Explore a curated list of must-read email marketing books to boost your email campaigns' success.

Good news, fellow marketer, almost every user of the internet has an email address. So, potentially, your business can make 4.57 billion connections simply by dropping an email to them!  Bad news, however, almost every user also knows how to delete emails without even opening them. So, you can only really have the world as your oyster if you tackle the art of email marketing and learn about all its peculiarities.

There’re plenty of options when it comes to learning more about email marketing, starting with blogs and websites and ending with workshops. However, if you want to learn the basics and have a comprehensive idea of how everything works, you should start with the most obvious option - a good old handbook!

E-Mail Marketing For Dummies by John Arnold

Regardless of where you stand as a professional — either you are a beginner testing the waters or an experienced specialist, — a dummies guide can be handy for both! A newbie in the world of email marketing can use one to pick up the basics of the craft and get a better understanding of all the techniques and tools available to them. At the same time, an expert in the field can go back to their roots to organise and refresh the knowledge they’ve accumulated over the years, use the guide as a source of inspiration, or simply have some light reading! No matter what your goals are, John Arnold’s E-Mail Marketing For Dummies has something for everyone.

The manual is divided into six sections, each of which contains lots of practical and up-to-date information about the art of email marketing.

The first part of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies explores the fundamental concepts within email marketing, explains the benefits of email marketing for businesses and talks about how you can incorporate this strategy into your current business model. Sounds like an awful lot of theory, but here’s the catch! John Arnold is terrific at keeping the reader’s attention. He knows exactly what his target audience and spices it up with some hand-on tips. For instance, in this section of the book, he discusses how email marketing can be used to strengthen communication with your customers and gives some practical advice on how to become a trusted sender and convince your recipients to want to open your emails.

The second part is dedicated to planning out your email marketing strategy, identifying your campaign objectives and building your mailing list. On top of that, Arnold shares his go-to content solutions and explains how to add value to your emails. By the end of the section, you’ll know how to ensure your recipients are excited to open your emails.

Sections three and four contain all you need to know about the actual emails and how to construct the most almighty email. Starting with the visual design of the email copy (which templates work best, which fonts and colours are most effective for call-to-action, whether or not you should include an image) and ending with coming up with the most enticing subject line. Besides, Arnold also shows how to simplify your life a bit by automating some of the critical processes.

The fifth section talks about collecting responses and assessing your campaign for subsequent adjustments. The final chapter debriefs the most common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

arrow leftWatch more: [Back From the Dead] Email Marketing is the “In” Thing in 2020

Email Marketing Rules: How to Wear a White Hat, Shoot Straight, and Win Hearts by Chad White

Amazon reviews say that Email Marketing Rules: How to Wear a White Hat, Shoot Straight, and Win Hearts is ‘an essential item on every email marketers bookshelf’. With a name like that, I bet it is!

Does the book live up to the expectations it sets with a promising funky title? After all, the bar is set high. With this one, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll enjoy your time reading Chad White’s creation. He really put a lot of thought into creating a comprehensive and accessible guide into email marketing. Yeehaw, Chad!

The book comprises three major parts, each of which tells the reader about one of the key cornerstones of email marketing: the first section contains email marketing rules, the second offers an insight into the successful email marketing strategy and the last one discusses the future of email marketing. Still not sold?

Email Marketing Rules is packed with useful, practical information and handy extras such as checklists, frameworks and study cases. The first chapter of the book outlines the difference between good email marketing and great email marketing, with examples, so you could become the best of the best.

The New Email Revolution by Robert W. Bly

If you aren’t a complete stranger to marketing, chances are, you already know who Robert W. Bly is. He is the author of numerous publications on the industry’s most avant-garde platforms such as Entrepreneur as well as a series of successful self-development books. He’s been helping business owners to prosper since 1982 when he published his first guide. Robert W. Bly mostly centres his works around content marketing and copywriting as opposed to a lot of other authors on this list who focus their works on explaining pure marketing strategies. However, this is exactly what earned The New Email Revolution a place on this top 5 must-reads for email marketing.

