Email marketing has been around since the beginning of the digital age. The first email was sent out before personal computers were even available.
Adapted from direct, snail mail marketing, people often regard email as dated when it comes to digital marketing. Year after year, people have debated whether or not email marketing is dead. Roughly a decade after the first marketing email was sent, people claimed that it wouldn’t be able to keep up with new forms of technology...the technology they were referring to at the time was a fax machine. Email marketing won that battle and continued on to beat text message marketing and almost every other form of marketing that it’s gone head-to-head with.
If everyone has been trying to write off email marketing for decades, why is email marketing crucial for your business’s success?
It’s as simple as that.
Above all other forms of digital marketing channels, including texts, mobile, online ads, and even social media, consumers want to receive your brand’s message, product updates & sales, company news, and other relevant information via email.
While it’s not the glitz and glamour that social media offers, it’s because customers want your emails that the interaction rate is 19.84%for email opens and 11.28% for click-through-rate whereas, for social media, the engagement rate among customers is only at 0.58%.
Oh, and did we mention that customers LOVE checking their emails? More than half of email users will check their email before any other online service, and they’ll continue to check it up to 20 times a day thanks to mobile email apps. Speaking of mobile…
As the era of smartphones took off, email marketing once again found a way to dominate. Millennials are responsible for a majority of email interactions, 90% of which are accessed via mobile phones. With how often everyone is on their phone, it’s no wonder email gets checked so frequently.
Not to mention, email marketing on smartphones is the only way for your brand’s message to show up as a notification without the customer having to download your company’s app.
Think of the advantage for a restaurant that is running an email campaign that appears on their customer’s lock screen just an hour before dinner…deciding what to have for dinner just got a lot easier.
In the end, what really matters is the bottom line.
Businesses should continue to use email marketing as it consistently receives the highest ROI compared to any other channel of digital marketing. On average, email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent which is 4 times more than any other digital channel.
This is because 59% of people use emails to influence their purchasing decisions and roughly 50% purchase something once a month from an email they have received. Email marketing is highly effective for your business.
Besides the fact that email marketing has the highest return on investment, customers are asking you to communicate with them through email and will look out for your message more in their inbox than other channels.
The question shouldn’t be, “why email marketing?” but, “how do I develop an email marketing strategy?”
People are becoming frustrated with brands presenting general messaging across digital platforms. Email is one of the few channels that can personalize messaging to customers. From the subject and preview line to the text within the email, it’s easy to include the customer’s name and other simple information to show the email was meant specifically for them.
However, personalization goes beyond just the simple name drops. Being able to send relevant emails based on past purchases, web pages interactions, or engagement (or lack thereof) with the brand are other ways to personalize messages.
The key to deeper personalized marketing is segmentation. Email segmentation allows you to break up your email list into relevant data beyond just age, gender, and location.
If you have a 50 year-old female and a 21 year-old male in your email list, you may not initially group them together. However, if you have data saying they both purchased a posture brace, they could be segmented into similar purchase history where you can suggest a new product that has to do with back health.
Keep it simple stupid.
We’re not calling you stupid. We’re just saying that email automation is a simple process to set up, and it personally engages with your customers. For example,,when a customer purchases something on your website, transactional automations (such as receipts, confirmations, or tracking emails) are personalized to the customer and often result in 80% open rates.
Other forms of automation emails that perform extremely well are welcome emails, birthday and anniversary emails, and unsubscribed emails.
To see these email strategies at work, join our email list and continue to build your knowledge on email marketing!
In the end, the quickest way to the best email marketing strategy is to hire an email marketing agency. Email marketing is crucial to any company’s marketing efforts, but it takes time and effort to build a successful campaign.
While you can certainly find success with our tips on personalization, segmentation, and automation, having professionally created email marketing can take your brand to the next level. For more information on email marketing services, contact Team Vibe!
