Email marketing is a powerful component of your marketing strategy that can drive massive increases in sales. Its extensive reach has helped it become so successful, offering access to 4 billion daily email users, and is projected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025. That is an amazing reach that allows you a direct window to your customer’s attention, with very little cost burden to you. Let's look at what you should know when starting your email marketing campaign.
Email marketing is a low-cost way to directly reach your target audience, with chances of a higher conversion rate than any other marketing channel. Sixty-six percent of online consumers made a purchase due to a marketing email, compared to only 20% who purchased because of a Facebook ad. However, optimal success depends heavily on cultivating a high-quality email list. The effort put into building your customer email list can pay off much more substantially than social media ads, generating $42 for every $1 spent for an astonishing 4200% ROI!
One of email marketing's greatest strengths lies in its conversational nature and level of personalization to each customer in your target audience. It can help you establish, maintain, and deepen your customer relationships. Email marketing allows you to segment your audience by demographic and tailor your email messages by where they are in the buyer's journey or sales funnel. Ninety percent of customers find personalized messages appealing, and 72% of customers respond only to messages that target their interests. Personalizing your messages is an effective tool for nurturing your leads and retaining customers because it allows you to provide value and show care without directly selling to them. Developing your consumer relationships increases the chances that you’ll turn people into customers.
Email marketing gives a unique insight into customer response with easily tracked metrics, like open rate, bounces, click rate, conversation rates, subscriptions, and unsubscribe requests. These critical data points let you recognize what is and is not working at a glance so that you can quickly make adjustments to your campaigns. Using these metrics, combined with A/B testing, allows marketers to experiment with and improve upon your email campaign as it grows and reaches more customers. A/B testing allows you to:
Another significant advantage of email marketing is that you have complete ownership of your customer database or email list. With social media followers, your ability to interact with them is at the discretion of the platform. You may have carefully and steadily built a following of thousands on various social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, but those followers aren't actually yours. Instead, they belong to those companies.
User guidelines on each platform can change seemingly arbitrarily at any point in time, and you have no say in it. Nor do you have control over how it impacts your ability to market effectively. Email imposes no limits to your agency and authority over your customer contact lists. Having total control over your subscriber list is a smart business tactic.
Email automation lets you optimize your reach and effectiveness by tailoring the right message to your target customers without the manual effort to create emails. It tracks analytics automatically, simplifying the process of evaluating the success of your emails. Using automation software, you can combine your website analytics with your email marketing platform to get more granular targeting and personalization, such as preferences, behaviors, and prior sales. For instance, the wedding site Paper Style realized sending the same email to all their visitors wasn't effective until they segmented their customer list based on whether they were on the site for their wedding or that of a friend or family member. They then personalized the follow-up emails to be relevant to either a bride or participant.
When you compare email marketing with other strategies, it is clear why businesses use it now more than ever. It delivers a high ROI with minimal investment. The more effort you put into building a high-quality customer database, the greater your success. You can measure your emails' impact almost immediately and easily make incremental changes necessary to increase their impact.
You can use technology to monitor the efficacy, personalize the emails, and send them out on a schedule, all with little to no manual intervention. It even allows you to personalize your emails based on a variety of factors. When you are planning your marketing strategy, email marketing is a crucial tool in your marketing efforts.