With all of the digital marketing tactics at your disposal, you may be wondering, what is the importance of email marketing?
Some are ignorant enough to believe that “email marketing is dead”. Is there any future in email marketing for small businesses?
Short answer: YES!
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your audience. In fact, the importance of email marketing is so great that we recommend most businesses develop a plan for implementation by 2020. Below, we’ll discuss the top reasons your brand needs to develop an email marketing strategy and start implementing campaigns in the near future.
Email marketing is cost effective
It’s time to talk money. No matter what new tactics or strategies arise in the next few years in the digital marketing world, one thing will always remain the same. Companies need to find tactics that allow them to maximize their marketing budget while still achieving their overall goals. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies that you can use to reach and engage your target audience.
While traditional marketing tactics like TV or print ads and direct mail can become quite costly with all the fees involved, there are very little costs involved with email marketing. Depending on your in-house resources, you may need to hire help to create email content, and most businesses also pay to use email marketing automation services, which make effective email marketing less time-intensive. However, these costs are fairly minimal when compared to buying add space or paying to print and mail marketing materials to leads and customers.
In addition to its relatively low cost, email marketing also provides a high return on investment (ROI). According to Campaign Monitor, every $1 spent on email marketing typically generates about $38 in ROI. This statistic indicates just how cost-effective email marketing can be for businesses, especially smaller businesses that are working with smaller budgets.
Overall, email marketing is the perfect digital marketing tactic for businesses working with small budgets because its relatively inexpensive to start and maintain email marketing campaigns. Similarly, email marketing tactics like segmentation and triggered campaigns help you get the most for your money, allowing you to grow your business without pouring all of your revenue back into digital marketing. The cost-benefit is a major reason why your business should leverage the importance of email marketing.
You can reach more mobile customers with email marketing
Mobile marketing cannot be ignored when it comes to the importance of email marketing. The number of consumers using mobile devices on a daily basis continues to climb. With that in mind, businesses need to find a way to better interact with mobile consumers if they want to remain competitive in the digital marketplace. With two-thirds of emails being read on smartphones or tablets, email marketing proves to be an effective tactic for helping businesses reach and engage those consumers that are using their mobile device.
Think about it this way, how many times a day do you check your phone for emails or other messages? Every time a consumer checks their phone presents a new opportunity for a brand to reach out and engage that consumer. While some marketing tactics are just not built for mobile engagement, email marketing offers businesses many opportunities to get their message in front of mobile users.
In order to ensure that your email messages are effective for mobile consumers, your business will need to create email content with a responsive design. Provide subscribers with the option to view html emails or emails with visuals. Any images or videos that you do use within your content should be small, so that they can quickly and easily load and be viewed on a mobile device. When it comes to written content, make sure that you keep your mobile email content short and sweet, ensuring that all email links can be clicked on and lead to pages that are also mobile friendly.
You can automate the email marketing process
Email automation will continue to be a major topic in the discussion of the importance of email marketing. There are many digital marketing processes that just can’t be automated. (At least, not successfully.) However, email marketing lends well to automation. In fact, automating your emails helps improve the relevancy and timeliness of your campaigns.
In addition to improving the relevancy and timeliness of your campaigns, marketing automation can also help you save time and money in the process. With automation, you don’t have to worry about waiting around for the perfect moment to send a message, your automation system takes care of that for you. This allows you to focus on your core business, while leaving the rest of your team free to take on other important tasks.
Email marketing makes it easy to personalize content for better response rates
The further we get into the digital age, the more personalization has become important to consumers. Rather than just being served the ads for the same products as everyone else, digital consumers want marketing to be more personal and tailored to their needs and preferences. In fact, in a study conducted by Davidson & Company, they found out that learning what your audience wants is the key factor to making it big in email marketing. Using triggers, mobile integration, and data collected from other platforms, businesses can help improve the relevancy of their campaign content.
Email marketing makes it easy to personalize the messaging and content you deliver to subscribers. Using data that you’ve collected from your subscribers and leads, you can work to provide more personalized and relevant content that your readers are more likely to enjoy and act on. This can improve both your open and clickthrough rates as well as your overall conversion rates. In fact, something as simple as using the consumer’s name can make all the difference when communicating with customers and leads.
Segmentation is one effective tactic that you can use to increase the personalization of your messaging and content. This is the process of dividing your subscriber list into different groups based on common characteristics. For instance, you might put those living in a common geographic area with a similar climate into one group, while separating those who live on the other side of the country. You can also separate your lists based on the subscribers’ interests or demographic information.
By segmenting your lists, you are making sure that your subscribers are getting the types of content and offers that appeal to them most. This increases relevancy, which can lower unsubscribe rates and improve conversion rates. This type of personalization is often not possible with other types of marketing like direct mail. Which is why it is highly relevant to the importance of email marketing.
You can make email marketing interactive
As the importance of email marketing continues to rise, so will email interactiveness. Email marketing offers businesses the opportunity to provide interactive content straight to consumer inboxes, for a much lower cost than some other marketing tactics.
Rather than sending the subscriber to a landing page right away, you can provide different types of interactive content within the body of the email. From embedded video content to email carousels, interactive content keeps consumers interested and engaged before they head back to your site to take action.
By creating more interactive email content, your business will not only be able to better capture the attention of your audience, but you’ll also be able to integrate other channels into your digital marketing. For instance, if you share a video in an email, you might use social media share buttons to encourage others to share the video content on their own social media pages. The more integrated you can make your marketing campaigns, the more touch points you’ll create within your target market.
You can quickly and easily measure your email marketing efforts
The only way to know if a digital marketing tactic is working for your business is to measure the results. Yet another reason why your business needs email marketing by 2020 is because email marketing metrics are easy to track and measure over time. That way, there is no guesswork or question about whether the tactics you are using are working or not.
With email marketing analytics, your business can see which users opened your emails, if they clicked any links, or if they took the desired action (or converted). You can also see how many people unsubscribed from your list after opening the email. This information becomes valuable as you work to analyze your digital marketing strategy and make adjustments for improvement.
With the right email software, you can even perform A/B tests, which allows you to see which specific elements of your email messages provide the best results. For instance, you might test different subject lines to see which leads to higher open rates or test different offers to see which offer influences the most conversions.
Now that you know the importance of email marketing and how your business can use it to grow, it’s time to start making a plan for implementation. If you want to have successful email marketing campaigns set up by 2020, you’ll need to start considering how you will grow your email list, what types of content you will offer your subscribers, and how you can influence more conversions over time.
If you need help with email marketing for your business, please visit our website! We specialize in email marketing as well as many other marketing techniques; we’d love to help you!