In the fast-moving online world, electronic mail has become a mainstay and is relevant when it comes to marketing products to consumers. According to data recently compiled by Magnetic, 44% of people across the world check their personal email one to three times a day.
It is easy to overlook email marketing when interacting with your customers. If your business is not actively building a database of customer emails, you may be setting your business up for digital failure. Proper email marketing delivers the right message at the right time to the right audience.
Before we get into why email marketing is important for your business, let’s understand what exactly email marketing is about. Email marketing is basically the use of email to promote products and/or services. Another definition I composed from experts’ descriptions of email marketing is that email marketing is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients.
Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing. It is essentially the same as direct mail except that instead of sending mails through the postal service, messages are sent electronically via email and are marketing driven by nature.
Against this background, let’s go on to discover the top 4 reasons that make email marketing necessary.
Stay Top of Mind
Email marketing allows your business to email the consumer whenever you want. While not every email needs to be a sales pitch, your contact with the customer should provide something of value to them. Whether this is an email asking them questions relating to your industry, or even an update on new products coming out in the near future, using email to stay connected to your customers keeps your brand on the forefront of their minds.
Generate Sales
Email marketing can be a channel to help you increase sales when implemented properly. Your business needs to use email marketing the right way; the smart way. To do this, I suggest pairing up your email marketing with a marketing automation platform, allowing you to put your email marketing initiatives on overdrive. Through lead scoring, progressive profiling, and well defined email campaigns, your business can know when a customer is primed for a purchase. Knowing where your customer is in the funnel through lead scoring will give you insights on when to be more aggressive with sales based messaging.
Being able to lead the customer further down the funnel on their own terms is a powerful tool. Allowing them to exhibit certain actions before hitting them up for a sale will not only make your customer happy, but your bottom line as well.
Data Driven and Measurable.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t is key to the success and improvement of a marketing campaign. With email marketing, you get insights into your initiatives; insight into a metric like open rates, which reports the percentage of users who were sent an email and actually opened the email sent to them. One key factor in improving open rates is having an intriguing subject line. Whether it is having personalization in the subject line, or text that makes it impossible for them not to open, having an eye-catching subject line helps to create higher open rates.
Another metric your business can track is Click Through Rate (CTR), which is essentially what percentage of people clicked on a link within the email. If you are really doing email marketing right, you should split test different Calls-to-Actions (CTAs) within your email copy (and even subject lines). Knowing if one particular phrasing works better than others in generating click throughs can provide exponential results to your campaign.
Having access to these and other metrics help your business keep tabs on what is or is not working in your email marketing initiatives.
Grow Your Audience
Modern publishers are looking to drive traffic back to their websites so subscribers can consume new content, make purchases, or continue their subscription through things like email courses. Emails provide a direct path for them to stay digitally engaged.
Conclusion/Summary notes
In a quick recap, Email Marketing enables you to remain top-of-mind, generate sales, measure your engagements and grow your audience. If you are looking to engage your clients in an unconventional way that produces results in real time, you would like to explore Email Marketing. Find out how much more it can do for your business and share your experience with many more people who are yet to try this underutilized messaging channel.
Joojo Thompson
Account Manager, Digital Innovations
Global Media Alliance
LinkedIn: Joojo Thompson
