(Updated 3-4-2022)
Email marketing isn’t dead. And it’s definitely not irrelevant. In fact, email marketing has risen in recent years to retake its spot among some of the top marketing tactics around.
These last couple of years have been crazy, to say the least. Businesses have had to scramble to find new ways to keep in touch with customers and prospects. Email marketing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience.
Even a little email engagement goes a long way. And if your brand’s email marketing campaigns aren’t working, it’s not necessarily because of the shortcomings of your strategy but the fact that your email probably doesn’t interest your readers.
The basic idea of email marketing is to connect your marketing channels and create a more fluid buyer’s journey through a more personalized means of communication.
As we enter near the 2nd quarter of the year, we need only breathe life into our strategies for a more fruitful outcome. That can require changes ranging from a total revamp in your email marketing campaign design to perhaps employing the help of business email copywriting services, or simply optimizing the content within your email for mobile devices.
In this article, you’ll not only learn why email marketing is still relevant, but why an effective email marketing strategy is useful now more than ever and a few simple ways you can significantly improve your email marketing strategy.
But first, let’s look at the numbers:
One thing is for certain: stats don’t lie. Email marketing stats from last year show that it is alive and well. According to Statista, Nearly 60% of the global population currently have an active internet connection – and just about everyone has an active email address. As this percentage rapidly grows, so does the significance of email marketing (and digital marketing overall).
Email is still recognized as one of the most profitable marketing strategies. Let’s look at why that is.
With email marketing, you are not spending as much money on design or media. And businesses are always looking for ways to get word out with minimal costs incurred, which is why email marketing is so ideal.
Table of Contents
Why use email marketing?
With email marketing, you run cost-effective campaigns with the greatest return on investment (ROIs). This is because through emails, you’re creating a more personalized experience for your customer, which in return deepens brand awareness with an increase in engagement and subsequently returning customers.
Consider email marketing an opportunity to connect your marketing channels. You’re able to gain access to valuable customer data without having to go the extra mile.
Studies show that marketers who used segmented emails saw a 760% increase in revenue. That’s a huge number.
With numbers like this, it’s hard to doubt the advantage email marketing has over other digital marketing strategies. So why is it that despite the evident technological proliferation in recent years brought about by a pandemic, many still believe that that email is “dead”?
The bottom line is, businesses should continue to pursue email marketing, now and well into the future.
Here are 3 reasons to keep working on effective email marketing strategies:
Email marketing is inexpensive
As marketing professionals, we are always tasked with doing more with less. To our benefit, email marketing is relatively budget-friendly.
In comparison to more expensive alternatives like print media, television or radio, email marketing is comparatively inexpensive.
If you don’t have the resources in house, you can outsource to an agency specializing in email marketing. This way, you save on the overhead cost of hiring a full-time email marketing specialist.
Investing in an experienced marketing agency comes with its own benefits, like an extra set of hands to help compartmentalize your audience into smaller groups based on their needs, expectations and demographics.
These costs are comparatively smaller, and the level of expertise you receive can benefit you significantly.
You can measure results easily
The only way to know if your campaign is getting the results you need is to analyze them. You have to be able to track the metrics and see how many of your customers are opening your emails, how many are clicking on your call-to-actions (CTAs) and of course how many are subscribing or unsubscribing to your emails.
Most important, however, you need to be able to track how many of your email subscribers are converting and turning into paying customers.
This is a vital step to take toward measuring the success of your campaign. This will help you identify weaknesses in your email marketing strategy which in turn will allow you to identify your strengths. Then the steps should be relatively straight-forward.
Fortunately, there are a number of amazing email marketing platforms that offer robust reporting to allow you to keep track of performance, make adjustments as needed, and rock your email marketing.
Email is easier to personalize
In the midst of a pandemic, businesses are finding more and more ways to grow their businesses on the digital plain.
Almost everything can be accessed through our portable devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones. However, it goes without saying that most emails are accessed through smartphones just for the sake of convenience.
According to Internet Trends, the average person uses their phones 150 times a day. 150 times!
This is definitely a statistic that we as marketers and business people should capitalize on. Human beings in general are mostly prone to choosing more convenient options for pretty much everything, why should checking emails be any different?
It is our responsibility as marketing professionals to make our customers’ experience more ‘fluid’. It can start with something as simple as greeting the recipient with their name or putting it in the subject line. Customers are more likely to open emails that are addressed directly to them, even if it is just out of curiosity.
You can automate emails to be sent out to segmented groups comprising your target audience who are divided based on certain characteristics.
Through personalization and segmentation, you can deliver email marketing campaigns that are personal and tailored to your customers. Customers genuinely appreciate when something is exclusive to them.
Mass communicating generalized emails to customers is a thing of the past, and it’s time organizations moved towards a more effort-based email marketing strategy.
How to use email marketing effectively
So far we’ve seen that people do in fact still make use of their emails. Not just because they can but because they must.
One can only come to the conclusion that the contents of the email itself need to change in order to see a substantial improvement in customer engagement. Mentioned below are some simple ways you can revise your strategies to get the best out of your email marketing campaigns.
Revisit your lists
Not all content is meant for all audiences. Content is rarely created for a general audience. There is always one particular group of consumers that companies should keep in mind when creating content.
Once you identify your target audience, you are able to understand them better. Segmentation helps bring about a more specific understanding of how companies can engage their audience, in this case through email marketing strategies.
Look at what the people on your lists have in common. You can segment your lists based on where your consumers are in their ‘consumer lifecycle’.
Demographics vary but so do every consumer’s needs and expectations. Creating email content tailored to those needs will undeniably give your engagement the boost it needs. This would also aid in either ‘clearing up’ your lists by helping get rid of subscribers who are simply not interested anymore or reconnecting your dormant subscribers.
Consider a ‘mobile-friendly’ design
According to the graph above, the majority of people use their smartphones to check emails. So, there is an obvious need to optimize for smartphones.
This improves the experience altogether. If your reader isn’t comfortable scrolling through your email, getting bombarded with texts, images and CTAs that aren’t optimized for smartphones, they are very unlikely to subscribe or even acknowledge any future emails. So to avoid that, keep smartphones in mind when coming up with a design for your email marketing campaigns.
Thanks to social media, most of us have been accustomed to scrolling, tapping and clicking almost like it is an involuntary action. With that said, it should be easy to incorporate that into the design.
Your email design should ideally flow as a ‘single column’ design with fonts and images in all the right places so readers don’t have to constantly pinch the screen to read what’s written. Once that is done, test it out before you send it out.
Conclusion
With all that said, email marketing is an ever-growing prospect in the corporate world. It will continue to expand and adapt with technology.
With it comes the potential to be explored by companies. So revisit your strategy and take a look at your stats and see where you can improve for better results!
If you get email marketing right, the sky is the limit when it comes to growing your business.
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- Why Email Marketing is Still Relevant (and More Effective Than Ever) - March 4, 2022
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It is Ian. This is one of the reasons why I still have a list. I am beginning to build an email list through Twitter too. Sending emails remains one of the best ways to help people and to stay in touch. This is a win-win scenario for bloggers and their readers.
Ryan
That’s a great idea, Ryan. I’ve considered testing out the Twitter newsletter feature for a while. Haven’t looked into it yet, but it’s very intriguing.
Creating a strong “email marketing” strategy assists you reach & connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales at an affordable cost.
Very true, Robert. Thanks for reading! Email is a powerful tactic for marketers. Perhaps even more now than some other tactics that were previously thought to be more effective.