Nowadays, a lot of marketers prefer social media, influencers, and paid ads to reach their potential customers. However important that is, one should not overlook the old method of bringing in new customers in an effective manner. We are talking about ‘Email Marketing’. There is a reason why email marketing still works.
Let’s look at some statistics:
- There are 3.9 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.3 billion by 2023
- Marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue
- 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months
- 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions
There is so much data to support that if email marketing is done right, it would do wonders for your business.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a strategy used effectively in digital marketing to send a message, typically to a group of people, using email. Essentially, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations.
Why Email Marketing Matters?
In the age of social media and viral marketing, email marketing is still a relevant and effective way to get quality and verified leads. We have outlined a few of the many reasons why it should be a priority in your digital marketing strategy.
1. Large Reach
As stated above, almost half of the entire planet uses email right now. Looking at this number, it makes a lot of sense to use email for your marketing as the potential is huge. It would be safe to say that almost everyone in your audience uses email as an effective way of communication, be it personal or business. In today’s hyper-digital environment, anybody who’s online has an active email account. Due to the ongoing struggle over data breaches and privacy, a lot of people are exiting some social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.
There are 3x more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter combined.
2. Reach Customers in Real-time
According to Litmus, 46% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This clearly means that you can reach half of your audience in real-time as soon as they open their email. Keep these figures into account when planning any marketing strategy. Also, it’s highly imperative that all your campaigns should be tested for mobile responsiveness. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails but all other types of media and information. And if your emails are well-designed and personalized keeping the user in mind, will increase the open rate and conversions.
3. Economic and Cost-effective
It’s easy, effective, and inexpensive. You can reach a large number of users at a rate of nearly nothing per message. It is a far better option than traditional marketing for small-business owners where the budget tends to be on the lower side.
Email marketing services such as SendGrid costs $0.0006 cents per message at their Platinum Marketing Email level. Mail Chimp allows you to send up to 12,000 emails a month for free. They also do offer larger monthly plans for growing businesses with up to 600,000 subscribers and high volume sender plans for anything over that.
It’s a no-brainer that email marketing gives you a better ROI than many other online marketing channels.
4. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is that intangible quality, which drives consumers to choose your products over competitors. The better they know you, the more likely they’ll buy from you.
While planning to raise brand awareness, a lot of marketers jump to take the help of social media platforms. And email marketing is thought of as a way to increase sales only. However, that’s not the case. Building strong relationships with an email list is one of the best marketing strategies for strengthening the position of a company. If you have a customer or prospect’s email address, it means they showed a level of interest in your business and would like to engage with the brand. Email marketing gives you the ability to increase that interest level that brand awareness, by staying top of mind.
5. People Engage with Emails
People are checking their emails all the time since a lot of people own a smartphone. You will find people looking into their phones in line at Starbucks, during their office commute, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, at the grocery store, everywhere.
91% of people use smartphones to access their email. This compared to 75% of the people who use their smartphones for social networking. You can keep them engaged with your brands by providing them with discounts, special offers, introduce new products, and more. If you are not using email as part of your internet marketing strategy, you are missing out on a big chunk of potential customers!
6. Targeted Messaging
Some of you might have heard of the term ‘Lead Nurturing’ when reading about email marketing. It means to craft the email message based on the buyer’s persona. Your potential customers are at a different stage of the buying cycle, some at consideration, some at research, and some at the buying stage. Now you need to ensure you create the right content targeting the consumers on the basis of the stage they are at in their buying cycle.
The easy way to do this is by creating separate lists segmenting these consumers. All of the email marketing tools give you the option to create such lists. This helps you send the right message to the right person and that would eventually lead to better conversion.
By now you would have got a fair idea about the importance of email marketing to grow your business. Once you have decided to use email marketing, the next step is to come up with the relevant content. Offering the right and personalized content to your subscribers is a key element of marketing strategy. If not sure how to do that, you can read our blog about content marketing.