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Email marketing with Zoho Campaigns

Table of content 

  1. Introduction
  2. What is email marketing?
  3. Why businesses still rely on email marketing
  4. Who should use email marketing?
  5. Different types of email marketing campaigns
  6. What makes email campaigns successful?
  7. How does Zoho Campaigns make email marketing easier?
  8. Email marketing best practices 

Introduction 

If you want to stay in touch with your customers, promote your products, and grow your business, then email marketing is one of the most powerful and affordable tools available. If you are on the lookout for such a platform, then Zoho Campaigns is worth your attention.
This document covers the basics of email marketing, why it matters, different types of campaigns, key components, how Zoho Campaigns can help, and best practices to follow.

What is email marketing? 

Email marketing is the practice of sending targeted messages to a group of contacts via emails. Businesses use it to share updates, promote products or services, welcome new subscribers, keep existing customers engaged and build good relationships with your audience. Unlike social media, where posts might never reach your followers due to algorithm changes, email lands directly in your contact's inbox. That direct line of communication is exactly why email marketing continues to deliver strong returns, even now.

Why businesses still rely on email marketing 

These are some of the key reasons why email marketing stays relevant:
  1. High ROI: Email marketing consistently delivers one of the highest returns on investment across all digital marketing channels. It is also one of the most cost-effective medium compared to other marketing channels.
  2. Direct reach: You own your mailing list. Unlike social platforms that can change anytime, you know exactly which email goes to which contact. This helps you build long-term relationships with customers.
  3. Personalization at scale: You can tailor messages based on how contacts have engaged with you and what they prefer. This in turn will help more people open your emails and click the links in them.
  4. Measurable results: Every email you send generates data, such as opens, clicks, unsubscribes, helping you make smarter decisions with future campaigns.
  5. Works for businesses of all sizes: Whether you have 100 subscribers or 100,000, email marketing scales to fit your needs.

Who should use email marketing? 

Almost any organisation that wants to build a relationship with its audience can benefit from email marketing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out or are a large corporation with a big marketing budget, you can use email marketing to grow your business. Here's a table that describes how certain industries can leverage email marketing.

Business Type
How email marketing helps
Small and medium businesses
Build brand awareness, run promotions, and grow a loyal customer base without a large budget.
Ecommerce stores
Recover abandoned carts, promote sales, announce restocks, and increase repeat purchases.
SAAS companies
Onboard new users, share product updates, stay in touch with potential customers, and keep existing users engaged.
Non-profit organizations
Engage donors, share impact stories, and drive fundraising campaigns.
Educational institutions
Send course updates, event invitations, and newsletters to students, alumni, and parents.
Healthcare
Send appointment reminders, share health tips, keep patients informed, and build trust through consistent communication.
Creators
Stay top-of-mind with followers, and updates, and offers.
Enterprise businesses
Run large-scale campaigns across multiple contact segments, automate recurring emails, and strategize using email reports.

Different types of email marketing campaigns 

There are different types of email campaigns based on what your business needs. Each one has a purpose and helps you move your audience closer to your goals.
  1. Newsletters: These are regular emails, sent weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, to keep subscribers informed and engaged about your products and services. They focus more on sharing useful content than selling. For example, a digital marketing agency sending a monthly newsletter with tips on improving ad performance, case study highlights, and upcoming webinar dates.
  2. Promotional emails: These are sent when you want people to take action, like buying something, signing up, or upgrading. They are usually time-based. For example, an online book store sends a 48-hour flash sale email with a 30% discount code. They can also add a call-to-action (CTA) button like “Shop now“ or “Grab your copies now” to nudge customers to complete the purchase.
  3. Event and webinar invites: These emails are used to invite people to events, workshops, product demos, or webinars. For instance, a hospital can send an email inviting patients to a free health check-up camp, with details and a link to register.
  4. Product updates and announcements: These emails keep your customers informed about what’s new in your business, like new features, improvements, security updates, new products, or restocked items. For example, a SaaS company can send an email announcing a new feature, explaining how it helps users and how they can start using it.
  5. Transactional emails: These are sent after someone takes an action, like placing an order or resetting a password. They share important details such as receipts, order confirmations, or account updates.
  6. Follow-up emails: These are sent after an earlier email or interaction to stay in touch or remind people about something. They help continue the conversation, share more details, or encourage the next step. For example, thanking a customer after a purchase, sending a reminder, or asking for feedback.

