</p>
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<li><strong>Choose the right tech.</strong>Email marketing platforms are a dime a dozen. What’s better is a B2C CRM that collects and stores all your customer data in a single source of truth, so every email you send, from a BFCM campaign to a<a>customer service</a>follow-up, is informed by real customer behaviors and preferences.</li>
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<ul><li><strong>Increased brand awareness:</strong>Email marketing enables you to reach out to your customers directly, making potential customers more familiar with your brand and what it offers.</li>
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<li><strong>Build your email list.</strong>You can’t send emails if you don’t have email addresses to send them to.<a>Sign-up forms</a>are the fastest way to start collecting contact information in exchange for incentives like discounts or exclusive content. You can use AI to automatically<a>display sign-up forms</a>when they’re most likely to convert people.</li>
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<li><strong>Personalization opportunities:</strong>Email marketing enables you to target specific audience segments with emails tailored to their preferences and behavior, capturing attention more easily. This increases the likelihood that your marketing efforts will turn into sales.</li>
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<li><strong>Collect as much data as possible.</strong>Along with contact information, consider asking new subscribers for product preferences or personal details, like hair or skin type, at the point of sign-up. You can also use quizzes and post-purchase surveys to collect this kind of valuable zero-party data that will help you segment your list and personalize your messaging accordingly later on.</li>
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<li><strong>Higher ROI:</strong>This channel has a higher ROI compared to other marketing channels like paid advertising or social media because it gives your customers direct access to your promotions, products, and services. Your recipients are more likely to act on the personalized offers they already expressed an interest in and agreed to receive from your brand.</li>
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<li><strong>Tailor emails to each stage of the customer journey.</strong>Different stages of the customer journey require different email types and content. Dissect each stage to define what types of email campaigns or automations make the most sense for customers. An<a>AI marketing agent</a>can help you map this out with just your website URL-no prompting required.</li>
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<li><strong>Measurable outcomes:</strong>With email marketing platforms, you can track how your prospects react to your messages and use this data to improve your overall strategy. By examining metrics like open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate, you can identify what your audience likes and dislikes and adjust your strategy accordingly.</li>
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<li><strong>Design your emails and determine your send cadence.</strong>Follow best practices for<a>email design</a>and content, here (an AI marketing agent can help with that, too). Different kinds of AI can make it easier to<a>remix your photos</a>, or even help you<a>understand which channels</a>and what send times are most likely to engage individual customers.</li>
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</ul><h2>How to make email marketing easier</h2>
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<li><strong>Test and optimize.</strong>Test email subject lines, CTA copy or placement, images, layouts, and more for performance metrics like clicks and placed orders. Some AI even empowers you to run A/B tests that tell you which version of an email is most likely to<a>resonate with an individual subscriber</a>, not your entire audience.</li>
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<p>To reap the benefits of this marketing channel, you’ll need the right email marketing tool-especially if you’re just starting out.</p>
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<li><strong>Track and monitor performance.</strong>Determine which<a>email marketing KPIs</a>matter most to you and your team. Click rate? Revenue per recipient? Placed order rate? Unsubscribe rate? List growth? Return on investment? Then monitor on a regular basis, making changes as needed.</li>
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<p>Klaviyo is a marketing automation solution that can help you easily gain, retain, and grow your customer base by sending well-crafted, personalized emails at the right time. Using the<a>power of AI</a>, Klaviyo helps you compose emails, identify your target audience, and send your messages when they’re most likely to convert. Features include:</p>
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</ol><h2><strong>What are email marketing best practices?</strong></h2>
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<ul><li><a><strong>Segmentation</strong></a><strong>:</strong>Quickly group your audience into segments based on predictive analysis, shopping behavior, or any other criteria you can think of, and start sending targeted emails to attract customers.</li>
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<p>To get the most out of your email marketing program, you’ll need to keep a few<a>email marketing best practices</a>in mind, like:</p>
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<li><a><strong>Campaigns</strong></a><strong>:</strong>Klaviyo enables you to create, personalize, and send email campaigns whenever you want to announce a new product launch or make a sale.</li>
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<ul><li><strong>Work from a unified data foundation.</strong>When your email marketing lives in the same system that houses and analyzes your customer data, you can activate rich insights, build segments from any piece of data, and personalize each interaction in a way that makes each customer feel like you know them.</li>
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<li><a><strong>Flows</strong></a><strong>:</strong>With over 60 pre-built flow templates to choose from, you’ll set up automated emails in no time. You can use the original templates or customize them as needed. </li>
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<li><strong>Lean on AI to reach more people and work more efficiently.</strong>AI can keep your emails out of spam folders, improve deliverability, and automatically repair your sending reputation so that emails keep landing in inboxes. It can also generate on-brand email marketing plans, campaigns, flows, subject lines, and copy, so your team has more bandwidth to focus on creative, strategic thinking.</li>
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<li><a><strong>Reporting</strong></a><strong>:</strong>Klaviyo gives you the metrics you need to analyze and visualize data with ease and use this information to adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.</li>
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<li><strong>Think beyond marketing.</strong>As a B2C brand trying to build long-lasting relationships with loyal customers, you know email marketing is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Sure, that puzzle requires coordinating email with other marketing channels, like text messaging and WhatsApp. But it also requires aligning your marketing team and data with your customer service team, so you never miss an opportunity to connect meaningfully with a customer.</li>
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</ul><p>On top of this list of powerful features, Klaviyo integrates with 350+ platforms and tools, enabling you to centralize the data from all your channels in one place. This way, you can access all the information about your customers’ preferences at once and come up with a personalized marketing strategy.</p>
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</ul><p>Klaviyo, the<a>AI-first B2C CRM</a>, brings customer data, omnichannel marketing automation, customer service, and analytics into a single platform. From easy drag-and-drop templates to customer service-triggered flows, that means everything you need to build lasting customer relationships with email marketing and beyond, all under one roof.</p>
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<p>Ready to start reaching out to your contacts with messages that speak directly to your audience?<a>Sign up for Klaviyo</a>to send your prospects emails that convert.</p>
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<h2>Additional resources</h2>
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<ul><li><a>What is an email blast</a>?</li>
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<li><a>What is a drip campaign</a>?</li>
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<li><a>What is a bounced email</a>?</li>
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<li><a>What is an email nurture</a>?</li>
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</ul>