Different types of email marketing and marketers: Ultimate guide

Let’s travel back to the shores of the history of emails. After the invention of emails by an American computer programmer who most people believe to be Ray Tomlinson while working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), it never took time for Gary Thuerk to earn the title of the father of spam by launching his first unsolicited email campaign. The acclaimed result of Gary’s first spam email seems to give a very strong reason why every marketer should master and understand the different types of email marketing. But before diving deep into the different types of email marketing let’s see what Gary’s ROI in his first unsolicited email launch was. This will keep us intentional subconsciously while implementing any of the different types of email marketing.

The First Spam Email sent.

Prior to Ray Tomlinson joining ARPANET, there was really no medium to exchange messages between networks of computers. By this time you can only leave messages to people using the same computer. Ray Tomlinson came up with a program that allows messages to be sent between computers connected to the ARPANET network. Gary Thuerk claimed he made a whopping $13 million dollar leveraging Ray Tomlinson’s program to send unsolicited emails to ARPANET’s 400 connected computers. These acclaimed 400 clients made him $13 million dollars. 

After traveling this lane of history, Gary’s action reminds me of the potential high Return on investment in email marketing. Although the result gotten by Gary has drastically reduced. This could be attributed to many factors such as today’s presence of radical spam filters, stricter rules for email deliverability, complex DNS configuration, the 2003 CAN spam act. Again nobody freaking really knows about the different types of email marketing or the concept of spamming then. 

Possibilities in Email Marketing

Despite all, Email marketing still has a high and scalable ROI pegged averagely at 4400%. This implies that you have the potential of making $44 on every $1 spent on email marketing. To me, this is still huge. This does not explicitly imply that you will make 44 times the amount you invested in email marketing. For instance, we at j-insights have never at any point in our marketing banked 4400% ROI. Though we have reached 3600% RIO the last time we checked our ROI in email marketing. What this implies is that there are a lot of factors that determine Your ROI in email marketing.

Here we will be looking at the most important of them all being ‘the different types of email marketing’. This helps to choose the one best for our business. And not use something that will suck our money dry and drastically reduce our ROI margin. Without wasting more time, let’s dive deep and see the different types of email marketing. Keep reading 😊😊…………….

Types of email marketing

There are different types of email marketing. This depends on how inclined it is to spam or the level of consent given by subscribers to send them emails. Let’s look at them one after the other:

• Traditional email marketing
• Cold email marketing
• Bulk email marketing

What is Traditional Type of Email Marketing:

Traditional email marketing in a general sense is the most ethical of the different types of email marketing. This involves your customers consenting to receive your updates and emails from you by subscribing to your newsletters. How this is achieved is by building something known as a landing page and email popups. This helps to capture the email address of anyone that wants to voluntarily receive your update. Once they input their email address and click on subscribe or signup, the email is automatically going to be collected by the software behind that landing page or popup.

There are a lot of services that will help you to build great-looking landing pages and popups. They also collect and send email campaigns for you totally for free. Here at j-insights we use systeme.io to build clean-looking landing pages and popups. It also collects emails and sends campaigns to up to 2000 contacts for absolutely free. You can go sign up for an account here if you don’t already have one.

Since traditional email marketing requires the full consent of the recipient, one can use any of the three types of email marketing platforms to genuinely collect these emails. It is very important to gradually accumulate subscribers traditionally. This will help you ensure you are really talking to real customers that are advocates and fans of your brand. Studies have shown a swift graphical rise in the ratio of responsiveness of traditional email marketers to cold or bulk email marketers. 

What is Cold email marketing?

Cold mailing is one of the best ways of reaching out to potential prospects to increase sales and conversions. Unlike traditional email marketing, in cold email marketing, the recipients of the cold email marketing campaigns do not consent for the sender to send them email campaigns. The implication of this is that; it is almost always considered spam if not done properly and rightfully so. This is because those you are sending these campaigns to never opted-in to receive the emails. So, if this is considered spamming, why are we then trying to implement it in our business? The solution lies in how we implement it in our business. This is what is going to be looking into shortly…..Continue reading 🤝🤝…….

What is cold mailing?

