Email marketing is important because, simply put, it acts as a conduit between your business and your audience. Whether that’s customers and prospective customers, newsletter subscribers, club members, fans or whoever else your audience might consist of. Use email marketing in the right way, and it will generate trust in you as a brand, create loyalty and repeat visitors and business.
Email marketing is a cost-effective and flexible way of getting your message out to your audience. It is far easier to see conversion rates compared to that of social media messaging including being able to see who’s opened, who clicked through and use the integration between your ESP and ECom solution to track purchases.
Depending on the type of business you operate, email marketing will have different types of campaigns and strategies.
If your business is purely sold offline and your website is more for educating customers about your services/product, then a more informational/educational approach is going to serve your requirements better. However, if you are the owner of a hybrid or purely online business you can use email marketing to directly drive sales through a web shop platform. You can promote special offers, date and seasonal sales, re-engagement campaigns and targeted emails based on historical purchases and interest shown. If your business is an ecommerce site, you’ll have potential customers filling baskets with products and leaving the site, a lost opportunity. Sending a “did you forget something” abandoned cart email after a would-be customer has left your site can, and has, been proven by businesses large and small to encourage the completion of sales.
With additional information available about customers through email marketing you can target emails based on them and their own personal events. Restaurants and cosmetics companies are well known for targeting emails around birthdays (Prezzo on your half birthday too) with offers, to get you in and spending money with them. These campaigns have very high open and click through rates as people want to know what they are being offered and how they can make use of it. Conversion rates are then tracked by completed purchases with coupons and directly at physical point of sale.
A lot of this doesn’t have to be manual either, you can build the campaigns and implement the strategies using automated tools to reduce the hours spent on these elements of email marketing campaigns and focus on content. Other uses of these tools and analysing these campaigns will fine tune the automation for maximum efficiency.
Email is almost instant, any time of the day, anywhere in the world, we are always connected (by smartphone, computer or smart home assistant) and so it is easier to connect with your potential customers more so than via your website (you make a change, they won’t know till the next time they visit) or social media (fiercely competitive and being driven more towards a PPC style for getting business messages to greater audience numbers or you get lost in the noise) making email more relevant and cost effective than ever. In a world where everybody wants your attention, building a loyal engaged audience is essential.
With the recent changes in data protection laws (aka, GDPR) using email marketing is back in the forefront of everybody’s mind because they have been asked if it’s okay for business’ to keep in contact with them? Business’ also have to detail what information is being kept, how it’s being used and for how long.
To summarise:
Why is email marketing important?
- Fast, flexible, cost effective and higher engagement than web and social on their own.
- 2.5 billion email users worldwide
- Facebook 2.23 billion active users,
- 335 million on Twitter
- It’s scalable, not just for small businesses, growing startups and big multinationals, it gives you what you want, when you need it.
- Different approaches for different kinds of businesses – inform, sell, engage
- Measurable
- Easily measurable KPIs and ROI and industry benchmarking
- Highly personalisable and hyper targetable
- Past purchases, name, location, age, colour schemes. If you can capture the data or test a variation, you can use it to personalize the email.
- Action focused – end result, get somebody on to your website to carry out the final action you want them to do.
How can it benefit my company?
- Keeping in touch with your audience/customer base (loyalty)
- Inform and educate (trust)
- Encourage sales and business growth (revenue)
- Stop potential customers going to the competition (win more business)
- Support other marketing efforts (PR, Web, Social)
- Easy to up and cross sell to existing customer base
- Strong lead generation and nurture capabilities
