What is email marketing? Any email sent out to enhance the relationship between your business and your past or current clients, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business is email marketing.
When executed well, email marketing campaigns are a robust and cost-effective way to boost your business performance. It will increase your profits and grow your base of loyal regular customers.
Here are 13 benefits of email marketing.
1. It’s Free, Quick and Simple.
An email is a free tool available to anyone who has access to the internet. In its basic form, there is no further expense you incur to send and receive messages. It’s also quick and simple. Once you compose your message (which is one of the hardest aspects), you have to hit the send button and deliver your message.
But if you have email subscribers on your email list and you are interested in all the bells and whistles that come with an automated marketing program, then you will need to pay! Nevertheless, the rates are affordable.
2. It Is Effective.
Regarding effectiveness, it is second only to search marketing as an online marketing strategy. This effectiveness makes it indispensable as a marketing tool. According to one report from DBS Data, businesses can expect an average return of $38 for every $1 they spend on email marketing.
A joint study from Shop.org and Forrester Research found that 85% of US retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. So sending timely emails campaigns is an activity to stimulate interest in your business or brand.
3. Drives Customer Acquisition and Retention.
These days, many people make purchases online and in a study by emarketer in March 2016 81% and 80% of respondents said email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention. Other digital tactics like organic search followed email’s usefulness at 62% for acquisition and social media at 44% for retention, both rated effective by far fewer respondents than email.
For customer acquisition and retention, email marketing is the way to go. And according to the same source mentioned above, email marketing accounts for nearly 7% of all customer acquisitions online.
Before launching your email campaign, you must have received the recipients' explicit permission to send them an email. Click To TweetIt plays an important role in the customer journey. You can use it as a tool to persuade your customer base of current customers and potential customers to become your brand evangelists.
4. Permission-based Marketing.
Before launching your email campaign, you must have received the recipients’ explicit permission to send them an email. An organic permission-based mailing list provides you with people who have shown their willingness to receive emails from you. And so your emails will be welcome in their inbox. Without their permission, they will regard your email as spam. And according to the new European GDPR law, it is illegal to possess the private and personal details of people without their permission not to talk of emailing them without their permission. You can end up in serious legal troubles.
5. Low-cost Means to Reach a Global Audience.
Email marketing is a low-cost means to reach a global audience. Email marketing is relatively inexpensive compared to traditional marketing tactics, such as direct mail and print media. While these traditional print media require you to spend money on printing and advertising space in newspapers, magazines, etc., email marketing requires only a small investment of time and resources in developing effective content. Besides relatively low operational costs, email marketing also provides an attractive return on investment (ROI). According to this article, the ROI of an email marketing campaign can be astronomical. In fact, the average campaign generates an ROI of 4400% or a return of $44 for every one dollar spent.
Email marketing and social media go great together and are an excellent combination for reaching a global audience. Email marketing can help build a strong following for your blog, Facebook, Twitter and other social channels.
Unlike traditional print media, reaching a global audience through business email marketing does not hurt the environment since it is paperless. It will also not hurt your business marketing budget too.
6. Email Marketing Is Thriving.
Despite the popularity and benefits of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., many people do not use them. But according to this article, email use is thriving and is used by 95% of online consumers. The article notes that 91% of consumers reported checking their email at least once a day and that it’s not uncommon for consumers to check their email dozens of times each day.
Using email marketing to promote your content, products, and services to your potential or loyal customers is a great way to drive more traffic to your website. It is a highly effective tool for nurturing leads through the buying cycle compared with a more significant number of people who have been using email long before these social media sites came into existence.
7. It Is a Useful Tool to Educate Your Target Audience.
Email marketing is a useful tool to educate your existing and prospective clients about new product releases and services during the holidays. As mentioned in this article, always remember that your newsletter should be 90% educational and 10% promotional. So even if you add a few calls to action at the end of your newsletter, selling should not be your primary goal.
8. Analytics and Actionable Data
Although big brands use it, it is not their exclusive property. SMBs too can use it to take their marketing to the next level. For instance, if you use a professional email service provider (ESP), you will get loads of analytics and actionable data. You can use the data you derive from your service provider to refine your overall marketing strategy.
9. Helps Build Strong Relationships, Loyalty, and Trust
In line with the previous benefit, email marketing is a great tool for collecting feedback and surveys. These will help you keep a pulse on the customer experience to build strong relationships, loyalty and trust between your target customers and your brand.
The data you collected is also useful in creating highly personalised and engaging content to meet your audience needs. It is possible to segment your audience into lists. Use this email list segmentation to group members of your email list based on geography or other criteria.
According to this source, if a customer has opted in to receive emails from you, then you shouldn’t be shy about actually sending out emails and contacting them.
Effective communication helps build strong customer relationships. According to this article, you will remain top-of-mind and keep people engaged with your business during your busy season and the slower times of the year.
10. Easy to Get Started, Measure, and Share
Compared with other digital marketing strategies, email marketing requires the least effort. It doesn’t require a techie, and neither does it require a team of persons to get started, measure its performance and share it. It’s managed through an automated program provided by your ESP that you can use to personalise your email right down to each recipient’s needs. The links in your email make it possible to track and measure the campaign’s performance and how each recipient engaged with your email. You can also use it to weed out any fake email address and improve your email sign-up process. So it is important to select the right platform that enables you to send out your marketing message and access the features and metrics you need to accomplish your marketing objectives.
11. Establishing Authority.
The goal of every business is to establish itself as an expert in your industry. If you have an email marketing program with millions of persons subscribed to your email list and engage with your email on their mobile or other electronic devices, you position yourself and your business as the authority in the eyes of your customers.
The links in your email make it possible to track and measure the campaign's performance and how each recipient engaged with your email. Click To Tweet12. Availability of Different Tools.
Several tools offer unique features at various price points that you can use to enhance your campaigns. Some of these tools provide you with the opportunity of harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to enrich your campaigns.
For instance, according to this article, AI brings smarter spam filters which email service providers are using to fight spam. This ensures that businesses follow best practices. Otherwise, their emails will go unread and straight to the spam box.
13. Message Optimisation for Mobile Screens.
This article notes that people read over 60% of all emails on their smart devices. Almost 80% of mobile users have purchased something online through their phones. Statistics points to an increasingly apparent move from computers to smartphones for viewing emails and other online activities.
Is Email Marketing Right for You and Are You Ready to Start a Campaign?
For small-business owners on a budget, email marketing is a better choice than traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, or direct mail. So don’t listen to the naysayers when you come across sensational headlines claiming email marketing is dead. Far from it. Email marketing is alive and thriving, as seen in the above article.
It has changed the game of sales cycle. You can handle email as it pushes the operation of the sales cycle on its own. With the email automation tools, you can create and schedule drip campaigns. So you send the right message and the right moment in their customer journey.
Conclusion
So there you have it, these are the 13 benefits of email marketing. As we have seen from the above, email marketing is the right choice for businesses to work smarter, not harder.
However, it would be best if you tread with caution. Privacy laws like GDPR and other similar laws guide how organisations use cookies to access and store their customers’ personal data. So please abide by these laws to not get into any trouble with the authorities.
Need help in formulating your email marketing campaign strategy? Contact us, and let’s talk!
Related Article(s)
- How to Perfect Your Audience Segmentation
- How to Make Your Email Marketing More Effective
- How to Collect Email Addresses for Email Marketing
- 5 Common Misconceptions About Email Marketing
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