When it comes to marketing trends, it feels like things change at the speed of a Tik-Tok video.
New marketing approaches gain traction, and new customer demands are voiced so frequently that it becomes hard to determine where best to spend your marketing time and, more importantly, your budget. Email marketing is the old hat in the modern digital marketing universe.
But don’t be so quick to write off the old tools just yet — let’s explore just how important email marketing continues to be to the growth and ongoing success of your business.
What Made Email Marketing So Successful?
Email marketing is more than just the corporate sales emails you dump into your trash folder.
When deployed strategically, email marketing is a powerful tool that will help your business achieve a multitude of goals.
There are 3 major reasons why email marketing has risen to the top of the mountain in terms of value to marketers.
Availability: More than 3 billion people use email or have access to email regularly, so it’s an incredibly target-rich audience.
Cost: Email marketing costs very little compared to the value it can return to you. You can send an incredible volume of emails that only costs time. Sure, you’ll incur some costs for data analytics, but nothing compared to what other marketing campaigns might cost.
Simple to Use: Email marketing doesn’t require a lot of extra applications and toolkits to be built well. And those it does require only get easier and more likely to be automated as your skills creating them increase with repetition.
If you’re not sure how to get started with email marketing, there are some excellent guides on getting up and running at your own pace.
Does Email Marketing Still Work?
Simply put: It sure does.
Email marketing has evolved over the many years it has been in existence. However, it not only remains effective, but its impact is also expected to grow over the next five years. Even as there have been changes in how email marketing campaigns are designed and the expectations of what their returns can be, the fact remains: Email marketing works. Still.
The strongest way to confirm that fact is to survey those who use email marketing to determine if they consider it a valuable tool. A recent survey shows that email marketing often outranks SEO, SEM, and pay-per-click marketing strategies to those who use them all.
If the people whose jobs depend on marketing success believe in email marketing, that’s proof enough.
Is Email Marketing Effective?
Just because we know email marketing works doesn’t mean it’s an effective strategy for you.
There are many marketing tactics that produce results, but it’s up to you to determine how you measure the success of each one.
Effective email marketing is all about return on investment.
For every dollar spent on email marketing, the business receives roughly $42 in return. As you’re in the growth stage trying to lock in a foothold in your industry or perhaps just continue to scale up accordingly, you can’t ask for much better than a 40x return on investment.
Keep email marketing in your toolkit for a while longer. It’s worth it.
A Key Benefit of Email Marketing
We already know email marketing works, and its return on investment has been proven over and over again — but what else can it do for you that is a value-add?
The tree of email marketing has many branches that can help you.
One of those branches is collecting feedback from surveys.
Keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer base is integral to understanding what steps in your customer journey planning you need to change. Feedback is how you learn what is working and what isn’t, and it’s also where you decide if newly tested ideas and products are gaining traction.
All email marketing is data-driven email marketing, so get used to using that data to help you.
Set up some satisfaction surveys to get additional feedback on email campaigns and product pages. This is one of the most useful ways to get an understanding of things that can affect your Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Your NPS is a number that helps you see how many of your customers are out there being brand ambassadors, pushing your products and services on their own. In contrast, it also reveals how many of your customers are active detractors — those who aren’t pleased and are letting other people know online.
Capture More Leads
There is no such thing as too many qualified leads.
Inbound marketing uses email campaigns to nurture leads via drip campaigns. This marketing approach involves sending frequent content over a period of time to prospects. Its path to conversion is a longer one, but it begins based on their interest. It gives your email marketing campaign an angle to hook them.
Since prospects have already engaged with some form of your content — like a social media advertisement or a landing page form — inbound email marketing is already a little warmer and is more likely to sway the reader into a sale.
Use inbound email marketing as a way to hone in on customer segments to discover what needs they have.
Reconnect with Inactive Subscribers
Even your most ardent supporters can become bored with you, your content, and your products.
It’s not an avoidable problem — it’s a chance for action.
