If you think emails are obsolete and don’t work anymore, your mind will change after reading this article. Emails remain one of the top 3 social channels to share content and news related to your business. Marketing through emails is both cost-effective and less time-consuming.
Emails are a great way to reach your audience and build your brand’s trust, recall, and reputation. Through emails, you can also keep your customer base updated about your company’s new offerings, deals, and news. Along with that, you can also provide them with exclusive content that they can’t access elsewhere.
What is email marketing?
Just as it sounds, email marketing is simply sending out your company communications, offers, exclusive content, etc., directly to your customer’s email inbox. Email marketing is a more personalized way of connecting with your customers. It is also easier to start with and doesn’t require a lot of hassle or investment.
It is relatively much easier to run an email marketing campaign than any other marketing initiative. Suppose you are a large organization and can’t possibly meet and connect with all your customers physically. Emails are the best way to communicate with your customers in a more personalized manner.
Important points to keep in mind for good email marketing
Contact list
The first and most critical step of email marketing is building a contact list. A contact list that is relevant and interested in your business and its offering is essential to see good results. Even though it takes time to build the correct contact list, make sure not to buy your email contact list because that will only result in demerits for your email marketing campaign and company name.
Express permission
The best way to build a good and relevant email contact list is by asking your users for express permission. This is called permission-based email marketing and happens when a user allows you to send them regular emails. With permission-based email marketing, it is sure that you are reaching the relevant audience who is already interested in your company and its products/services.
Value addition
Your business also needs to ensure that it delivers real value to the customers with its email marketing. Make sure not to bombard the customers and only send regular emails when they permit you to do so. Along with that, instead of making every email sound like a sales pitch, work on educating the customers and building trust by providing free knowledge and content that adds value.
Opt-out/ unsubscribe option
Opt-out or an unsubscribe option is essential for any email marketing send-out. Sending regular emails to a user who is no longer interested in your emails or offerings impacts your email marketing negatively (and could be illegal depending on where you are in the world). Each email that you send out should have this button at the end of it to make it known that you care about what the user wants.
Reasons why your company should consider email marketing
- The number of emails that are sent each day exceeds 205 billion.
- An average white-collar worker starts off the day by checking his or her email inbox, continues to check it throughout the day.
- Even today, email is the most used platform for business communication by employees and offices around the world.
- The cost per conversion of email marketing is also lower than other mediums.
- The click-through rates of email marketing are higher than any other social media.
- With email marketing, you can send different content to your customers on the same platform.
Here are some benefits email marketing can provide to your business
If done correctly, email marketing has many benefits. Following are some of the many ways email marketing can help your business.
Cost-effective
Since there isn’t a lot of setting up costs involved, email marketing is relatively inexpensive. It is cost-effective because you can reach many people in a more personalized manner than any other platforms or marketing methods.
Create brand recall
Regular emails help build a strong connection with the customers. When a user repeatedly sees your company name, logo, and tagline on his/her screen, it builds familiarity and puts your brand in their preference set. However, make sure that you don’t spam a user or send emails to people not interested in receiving them.
Build trust
Sending out quality emails increases your brand’s trust and credibility. People are likely to trust a brand that educates them and provides them with free knowledge. Keep your customers informed about your business but also add value for them.
Personalized connection
With email marketing, there are many ways you can add a more personalized touch. Some of these ways are starting the email with the user’s name and then mentioning their past purchases or buying patterns.
You can also pick out insights from how they reacted to your past emails and incorporate them. All in all, reaching your customer directly in their inbox, with their name and other habits, shows that you care about your customers and want to connect with them better.
Not only all this, but email marketing is a great way to generate and enrich leads. According to McKinsey, emails are 40 times more effective when trying to gain new customers than any other social media platform.
Email Marketing Software
With email marketing tools and software, running email campaigns is now easier than ever. Setting up, sending, and monitoring email marketing campaigns can be efficiently done using a CRM like HubSpot or an emailing tool like MailChimp.
These types of email marketing tools provide templates to create and draft emails quickly. And, within a matter of minutes, you can send emails to your entire email contact list. You can also safely store your email lists in these tools and update them when needed.
One of the best features of these email marketing tools is that they provide insights and details about email campaigns. These insights and data can come in handy when deciding the way forward for the upcoming email campaigns and keeping track of what users liked or disliked. The type of data these tools provide is open email rates, click-through rates, conversation rates, and bounce rates.
Final Thoughts
Keeping in mind all the benefits and the ease email marketing provides, we don’t think this platform should be overlooked from your marketing plan. If set up and run correctly, email marketing can provide the best conversions and click-through rates out of all your advertising platforms. With the advent of email campaign tools and software, it can be done more efficiently and effectively.
