Email marketing is not on the cutting edge of digital marketing anymore. After all, email predates the internet and social media by a few decades it’s not exactly the newest technology out there. But in this guide, you’ll learn why email marketing hasn’t gone anywhere, even as new forms and platforms become available to marketers.
On your journey from novice to expert, you’ll understand what email marketing is and what it can do for your business’s online presence, learn about techniques that are currently working to help companies connect with their audience via email, and discover how to use analytics and other data insights to inform your strategy and leave with a plan for continuous improvement in place.
| Takeaways |
|---|
| Email marketing remains a powerful tool for digital marketing. |
| It offers direct and personalized communication with customers. |
| Email campaigns can be tailored for specific target audiences. |
| Automation enhances efficiency and scalability of campaigns. |
| Analytics provide insights for continuous improvement. |
| Integration with other strategies enhances overall effectiveness. |
1. Emails Are Still The Best Way to Reach Customers
Emails have a higher read rate than any other form of communication. Social media posts and ads may be seen by users, but they are quickly passed over while they are scrolling down their feeds. Emails, on the other hand, have a 95% open rate!
Emails allow you to target your audience with more specificity than any other marketing channel. For example, if you run a home decor shop and want to advertise your new holiday collection featuring faux fur throws and pillows, you can send an email to your list of customers whose purchase history shows that they prefer warm fabrics for winter.
You can segment your audience even further by personalizing the emails you send them. If you sell womenswear in multiple sizes like petite, misses, plus sizes, or tall sizes, then you could segment your customers based on the size they usually buy and send them only clothing items close to their size range so that they feel like they are getting personalized recommendations from their favorite store.
This will make them feel special and increase the chances of them converting into paying customers!
Enhancing your email marketing strategy is crucial for business success. Discover valuable insights and tools in The Best Tips and Tools for Email Marketing to take your campaigns to the next level.
2. Emails Have A Higher ROI Than Other Marketing Channels
It’s reported that for every dollar you spend on email marketing, the average return is $38. It has been estimated that email marketing has an ROI of around 22%, and that’s higher than other marketing channels such as social media (1.5%), PPC (7%), and affiliate marketing (8%).
3. Emails Are Cost-Effective
In short, if you can make a decent return on investment (ROI) with email marketing, then you’ll have more money to spend on other marketing channels. According to Campaign Monitor, the ROI for email marketing is $38 for every $1 spent. That’s a whopping 3,800% increase in profits as opposed to just investing your time and money into other marketing channels.
Email marketing isn’t just cost-effective; it’s easy to measure costs and returns as well. Because everything is done digitally through the Internet, you can easily calculate the ROI of your email efforts. It’s simple: all it takes is setting up some tracking tools and looking at the numbers.
To measure results from an email campaign, create a custom link in your emails that will send users to a specific landing page or site tailored to that particular message when clicked on. You can analyze what percentage of customers or users went to your site after receiving a specific email by doing this. Better yet, if you use software like HubSpot Marketing Email (which is free), then all the analytical data will be automatically recorded and reported for your convenience!
5. Emails Nurture Leads
Email marketing is a powerful way to nurture leads, converting them into paying customers. It also helps you retain customers and increase brand loyalty. You probably know that emails are an effective way to get someone’s attention, but did you know they’re also great at keeping your audience engaged? The reason? People open their emails every day (and the numbers don’t lie; in 2019, more than half of the world’s population was using email).
Are you new to email marketing? Dive into the essentials with our guide on Email Marketing 101: The Mailchimp Guide for Beginners and get started on the right track to effective communication with your audience.
6. Emails Support Sales Funnel Activities
When you’re first starting with email marketing, it’s easy to put your efforts into one campaign without thinking about how it fits into your sales funnel. But once you expand your email list, it gets a lot harder to manage fragmented campaigns that don’t work together. This is where creating an effective funnel comes in handy.
The marketing funnel is a process that tracks the stages of your prospects as they move towards making a purchase decision. There are three main stages: awareness, interest, and decision. You can use this model to create more targeted email campaigns that support each stage of the buying process.
The first stage of the marketing funnel is awareness, which is all about attracting new customers and leads to building up an audience for your business. The best way to achieve this through email marketing is by sending subscribers highly personalized content about their needs and preferences based on what you know about them so far.
