The Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a valuable and direct communication channel that allows marketers to deliver engaging content to past, current and prospective customers. Well-designed drip campaigns and personalized email newsletters provide an exceptional return on investment, nurture customer relationships and keep brands top-of-mind.
What’s email marketing doing for your organization? Here’s what it should look like …
First, What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing delivers personalized marketing information to the right user at the right time. These emails are designed to build new relationships, reestablish previous connections and position the brand as a trustworthy resource.
Getting the Word Out
There are dozens of email marketing management tools available. Most require a monthly subscription, with pricing based on the number of subscribers and other nice-to-have features, such as audience segmentation.
These are some popular email marketing solutions:
Check it out: Here, we compared two of our favorite email marketing platforms, and for the record, we use HubSpot for our (dare we say, popular) weekly Digital Digest email.
No matter which platform your company chooses, the opportunity to grow your business using compelling campaigns is endless.
What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?
Email marketing allows brands to leverage first-party data to reach the right audience. This is perhaps made even more important what with third-party cookies and changing privacy laws making paid media more challenging.
The Inbox Is a Safe Space
Unlike social media’s chaotic, scroll-happy world, email is a quiet, intimate and direct form of communication. While social media is a great place to deliver content, it’s dominated by ads, constantly changing algorithms and less-than-savory posts and opinions. It’s also fleeting, making it difficult for users to circle back to something they found interesting but couldn’t get to immediately.
The Truth: Subscribers Want to Hear from You
No matter how well-targeted that social media ad is, the customer didn’t ask for the information or tell the advertiser that they wanted to hear from them. That’s where email marketing has an advantage – your customer signed up to receive your messaging. Further, you’ll potentially reach more and different people on a slice of the 4.6 billion daily email users forecasted by 2025.
Email is where your customer wants to hear from you. Roughly 55% of consumers say that email marketing is their preferred means of receiving marketing messages.
Email Is Measurable
To determine a campaign’s success, marketers need to be able to track results. It’s extremely difficult to measure TV ads, billboards or direct mail pieces; it’s very easy to see the performance of an email marketing campaign. Many email services offer unique insights into the open rate, clickthrough, bounce rate and conversions that allow campaigns to be tested, measured, improved and re-tested.
An Excellent Return on Investment
Email is highly cost-effective. The most recent data puts the ROI of email marketing at $36 in revenue for every $1 spent. Maintaining a consistent email marketing strategy can also improve operations in others, including regulating inventory to maintain a healthy bottom line.
Make It Personal
Email allows marketers to deliver highly personalized, relevant messages to their customers. While other marketing mediums are typically more of a broadcast, email keeps things personal.
With email, you can:
- Greet customers by name.
- Serve them a photo of a product they recently browsed, purchased or placed in their shopping cart.
- Present an offer based on their previous behavior as a customer.
If you have the data handy, you can also segment users based on expressed interests, when they became subscribers and where they live. Personalized content takes a little more effort upfront, but can result in higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and increased revenue.
It’s easy to see why email is such a popular marketing platform. When it comes to keeping costs low and measuring success, email is a very powerful way to market to customers.
The Most Effective Types of Email Marketing
Different email formats and strategies can improve email marketing’s effectiveness in the near and long-term. Oneupweb’s team can help you concept and design different types of emails to see what works and what needs a tweak.
Email marketing can take many forms. Here are a few formats/campaigns to consider …
1. Informative Email Formats
The Newsletter – Newsletters are one of the most commonly used forms of email campaigns. Email newsletters are an opportunity to regularly update your audience about upcoming events, new products, special promotions or anything else that’s happening with your company.
Dedicated Email – Like an email newsletter, a dedicated email takes just one topic and informs a brand’s audience with a single-topic send. Events, products, announcements and other single informative updates are well-spotlighted in a dedicated email send, along with a clear, specific call-to-action.
2. Sales-focused Emails
The Deal/Offer Email – If you’re having a sale, let your customers know! Offering your reader something of value encourages interactions with your products, services or website. These types of emails are focused on conversions. Use deal or promotional emails to make your subscribers feel special; consider sending email-only deals or launching sales with emails first (prior to other channels) to make being on your list more valuable.
Abandon Browse/Cart Emails – Your customer shopped, selected your product or service and … left. To encourage the completion of that conversion, give your customer a helpful nudge with an email. Whether it’s a customized email with an image of the item left in their shopping cart or a special offer to entice them to finish their shopping, “abandon browse” emails are incredibly successful campaigns with a 63% higher open rate than traditional emails.
3. Informative Email Formats
Welcome Emails – As users become new customers or subscribe to your email list, sending them a welcome email is an easy way to set an expectation. After receiving a welcome email, your customer knows what your emails will look like and hopefully will recognize your brand look and feel. That first email encourages clicks, averaging between an open rate between 50-86%, depending on the industry. Welcome emails are easy to automate and are often very successful in establishing your brand in your reader’s inbox.
Nurture Campaigns – As a brand gathers customer behavior data over time, that data can be used to deliver timed and targeted messaging that presents products and offers that are curated to the customer. While this format is a time-consuming tactic, it can be highly rewarding for growing your relationship with your customer over time.
Drip Campaigns – Similar to a nurture campaign, a drip campaign is a series of emails. Unlike a nurture campaign, a drip campaign uses only time-based sends to deliver messaging to prospective customers. Drip campaigns continually keep your brand at your customer’s top of mind.
Re-engagement Campaigns – When a subscriber stops showing interest – has a decreased clickthrough rate or not opening emails altogether – it might be time to include them in a re-engagement campaign. Based on customer behavior, re-engagement emails can highlight products, special offers or messaging to get disengaged customers excited about your brand again.
Anniversary Campaigns – As we discussed earlier, personalization in email campaigns is compelling. That’s why anniversary emails are a great tactic to grow the connection between your brand and your customer. Sending emails around your subscribers’ birthdays or their anniversary of joining your email list shows them that you know them.
Video Emails – Have a great video to share? Send it to your email list! Video content is a great way to inform, compel and engage your customers. A survey found that video emails led to an 86% increase in leads compared to text and image emails. Videos are a quick and easy medium for viewers to consume your product or service. Just be sure to use video in emails the right way.
Why Email Marketing Works
It works because mail marketing checks all the boxes. Brands can mix, match and test different tactics to achieve any number of short-and-long term marketing goals.
Email campaigns can slowly grow your company’s customer base, or they can turn around a conversion more quickly. It takes time to create email flows, but with consistent testing, timing and tweaking, you’ll see excellent results.
Ready to Hit Send? Email Us First!
With a high ROI and easily accessible and accurate metrics, email marketing is exactly what you need to attract new customers and keep existing clients coming back.
From designing eye-catching email templates to A/B testing your next campaign, Oneupweb’s integrated team of designers, writers and developers can make your emails irresistibly clickable. Get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 today to get started. (Tomorrow is totally cool, too.)
