With the breakthrough of marketing mediums such as social media, SEO and mobile marketing, you’d be forgiven in thinking that email marketing could be on its way out. Email marketing is however alive and well, and remains one of the most profitable means of marketing. Here are some reason why:
Cost effective
In comparison to other channels, email marketing costs little to implement and manage and even better, its returns are proven to be high. There are no expensive print or postage charges to take into account and no high fees for exposure on magazine, radio or television. In fact research has shown that email marketing can be up to 20 times more cost-effective than other methods. This provides marketers on a budget with a golden opportunity to reach more potential customers.
The only cost inccurred will be investing in some specialist software to distribute your campaigns. Although there are a variety to choose from, we think MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are two of the best available. Also, it’s worth bearing in mind if you are a small business or just starting out with emailing marketing that both these services have a free basic service from which you can easily create eye-catching email campaigns without having to spend a penny.
Personalised
Email marketing gives you the opportunity to personalise your marketing message in a way that other methods cannot. Whilst personalised print campaigns bring additional costs and time factors into the mix, email allows you to create personalised messages for audiences at no additional cost.
As well as offering the option to personalise the email with the recipient’s name, many email marketing programmes offer the ability to incorporate information such as purchase history and location. Of course now that GDPR has become law, it’s crucial to make sure you have permission to contact everyone on your list and store the information you have collected about them. However, although this means you will have probably lost contacts from your list since the new regulations came into effect, it does mean that your new streamlined list should be a more valuable commodity and targeted better to people who have expressed an interest in engaging you and hopefully buying your product or service.
Targeted
Software like Mailchimp includes ready made segments but you can take this process further by creating your own segments which will update automatically. So for example, if you want to send targeted campaigns to people who have previously taken advantage of a special offer or who have joined the mailing list within the past month, you can easily do so. You can also use to tags to organise your contacts into different categories.
One criticism of modern email marketing is that emails can get lost in the daily deluge of sales emails that most people receive and often ignore. However, emails are only dismissed as irrelevant if they are in fact irrelevant! Segmentation is a clever but easy way to use your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of the customers who are most likely to respond to it, fostering a higher conversion rate.
Measurable
Following each email campaign, metrics and reports are provided which show information such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates and conversion rates. This information can be used to understand what is working and what needs to be improved.
Using A/B testing for different headlines, story positions graphics and links gives you the opportunity to formulate the best possible email campaign based on what works best to get the highest returns. The basic version of Mailchimp allows you to send up to 3 campaigns to compare for effectiveness with A/B testing, while the paid-for Mailchimp Pro allows you to test up to 8 campaigns with multivariate testing.
Shareable
Email marketing is one of the few marketing forms that is easily shareable. It’s always a good idea to include your social media buttons at the bottom of your email campaigns so that subscribers can act as brand advocates by sharing deals, offers and news with their contacts with just one click.
If you need any more persuasion about how powerful email marketing can be, consider social media icon Guy Kawasaki’s declaration that “If I had a choice of a follower or an email address, I’d take the email address.”
Your full service digital marketing team
To have a look at some of our past email marketing work click here. For marketing advice specific to your business, get in touch and speak with a marketing specialist on 01858 374 170 or email info@idealmarketingcompany.com
