WHY EMAIL MARKETING?
Email marketing may have been around for almost 40 years but it is still among the most effective forms of marketing, and certainly worthy of consideration in most marketing strategies. For this reason, it was the subject of the July New Media Breakfast sessions in Glasgow and Edinburgh and I thought I’d share some of the key points from the presentation in a series of posts over the next few days.
I will be publishing the following posts over the next few days, so please look out for them, or follow me here on LinkedIn so that you get the full series.
- Why Email Marketing?
- Email Service Providers
- Building Your Email Subscriber List
- Maintaining Your Email Subscriber List
- Improving Your Email Marketing ROI
- Automation – Triggered and Personalised Emails
So, let’s get started.
Why Email Marketing?
From time to time, we will see articles and claims that email is dead, however the reality is that all social media channels and online businesses like Amazon, Apple, MicroSoft and any other commerce site requires you to provide an email address in order to do business with them.
Email is still very much the core communication channel of the internet with some 4.1 billion email accounts worldwide, and t’s still growing to a projected 5.23 billion accounts by 2018. It is also estimated that 95% of all consumers use email.
It is also important to realise that, unlike social media, HTML email connects you directly to your audience – as little as 2% of the people who have ‘Liked’ your Facebook page will actually see your updates, whereas every subscriber to your email list will receive your emails. So, when you build a good quality mailing list you are truly able to create a direct relationship with your audience.
As marketers, or busy business people there’s something else that is really important to take on board – consumers like to get emails. For many busy people the email inbox is akin to a daily ’To Do’ list, however we are not our audience, consumers are happy to get regular emails from their favourite brands. Recent research by Marketing Sherpa concluded the following:
- 70% of people will open emails from their favourite brands
- 72% of consumers say email is their favourite form of communication with the brands they do business with
- 61% said they like to receive weekly promotional emails from their favourite brands
- 28% wanted to receive promotional emails more frequently
- 85% of opted-in subscribers said their email promotions were somewhat useful, or very useful
So remember, you are not your audience!
Perhaps the most compelling reason to consider email marketing lies behind its longevity. How often have you utilised a function on a social media channel only to be disappointed at a later stage when it has been changed, or completely removed? It is highly unlikely that this will ever happen with email marketing because no one company or organisation controls email technology or the infrastructure that delivers email. So, your email marketing strategy doesn’t ever have to change because the platform you are using has suddenly altered its focus.
Email marketing outperforms all other forms of marketing. McKinsey research found that you are 40x more likely to find a new customer through email marketing than you are on social media, and the Direct Marketing Association concludes that every $1 invested in email marketing returns $43 – that’s an ROI of 4300%!
You may, as I did, question this enormous ROI, but given that you have engaged opted-in subscribers, good quality content, attractive offers and highly optimised email campaigns, this is not an impossible return.
I found a useful resource to help you calculate the potential ROI of your email marketing campaign which, at the very least, helps you to appreciate the impact of good open and click-through rates. You can easily see how even a small improvement with either of these will dramatically improve the results of you campaigns. Later in the series we’ll look at split testing your emails and learning from the reports, this tool certainly highlights the benefits of split testing and constantly reviewing every aspect of the email campaigns you are sending.
So, take a look at the Email Marking ROI calculator here, it should help you to see what is possible and maybe even help you to establish some targets for your future campaigns.
The next post will look at Email Service Providers (ESP’s) and the essential functions you need them to be able to provide. Please watch out for it, or ‘Follow’ me on LinkedIn by selecting the ‘Follow’ option when you hover over the ‘Connect’ button on my profile.
Meantime, if you have found this post interesting, please use the social share buttons on this page to share it with your online community, there’s a good chance that others in your community will find it interesting too. Thank you.
Author: Gordon White
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Email: Gordon@fatbuzz.com