There’s a common myth about digital marketing that often prevents business owners and entrepreneurs from achieving the success that they deserve.
It’s this: social media is king and email marketing is dead.
They say it’s not worth the effort, that millennials don’t use email or that the changes in GDPR made it harder than ever to connect with your target customer via email.
However, as digital marketing experts know, email marketing is far from dead.
The truth is, email marketing remains one of the most budget-friendly ways to attract, nurture and convert customers for all types of businesses. Even in 2023, it still outperforms every other channel in terms of engagement, average order size and even return on investment.
If you want to boost branding and engagement, generate more sales and build a solid inbound marketing strategy, you need to include email marketing.
So why is email marketing so effective? How does it fit with your overall marketing strategy? And how can you build rock-solid email marketing campaigns that deliver maximum ROI in 2023?
QUICKLINKS:
Why is email marketing so effective?
How to design an effective email marketing strategy
Why is email marketing so effective?
If you want to capture your target audience’s attention, offer maximum value, and convert them into paying customers, email marketing can be the most cost-efficient approach to take. Here are some of the main reasons why:
1. Email delivers better ROI
When you invest in email marketing, you’ll make your marketing budget stretch even further and potentially deliver an impressive return on investment (ROI).
A UK survey conducted in 2022 discovered that email marketing delivers around 35-40 times the amount invested. In other words, if your business invests £1, you’re likely to receive £35-40 in return.
2. Email marketing generates more engagement
People of all demographics generally feel more comfortable with marketing emails than they would with other forms of digital marketing. According to recent statistics, it’s estimated that 99% of people check their emails every day and around 50% check at least four times every day.
Whether that’s staying in touch with our friends, communicating for work or business, making online purchases or subscriptions, or even staying updated about developments that pique our interests, email is the thread that pulls it all together.
We are also more likely to feel engaged when reading emails and will take more time to read them than if we were to encounter a promotional social media post or similar type of content.
This makes email a more effective way to reach customers, offer discounts or promotions and increase brand awareness. Even if they’re not ready to buy immediately, they will think of you first when they want to make a purchase.
3. It’s easy to measure
Email marketing tools make it easy to check how your email marketing campaigns are performing and allows you to make tweaks or changes according to the needs of your business. Using the metrics provided such as delivery rates, bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates and unsubscribes, you can improve your overall inbound marketing strategy for future success.
4. Emails are highly personalisable
The secret to effective inbound marketing is to send exactly the right content to the right person at the right time. When you create an effective email strategy, you can personalise the content to your unique target audience and their stage in the buyers’ journey so they are more likely to stay engaged and take the next step.
What’s more, an email is a one-to-one communication – from you to me – so it has much more impact than a social media post.
5. Your target audience is already engaged
What sets email marketing apart from many other forms of digital marketing is the fact that your potential customers have already expressed an interest in your company by signing up for your mailing list in the first place.
Whether this was to hear about discounts or special offers, find out more about your offerings or already made a purchase, they will be more receptive to your messaging and more likely to make a purchase.
GDPR has made this even more relevant: the only people on your list are those who have opted in, so you know they’re interested.
How to design an effective email marketing strategy
Given all the benefits we’ve shared above, you’re most likely wondering how you can ensure that your business creates an outstanding email marketing strategy and maximises potential ROI.
To help, we gathered together our team here at Marcom to share their insights so you can benefit.
1. Understand your audience
Inbound marketing is buyer-centric and designed to meet the needs, wants and desires of your target market. Therefore, you must start designing your email marketing campaigns by finding out as much as you can about them so you can address their needs.
You can use your buyer personas to answer these questions or ask yourself:
- Who is your audience?
- What are their demographics?
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- What do they do for a living?
- What are their biggest problems?
- How could your company solve these problems?
[Note: This isn’t an exhaustive list. If you need help defining your target audience, we can help. Get in touch today.]
2. Segment your audience into relevant groups
Once you’ve defined who your audience is, you should divide these customers into groups so that you can communicate more effectively and provide them with the solutions they need.
The best way to do this is to segment your audience according to factors such as job description, industry sector, age and demographics, past buying behaviour, particular niche, why they signed up to the mailing list, and so on.
You can then use this information to ensure you’re sending the right kinds of emails to the right person at the right time so they’re more likely to take the next step in the buyer’s journey.
The holy grail of marketing is a personalised and/or different email to each prospect. This is relatively easy with a well organised database.
3. Clean up your database
If you want to ensure that your target customers still want to receive your emails and help ensure maximum ROI, you need to clean up your database regularly. This makes sure your emails don’t end up in the spam folder, improves your sender reputation and protects the integrity of your business.
Most email platforms will do this for you automatically, but you will need to ensure that your CRM is linked to the email database.
4. Optimise your email design
It’s simple. Create emails that look beautiful, are reader-friendly and are optimised for results and you will better engage with your target customer and boost ROI. There are many design tricks we use to make your emails more effective.
5. Create compelling subject lines
Have you ever received a marketing email and felt zero desire to actually open it and find out what it contains?
It’s the same for your potential customers. If you can create brilliant subject lines that grab the recipient’s attention, spark curiosity and encourage them to open, you’re more likely to get the engagement you deserve and gain maximum ROI.
Recipients will see who the email is from and what the subject line says before they make the decision to read on, so make sure you get it right!
6. Remember your Call-to-Action (CTA)
Want to encourage your potential customer to hit that ‘buy’ button or request further information? Engagement is what it is all about.
Make sure you include strategically placed CTAs in the body of the email as well as at the end. This helps your business or brand appear more friendly and approachable and increases the chance that the person reading your email takes action.
After all, who has time these days to scroll through an email to find a link or have to search Google to get in touch with a company? Enough said…
7. Provide value
You’re not the only business sending marketing emails to your potential customers. There are multiple other competitors who want this potential buyer to choose them over you. For this reason, you must ensure that you’re offering value in every single email you send, not just giving them a sales pitch. Your recipients are only going to take time to read your emails if they think they’re going to be better off, or wiser, as a result.
Ask yourself what makes you stand out from your competitors and how you can add value to your emails. What do your customers care about? What information or solution can you offer in your emails?
Once you’ve defined this, make sure you create your emails with this in mind.
8. Monitor your metrics
As any savvy business owner knows, to succeed in the modern world, you need to remain flexible, open-minded and aware of the changing needs of your customer, then tweak your marketing strategy accordingly.
To do this, make sure you keep a close eye on your metrics like open rates, click-through rates, engagement and so on. If you discover that something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it so you can deliver better results.
Final Words
To wrap up, email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective inbound marketing methods that deliver optimal ROI and gets your potential customers engaged.
Email marketing is the best way there is to create that one-to-one relationship with your customers. The more personalised and tailored it is, the more it will resonate with them and meet their needs.
Long term consistency is key. Your email campaigns should reflect you and your brand and integrate seamlessly with the rest of your marketing activity.
Create your marketing strategy by considering who your audience is and what they want and then segment your list accordingly. Once you’ve done this, create cleverly designed emails with compelling subject lines that offer value and encourage your potential customer to take the next step. You’ll be amazed at the difference it can make to your business.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.