A lot of other books focus on how to build a mailing list and how to segment it effectively. It almost seems like for a lot of handbooks on email marketing the ‘how’ is more important than ‘what’. Fortunately, it’s not the case with The New Email Revolution. The book extends way beyond the usual overused templates for email marketing campaigns and teaches you how to craft a powerful copy yourself.

In one of the sections of The New Email Revolution, Robert W. Bly shares his best email copywriting tactics and techniques and teaches the reader how different words can have a different effect on prospects. After completing this section, you will be able to choose the most appropriate verbs for your CTA, construct and structure your emails in such a way that they keep the recipient wanting to read further and have a long-lasting positive impact on your brand image. On top of that, Bly also reveals the secrets of successful implementation of visual content into your emails so that they could stand out among the competitors’ copies in the prospects’ inbox.

Email Marketing Demystified by Matthew Paulson

The word on the street is that email marketing is a long time dead! Chances are, you didn’t hear it here. Perhaps, you might’ve even believed it the first time you came across this loud statement.

I don’t blame you… With email marketing, there’s so much contradicting information going around that you simply don’t know what to believe in. Some rumours are obviously untrue as they sound absurd. However, there’s also plenty of information that gives off a pretty legit vibe. So, it can be confusing!

The only solution in a situation like this is to turn to a trustworthy source for help. You need someone reliable to debunk all the myths and tell you what the deal with email marketing is. Matthew Paulson suits the role well! A serial entrepreneur and the runner of MarketBeat.com that publishes newsletters to over 250,000 investors daily, he knows a thing or two about email marketing and how to make it work for your business. Hence, in his book Email Marketing Demystified, Paulson doesn’t only try to put an end to the common misconceptions about email marketing but also gives many useful tips and tricks for implementing it into your business model.

The book comprises 9 chapters, each of which is packed with theoretical insight into email marketing and some practical advice. Almost every chapter of Email Marketing Demystified offers a fret case study to actualise the knowledge and put a face to a concept.

Some of the most useful topics Matthew Paulson covers in his book include choosing the most appropriate mailing service for your email marketing activities (which might not sound that exciting but is actually crucial for the campaign’s success); building your mailing list both through your website and without it; bumping up the value of your mailing list, etc.

The hidden gem of Email Marketing Demystified that isn’t featured in many other email marketing books is Paulson’s discussion on outbound email marketing. Just in one neat chapter, he teaches you how to reach people who aren’t your subscribers directly through emails and not end up in spam.

Email Persuasion by Ian Brodie

Ian Brodie is a known name in the marketing industry. Brodie is famous for his numerous publications and cases that scored a feature in BBC World Service,  BusinessWeek, Marketing Profs and many other trustworthy sources. Over the years, Ian Brodie has gained lots of experience in email marketing, so him sharing bits of the valuable knowledge he’s garnered over time is a win-win for anyone interested in boosting their email marketing skills. Email Persuasion is a killer book for all the email marketing enthusiasts interested in learning the art of communicating with their target audience, using the power of emails to build a strong relationship with your prospects and turning them into loyal customers.

The book has a very clever structure that allows you to use it as a step-by-step guide. Ian Brodie kicks it off with an inspirational introduction where he explains why you might want to implement email marketing into your business model and how you can benefit from it before he moves on to the first chapter. From there, Email Persuasion is an orderly executed sequence of actions an email marketing manager should take on their way to success.

The most valuable pieces of information Ian shares with his readers include the tips for building effective mailing lists, segmenting your target audience within the email marketing framework, crafting engaging emails that will be opened by the recipients and much more! Besides, he also gives a useful insight into the importance of email marketing automation, and talks about how to enhance your authority and brand image so that your readers were susceptible to your expertise.

The icing on the cake is the fact that Ian’s book isn’t just a collection of theoretical knowledge but also a lot of ready-to-use templates, examples and content-plans for you to kickstart your email marketing campaign.

And if you don’t have the time to go through hefty books and need some help asap, you may as well browse our blog! Start with a nicely crafted long-read here.

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