Do you ever ask yourself why email marketing is so important?
Many may think that email marketing is a dying industry, but they are wrong. Some may ask if small businesses will have a future with digital marketing and the answer is yes.
Being known as an effective way to keep the attention of your target audience, email marketing has become a great way to reach those you hope to market to. Email marketing has become so popular, that small businesses are recommended to have a plan to contribute to their marketing by 2020. In this article, we will explain to you on why it is so important to have an email marketing plan and how to implement campaigns in the future.
Email Marketing and Your Business
For many of us every part of our lives involves emails. Whether you are a professional worker, consumer, or someone who uses your email address in private, the email takes up a big part of day to day living. Have you ever stopped and wondered how many people you knew did not have an email address? More than likely, you are able to count these people on one hand.
There is an estimated 3.7 billion people worldwide who use email, according to the Radicati Group, a technology marketing research firm. Meaning close to 54 percent of the world’s population are email users. Pew Research, a non partisan fact tank that provides everything from social issues to demographics, has reported that 92 percent of the adults in the United States use email, while 61 percent of email users are checking and sending emails everyday.
With there being so many email users, this creates a great opportunity for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience. If businesses add email marketing to their marketing tactics checklist, then they increase the chance for improvement on their reach and visibility. These added tactics also provides businesses the opportunity to attract and persuade leads regularly.
Email marketing not only gives you the advantage of reaching a large number of people, but also offers other benefits not provided by other digital marketing strategies. Based on the actions of customers, you are able to personalize and make changes to your messages. Your audiences can also be segmented to make sure the right leads are getting the most effective information at the right time.
Email marketing has become important because it is competition between businesses of all industries. It has been reported by Marketing Land, a digital publication that covers all aspects of digital marketing, that over 1.4 million emails are sent each month, but over 1.3 million of these emails are sent by businesses in the United States. So, if you want to compete in the digital world, then email marketing will have to become a priority for your company and the audience you hope to reach.
6 Reasons You Need to Use Email Marketing by 2020
Are you convinced yet? If not, then our list of strong reasons of why your brand should start using email marketing by 2020, will motivate you.
1. The Cost-Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Let’s talk money.
Even if there are new tactics and strategies to use in the digital marketplace, there will always be one thing that will not change. Businesses need strategies that will help them with reaching their maximum budget in marketing, while pursuing the goals set for their company. If you are hoping to be cost-effective with digital marketing, then email marketing is the way to go when reaching your audience.
Even though print ads and television can be expensive, you will find real marketing success with email marketing. However, you may need to hire someone to help with the creation of your email content or use an email automation marketing service. Hiring someone to help with the email content may help with cutting down on time sensitive email marketing. The costs of digital marketing is affordable, compared to other forms of marketing, such as print and mail marketing.
If you choose to make email marketing apart of your plan to reach your audience, then you will find that it will provide you with a successful high return on investment or ROI. Campaign Monitor, a global email marketing company, has reported that every $1 spent in ROI, will likely bring in $38. With this cost effective kind of marketing, it can help businesses greatly, especially smaller businesses with lower budgets.
To sum it up, email marketing is reasonably priced when starting and maintaining email marketing campaigns. It is also a perfect strategy for businesses to use if they are working with a smaller budget. This form of marketing will provide you to get the most from your money spent, by allowing you to use segmentation and trigger campaigns. You will also be able to watch your business grow without having to worry about putting revenue back into digital marketing. Cost effectiveness is more of a reason why email marketing should be a priority in your business.
2. Reach More Mobile Users With Email Marketing
Another form of digital marketing that can’t be disregarded, is mobile marketing. The use of mobile devices by users continues to rise. It was predicted by Statista, a market research and business intelligence portal, that the number of cell phone users will rise to over five billion users by 2019.
Now knowing the statistics of cell phone users, businesses that hope to find better ways to market in the digital world will have to use email marketing in the digital world.
To put it another way, how many times in a day do you check your phone for messages and emails? There is an opportunity for a brand to reach a consumer everytime that consumer checks their phone. Even though not all marketing tactics are made for encounters on a mobile device, businesses are still presented opportunities by email marketing. Some of these opportunities still provides a way for businesses to get their messages to mobile users.
A responsive designed email content is needed for mobile users to find effectiveness in a message sent by a business. Subscribers should have the option to view visuals with html as well as emails with visuals in it. Videos and images should also be small when sending your content, because it allows the consumer to view it easily on their mobile device. Make sure your content is short and engaging when sending it to mobile users. All links should also be mobile friendly and consumers should be able to click easily to go to home pages.
3. Automate the Email Marketing Process
Email automation will always be a major talking point when discussing how important it is in email marketing.
