Learn How You Can Leverage Inbound Emails To Get The Best Out Of Your Marketing Strategy

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Emails have always been the first choice of any digital business to reach their consumers. According to a survey, at least 91% of consumers check their email inbox daily. Depending on the targeted lists of consumers/clients, there are two categories of emails – inbound emails and outbound emails. Let’s begin with understanding the difference between the two.

Difference Between Inbound Emails And Outbound Emails

Inbound emails are nothing but emails received by users from a sender inside the set of your organization sphere. Whereas, outbound emails are emails that are sent by users to recipients outside the set of your organization domain. In simple words, inbound emails focus on getting consumers to reach a particular business, while outbound emails require a firm to reach out directly to their potential consumers.

What Is The Problem With Outbound Emails?

The growth of a business and its marketing strategies go hand in hand. Most of the industries market their product with the help of TV ads, radio, newspapers, social media advertising, email blasts, and other methods. These mediums send messages to a broad audience of people, most of whom are not even looking for that particular product.

The problem with outbound email is to be appropriate for the most significant number of people; the message must be very general. It is very challenging and near impossible to make sense and be appealing through a generalized message when the needs of the recipients are so varied and apart. Most of such emails end up in the spam folder or don’t even get opened.

An outbound email example can be a hair fall treatment email that is sent to multiple people at a time. Most of the recipients might not even open the mail if they don’t have a hair fall problem!

MORE: Outbound Email Examples

Inbound Emails: How They Overcome The Issues Of Outbound Emails

As mentioned earlier, inbound emails are sent to only an intended group. These groups might have shown interest in a product by visiting a particular website, by searching for some information related to that product on browsers, or by subscribing to a business newsletter.

A situation example of an inbound email is as follows:

A user visits a tourism site in search of the best deals for a particular trip. Based on the list of people visiting the website, a business sends an email with customized deals to such users. The idea behind this is simple: present your product to the one who needs it. This method is effective as it attracts the potential customers who are genuinely interested in finalizing the deal.

What Makes Inbound Email Marketing Profitable?

The following points cover the things that make inbound email marketing more profitable compared to outbound email marketing or traditional email marketing:

Quality Over Quantity

Inbound email marketing is mainly dependent on creating quality content before attempting to attract consumers with the same.

Less Expensive

Inbound email marketing is less expensive as compared to outbound email marketing, which requires messages to be broadcasted to a mass audience even if they aren’t in your target list.

Permission-Based Marketing

Inbound email marketing can be done based on the following two scenarios:

The audience permits you to communicate with them through various mediums. Examples are subscription-based email marketing, social media, blog subscribers, etc.
Redirect the users to a specific site (your site or anything that suits your marketing strategy) by answering the questions that people ask on a public forum. Examples include SEO, keyword targeting, landing page strategy, content/blog strategy, etc.

Communication

Communication is one of the critical differences between inbound and outbound email marketing. Outbound email marketing relies on mass media, where communication is only one-way. Whereas in inbound marketing, people can engage with the business by sending an email, leaving a comment on a blog, or posting a message on social media.

Inbound Email Templates Vs Outbound Email Templates

The following inbound and outbound email templates will help you to understand the difference between inbound emails and outbound emails:

Outbound Email Template

Subject: Demo promotion
Hey {Name}, we are a newly launched startup company. We've got some exciting deals for various products:
· [link 1]
· [link 2]
· [link 3]
We guarantee you won’t find such deals anywhere!
We are looking forward to hearing from you.
Thanks!

Inbound Email Template

Subject: Re: Demo request
Hi {Name},
I saw that you recently filled out a form on our website. I hope you found the resource useful.
Here are a few other topics that you may want to check:
· [Link to blog post]
· [Link to a video]
I would be happy to discuss these topics if you can let me know the time of your preference.
We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks!

Final Words

In this article, we covered the basics of inbound and outbound emails. We also included points that show why outbound email service has a low probability of achieving the desired result despite reaching many users as opposed to inbound emails that target specific users. We hope you were able to get sufficient idea about how inbound emails work and how you can use these for your marketing campaigns.