By providing information that helps solve their immediate problems, you can help establish yourself as an expert in the industry and encourage them to take further action by moving down the funnel into the next stage!
7. Emails Offer Personalization
One of the major benefits of email marketing is that you can personalize your messages. This lets you deliver content to customers that’s relevant to them and their specific needs. When your customers feel like you care about them and their needs, they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
If a customer requires socks, it’s great if you can recommend a pair that works well with the type of shoes they have (hiking socks with hiking boots, dress socks with dress shoes) or the climate they live in (thick wool socks with hiking boots up north). When people feel like businesses are taking an interest in them as individuals instead of seeing them as just another name on a mailing list, it creates a stronger bond between business and customer.
A company named MailChimp uses email marketing as one of its key points of contact between itself and its users, tailoring its emails towards how long each user has been subscribed to MailChimp and how often he or she uses the service. The more recently someone signed up for MailChimp, the more frequently he or she receives personalized emails encouraging him or her to use MailChimp.
Email marketing plays a pivotal role in business growth. Learn how it can shape your business’s fate in How Email Marketing Can Make or Break a Business Set Up and master the art of impactful digital communication.
8. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a customer-centered approach to gathering leads and focuses on providing helpful content to your audience. When you use inbound marketing to obtain leads via email, you can segment your audience based on their interests or where they are in the buying process. By providing informative content that is relevant to each of these segments, you’re more likely to convert them into paying customers.
Creating helpful content for your audience may seem daunting at first, but it doesn’t have to be! There are several types of content you could use for your email campaigns: Blog posts about industry trends, Whitepapers about product solutions, Ebooks with useful tips, and Webinars that provide information.
9. Branding And Identity
Branding is about defining your company’s identity so that customers can recognize your brand in a single glance. It’s about creating a sense of familiarity and comfort with your company, as well as making sure that you’re communicating the right messages about what you stand for and why customers should do business with you. Think of it this way: you want to be the kind of person who someone would want to sit next to at dinner, even though they’ve only just met you.
Email helps with branding by ensuring: Consistent use of a logo throughout all emails; Color palettes that are consistent with other branding materials (e.g., website); Consistent formatting and layout of emails
Consistency is key here; this will help people recognize your brand at a glance, which will make them more likely to interact with your emails. This can be tough if several people are working on different aspects of email marketing in your company, but there are tools out there that help streamline the process so that everyone knows exactly how they should be representing the company while writing their email content.
Crafting compelling content is essential for successful freelance email marketing campaigns. Learn how to engage your audience and drive results with our guide on writing successful freelance email marketing campaigns.
10. Deliverability And Triggers
With the help of automation and trigger-based email marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to bring in more leads, connect with potential buyers, and increase your sales. However, there are a few things you must understand before diving headfirst into an email marketing campaign:
Deliverability: You need to make sure that your emails get past any spam filters and reach your customers’ inboxes. According to Statista, only 79 percent of business emails with a good reputation reached their recipients’ inboxes in 2020.
If you have a low reputation or if the recipients have marked your previous emails as spam (whether intentionally or not), then this rate will go down considerably. We recommend that you speak to someone who can help analyze your current email infrastructure and guide you through the process of maximizing deliverability rates.
Re-engagement: The vast majority of email providers use engagement-based algorithms to determine whether an incoming message is worthy of being put into the recipient’s inbox or sent straight to the trash bin. What this means is that if enough recipients mark any given message as “spam” within a short period, then all subsequent messages from that sender will be flagged as junk mail by default.
This is problematic because it may force important messages into the junk folder simply because they came from an organization’s standard address rather than from any specific individual’s primary account. To combat this problem, we recommend setting up re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers.
This can be done by sending them enticing offers such as discounts or free ebooks for signing up for another year on their subscription plan; in doing so, you’ll ensure that they remain interested enough in what you’re offering them to keep receiving future messages from you.
11. Value To The Customer
Value to the customer is the basis of a good marketing strategy. If you do not add value to your customers, they will not buy from you. The best way to ensure that you are adding value is by focusing on creating content for your audience, not for yourself.
A good method of identifying what content to create is having an understanding of what your ideal customer wants and needs from you. You can then create content that serves their point of need in the buying process: awareness, consideration, or decision stage. For example, if someone has already bought from your brand then sending them to upsell options will make it easier for them to spend more money with you than going elsewhere.
