E-mail Marketing
What is E-mail Marketing ?
Email marketing is a way to reach consumers through electronic mail. It’s a direct method of written communication that aims to reach a targeted audience for the promotion of a campaign, a product, or a service that might be useful for the recipient.
Email marketing may not be new, but it’s still effective.
Unlike spam, the context is crucial for every email, as its effectiveness depends on the ability to grab the recipient’s attention. The goal is to add value and convince a consumer to proceed to further actions through the right incentive.
Its low cost compared to other forms of marketing doesn’t make it an easy method of reaching consumers, as it still requires the right strategy to drive the desired results. However, email marketing has the potential to be a key part of a marketing strategy, provided that a business follows all the necessary steps when starting with a new email marketing plan.
How E-mail Marketing can help you grow your business ?
1. E-mail has a higher reach :
With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users and Twitter boasting 255 million, it’s tempting to believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the masses. These are impressive numbers, but what isn’t so frequently shared are the statistics on email usage. In the year 2013, 67.7 million Indian users accessed their e-mail via mobile device. In 2018, this number was estimated to surpass 200 million users.
While this might seem surprising at first, think about your own online behavior: When you sign up for a website (like an online store), you have to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account. What’s more, Facebook and Twitter email to notify users of activity, like when someone is tagged in a photo.
Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who’s online has an active email address. So when it comes to connecting with your prospects and customers, there’s no channel with a wider reach than email.
2. E-mail delivers the message :
If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list, or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time.
There are two key reasons why:
First, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook limits the number of times your posts appear in the News Feed in an attempt to drive brands towards their paid advertising options.
This is a big deal when it comes to getting your messages in front of your desired audience.
Secondly, your email subscribers have explicitly told you they want to hear from you when they signed up for your email list.
There are strict laws and regulations around SPAM laws, so if you’re emailing a prospect or customer, it’s because they gave you their permission. Now think about the ads in your Facebook News Feed – did you ask those companies to market to you?
Probably not. More than likely, you performed a Google search or visited their website. That’s decidedly different than proactively signing up from an email newsletter.
Email is proven to ensure your audience gets your message.
3. E-mail Drives Conversion :
Most marketers are laser focused on driving conversions. Regardless of whether they do so in the form of leads, sales, memberships, or a metric unique to your business strategy, the ultimate goal for marketers is to turn potential customers into paying customers.
And when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email.
In fact, the average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients).
4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media, according to a survey conducted by Monetate.
What’s more, email is highly measurable. Campaign Monitor customers have real-time access to metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, forwards, social shares, and more.
4. E-mail has a higher ROI :
Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it makes sense that email is also the most effective marketing channel to drive ROI for your company.
It’s clear that email is a cost-effective channel for marketers, but why does it outperform other channels so significantly when it comes to ROI?
It comes down to delivering highly personalized and relevant messages. Unlike social networks where you send status updates to every follower regardless of their location, interests & purchase history, email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications.
The more data you have about your customers in an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor—including insights pulled in from integrated systems like your CRM, customer service solution, etc—the more targeted you can be.
Campaign Monitor customer Rip Curl utilized segmentation and dynamic content to deliver the right message to the right person. For example, they know the gender of their subscribers and where they are located geographically, so they can ensure that females in the United States receive a promotion about bathing suits during the summer months and males in Australia receive an email about wetsuits during the winter months.
This use of segmentation and dynamic content helps to ensure the content they send is relevant to every individual recipient and that relevance drives people to click-through, make purchases – and increase the ROI of their email marketing campaigns.
5. E-mail is the preferred communication channel :
For many, social networks are a personal form of communication used to keep up to date with friends & family. When people log in to their social media accounts, they’re there to see photos and updates from people they know and care about.
Email, on the contrary, is a much more professional medium and people expect to receive information about products and services through that channel.
In fact, studies show 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.
6. E-mail is an open platform :
Over the past few years, many brands have invested millions of dollars into buying large social followings in order to be able to communicate and engage with an audience.
But while businesses are investing in various social media platforms, Facebook has frequently updated its algorithm to reduce the amount of followers who will see a brand’s post, unless those posts are paid advertisements.
Twitter seems to be moving in a similar direction with the announcement it will introduce an algorithm-controlled feed as well.
The issue with channels like Facebook and Twitter is they’re owned and controlled by third parties which means marketers are at the mercy of changes the platforms make to their platform.
Meanwhile, email isn’t owned or controlled by any one particular entity. It’s an open communication platform and there are a multitude of services that provide access to send and receive email.
The diverse array of companies involved in email marketing ensures that no one party can make changes that would have a widespread effect, and unlike Facebook or Twitter, if you invest the time and money into building and cultivating a great email list, your subscriber list will be an asset you own. Thus you’ll be able to leverage your list without the threat of someone limiting its effectiveness.
According to Marketers, Email marketing is an essential tool in every smart marketer’s tool belt. Nothing else is as good at reaching your customers where they are, and nothing else is as effective at building personal relationships with customers. If you want your business to succeed, start building your email list on Day 1.
