What is email marketing?
Email marketing is about using email to promote your business. It’s all about communicating with your customers in a relevant, timely manner – so has little in common with SPAM or buying lists! This digital marketing channel doubles as a direct marketing tool and is one of the top free channels used by 87% of B2B marketers (Content Marketing Institute, 2020).
Think of email marketing as an easy, direct route to your customers. Like a fast A-road, you can hop on and deliver your message straight to their door. Arrive with something appealing and you can expect a warm welcome. But turn up too often with nothing interesting, they’ll soon turn you away and may eventually stop answering!
Specialise, don’t generalise
Sending everything to everyone, aka the average e-Newsletter, misses one of the fundamental opportunities of email marketing – being able to target your audience according to their behaviour. Known as ‘behavioural emails’ these are automatically triggered when a customer interacts with your business online (on your website or social media for instance).
By mapping your customer’s journey, you can then develop multiple emails in response to key route-markers (touchpoints) along the way. Behavioural emails are a timely nudge in the right direction, working for you 24/7 to help retain customers and increase conversion rates.
That’s a big win.
Know your customer
Successful email marketing is built on data. The more you understand your customer and know about them, the more targeted and multi-faceted your emails.
Besides their name and email, do you know when they last interacted with you – and how? What did they last buy from you – and when? What’s their turnover? When is their financial year end (…when budgets are often spent)?
The more valuable the data, the stronger your content, the greater success you’ll achieve. And as every response from them yields yet more information, you’ll discover more about your customers with each interaction.
Data is the secret sauce that allows you to fine-tune future email campaigns for even greater impact.
Make it personal
Learning how to utilise data is key. Using it to segment your customers into specific, targeted groups means your email message feels more personal to each customer, like you’re talking directly to them. Marketers who create segmented campaigns report as much as a 760% increase in revenue. (Campaign Monitor, 2019).
That’s huge.
ALWAYS ensure the data you hold and use is GDPR compliant; this is your legal responsibility and an important aspect of all online communications.
Email marketing is here to stay
It’s worth noting just how ubiquitous email has become: in 2020, around 306 billion emails were sent and received every day worldwide. That figure is projected to increase to over 376 billion in 2025 according to Statista (2020) with more of us increasingly opening emails on our mobile phones (Litmus.com, 2018).
Checking our emails has become a complementary activity. We do it while watching TV (69%), in bed (57%), and on holiday (79%). And when that same email is opened again on another device, we’re 65% more likely to click-through to the site.
Far from being a channel in danger of retreat, email is one of the safest, most resilient places to invest your marketing time and spend.
Here’s a quick round-up:
Why Invest in Email Marketing?
Increased Sales
Increased Sales – in a survey by HubSpot, 59% of people said that marking emails influenced their purchase decisions.
Whopping ROI
Email marketing is renowned for having one of the best returns on investment, with an average of 3800% in the UK.
Higher Engagement
Higher Engagement – an email marketing campaign is 6x more likely to get a click than a social post.
It’s Personal
Emails tailored to individual customers are more likely to get a positive response (hint: get to know them better).
It’s Measurable
It’s easy to monitor performance and identify what’s working, then utilise this knowledge for future campaigns (become a data nerd!).
…and less intrusive
61% of people prefer emails to tele-marketing calls, as they can choose to open and read emails when it suits them. They’re in control.
Real-time marketing
Once set-up, automated behavioural emails work for you 24/7, responding to customers as and when they interact with you online.
As email marketing looks set to get bigger and more powerful with advances in digital technologies, integrating it into your marketing mix is increasingly essential.
Ready to Work Together?
Get in touch