If you start noticing your website traffic is down, take time to try re-engaging email subscribers who haven’t interacted with your content or website in a while with a targeted email.
Simply create a new distribution list of the inactive subscribers and craft an email that plays catch up for them. Let them in on company news and updates they may have missed. It’s a great opportunity to highlight new products and ventures and excite them about what they’ve missed.
Provide Additional Customer Value
Your email marketing doesn’t just have to be sales promotions and links to products. You can include topical and industry content as well as promote your blog or events calendar. Give customers more for their time.
This is where quality long-form content can really add value to your emails.
This content is often more industry-related or topical, and it isn’t a straight-line sales item. It provides customers and readers with more of what interests them in general, not just what they buy from you.
Don’t Be Scared of Permission-Based Email Marketing
The dreaded check box asking if you want to receive emails from this company isn’t the leads-killing monster you think it is.
This type of email marketing requires the recipient to have approved or opted-in to receive emails from you. Sure, having an opt-in feature to receive emails may initially have a negative effect on your overall email list numbers, but that’s nothing to worry about.
Consider the value permission-based emails deliver to you. If a prospect or customer opts in, you can safely assume they have a real interest in what you have to say.
Spend time creating quality emails that go beyond the marketing aim. You can include links to your own blog, details about upcoming events, or even related industry content not written by you. It’s all about adding value to your emails — this will help turn readers into brand ambassadors.
Use the data from these emails to really gain insight into what your supporters and customers enjoy and find value in. This can be a great way to discover what content helps add more converts and what doesn’t
Take Advantage of Timely Campaigns
Traditional marketing campaigns require a lot of planning — perhaps multiple teams are involved!
Email campaigns can be done quickly, without outside team help, so they can respond to current events. The ability to deliver timely content, whether it is a flash sale email drop or content relevant to a recent occurrence or news story, is a benefit.
Content agility is a potent tool in a market team’s kit.
Email Marketing Tips for Success
Email marketing works — it just doesn’t work by itself in a vacuum.
Blasting haphazard emails to your entire subscriber list with no rhyme or reason isn’t going to deliver quality results for you.
There are many do’s and don’t’s in email marketing, and we have provided some of the most useful so you can get right to the good stuff.
Make a checklist out of the following tips that you can review before you send any more emails. Think of this as a way to prime your next email campaign for max results.
Set Goals
Determine the goal of each email campaign before you even create it. Some emails are for building brand awareness, while others are for increasing engagement with your customers. Both goals are great, but each should have a different approach when you are creating the email content.
Before you even add any content to a marketing email, take time to consider what you want in return, then add the content and copy accordingly.
Attract Attention with Your Subject Line
You spend days creating a marketing email and a distribution list. Then you spend two seconds right before you hit send writing a subject line.
Don’t do that.
Subject lines are your first chance to capture a prospect’s attention. Don’t waste it!
There’s no exact science to creating engaging subject lines, but don’t be afraid to be funny or take a tone that’s different from your other content. Experiment to see what gets the highest open rate.
Keep It Short
Your email marketing content should be no longer than it needs to be. And while that may seem like a faux-Zen answer, it’s true.
Your email body should be to the point but not go straight into your pitch in the first sentence. It’s a huge turnoff.
Consider opening with a personal anecdote or something lighter in tone related to your industry — anything you believe will make a reader feel comfortable upon opening your email. That includes personalization like using the name of the customer several times as well as filling the email with an interesting variety of content.
Add These Email Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid to Your Checklist, Too
Don’t Overdo It
We all get way too many emails — don’t be part of the problem by sending multiple emails a day. This isn’t social media, and you don’t want to hit your subscribers’ inboxes multiple times a day, every day.
Limit the Photos and Videos
Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean your email content should be rife with them. Selectively use banner and thumbnail images.
Don’t Forget a Call to Action
Every email should have a major call to action in it. Regardless of the content of your email, there should always be a call to action driving readers to click. Something simple like downloading an asset or signing up for a webinar are great topics for a CTA — just be sure to write clever copy for them.