What makes email campaigns successful? 

Sending an email is easy but getting contacts to open it, read it, and take action is not. These are the building blocks of a campaign that actually delivers results:
  1. Recognizable sender name: Use a sender name and email address that your subscribers will recognize. Unfamiliar sender names are one of the top reasons people skip or delete emails.
  2. A catchy subject line: Your subject line is the first thing a recipient sees. Keep it short, specific, and relevant to the recipient’s interest.
  3. The right audience: Sending the same email to everyone don’t work. Segment your contacts by location, behavior, purchase history, or preferences, and then tailor your message to each group.
  4. Content that delivers value: Every email should give the reader something useful – information, a deal, a resource, or entertainment. If your emails do not add value, recipients will stop opening them.
  5. Mobile-friendly design: More than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Your email must look great on small screens as well.
  6. Clear call to action (CTA): Tell the recipient exactly what to do next. Whether it is 'Download the guide', 'Claim your offer', or ‘Register now’. A single focused CTA always outperforms multiple ones.
  7. Right timing: Even the best email can underperform if it lands at the wrong time. Test different send times to find when your audience is most likely to engage and send the campaign at the right time.

How does Zoho Campaigns make email marketing easier? 

Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing platform designed to help businesses of all sizes plan, create, send, and measure their campaigns without needing a dedicated technical team. Here's how it can help you:
  1. Organize and segment contacts: Import your contacts into lists and create segments based on criteria like location, purchase behaviour, engagement level, and so on. This ensures each contact receives messages that are relevant to them.
  2. Plan ahead with the campaign calendar: The built-in calendar lets you visualize your upcoming campaigns, avoid scheduling conflicts, and keep your marketing efforts organized over weeks or months.
  3. Design campaigns without coding: Use the drag-and-drop template editor and an array of email templates to quickly build professional-looking emails. You can customize colors, fonts, images, layouts, buttons, and much more to match your brand. All this without the need to know any coding.
  4. Schedule campaigns for the best time: Decide exactly when your email goes out. You can send campaigns immediately or send them at a later time and date based on recipients’ timezones and optimal open times. Scheduling emails at the right moment significantly improves open rates.
  5. Automate your email workflows: Set up automated emails that are triggered based on recipient actions like signing up, clicking a link, making a purchase, or submitting a form. Automation saves time and ensures your recipient gets the right message at the right point in their journey.
  6. Track performance with detailed reports: After every campaign, review metrics like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, and so on. Use these insights to understand what is working and what needs improvement for your next campaign.
  7. Improve deliverability: The Content Compliance and Manual Moderation teams at Zoho Campaigns review your emails to make sure they follow the rules and reach inboxes instead of spam folders. We also suggest verifying your sender domain, keeping your contact lists clean, and getting consent from contacts before sending emails.
  8. Integrate with other apps: Zoho Campaigns connects with Zoho apps like Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, Zoho Survey and a range of third-party apps so your marketing and customer data stays in sync across your entire business.

Email marketing best practices  

Even experienced marketers sometimes overlook the basics. These are the most important rules to follow before sending any campaign:
  1. Only email people who have explicitly opted in to receive messages from you. Sending unsolicited emails damages your sender reputation and can violate laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM.
  2. Authenticate your sending domain using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. This tells inbox providers your emails are legitimate and reduces the chance of landing in spam.
  3. Warm up a new sending domain gradually. You can start with small email volumes and increase over time to build a positive sender reputation.
  4. Ensure that each email you sent has a clear purpose and shares useful, meaningful content with your recipients.
  5. Test your emails before sending. This helps you check how it looks on desktop and mobile, make sure all links work, and preview it in multiple email clients.
  6. Always include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link. Making it hard to opt out frustrates recipients and can increase spam complaints.
  7. Review your campaign performance after every send. Look at what changed between campaigns that performed well and those that did not.
  8. Keep your contact list clean. Remove hard bounces immediately and periodically remove inactive subscribers.
  9. Avoid sending too many emails in a short period as it might lead to unsubscribes and reduced engagement.