Email marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective ways of having your content noticed and read by its recipient because it’s perceived as not intrusive.
Consumers can view marketing content as a nuisance because they are regularly blitzed by ads on websites and social media. For this reason, many tend just to ignore them.
But when your marketing content lands in the inbox of your target audience – of people who want to receive your content – there’s a very high probability that they will click and read through it.
The numbers show that email marketing is a powerful tool for promoting your business to your target market. Still, success is never guaranteed. The key to success is to do email marketing correctly.
What Is Email Marketing And What Are Its Advantages?
Email marketing is a strategy whereby marketing content is sent to a large number of people using email as the delivery channel.
You might be more familiar with social media marketing as a channel for delivering content. That’s perfectly understandable as social media attracts billions of users every day and is popularly used to share marketing content such as blogs and ads.
But email has advantages over other marketing channels including social media. Let’s find out what these advantages are and why your business needs to start doing email marketing.
1. Email Marketing Generates the Highest ROI
According to a 2020 study by Marketing Insights, 50% of B2B marketers prioritize email marketing over other forms of marketing – including search and social media – because it produces the highest ROI.
The ROI on email marketing has been estimated to be at US$36 for every US$1 spent. Another study, this time by eMarketer, measured the median ROI on email marketing to be a whopping 122%.
So why is it possible to get a high ROI on email marketing?
- The volume of emails per day sent has been steadily climbing every year. In 2017, there were an estimated 269 billion emails being transmitted every day. That number has grown to 347.3 billion emails per day in 2023 and is expected to hit 392.5 billion per day in 2025.
- As mentioned earlier, people check their emails multiple times per day – sometimes as often as 20 times per day. You have a better-than-average chance of having your marketing content found by its recipient.
- The cost of email marketing is comparatively lower than other forms of marketing such as print ads and direct mail. With email marketing, there are no printing costs, content can be shared, and there are no advertising fees to be paid.
Here’s a key statistic that should excite those who operate e-commerce businesses:
Shoppers spend 138% more when marketing through email compared to other online channels.
2. Email Generates Better Results Than Social Media
The statistics proving email marketing superiority over social media as a content delivery channel aren’t even close.
- Conversion Rate: 6.05% (Email) vs. 1.9% (SM)
- Engagement Rate: 22.86% (OR-Email) and 3.71% (CTR-Email) vs. 0.58% (SM)
- ROI: 4,000% (Email) vs. N/A (SM)
It’s no surprise that 60% of marketers surveyed preferred to use email marketing as the delivery channel over social media.
3. Email Is An Effective Channel for Improving Customer Retention
Only people who sign up for your email subscriptions will receive your content. Thus, email marketing isn’t viewed as an intrusive or aggressive form of marketing.
Email marketing presents opportunities for you to improve customer retention by fostering solid relationships with your customers.
Email marketing can help you build long-term relationships with customers through the following means:
- Personalizing emails by name.
- Sending out special offers, gifts, promos, and discounts to loyal customers
- Inviting customers to product launches, pre-selling events, and other special occasions.
- Sending out personalized well-wishes and greetings on their birthdays, Christmas, and other special days.
- Sending out quick surveys to get their input on how to improve products and services.
Why is customer retention important?
When you have loyal customers, that means you have a solid fan base of people who love your products and services. Loyal customers can become a source of future sales through additional purchases or referrals.
That’s why it’s cheaper to retain customers than it is to acquire new ones – around 5 times cheaper!
4. Email Helps Reduce Cart Abandonment Rates
Cart abandonment is the incidence whereby a shopper has decided not to complete the transaction and has left products in his virtual shopping cart. It’s a serious problem for e-commerce businesses.
The average rate of cart abandonment for e-commerce websites has been estimated to be 68%. Emails can help lower the rate of cart abandonment.
Cart abandonment emails have a very high open rate of 41.18% – higher than regular emails. As a result, cart abandonment emails have an impressive conversion rate of 18%!
7 Tips On How To Run A Successful Email Marketing Campaign
To be clear, not all email marketing content is clicked through and read. Some are outright discarded.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for marketing and promoting businesses… but you must do it right!
1. Generate a High-Quality Email List
The email list is the list of people who have subscribed to your mailing service. Because they voluntarily signed up and provided their email address to you, the marketing content that you emailed will land on their inbox or “Promotions” page.
How do you generate a high-quality email list?
- Consistently create high-quality content that is optimized for search, unique, useful, informative, engaging, and compelling. Include a link back to your website either as an internal link or as a CTA.
