Email marketing is a powerful tool, and it's highly effective as a digital marketing strategy. Not only is it extremely cost-effective, but it's also customizable and offers measurable results as well to increase brand awareness. You can own your contact list and reach out to targeted consumers who may have a real, vested interest in what you have to offer.
To fully recognize and use the power of email marketing, though, you need to understand all the largest aspects of it. Only then can you make the most of what it brings to the table and create marketing emails that catch audience attention and create conversions. It doesn't matter how many emails you send out if they aren't being read and a reasonable percentage of recipients don't click links and buy products or services from you.
Here's what to know about email marketing's power and the ways you can use that to your business' advantage.
Among the most powerful aspects of email marketing is establishing a direct line of communication with your audience. You have a truly direct channel for communication, and you don't have to worry about whether what you want to say shows up in a newsfeed or have to play the algorithm game. Instead, you know that it's absolutely going directly to the inboxes of the people you want to reach.
In fact, nearly 90% of marketers choose to use email as their primary lead-generation channel.
Because you're trying to reach a particular segment of an audience, you can tailor messages to specific reader groups based on interests or demographics. Instead of a broad approach, focus on targeted messaging to reach the right people. While a broad approach can and does work in some cases, it's certainly not as valuable as a targeted and directed message experience.
Breaking your audience out into segments is the way to go when using email marketing, because it helps determine which emails are specifically going to which parts of your audience. While companies have specific target markets, they also typically have several different types of products or services. Each one of those might not be right for every segment, so the breakdown and segmenting helps create specificity and get the right message to the right people more easily.
The automation that comes with email marketing is a great way to make things easier for you and your customers. You can set up everything from simple "abandon cart" emails to complex nurturing journeys, along with a number of other experiences. With 81% of companies using email as part of their marketing strategy, it's easy to see that these companies are taking the value of it seriously and exploring how automation can make it even more impactful over time.
When you automate your marketing efforts the right way, the receiver of your emails doesn't feel like they're getting messages from a bot. Instead, they feel like they're getting the help and support they're looking for in every leg of their journey, and that helps foster a good relationship with them both now and for the future.
The personalized communication that comes to readers through the automated messages and other emails from your business allows for the building of deeper connections with those readers. Depending on what you're selling and the way readers will use your product or service, the idea of building long-term relationships with your company and its people may be very important. If you can continue to foster that, you can have customers who are loyal for life.
Approximately 4.5 billion people around the world use email, and that number will likely continue to grow over time. While all those people certainly won't fall into your target market, it's a safe assumption that many of the people who do fit your target demographic have email. The goal is to get your company's information in front of them and make sure they recognize the value you're offering, so you can build a relationship with them that makes them want to buy.
Many forms of traditional advertising are very expensive, and email marketing makes it easier for you to reach a targeted audience at a lower cost compared to those traditional options. You can also expect a higher ROI, where you can see an average $36 return for every $1 spent. Some studies even put that figure closer to $42 per $1 spent. That's significantly lower in cost and higher in value than the vast majority of other marketing options, making email marketing one of the best ways to help your company reach customers.
Since some types of marketing can be very expensive, and you may already be using some of those types, there's no reason not to consider other options that cost less and can provide a strong ROI for your company to enjoy. The more cost-effective options you find that provide you with good value the more easily you can increase the strength of your business without any significant additional financial outlay.
Social media is extremely popular for engaging with your target audience, but you can achieve higher open and click-through rates when you use email marketing. By specifically targeting potential customers with the right pain points and solutions you can get them to engage with your business and explore all the options you have to offer.
From a potential customer who hasn't heard of you before to a returning customer who's coming around again, you want to make sure you're giving everyone what they're looking for no matter where they are in their journey. Doing that can mean impressive levels of engagement that expand your customer base and provide new insight for additional marketing campaigns in the future.
Being able to measure your results is a vital part of determining whether your email marketing campaign is successful. When you market through email you can track performance and make important strategic adjustments. The goal is for every email to perform as well as possible, but it's also natural that some will do better than others.
Measurable results help you see where an email may have missed the mark and adjust to avoid the issue going forward. With 60% of consumers wanting contact with brands through email it's easier than ever to get email addresses from interested consumers and focus on converting them through results you can measure over time.
You don't need to rely on external platforms and their ever-changing algorithms when you have an audience list for email marketing. You'll have complete ownership of that list, unlike followers on social media. With email lists, you won't suddenly find that half of your followers aren't seeing your new posts, or you're too far down in the typical newsfeed of customers you're trying to target.
Avoiding algorithmic problems doesn't have to be complicated, because the key is to keep your audience list and marketing efforts away from anything that uses algorithms to determine whether your information appears to specific demographic groups. That's not to say that you shouldn't use social media and other kinds of online marketing, but only that you don't want to make those options your main way to reach your intended audience.
With email marketing you can nurture leads and convert subscribers into customers, so they can buy from you and become loyal customers for years. You want the people who receive your email to see the value in it, and to move from reading about your product or service to purchasing from you. It doesn't matter what you're selling, either. There are ways to use email marketing for every kind of business imaginable.
The most notable thing about the power of email marketing is that it provides a large mix of different kinds of opportunities, all in one place. From strong ownership of your audience list to the measurable results of your campaigns you can feel confident that your marketing efforts will be rewarded. It's a cost-effective and highly efficient way to move from developing leads to turning readers into customers, and it can help take your business to the next level.
Even if you have other ways of marketing your business and the product or service it provides, taking the time to bring in some email marketing is well worth any effort you'll put into it. You can automate a lot of the process, as well, so you won't feel like all your time is being taken up producing newsletters and answering emailed questions.
Whether you hire someone to create and send campaigns or make it part of your personal job, you can see significant value when you market through email to the right people.