Unfortunately, there are many processes that can’t be automated in digital marketing. However, email marketing can contribute greatly to automation. Using automation for your emails will help with improving relevance and time sensitivity in your campaign is. Once a consumer takes a specific action, you can use triggers or workflows to send messages automatically.
An example would be, if a consumer visits your site and spends a lot of time searching through products. After looking through the products and adding them to the cart, the consumer leaves the site without making a purchasing anything. This is would be when email automation comes in. The user will be sent an email after leaving the cart. The email will remind them what they left in the cart and ask if further help is needed to complete the order. In this case, a missed opportunity is turned into a chance to build a better and stronger relationship as well as make a sale.
Time and money can be saved through automation by making improvements to the relevance and timeliness of your email campaigns. Automation takes away the worry of wondering when the perfect time would be to send a message. This being because your automation system handles that for you. Another benefit of having an automation is system is being able to focus on your business, while the rest of your team occupies their time with other tasks.
4. Email Marketing and Better Response Rates
As time passes in the digital world, consumers continue to find importance in personalization. Digital consumers would rather have marketing ads more personalized to fit what they need and prefer. These ads would be better, because they would not be like ads that are given to everyone else for the same kind of products. The Vice President of Insights at Epsilon and Digital Strategy, Jill LeMaine Redo, has stated that hyper-personalization will be of more importance to consumers in digital marketing by 2020. Campaign content in businesses can be improved with the use of triggers, integrated mobility, and the collection of data from different platforms.
Content delivered to subscribers by you can have personalized messaging because of email marketing. Data collected from your collected information and leads, can provide you with more personalized and relevant content in which your readers will find more enjoyable and feel more persuaded to act on. With this information your open and clickthrough rates can be improved and you will have better conversion rates.
Using a consumer’s name can make a big difference when communicating with them. Hubspot, a developer and marketer of software products, has reported that when an email uses the recipient’s name in the subject line, they have a better chance at having a clickthrough rate.
Another effective tactic to use to increase personalized messaging in your content, is segmentation. Segmentation is a process that involves dividing your subscriber list into different groups that have common characteristics. An example, would be if you decided to put those living in a certain geographic area in one group with those who live in a similar climate. Separating those who live on the other side of the country in this group into a another group, would be another form of segmentation. Subscribers can also be separated centered around their interests or demographic information.
With segmentation, you will be providing subscribers with the kind of content and offers which appeals to them the most. Relevancy is increased, while unsubscription rates are lowered and conversion rates are increased. Personalization is not always possible with direct mail, which is why segmentation has more of a success rate. This would also be the reason why it is highly relevant and important in email marketing.
5. Make Your Email Marketing Interactive
While the importance of email marketing is growing, so is the interactive email. The digital publication, Marketing Land has predicted that more interactive digital marketing will have a higher response rate and appeal rate with different marketing groups, by 2020. Businesses are offered the opportunity to give consumers interactive content, for a lower price, with the use of email marketing.
Instead of sending subscribers to a landing page, you will be able to provide them with email content that is interactive in the body of the email. Whether you use embedded video content or email carousels, consumers will continue to be interactive and captivated before going back to your site to take action.
The creation of interactive email, will be able to appeal to the audience as well as allow integrate other channels into your digital marketing. An example would be, if you shared video content in an email and encouraged others to share the video in their social media environment. Your marketing campaigns can become more integrated with the guarantee of more touch points being created for your target market.
6. Email Marketing Efforts can be Measured
The measured results will be the only way to tell how successful your business is doing in digital marketing. Tracking marketing metrics would be another reason for having email marketing, by 2020. This technique would keep the worry down on if your tactics were working.
Email marketing analytics provides your business the opportunity to see which users has viewed your emails. This process also lets you see if the users clicked on any links or if any action was taken. You will even be allowed to see if anyone unsubscribed after viewing your email. This information is valued while working towards analyzing your strategy in digital marketing as well as making adjustments.
The best results can be provided because of an email software or performed A/B tests. An example of seeing the best results, would be if two subject lines were tested for rates with trying to see which one had higher opens. This test would also look at various offers to see which one was the most influential and had the most conversions.
Email Marketing Growth
Your knowledge of email marketing can now help you with making a plan to implement. A successful email marketing campaign is going to involve consideration of how to expand your email list. You will also have to decide what kind of content should be presented to subscribers and how conversions can be influenced is also a good test of implementation.
You may have to hire an email marketing agency if you are in need of an expert for your email marketing. With small email marketing services offered, an agency will know what you will have to do to expand your list. The agency will also show you how to give good quality content as well as provide knowledge. After getting knowledge for how to market through email, you will know how to convert your target audience. We have designed our strategies for small businesses. With these successful strategies, you can start seeing success in your business for prices starting at $300 a month. Feel free to contact us today, if you are in need of help with implementing your email marketing plan.
