E-MAIL MARKETING
E MAIL MARKETING IS ALIVE & WELL!
Who would not want a slice of that?
According to marketers who engage in email marketing, 78% of them have seen an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months (Not Another State of Marketing 2020). The list of positive statistics goes on and on, as any cursory online search of email statistics will highlight. Perhaps your company has been banging off regular emails to potential customers and wondering why your return has been minimal. If so, then you need to take an honest look at your email strategy and particularly the quality contents and relevance of the content that you are communicating. We say relevance, because nothing is more annoying than receiving an arbitrary email about subject matter that you have no interest in. It’s become the modern form of junk mail. Like many online marketing tools, emailing strategy has become a specialist area, that entails focus and an in-depth understanding of target marketing and consumer behavior. Annoy your potential customer with irrelevant clutter and your email will be relegated to the bin with the click of a mouse, or more seriously, labelled forever, as ‘spam’. In order to gain maximum ROI, your email marketing strategy should be right up there in terms of marketing focus, along with your social media initiatives and your website. Done correctly, email marketing is a full time business and luckily there are specialist digital marketing agencies like Cliqued Media, who are experts in this field and who will take away the onerous tasks, like the sourcing of mailing lists, daily content management and analysing of results.BENEFITS OF EMAIL MARKETING
There are many potential benefits to having a good email marketing strategy. The following are just a few important ones:
Effective targeting and personalisation
E mail marketing offers the opportunity to reach only those people who are truly interested in your brand and who meet certain criteria. You can segment your mailing list to target specific groups who have similar traits, behaviors and needs and hence, would be attracted to your content.
Who wants to use a shotgun approach to marketing when you can use a sniper rifle?
The more that you understand your target audience, the more you will be able to personalise the message and the more appealing the email will be to individual respondents.
Good return on investment
Email marketing alleviates most of the costs normally associated with other marketing or advertising channels. You can reach thousands of people, without having to pay for advertising costs and expenses, which in traditional media, can reach well into the millions.
Sure, there is upfront investment required if you wish to automate the process, or if you use a digital marketing specialist like Sonous Digital. But the investment will be more than compensated for, in terms of the sheer number of respondents reached and resultant sales.
Interaction and conversion opportunities
Potential interaction results when you have successfully targeted someone and they have reacted positively to the e mail. By doing so, the respondent has indirectly indicated that they find the content to be interesting and relevant.
This represents an opportunity to open a dialogue and to communicate product and other applicable information on a fairy regular basis. The objective here is to educate the potential customer about your products and services and hopefully, move them towards making a decision to purchase.
This is also an opportunity to invite respondents to visit your other online platforms and website, with a view of encouraging further interaction, loyalty and conversion.
Flexibility and practicality
When it comes to communication, email marketing allows for flexibility and easy adaption between target markets. When you have developed your email marketing strategy, have a planned schedule of communication and have put the necessary mechanisms in place, then sending out regular email communication becomes relatively easy. This is particularly so if you have invested in an automated system.
Once set up, you will be able to seamlessly switch between communicating on both a B2C and B2B level and the only thing that needs to change is the content and tonality of your messages.
Ease of measurement
Conducting an e mail marketing campaign without measuring its success, is like sailing a yacht without a rudder. You’ll never quite know where you are going to end up.
Luckily there are a host of metrics that are easy to measure and which can be used to adjust course if so required. Only through in-depth analysis of these metrics can you ensure that you are accurately targeting the right people and achieving a sustainable ROI.
Measure at least the following metrics if you want to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts:
- Website traffic– you should be driving as many people as possible to your website, the center of your brand’s universe for search and sales conversion. Analyse the percentage of website traffic that has been generated by emails.
- Email conversion rates – measure how many of your email recipients clicked on your mail and took some form of action, such as making a purchase.
- Growth of your email list– simply analyse the number of people who have subscribed, versus the unsubscribed number, to determine growth, or decline.
- Landing page bounce rate – this entails checking how many people have arrived at your landing pages and left immediately, having taken no action.
- Rate of shares achieved – you should be able to monitor the number of times the content has been forwarded. Divide this by the total number of emails delivered and multiply by 100 to determine a percentage.
Analysing the metrics, identifying corrective action and making improvements, takes knowledge and expertise. Without this, you risk wasting opportunities and at the very worst, alienating your potential customers for good.
Sonous Digital are there to support your emailing marketing initiatives, with in-depth analysis, regular feedback and appropriate corrective strategies.
WAYS TO MAXIMISE SUCCESS
There are a few basics to contemplate, if you wish to maximise your email marketing efforts, or feel that your strategy is not achieving its true potential:
Optimise for mobile
Mobile phones are fast becoming the primary method of consuming online content, with more than 60% of emails now being opened on mobile devises. Your emails must be designed and optimised for mobile, or recipients will simply unsubscribe
Integrate with social media
Consider the fact that your digital marketing platforms do not work alone in a vacuum. Your customers have similar tastes and social media consumption. They are a community of sorts. The trick is to build loyalty and relationships, by communicating the same narrative throughout all your media platforms, email included.
Re-approach inactive subscribers
Chances are that you have a few dormant recipients on your mailing list. People may become unresponsive due to a variety of reasons, not always negative. From time to time it may be worth trying to revitalise inactive subscribers, with exciting new content, or even with incentives.
COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID
Marketers make mistakes and in the case of email marketing, it is usually the simple ones that determine the success or failure of your initiative. Some of these include:.
Overmarketing
You are there to create and build relationships, not to hard-sell your prospective customer to death. Over-sell, or inundate a prospect with too much irrelevant information and your mails will be heading for the bin.
Ignoring segmentation
If you do not segment your mailing list into subsets of like-minded customers, your mailing will no doubt be considered as irrelevant junk mail.
Excluding calls to action
It’s no use rambling on without letting your recipients know what action you want them to take. We do not all part easily with our money. You need to stimulate action and make it easy to do so. Large red or green action buttons do help!
Neglecting to personalise
People like to feel special. Make them so, by personalising your emails. By segmenting the mailing list your’e already doing so to a degree. But to make it noticeable, including even a recipient’s name can make a difference.
Mailing at the wrong time
Be logical about when you send out a mailing. You want recipients to receive it when they are most conducive to being approached. Being woken up at three in the morning by the ping of your smart phone is rather annoying don’t you think?
CONTINUED GROWTH AND SUCCESS
Due to the current growth of social media and other online platforms, it is natural to think that email marketing is perhaps nearing the end of its lifespan. You may even have read this in an article somewhere. But the figures don’t lie. The growth of email marketing continues unabated.
What is important to remember, is that nothing online works well in a vacuum. Integration with other online platforms and even traditional marketing strategies, is the key to success. Innovation and creativity are required. As is having a well thought through email marketing strategy.
Having a competent partner to guide and support your marketing efforts is really important. Sonous Digital is one of Ireland’s best. They are recognised as digital marketing experts, who are committed to help clients achieve growth and ROI, with the full mix of digital marketing services to offer.