Why Use Email Marketing?
Why should your business start implementing email marketing? Could it be the impressive ROI of £30 for every £1 spent? Or the potential reach of 5.6 billion active email accounts?
Here, we list our top 10 reasons to start email marketing today.
Well, What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing promotes your products and services whilst simultaneously creating a healthy relationship with both existing and potential customers. It can be entirely cost-free and still stands as the most successful method of marketing, providing you with direct access to your target audience's personal mailbox, whether this is viewed on their desktop, tablet or mobile. Email is an extremely simple (and eco-friendly) method to convey your message, with your customers being 45 times more likely to see your email compared to a post on social media.
1 - Personalised Marketing
Email allows you to create a persona for your company; a writing style which suits your approach to business and a tone of voice which will appeal to your target audience. Email is a platform to express yourself and appeal to your customer directly, whether this is through the design of the email, the main body of text or even the subject line. Many email platforms such as ActiveCampaign, MailerLite and MailChimp include features which allow you to create a subject line targeted to the recipient, such as “{First Name}, a £10 voucher code just for you!”. Using this technique creates a personalised experience for the reader, resulting in them feeling important and gaining trust in your company.
2 - Expanded Exposure
A main advantage of email marketing is the huge and ever-expanding reach it creates for your company. With 5.6 billion active email accounts and 99% of consumers checking their email every single day, this is evidently a platform which receives attention, regardless of which industry you are promoting. Any customer who provides you with their email address (this could be through a social media competition or even a simple newsletter signup) automatically turns into a free audience for your products, services and offers.
3 - Build Trust And Credibility
Customers purchase from companies who they know and trust, by sending regular emails to your contact list, this helps to keep you in the mind of potential clients, and when given the choice, people tend to purchase from companies they are familiar with and have had past communications with.
4 - A Reach Across Multiple Devices
With emails being able to be accessed anywhere and at any time; on desktops, tablets and mobiles, email allows your company to create a communication platform which conforms to all of these devices. Mobile phones account for 46% of all email opens, meaning a mobile-friendly email creates the perfect way to showcase your business and its benefits.
5 - High Return On Investment
Email marketing is the most effective method of digital marketing, resulting in a 122% Return On Investment, a figure that is four times higher than any other marketing channel.
6 - All Capabilities
Email marketing can be a low-cost method for reaching your customers, with the ability for any non-tech-savvy business owner to create a basic email template. Of course, you can create highly engaging and perfectly designed emails with a professional image if you have a creative flair and the ability to navigate your way around the many email marketing software available. We also offer a service to create your email newsletters on your behalf, find out more here.
7 - Create Automations
Automated email marketing is a popular solution for companies to promote their services at all times, automatically. One example is through “abandon cart” when personalised emails are sent to customers who have left specific products in their cart without purchasing. These can work as reminders and also incentives if paired with an enticing offer. Another example is creating an “email marketing funnel”, where a series of emails are sent to new or existing customers based on their interests and can alter depending on which actions they take when receiving the emails.
8 - Discover What Works For Your Customers
By using email marketing, the software available provide you with statistics which let you know how your emails are performing; giving you an indication of what works and what doesn’t work. This could be a simple detail such as adding an emoji into your subject line, a technique which 56% of companies experienced a higher open rate when using.
9 - Increase Traffic To Your Website
By including “call to actions” in your emails, potential customers who are interested in your products and services tend to click through to your website, ganging an increase in traffic and potentially an increase in leads. Clicks to your website through emails is also measurable on many email marketing platforms.
10 - Create Relationships
When customers receive regular and personalised emails, they feel connected to your business, building a foundation of trust and credibility. Additionally, giving the recipient an option to contact you directly or including social media links in the footer of your emails adds an even deeper level of communication and a feel of humanity towards your business.
Email Marketing Problems
Segmenting your audience correctly: Your customers would rather not be inundated with copious emails for a variety of products and services they may not be interested in. By sending multiple and irrelevant emails to people may result in them unsubscribing entirely from your email list. To ensure this doesn't happen, your segmentation needs to be organised perfectly. To do this, you need to divide your audience into sections such as age, gender, their purchase history, geographic location, sales funnel location and even the paths (webpages) they interact with on your website. Following this method will assist with sending your customers emails that they will be personally interested in, resulting in higher conversion figures for your email marketing.
Forgetting about your existing customer base: Many businesses focus on bringing in new customers; with offers for first time purchases and incentives to drive potential new customers to purchase your products/services. We find that your existing customers should be who you focus on retaining, offering loyalty programs and special discounts for your loyal customers. Practising this method aims to create healthy relationships by building trust and credibility for your brand.
Low open rates: If your emails are not being opened, the main reason for this will be your subject line, as this is the only element of your email which can be viewed without the email being opened. Your aim is to capture the interest of your audience to entice them into opening the email. To overcome this, the best method is to carry out subject line testing; discovering which subject line receives the highest amount of opens and which ones are less successful.
Gaining subscribers: If you have brilliant content, it's completely useless if you have no audience to share it with. To help build your list of subscribers it may be worth offering a discount or an incentive, ensuring your sign up process is quick and simple, and show what material/content/offers they will gain by signing up to your newsletters.
Why Use Email Marketing?
These ten reasons are only a handful of advantages to starting email marketing, a simple yet extremely effective method of marketing to gain exposure, awareness and new customers for your business. Being an inexpensive technique for all industries, this method is risk-free and easy to improve once you start creating emails have the ability to see how they are performing. Feel free ask any questions in the comments section below.
