Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and any email communication that is meant to build loyalty, trust or brand awareness.

Email marketing can be done to either cold lists or current customer database. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to: sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Types of email marketing
Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails;
Email Newsletters are direct emails sent out on a regular basis to a list of subscribers, customers. The primary purpose of an email newsletter is to build upon the relationship of the company with their customers/subscribers. Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, purchase or order confirmation emails and email receipts.

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to it’s high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters, transactional emails are a golden opportunity to engage customers; to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers, to anticipate and answer questions or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services.

Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails. There are also software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services, which include providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing campaigns (such as customer referral programs).

Direct emails
Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example,an announcement of a special offer or a catalog of products). Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they can also rent a list of email addresses from service companies.