- Situate opt-in forms throughout your website. You can add newsletter subscription signup buttons or opt-in forms on all of the key pages of your website – home page, about us, products, and contact us.
- The best locations for these buttons are the sidebar and blog feed, or you can make them appear as a pop-up.
- Give your website visitors offers they can’t refuse if they sign up. For example, attractive 50% discounts or Buy 1-Take 1 offers on their first purchase. Other enticing offerings are limited access to premium content, free e-books, free reports, free but limited-time-only trials on select products or services, and a special invite to a forthcoming event.
Review the opt-in form and make sure it includes a field that requires the signee to provide an active email address.
It’s also important to segment your email list. Segmentation is the process of categorizing the list according to criteria. For example, you can segment the list based on:
- Demographic information
- Type of industry
- Size of business
- Designation
- Sales Funnel
- Behavioral Patterns
- Purchase History
The last 3 items require some explanation.
Sales Funnel
If you own an e-commerce business that sells audio devices, a person who signs up in order to be notified of the availability of the latest Marshall Bluetooth speakers should be placed on top of your sales funnel.
There’s a very high probability that this person would make a purchase the second the speakers are available on your website.
In contrast, a person who signs up to receive basic information about your company might want to learn more about you before deciding to purchase.
Behavioral Patterns
You might have a few customers who are still on the email list but the last time they bought anything from you was 3 years ago. It would be a good idea to reconnect with these customers by sending them a simple email such as:
“Hi Steven,
How are you? We haven’t heard from you in 3 years and hope everything is okay.
How are the Logitech speakers that you bought from us? Let us know if you need any assistance or help with the item. And if you have questions about new products, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
We hope to hear from you soon!”
Purchase History
Evaluate the purchasing history of your most active customers. What types of products are they buying most of the time?
Let’s say you own a music store and one of your regular customers always buys guitar strings and cleaning products. You can send him an email about the latest strings and cleaning products that have just arrived… and offer him a limited-time discount for being a loyal customer.
By segmenting your email list into categories, you are significantly improving your campaign’s click-through rate, open rate, and conversion rate.
2. Design a Professional-looking Email
You spent time creating high-quality content. How can you entice your subscriber to open and read it? The first step is to show the recipient that you mean business by sending out a professional-looking email.
- Attach your company logo to the email.
- Use visuals such as graphics that help push your brand identity.
- The design of your email must look good on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Keep your content short and concise. Add white spaces to contribute to a clean-looking design, organize content, and help the recipient navigate its sections.
- Simple is always the best, but don’t hesitate to be creative. Feel free to add your company colors as accents on the email. This will help keep your brand top of mind.
Always include contact information such as website URL, phone numbers, and business address in the email.
3. Come Up With a Compelling Subject Line
The next step to get your recipient to open and read your email is to come up with a compelling subject line.
Why is this important? The subject line describes what your email is about. If your subject line is weak or uninteresting, the recipient may decide not to read it for the time being or disregard it completely.
Going back to our example of an entrepreneur who sells audio devices online, a good example of a subject line is as follows:
“Steven, the music will come to life in 3…2…1. 50% discount on the new Marshall Emberton III speaker before July 1.”
Here are a few tips on how to come up with an enticing subject line:
- Give it a personalized touch by including the first name of the recipient.
- Be catchy! The subject line must grab the attention of the recipient.
- The subject line must be relevant and aligned with the online behavior of the recipient.
In our example, since Steven was looking for Marshall’s audio products, it made sense to email him about the latest arrival of the brand he was looking for. - Compel an action. The second line; the one that comes after the subject line is the email preheader. It must be enticing enough to compel the reader into action.
In our example, the preheader is “50% discount on the new Marshall Emberton III speaker before July 1. This is an effective preheader because it offers value and creates a sense of urgency.
Make sure that the sender name you are using is the same one indicated in the signup form or opt-in box. Some businesses make the mistake of using a different sender name. If the recipient isn’t familiar with the name, he might think it’s spam.
If your business name is Aztech Audio and this is the name that appears on your website, then that should be the sender name that you use. Don’t try to be cute and use a different sender name such as Tech Guru 3000.
4. Focus on Creating Customized Content
Getting subscribers isn’t the end goal. That’s only the beginning. You want to build your subscriber base and the best way to do that is to create customized content.
If you’ve segmented your email list, it will be easy to come up with content ideas for your subscribers. With email marketing, you’re not sending out long-form blogs. You have to keep content short and readable.
