3 Case Studies: How brands grew with Email
Marketing
An email marketing campaign is a sequence of marketing efforts that reach out to multiple
individuals all at once. You just need to set up some email contacts and run a campaign based on
the audience. The first step towards successful email marketing is gathering some emails from
people who showed interest in your business. The next step is copywriting to generate good
leads, and the last one is to run the campaign.
There are many brands that are known to us just because of effective email marketing. We are
going to discuss case studies of some of the best brands and how they have converted into a
multi-million-dollar brand by using different email protocols.
But first we need to learn what is an email protocols, and how they are important for us.
What is an Email Protocol?
POP3, IMAP, and SMTP are the most commonly used email protocols available on the internet.
All three of them worked on the same principles as mentioned above with some slight changes in
functionality. Let’s discuss all of them in detail.
1. POP 3
What is POP 3?
Post office protocol version 3 (POP 3) is used to receive emails from remote servers to local
email clients. It also allows you to download the emails to your local computer which is very
beneficial because you can read emails even when you are online. Having said that; the emails
are removed from the remote server when downloaded.
This is not good to use if you intend to use your account from multiple locations, as you cannot
take your local computer along with you all the time. You need to have your emails saved on
remote servers to access them from anywhere, and anytime.
Default Pop 3 Ports
By default, Pop 3 ports work on 2 different ports…
a. Port 110: This is the default port
b. Port 995: This port enables a secure connection
2. IMAP
What is IMAP?
The Internet Message Access Protocol or IMAP is used for accessing email on a remote server
received from local clients. IMAP allows access from multiple clients which differs from POP3
that only allows access from a single local application. This is one of the reasons IMAP is
suitable for you if you want to access emails from multiple locations, and if your emails are
being handled by your virtual assistants IMAP is the most reliable one.
Default IMAP Ports
IMAP basically runs on three different default ports
a. Port 143: This is the default IMAP port
b. Port 993: This port is used to maintain security. These are normally used when you have
to secure your connection while using IMAP
3. SMTP
What is SMTP?
This is the simplest form of email protocol that is used to send emails over the internet. You just
need to send emails nothing technical is required.
Default SMTP Ports
SMTP works on three default ports
a. Port 25: This is the default encrypted port
b. Port 465: This port is to provide safe email marketing
c. Port 2525: It is a non-traditional port number and is promoted by consumer ISPs and
cloud hosting providers
Now, as we have discussed some of the technicalities of email marketing; let's jump into the case
study, and discuss how these three companies became a giant of their field by doing Email
Marketing and following different Email Protocols.
Email Marketing Case Study – Amazon
In recent times, Amazon has taken over the world with some excellent business. Most of them
were backed up by their excellent email marketing. You will still be receiving emails, even if
you visited them a year ago. They have huge cloud storage-based servers, and they generate a lot
of leads from their email campaigns.
Many people are not aware of the fact that Amazon uses SMTP protocols. Amazon has recently
built their own service named SES which was prepared by using SMTP.
If you are a regular customer of Amazon, you might not have missed it, Amazon sends emails
regularly, a lot of them! Yet it is not that much annoying. Amazon has a very targeted approach,
to make their email marketing really catchy.
Building a marketing campaign for such a huge business could be really difficult. Despite that,
Amazon has shown exceptional results by building an excellent infrastructure, configuring the
network, maintaining IP addresses, and handling the security perfectly.
Using a variety of SMTP-enabled programming languages, they have built their brand to what
people know today as Amazon.
Email Marketing Case Study – Vista Print
Luckily, Vista Print is one of the brands that have built their identity using IMAP. Using this
protocol, they synchronize all your emails from a separate folder.
Vista Print is a Global eCommerce market, headquartered in Australia, they provide multiple
physical and digital products. They have grown their business exceptionally well using IMAP,
moreover, they also provide digital marketing services to their customers.
Email Marketing Case Study – Zumba Fitness
Not only Zumba has taken the internet with the storm, but also Zumba fitness due to its excellent
Email Marketing skills. They are a living example of how to grow a brand through excellent
email marketing. They use SMTP for their email marketing campaign.
Since 2014 they conduct an instructor campaign in which 2000 instructors are invited to attend.
They made it compulsory for people who wanted to attend to fill a sign-up form and by doing
that they gathered tons and tons of emails. They used a video to give a call to action to the sign-
up form.
Since then they have gathered uncountable email contacts, and have been running different email
campaigns accordingly.
According to MailChimp statistics Zumba Fitness has a click through rate of 50% which is above
average, as most of the companies have a click through rate of below 25%.
Conclusion
So, email marketing is the key to success for any business you can build a brand with an
effective email strategy. Imagine a brand like Amazon doing email marketing for more than a
decade just to create brand awareness. This is how much effort it takes to build a brand and do
well as an email marketer.
Creating good content is also necessary to improve the click-through rate, and avoid scamming.
While running an email campaign you should know how to sell anything to anyone by your
words.
Email protocols are essential depending on the campaign requirements, each server has its own
specialty and is used accordingly. You should know which protocol you should use, and when;
to be successful in email marketing.
