Email Marketing
Email Marketing
What is email marketing?
- A channel for ongoing communication with a list you own
- Segmentation and personalization separate you from spam
- Nurture leads with automated sequences
Once email marketing is running properly, the nature of your marketing budget changes. Ads leave no touchpoint once spending stops, but a subscriber list stays with the company after a campaign ends. In B2B especially, the gap between the start of evaluation and a signed contract is at least 3 months, and over a year for equipment or systems; sales calls alone can’t bridge a gap that long. Email is the always-on channel that fills that gap, a way of claiming mindshare so that your company’s name comes to mind first at the moment the buyer gets budget approval.
In practice, sends are managed in three types: broadcasts (newsletters) that send the same content to everyone, sequences that go out in a set order after a download or sign-up, and trigger emails that respond to behavior such as viewing a pricing page or revisiting the site. Separate your metrics too. Since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection took effect, open rate is inflated, so it is safer to shift your decision metrics to click rate, reply rate, and number of inquiries. Rather than hunting for industry averages, compare against your own previous-quarter figures as the baseline; it is far more accurate. It is also worth making clear that this is not the same as cold emails sent by a sales team without consent. Under Korea's Information and Communications Network Act, promotional messages must carry '(Advertisement)' in the subject line, sending between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. requires separate consent, and opt-in consent must be reconfirmed every two years.
The most common misconception in the field is that a bigger list is always better. If you keep sending to the whole list, including unresponsive addresses, spam complaints and bounces pile up and eventually damage your domain reputation. The damage goes beyond lower newsletter open rates. The sales team’s quotes and even contracts sent from the same domain end up in spam folders too. Bulk-importing business cards collected at a trade show without confirming consent, or buying a list and adding it, ends the same way. Before you start regular sends, remove unresponsive addresses first.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Euijung KimBrand strategist with 30 years in advertising, formerly a division head at Daehong CommunicationsIt dates back to the first commercial email blast in 1978, and became a core channel as the internet went mainstream and marketing automation matured.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A distributes industrial automation parts, with 120 employees and KRW 28 billion (≈ US$20,948,700) in annual revenue. It had piled up 4,200 email addresses collected through technical-document downloads on its website, but had not sent a single email in over a year, and email-sourced inquiries were stuck at 3 per month. It decided to relaunch its newsletter on a six-month plan.
- When Kim, a marketing manager, went through the 4,200 addresses, only 1,100 had clicked even once in the past two years. After hearing the report, the CEO said, 'That wasn't a list. It was a ghost town.'
- They sent a three-part 'Do you want to keep receiving updates?' re-confirmation email over 3 weeks, then removed the 2,600 addresses that never responded from the send list. The head of sales objected for two days, asking, 'Can we really cut the list in half?'
- They split the remaining list into three tracks (equipment engineers, procurement, and executives) and sent each its own subject line every other Thursday at 10 a.m. Engineers got breakdown case analyses; procurement got unit-price comparison tables.
- They set up an automatic email to anyone who viewed the pricing page three or more times within two weeks, plus an alert to the assigned sales rep. In the first month alone, 41 alerts fired and 9 of them led to calls.
- Six months later, the click rate had risen from 1.2% to 4.8% and the spam complaint rate had dropped from 0.31% to 0.02%. Email-sourced inquiries grew from 3 to 17 per month, and over the same period cumulative orders came to 2 deals worth KRW 190 million (≈ US$142,200).