There are many ways to market a product or service, including search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. The concept of inbound and outbound applies to most of them, but how does it apply to emails?

Read on to learn more about inbound and outbound emails and how these methods are applied to marketing today.

What is Inbound Email Marketing?

Inbound email marketing attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. Typically, inbound emails are sent to leads that have already expressed interest in your product or service or have subscribed to your email list. Examples include newsletters, content roundups, and discount codes for returning customers.

Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. It includes blog posts, social media posts, infographics, and — you guessed it — emails.

Email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email. The statistics on email are impressive and lend to its importance as a marketing tool. With 4 billion daily email users, it is necessary to focus on strategy and best practices to reap the benefits of improved sales, generated traffic, increased leads, and more.

What is Outbound Email Marketing?

Outbound email marketing involves reaching out to prospects who haven’t opted into communication with you. By nature, outbound emails are unsolicited and can be considered disruptive, since it involves reaching out to an audience regardless of whether the audience sought you out or not.

In general, outbound marketing involves reaching out to potential customers to gauge interest in a product or service. Outbound marketing is interruptive in that it finds an audience regardless of whether the audience sought it out or not. Examples of this are TV ads, radio ads, billboards, banner and display ads, telemarketing, and outbound emails.

Inbound Email Marketing vs. Outbound Email Marketing

Inbound email marketing attracts subscribers who are interested in your products and services, while outbound email marketing pushes your products and services onto an audience regardless of expressed interest.

Understanding the differences between inbound and outbound email marketing is the first step to creating a successful email strategy.

Inbound and outbound email marketing have differences in:

  • Audience & Engagement: Inbound email marketing targets a small list of interested subscribers, while outbound email marketing targets anyone it can send a message to.
  • Reach & Speed: Inbound email marketing lists are typically slower to build and much smaller to start. Outbound email marketing lists are much larger, and you don’t have to build them from scratch, specially if you purchased an email list.
  • Cost: Inbound email marketing costs less on average due to a smaller subscriber count and increased ROI. Outbound email marketing costs more because the more emails you send, the larger your expenditure. It also doesn’t turn a lot of recipients into costumers; thus, the ROI is significantly lower.

Audience and engagement, reach and speed, and cost are understood differences between inbound and outbound email marketing.

Email marketing is inbound and outbound

Email marketing is both inbound and outbound; however, it is up to you to decide which method is effective and productive for your business. Inbound email marketing allows you to build on a relationship that your customer sought out. Outbound email marketing asks potential customers to form a new relationship. They follow different methodologies, but both have been proven successful.

To read the full blog, visit our partner HubSpot’s website. Need help with your Inbound or Outbound Email marketing campaigns? Contact us today to learn more about how we can help..