Here are a few ideas on how to create customized content:
- Create short “how-to” and list-type articles. Keep the articles down to 300 words.
- The topics should be aligned with your subscriber’s online behavior. For example, if you have subscribers who tend to buy tech equipment for working out, you create articles such as “5 Of The Best HIIT Routines”, “How To Build Muscle With Calisthenics”, or “5 Best Gadgets For Measuring Strength”.
- For promos and discounts, use graphics and a variety of font styles to make the content more easily understood and eye-catching.
- Create an opportunity for the recipient to engage with you. For example, at the conclusion of the article you can write “Steve, do you have a favorite HIIT routine? Feel free to respond and we’ll include it in the next article!”
Remember, subscribers can always unsubscribe. If your content isn’t relevant, interesting, or useful for them, that’s exactly what they’ll do. And all it takes is one click of the unsubscribe button.
Giving your audience consistently great content will keep them onboard for a long time.
5. Conduct A/B Testing
You can’t expect to get your emails right every time. But you can lower the risk of making mistakes by conducting A/B testing on your emails.
- Target a small sample of your subscribers.
- Prepare 2 versions of your email and differentiate each as “A” and “B”.
- Send out the 2 versions to the sample size.
- Analyze the results.
Again, it’s just a small sample size. The result won’t guarantee a 100% success rate. However, the feedback and analytics will give you ideas on how to improve the final version of the email.
A/B testing will also help you gather more data about your audience. Based on their responses or feedback, you’ll learn more about how they think and behave as well as their likes and dislikes.
6. Humanize Your Approach
Effective customer retention is the result of excellent customer relationship management.
Just look into your experiences.
Aren’t you tired of receiving emails from businesses that seem like they only care about your money and not your well-being?
If you want to keep your customers – and you should – don’t view them as cash cows. Instead, acknowledge them as people by humanizing your approach by being considerate of their feelings and impressions.
- Write content in a conversational manner. Trying to impress your readers by using technical jargon will only annoy them. It might make them think you’re belittling their intelligence by using big words or terms they’re not familiar with.
- We mentioned this earlier. Don’t send emails with a “no-reply” address. Use a real email to which customers can send a response.
- Follow-up emails are effective in addressing the issue of cart abandonment. The key to a successful follow-up email is to not sound pushy or judgemental. Send a friendly reminder or use humor to get a customer to go back to his abandoned shopping cart.
Your brand is you and you are your brand. How people perceive you is how they will perceive your brand.
If your content makes them perceive you as knowledgeable, friendly, and approachable, then that’s how they will perceive your brand.
7. Track Results
Email marketing campaigns are never set in stone. They should be allowed to evolve and adapt to changes in your customers’ behaviors and preferences. The composition and qualities of your audience are also subject to change.
And these changes happen without warning.
Because of the unpredictability of customers’ behaviors, you must stay on top of your target market by constantly tracking the results of your email marketing campaign.
Here are some of the key metrics to focus on:
- Open Rate – The average number of times email recipients open and read your email content.
- Click-Through Rate – The average number of times email recipients click on the links included in your email.
- Bounce Rate – Measures the rate by which your email isn’t received by its intended recipient.
- Unsubscribes – Summarizes the total number of email subscribers who decided to unsubscribe from your service.
- Spam Complaint Rate – Indicates the average number of times your email content was marked as Spam. If your subject line reads suspicious or irrelevant, it could be sent to the Spam folder.
There are other metrics that you can look into such as conversion rate and revenue per email. Use these numbers as a guide to improve your email.
You shouldn’t expect to deliver perfect emails every time and you don’t need to. What’s important is to send emails that make your audience want to click, open, and read.
Conclusion
Yes, email marketing is a crucial component of the business development strategy but it takes time and effort. As an entrepreneur, time is precious to you and should be spent running the core functions of your business.
You can still manage your business and run an effective email marketing campaign by adopting these 2 solutions.
First, is to use email marketing software. There are email marketing brands that can segment your email list, design the email, run A/B testing, provide analytics, and automate the delivery schedule. Some of these services offer 24/7 support as well.
Second, is to outsource content creation to a proven digital agency such as Mountaintop Web Design. We can create content for your newsletters, promos, cart abandonment follow-ups, and other types of email.
Also, if your current website’s CTAs, opt-in forms, and signup boxes aren’t producing engagement, let us have a look at them. We offer website redesign services to help your business get back on track.
Just give us a call or drop us an email and we’ll schedule you for a free 30-minute consultation.
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