If someone is still at the consideration stage of the buying process then providing them with free trials or limited time offers can help sway their decision towards purchasing from you instead of one of your competitors. And lastly, if someone isn’t aware that their problem even exists yet then reaching out to them with educational content can help educate them on why they should invest in solving this problem now instead of later.
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Final Thoughts
In this article, I’ve given you three reasons why email marketing is still the future of digital marketing. You learned that:
- Email drives engagement and has a high return on investment (ROI).
- It allows you to build long-term relationships with your customers.
- It helps you reach your audience in a personalized way.
Email marketing might be old school, but that doesn’t mean it has gone out of style! If you want to keep up with the rest of the digital marketing world then you need to add email marketing to your arsenal now.
Further Reading
Explore more about the future of email marketing with these additional resources:
The Future of Email Marketing: Trends and Strategies – Stay ahead of the curve by discovering the latest trends and strategies that will shape the future of email marketing.
Unveiling the Potential of Email Marketing in the Future – Dive deeper into the potential impact and opportunities that lie within the evolving landscape of email marketing.
Evolving Trends in Email Marketing: What Lies Ahead – Gain insights into the shifting landscape of email marketing and how it could reshape your marketing efforts in the coming years.
People Also Ask
How Do I Improve My Email Marketing Strategy?
In most cases, it’s a good idea to keep things as simple as possible for the person reading. If your email is cluttered with images and other elements that don’t directly serve a purpose, your recipient may become confused or frustrated.
When planning an email, consider whether each element is adding to the meaning and value of your message. For example, if you’re sending an announcement about a discount on a specific item at your store, make sure you include key details like what the product is called and how much it will cost.
What Is The Best Email Marketing Software?
The best way to find out which software is right for you is to try it out yourself before making any decisions. One option that’s been getting a lot of buzzes lately comes from a company called ActiveCampaign. It allows users to create stunning emails with no coding required.
You’ll be able to build beautiful newsletters in just minutes using their drag-and-drop editor tool (which makes things super easy). Plus they offer free trials so you can test it out before committing too much time or money to something else when this might work perfectly fine first-hand experience instead it’s pretty great!
Why Is Email Marketing Still Effective?
Email marketing has been around for years, and it is still one of the most effective forms of marketing. It is also one of the easiest. Consider this: You can send your ad to thousands or millions of people with just a click of a button.
If you have followed other forms of advertising and marketing that were popular in the past, you have probably noticed how much time and effort it took to get an ad out and seen by many people. Email marketing eliminates all these unnecessary steps and allows you to reach more potential customers for much less money.
How Do I Succeed In Email Marketing?
The first thing that you should know about succeeding in email marketing is that it’s not about simply creating good content or having a catchy subject line. These things are important, but they’re only half the battle when it comes to getting your emails opened and read by potential customers. To be successful, you need to make sure that your emails are relevant to each other so they don’t become overwhelming.
For example, if someone has signed up for an email list whose topic might be “grocery shopping,” then they probably won’t want another message about groceries unless those items relate directly back to their original interest (such as coupons). The key here is relevance if something doesn’t seem related at all, people aren’t likely to go through with opening up an email from someone else who isn’t related either!
How Do I Start An Email Marketing Campaign?
To start your email marketing campaign, you need to work out what it is you want to accomplish with your campaign. Once you have determined this, you can move on to the next steps.
The next steps would be to draft a compelling email pitch, build a list of recipients, and then send it out. It’s important to remember that once you’ve sent the first email in your campaign, there will be subsequent emails that need to follow up on the initial pitch.
How Do I Get More Email Subscribers?
To get more email subscribers, you should offer valuable information that they are interested in receiving through their inboxes. For example, if they love cats and also like receiving cute cat photos from time to time from their favorite local shelter, then offering them a weekly newsletter with adorable cat photos may entice them into signing up for your list.
What Is The Best Email Marketing Service?
The best email marketing services are those that allow users to segment their contact lists so as not to overwhelm people who aren’t interested in receiving promotional emails every day of the week or even every hour. A good service should also include analytics tracking tools for measuring your customer engagement and feedback on each message sent out through its system.
I am a content writer, and I love what I do! Writing makes me feel like the words are flowing through my fingers, and then onto the keyboard, like magic. My experience as a writer has taught me that writing makes me feel good, as well as helps others to feel better too!