Cold email marketing is the process of sending non-promotional emails to a targeted audience with the aim of establishing relationships and creating awareness for your business. Not going after immediate sales is the aim of cold mailing. The goal is to make those you reached out to know about you and your brand. This will make them know about your business on a subconscious level. Aside from that, they might need such a service or product in the future or have somebody in their network that need it. Once they do they’ll refer to your brand. I hope this is super simple to grab ….😊😊

Major challenges of cold email marketing

Cold mailing is a very profitable but critical type of email marketing and needs to be mastered properly. This is very important because if you don’t do it the right way, your recipients will see you as being salesy, pushy, and annoying. Now, let’s see some of the challenges of cold mailing. The problems we are gonna be looking into are not typical for cold mailing. They occur for the 3 different types of email marketing. I didn’t talk about this under the traditional email marketing part because the potential of these happening is very negligible compared to cold mailing and bulk mailing. One of the most challenges is that cold mailing impacts your sender’s reputation. You might now be wondering what sender’s reputation is …….. We are going to see it shortly

What is sender’s reputation?

In simple term, Sender reputation can be seen as a score given to an email sender by the internet service provider (ISP). This is crucially important for good email deliverability. It to a very great extent impacts the folder where your emails are going to be landing. Technically, the higher your sending score, the higher your email deliverability, and the higher your potential of reaching the inbox of your customers. So your sender reputation is what you got to guide handsomely when doing the cold mailing. To accumulate a low sending reputation is very easy and get your emails delivered to the spam folder if you are not intentional. Now let us look at the few causes of low sender reputation and how you can keep curb it to the minimum.

Cause of low sender reputation.

Today spam filters are very sensitive. They can filter your emails to the spam folder or the promotion tab by the suspicion of spam patterns of any sort. I think the best way to get your emails delivered to your customers irrespective of the type of email marketer you are is by obeying simple spam filtering and deliverability rules. Some of these rules include:

• Avoid spammy subjects and content texts
• Configure technical details such as Rdns,dkim,spf, dmarc, etc. you can check the 3 DNS records every marketer must know and our postal SMTP setup guide. These guides will show you from start to finish, how to set up and configure these details correctly.
• Slowly ramp up your sending volume and try to implement IP rotation technology.
• Implement link shortening or cloaking and avoid linking to websites with a track record of spamming
• Ensure you keep your bounce rate low by frequently validating your email list. This will help ensure you are sending emails to a real address. You can use services like zero bounce to validate your emails.
•  Avoid bad recipient interaction. Are your recipients reporting your emails as spam? This will send a negative signal to ISPs that your recipients did not really opt-in voluntarily to your list. 

How sending reputation affects email deliverability

All these and many more reasons will determine your sender’s reputation. The above rules are more significant in cold and bulk mailing than in traditional email marketing. For instance, when you send cold emails and your recipients are reporting your emails as spam ISPs will lower your sender reputation and a particular percentage of your emails will start hitting the spam folder. In cold email marketing when someone receives an email that they didn’t opt-in for they may report them as spam. That is the reason why I see cold mailing as a skill that needs to be developed to get the best out of it. You got to use the right template, the right subjects, the right body contents, and do away with the spam. 

Bulk email marketing

This is the last of the different types of email marketing on our list. Bulk mailing is quite different from cold mailing. A lot of folks mistake bulking email marketing and cold email marketing for each other. And I think this is the major reason for the low conversion rate in cold email marketing. Bulk mailing is more aggressive and promotional than cold mailing. In cold mailing, you just reach out to potential prospects letting them know of your products, brand, or services that can help them maybe in the future or someone in their network without any external link.

Bulk emailing on the other hand is purely promotional and involves adding external links to take recipients who never subscribed to your list to an external web page or offers. This is the reason you can’t see any email marketing company that will allow you to use their servers for bulk mailing.

I know you might be saying you have heard of a few that does and tried, but the question is ….what is your experience like? I know quite a few of them but the issue is that most of their IPs are on the blacklist. What is the essence of sending emails from blacklisted IPs which will land your emails in the spam folder? I don’t think it makes sense either. So, to do bulk mailing successfully, you have to have your own custom email marketing system. To run a custom email marketing system is quite cheap and you can send unlimited emails for as low as $12. I have made an in-depth tutorial about how to set up your own custom email marketing system and send unlimited emails you can check it out here if you want. 

Bulk mailing cont

Back to bulk mailing. If you check the graphical representation of the conversion ratio of bulk email marketing vs cold email marketing vs traditional email marketing you will notice a swift increase from bulk mailing to cold mailing through traditional email marketing. 

Conclusion

The different types of email marketing are all super effective. You just need a little time to understand how to go about each and every one of them and implement them the right way. Here we end it. if you have any further concerns, you can comment below or submit your question in our forum.