Since its inception in 1965 as a way for academics to correspond, email has exploded in popularity among users. Brands eventually implemented emails as a marketing strategy, making it popular thanks to its low costs, high return on investment, and ability to reach users virtually anywhere.
As new forms of digital marketing, such as influencer marketing, digital ads, and sponsored videos, continue to evolve and pop up, email marketing remains a cornerstone of many brands’ marketing efforts, with 81% of brands using email in their marketing strategies.
In this post, let’s unpack why email marketing is essential for your business to implement and tips for making a more effective email marketing campaign.
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
With 4.48 billion email users worldwide, it’s clear this form of marketing isn’t going away anytime soon. Some of the top reasons to implement email marketing into your marketing strategy include:
Staying Connected
With email, you can reach your customers and leads on a daily basis with ease. While it’s important to find a healthy balance between keeping your brand top of mind and bombarding people with marketing messages, there are plenty of tools and platforms to help you determine how often to connect with users.
This is a great way to retain customers and nurse leads, especially for brands that don’t have the bandwidth to hire customer retention staff — although for brands with this workforce, email is still a great tool for their employees to engage with customers and schedule follow-up meetings.
Offering Deals
One way brands drive traffic back to their websites is by offering deals via email marketing. This not only reminds customers of your offerings but may make them feel appreciated for supporting your brand. Bonus points if you can set up a rewards system where loyal customers receive additional coupons and deals based on how much they spend.
Measuring Results
The success of traditional marketing, such as direct mailers, printed ads, and television ads can be difficult to measure. With email marketing, you can measure your open rate, click rate, bounces, unsubscribes, conversion rate, and countless other valuable metrics. With this data, you can refine your email campaigns to be more engaging and actionable.
Customizing Messaging
In email marketing, there isn’t always a one-size-fits-all approach to reaching your target audience. That’s why drip marketing is such an essential tool for many brands. Essentially, drip email marketing is when you set up specific marketing emails to send when a user does a specific action.
For example, if a user puts an item in their cart but leaves it there without checking out, you might have your system trigger an email with a coupon code to send to that user in order to entice them to finish the purchase. You might also set up a drip campaign to automatically send a user a welcome email when they fill in a lead form, even sending a follow-up email several days later. Think of this type of email marketing as a Choose Your Own Adventure, where a user’s choices lead to specific marketing emails sent to them.
Tips for Better Email Marketing
Here are several tips for better email marketing results:
- Use A/B Testing: This is where you send half of your email list one variation of an email and the other half a different variation to measure which version is more successful. For instance, you could send half of your audience an email with an emoji in the subject line and the other half an email subject line without an emoji. Then, you use your results to determine if you should continue to use emojis in your subject lines.
- Understand Your Audience: Write your marketing emails with a specific audience in mind. Many email marketing systems enable you to segment your audience based on key demographics, helping you better tailor your messaging for better results.
- Always Include a Call to Action (CTA): Your CTA should be highly visible and straight to the point. Put your CTA on a button that links to your desired outcome. Say you want your customer to schedule a call, your CTA button could say “Schedule a Call Today!” and link to your contact page.
- Be Mobile Friendly: 81% of emails are opened on mobile devices, making mobile-friendly email marketing a must for your brand. Consider using an email marketing platform that has responsive email templates.
Need help kicking off your email marketing strategy? We can help! Get in touch by calling 920-214-4025 or filling out our contact form here.
